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Category: IT Administration

  • Catchpoint Provides Free Remote Monitoring Tools to Help Combat COVID-19 Pandemic

    Catchpoint Provides Free Remote Monitoring Tools to Help Combat COVID-19 Pandemic

    Catchpoint announced today it will provide free access to tools to monitor remote network connections to help organizations that are helping to combat the COVID-19 virus by requiring employees to work from home.

    Company CEO Mehdi Daoudi said supporting an entire workforce that suddenly needs to work remotely is clearly a major IT challenge. To enable IT teams to cope with that transition, Catchpoint is providing access to free tools that monitor access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications using agent software installed on endpoints. The company also makes available a browser extension through which remote users can discover instantly what is slowing down application performance, which they can then share with their IT support teams.

    Catchpoint is also making available an Enterprise Digital Experience Monitoring for free for 90 days to IT organizations that want to more proactively monitor application experience. That service is based on a Global Monitoring Network that consists of 825 worldwide locations through which Catchpoint monitors network traffic flows.

    With large numbers of workers accessing applications remotely, many IT teams are about to discover how intermittent network access from home can be. Not all neighborhoods and residences have access to the same levels of network bandwidth. With more workers trying to access backend network services remotely—some with children who are home from school because of COVID-19—the probability of connectivity issues is high for the next several months. In addition, Daoudi noted the need to have employees working from home could go on for as long as three to six months, which means many employees may decide to relocate to other places, such as summer residences, where connectivity is not as robust as their primary home service.

    Rather than viewing the virus outbreak as roughly the equivalent of an extended snowstorm, IT teams would be well-advised to make sure critical employees have access to multiple networks. In some cases, that may mean providing employees with multiple wireless access cards for different networks in case the services provided by one carrier become overly taxed or simply inaccessible. Daoudi said Catchpoint is already seeing divergent levels of network performance between carriers operating in the same geographic regions.

    At the same time, IT teams that operate in highly regulated industries may want to make sure employees are not inadvertently making use of their neighbor’s wireless network—or, potentially worse, accessing applications over a wireless network provided by their local café.

    It’s too early to say with any certainty just how fragile network services in the months ahead may become. What is clear is providing network bandwidth and making certain those connections are secure requires a lot of planning on the part of internal IT teams. In some localities, there is still time to put those contingency plans in place. Elsewhere, employees are already being told to work from home by local and state officials.

    Whatever the outcome, the dependency organizations have on IT and IT professionals is about to become more apparent than ever.

    — Mike Vizard

  • HPE Leverages AI for Remote Server Management

    HPE Leverages AI for Remote Server Management

    The latest ProLiant MicroServer is designed to use AI to provide the next generation remote server management

    Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus platform designed to be managed remotely using advanced algorithms the company makes available via the cloud.

    Tim Peters, vice president and general manager for global small-to-medium businesses and the midmarket at HPE, said the goal is to make it possible for organizations of all sizes to take advantage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to automate the management of servers in remote offices.

    Based on Intel Pentium and Intel Xeon processors and weighing less than 10 pounds, the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus comes with HPE Integrated Lights Out 5 (iLO5) server management tool that enables IT teams to configure, monitor and update servers remotely. Those servers can then also be connected back HPE InfoSight for Servers, a cloud-based AI tool that HPE is making available for the first time on this class of servers, said Peters.

    HPE is making this class of servers available as part of a subscription service option that makes the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus available starting at just less than $20 per month for organizations that prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. This latest generation of HPE servers also only generates 36dB of sound so most employees in a remote office may not even be aware of its existence.

    In addition, Peters noted the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus server also supports HPE’s silicon-based root of trust technology, which prevents servers in remote offices from being tampered with when there is no IT staff available at that location.

    The days when most organizations could afford to have IT staff at each remote office are all but over. IT organizations increasingly need to rely on frameworks that allow them to centrally manage IT infrastructure wherever it’s deployed. IT teams can either build and deploy those IT automation frameworks themselves or they can rely on the frameworks that IT vendors are embedding in their latest generation of systems. Naturally, that latter approach requires IT to replace their existing IT infrastructure. However, given the rate at which applications are being deployed and upgraded, many organizations are now finding they are replacing server infrastructure more frequently.

    Regardless of the approach, overworked IT staffs don’t want to have to send someone to a remote office location unless it’s absolutely required. Beyond the cost of the travel, there’s the time that could be better spent on more pressing IT management tasks to consider.

    Of course, anything involving AI is likely to make IT administrators nervous. However, as IT becomes more complex, it’s not likely IT teams will be replaced. Rather, the focus of IT teams will shift toward other areas that add more value to the business as more rote tasks increasingly are automated.

    Naturally, it may be a while before all the legacy infrastructure installed is replaced, so IT teams may still need to travel to remote offices for some additional period of time. However, the days when IT teams racked up frequent flyer miles because of the need to visit remote office locations will soon be a distant memory.

    — Mike Vizard

  • ServiceNow Embraces AI to Manage IT

    ServiceNow Embraces AI to Manage IT

    ServiceNow has taken the wraps off the Orlando update to its cloud platform for managing IT that adds advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

    In addition, an existing integration framework that enables the Now Platform from ServiceNow to manage DevOps pipelines created by third-party platforms is now part of the core platform. Previously, that capability was only available as an add-on that could be downloaded from the ServiceNow online store.

    Pablo Stern, senior vice president of IT workflows for ServiceNow, said that as ITIL-based frameworks and DevOps continue to converge it is apparent IT teams will also need to rely more on AI to manage IT environments that are becoming increasingly more complex.

    The Now Intelligence capabilities being embedded into the Now Platform will address that issue by surfacing insights and making recommendations to predict and resolve issues before they become a major problem, he said.

    IT teams can also take advantage of “always-on virtual agents” to track and automatically initiate specific workflows.
    Analytics capabilities provided by Now Intelligence also include recommendations on how to optimize usage of cloud assets based on the billing options available and the ability to asses risks to the business. That latter capability includes vulnerability assessments of software and hardware that can be used to automatically trigger a remediation process.

    ServiceNow has also enhanced its support for mobile computing platforms and added Agent Affinity for Work Assignment, which allows IT teams to assign work to agents that have the most expertise dealing with a specific issue or familiarity with certain end users.

    In general. Stern said IT organizations would be well-advised to starting walking back many of the biases that now exist among advocates of DevOps and legacy ITIL-based approaches to managing IT. Both approaches are equally relevant depending on the task at hand. The challenge now is providing access to a common pool of data that informs those processes, he said.

    There’s no doubt that ITIL and DevOps frameworks will continue to evolve side-by-side for many years to come. In fact, the latest iteration of the ITIL framework borrows many of the concepts for adroitly managing IT infrastructure from best practices that were pioneered by DevOps practitioners. The balance that needs to be struck is finding a way to respond faster to rapidly changing application and business conditions without sacrificing a structured approach to managing IT that makes it possible to consistently scale systems that are highly resilient.

    Naturally, it may be a while before that balance is struck. However, AI will play a critical role in enabling organizations to achieve that goal. Given the complexity of modern IT environments, it’s simply not possible to effectively manage IT by relying on manual processes or custom scripts that don’t scale. AI is not likely to replace the need for human IT expertise anytime soon, but it will go a long way to maximizing what is already an overtaxed resource often subject to more fallibility than anyone cares to admit.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Nerdio Unfurls Management Tools for WVD on Azure

    Nerdio Unfurls Management Tools for WVD on Azure

    Nerdio has launched a management tool that makes it easier to provision large numbers of virtual desktops on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

    Company CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy said that now that Microsoft is finally encouraging organizations to embrace desktop virtualization in the form of its Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service, there is a need for tools to manage all those desktops.

    Nerdio Manager for WVD fills that gap by providing support for, among other things, dynamic host pools that automatically grow and shrink depending on workload and desktop images that can be employed across thousands of users.

    Vladimirskiy said Nerdio Manager for WVD runs natively on Azure, which among other things allows all the data it collects to remain within the geo-boundaries of the selected Azure region. No additions to an Azure subscription are required to store that data, he noted.

    Fresh off raising an additional $8 million in funding, Nerdio is riding the coattails of a relatively newfound enthusiasm at Microsoft for virtual desktops. While the concept of a virtual desktop has been around for the better part of two decades, Microsoft has only been encouraging IT organizations to embrace virtual desktops since the WVD Service became available on Azure in the last several months. Previously, Windows licensing restrictions tended to make virtual desktops less economically attractive.

    Rather than organizations relying on Citrix or VMware for virtual desktops, Microsoft is now making a case for employing its Azure cloud service to subscribe to virtual desktops as a less complicated alternative that also supports both Windows 10 and Windows 7. That means IT teams that embrace Windows 7 on Azure will be supported by Microsoft.

    It’s not clear to what degree Windows desktops will move into the cloud now that Microsoft has embraced the concept. In addition, it’s also worth noting that rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) now provide similar desktop virtualization services. What is clear is many fewer instances of Windows will be running locally as more organizations determine it might be easier for them to manage Windows desktops via the cloud than on each individual machine. At the same time, many organizations are also looking at ways to more easily enable remote computing to help limit potential employee exposure to the COVID-19 virus.

    Whatever the path forward, it’s not likely large enterprise IT organizations will make the jump to WVD or any other cloud service all at once. IT administrators may find themselves managing a hybrid desktop computing environment for many years to come. There are also, of course, organizations operating in highly regulated industries where virtual desktops running on a public cloud are simply not an option.

    Nevertheless, it’s apparent the time when IT administrators had to spend time visiting individual desktop machines is coming to an end. The management of both virtual desktops and physical endpoints is becoming more automated with each passing day. The only real question is what degree of automation can be achieved based on where the desktop actually resides.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Survey Finds IT More Challenging to Manage Than Ever

    Survey Finds IT More Challenging to Manage Than Ever

    A survey of 415 IT executives published today shows IT teams are struggling to keep up as the number of platforms that need to be managed continues to expand rapidly.

    Conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of Volterra, a provider of a distributed computing platform, the survey finds 97% are planning to distribute workloads across two or more clouds. The top three reasons cited for adopting multiple clouds were the need to maximize availability and reliability (63%), meeting regulatory and compliance requirements (47%), and leveraging best-of-breed services from each provider (42%).

    At the same time, the survey finds 70% of survey respondents said it’s “very important” to have a consistent operational experience between the edge and public and private clouds.

    The survey, however, also makes it clear IT leaders understand that achieving the goal will be a significant challenge. The top issues identified when employing multiple clouds are establishing secure and reliable connectivity between providers (60%), employing different support and consulting processes (54%) and navigating different platform services (53%).

    The rise of edge computing is going to further exacerbate those challenges. The survey finds the difficulty in managing apps across multiple edge locations (44%) and an inability to accommodate the IT infrastructure needed to host and operate at the edge (38%) as the two major edge computing issues identified by survey respondents. In terms of specific technical challenges identified, integrating cloud-native workflows such as automation, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and performance management (69%) and trouble installing a full set of application infrastructure spanning compute, storage and network and security (67%) top the list of issues.

    As far as lifecycle management at the edge is concerned, the two biggest long-term issues identified are the lack of resources or time to keep applications and infrastructure up to date (37%) and managing silos of distributed clusters (26%).

    Mark Weiner, chief marketing officer for Volterra, said the survey makes it clear there soon will come a day when IT organizations will need to centralize the management of an increasingly extended enterprise. IT organizations may have adopted public clouds aggressively, yet 70% to 80% of all workloads still run in an on-premises IT environment. At the same time, the number of workloads that will be distributed to edge computing platforms is set to explode. The survey identifies the primary reasons more workloads will be deployed on the edge as the need to control and analyze data locally (54%) and the amount of latency experienced when sending edge data to public cloud-based apps (47%).

    Ultimately, the goal is to have a hybrid cloud computing environment through which the management of IT is as centralized as possible. While the cost of deploying workloads in a public cloud is comparatively inexpensive, it turns out the total cost of IT continues to increase as IT teams find themselves managing more distributed platforms than ever. It may be a while before IT teams have the tools and processes in place to rein in those costs. However, at this point, it’s more a question of how and when that goal will be accomplished, not if.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Zoho Offers Free SaaS Apps to Combat Coronavirus Spread

    Zoho Offers Free SaaS Apps to Combat Coronavirus Spread

    Zoho today announced it is making available for free a bundle of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications dubbed Remotely through July 1.

    Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist for Zoho, said Remotely is a humanitarian gesture to help mitigate the impact of a global coronavirus epidemic. Remotely comprises a set of productivity and collaboration applications that users can access in as little as five minutes.

    Included in Remotely are productivity, collaboration and project management applications as well as tools that automate the migration of data into the Zoho cloud platform.

    Vergesna said Remotely also addresses cybersecurity concerns by enabling IT teams to apply security controls to the data that employees are allowed to access. Of course, IT organizations in many cases would still need to make sure the network connections being employed to access SaaS applications are secure.

    Now that many local governments are recommending that organizations allow employees to work from home to help limit the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, many IT administrators are scrambling to provide remote access to applications at scale. It’s one thing to provide access to a small number of employees who might travel intermittently, but it’s quite another to support an entire remote workforce for some unknown period of time.

    Vergesna, however, said that at this point the challenges associated with making that transition have a lot more to do with overcoming cultural issues than they do the technology. Much of the transition to Zoho SaaS applications has been automated, he said.

    It remains to be seen to what degree the coronavirus outbreak might accelerate the transition to cloud applications. Many IT administrators are still managing local instances of Windows servers to deliver applications because the time and effort to migrate to SaaS applications have been substantial. Making those on-premises applications available remotely at scale is not only challenging from a technical perspective, but it’s also expensive.

    Of course, Zoho is far from being the only provider of SaaS productivity and collaboration applications. However, it remains to be seen whether other providers will follow Zoho’s lead. The hope each of these vendors has is that once the coronavirus crisis passes many of the organizations that take advantage of their software to enable employees to work from home will start paying to use that software.

    In the meantime, the economic impact of the coronavirus is likely to be staggering. Conferences are being canceled and face-to-face business meetings are being shifted online. It’s hard to say how many of those meetings are likely to stay there for good. At the very least, many more end users are about out to discover just how rich SaaS application environments have become. In many cases, IT teams will stitch together workflows across a range of SaaS applications using application programming interfaces (APIs). The challenge they will face is acquiring the programming skills required to construct those workflows.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Quest Software Expands MDM Cloud Reach

    Quest Software Expands MDM Cloud Reach

    Quest Software today extended the reach of its mobile device management (MDM) service to provide more granular control over mobile devices and applications in addition to being able to track their location.

    Capabilities being added to the KACE Cloud MDM service include support for a “Kiosk Mode” for Android devices that allows administrators to lock down a device and limit activity to a specific application or task, as well as a Disallowed Apps feature that brings the same level of blacklisting capability to Android devices that currently exists for Apple iOS devices.

    Quest Software has also added file encryption tools for MacOS devices and extended the multi-tenant capabilities of cloud service to enable profiles to be applied within Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager.

    Jody Evans, product manager for KACE Cloud MDM at Quest Software, said the latest updates to the service are intended to make it easier for IT teams to manage a broad range of mobile computing devices using a cloud service they don’t have to deploy and manage.

    Longer-term, the goal for most IT teams will be to unify endpoint management as much as possible relying on cloud services. In the meantime, most organizations will continue to rely on a mix of cloud services and local appliances to manage endpoints, said Evans.

    It’s not clear to what degree or at what rate IT organizations are unifying the management of endpoints. Internal IT teams tend to manage desktops and laptops. Mobile computing devices such as tablets and smartphones, however, are often managed via portals provided by telecommunications carriers or managed service providers (MSPs).

    Competition across the IT systems management category is naturally fierce. The KACE product line has been around since 2003, when the company developed appliances to automate the management of Windows desktops. In 2010, Dell acquired KACE Networks and in 2012 it acquired Quest Software, which, along with KACE Networks and SonicWall, became part of Dell Software. At roughly the same time, VMware, also part of Dell, had also been expanding its reach into the realm of MDM via acquisitions.

    To help raise the cash needed to take Dell private, Quest Software and SonicWall were formally separated into two separate companies that were sold to venture capital firms. The KACE product line remained with Quest Software. Since then, Quest Software has been gradually rolling out instances of its portfolio that are delivered as a cloud service.

    At the same time, however, ITSM is being transformed by the rise of DevOps. While most endpoints are still managed using service desks based on ITIL frameworks that typically rely on job tickets to manage tasks, many of the mobile applications that reside on those platforms are being managed using DevOps processes to deliver a richer end user experience faster. It’s not at all clear to what degree the management of endpoints using ITIL processes and mobile applications using DevOps processes will converge.

    In the meantime, reliance on mobile applications and devices continues to increase. Many end users now spend more time on tablets and smartphones than they do in front of traditional desktop systems. The challenge IT teams now face is determining the best way to manage an IT endpoint landscape that has never been more diverse or complex.

    — Mike Vizard

  • OpsRamp Adds Recommendation Engine to AIOps Platform

    OpsRamp Adds Recommendation Engine to AIOps Platform

    OpsRamp added a recommendation engine to its artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform that makes use of predictive analytics to suggest potential actions to either improve performance or avert downtime.

    The OpsRamp Winter 2020 Release also adds 19 cloud monitoring integrations for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), along with dynamic topology maps for Azure and GCP. OpsRamp currently provides integrations with more than 120 different cloud services.

    Finally, OpsRamp has added an ability to detect seasonality patterns that would otherwise generate alerts, an Alert Stats widget that makes it easier to keep track of raw alerts, synthetic monitoring and agentless discovery and monitoring of Windows Server instances.

    Bhanu Singh, senior vice president of engineering and DevOps at OpsRamp, said as IT continues to become more complex resistance to AI within the ranks of IT staffs is declining. Organizations realize that IT specialists are an expensive resource, so they need to maximize the capabilities of IT generalists as much as possible, he said. OpsQ Recommend Mode adds a predictive analytics module to the company software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing IT that provides explainable and transparent analytical recommendations to help the average IT administrator head off issues that would require a specialist to solve later, said Singh.

    That visibility is critical because it still leaves the decision about what to automate in the hands of the IT administrator. However, as OpsRamp continues to learn the nuances of the IT environment, the more confidence IT administrators will have in the recommendations being surfaced, he said.

    It takes about 24 to 48 hours for the OpsRamp platform to learn enough about an IT environment to start surfacing recommendations, Singh noted, adding because OpsRamp is a SaaS platform, setting up the platform requires minimal effort.

    To some degree an increased reliance on AI among IT professionals is inevitable. AI may never eliminate the need for IT personnel, but many of the mind-numbing rote tasks that IT administrators perform today soon will be automated. The challenge that creates, however, is the IT staff needs to be able to manage IT at a higher level, which means many entry-level jobs in the IT sector may no longer be required. The challenge then becomes finding IT professionals who have the right level of skills, when many of the entry-level jobs for which they have been trained no longer exist.

    In the meantime, a race is clearly on to infuse IT management platforms with machine learning algorithms. Startups such as OpsRamp are looking to supplant legacy IT platforms that were designed for a previous era of IT. However, the providers of those platforms are clearly investing heavily in AI as part of their ongoing modernization efforts. Each IT organization will need to decide for themselves to what degree the rise of AI warrants switching management platforms.

    Regardless of the platform selected, however, the one thing IT teams can count on is that AI platforms are only going to get smarter as they continue to evolve.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Rackn Extends Reach of IT-as-Code Framework

    Rackn Extends Reach of IT-as-Code Framework

    Rackn announced the Digital Rebar platform it created to automate the provisioning of bare-metal infrastructure now can be applied simultaneously across multiple physical sites.

    Company CEO Rob Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar 4.3 makes it possible to manage IT infrastructure as code across highly distributed computing environments. Previously, IT organizations would have needed additional versions of Digital Rebar for each physical data center.

    Hirschfeld also noted IT teams can also set up mirrors of data centers, now that Digital Rebar can be employed across multiple sites.

    IT teams that adopt Digital Rebar can define workflows through which, for example, instances of virtual machines or Kubernetes can automatically be deployed on hundreds of thousands of servers in about an hour, said Hirschfeld.
    Accomplishing that same task using manual processes would take most IT teams six months, he noted, adding IT teams can even use Digital Rebar to deploy instances Kubernetes on virtual machines at scale.

    Hirschfeld noted many IT teams assume they need to have a layer of virtualization in place before they can start automating the management of their IT environment. Digital Rebar provides a framework around a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs) through which servers, storage and networking resources can be provisioned consistently. In addition, IT teams can set up a to manage IT infrastructure on an ongoing basis, including firmware and operating system updates and cluster configurations.

    Digital Rebar doesn’t necessarily replace the need for frameworks such as OpenStack or VMware vSphere. However, it does provide a simpler mechanism for installing them. Alternatively, IT teams can employ Digital Rebar to deploy software such as Kubernetes on a bare-metal server.

    Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar is designed to be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud rather than be accessed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. That approach means IT teams operating in highly regulated industries can still take advantage of the framework, he said.

    While the concept of IT as code has been around for a while, IT teams that are being asked to now manage IT at an unprecedented scale are turning to IT automation frameworks in larger numbers. Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar is now designed to replace other frameworks as much as it is to provide a complementary framework for specifically managing bare-metal infrastructure. In fact, Digital Rebar can be access vis Terraform or Ansible using a plug-in that Rackn makes available.

    Rackn also plans to extend the reach of Digital Rebar out to edge computing platforms as well as endpoints based on, for example, Raspberry Pi platforms, he added.

    Most IT teams will eventually wind up employing multiple IT automation frameworks in place of thousands of custom scripts that many IT professionals have developed themselves. The issue with most of those scripts is they don’t tend to scale especially well. In addition, they are usually poorly documented so when the author of the script leaves the organization the remaining IT staff wind up having to write another custom script because no one is quite sure how the script in place works. Whatever the path forward, the one thing that is certain is the days of being able to get by manually provisioning platforms is finally coming to a merciful end.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Dell Pushes Computing to the Edge

    Dell Technologies today set its sights on becoming a major edge computing player with the launch of a Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 server optimized for space-constrained environments and a smaller version of a pre-integrated Dell EMC Modular Data Center Micro 415 (MDC Micro) ruggedized platform.

    In addition, Dell launched the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform, a streaming analytics platform based on open source Kafka software. Dell is using Kafka also to provide an embedded management capability known as the Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC 9 Datacenter) for its edge computing platforms.

    Matt Baker, senior vice president for Dell EMC strategy and planning, said edge computing applications require a different approach to IT infrastructure because data is being processed and analyzed in real-time. Dell expects that eventually 75% of all data will be created and processed outside of a data center, he said.

    A primary driver of that transition will be the rise of wireless 5G networks, which will make it feasible to build and deploy real-time applications on edge computing platforms.

    Dell, of course, is making a case for distributed IT environment made up of its platform, contending will be easier for IT organizations to deploy and manage.

    The iDRAC 9 Datacenter platform, for example, provides a remote deployment capability that Dell claims can reduce administrator-attended time by up to 99.1% per server after initial setup. The streaming analytics capability, meanwhile, makes it possible to discover trends, fine-tune operations and create predictive analytics to help ensure peak performance and reduce downtime. Dell has also made available an automated certificate enablement tool to enable zero-touch security at the edge and in central locations.

    All told, Dell claims to be collecting nearly 2.9 million data points per server that can be surfaced in as many as 20 different types of reports.

    Baker said Dell has no plans to extend its data streaming analytics capabilities to other platforms, so IT teams will have to decide to what degree they want to standardize on Dell infrastructure versus setting up a streaming analytics platform of their own that is capable of supporting edge computing platforms from multiple vendors.

    Whatever the approach, the one thing that is certain is the way applications historically have been built and deployed is fundamentally changing. Rather than relying primarily on batch-oriented applications that often require large amounts of data to be transferred across networks to either a data center or public cloud, a lot more data is going to be processed at the edge because of application latency requirements. Edge computing applications, for example, will need to process analytics in near real-time to optimize a process or end user experience in milliseconds.

    Naturally, that shift will have profound implications for the management of IT going forward as IT environments become even more distributed than they are today. In fact, the real issue isn’t so much how computing platforms will be deployed at the edge so much as it is how they will be managed, at a time when most IT organizations are already short-staffed.

    — Mike Vizard