One of our customers (Underwriters Laboratories) spoke with CIO Magazine a couple of weeks ago and the resulting story made for an interesting overview of their success in reducing servers, complexity and cost through virtualization.
One topic that I have found to be increasingly important to IT leadership, but not covered in this article, is balancing the kinds of consolidation results that Underwriters Laboratories identifies, with increases in risk.
It reminded me of a conversation I had some time ago with CiRBA board member and insurance company CIO Mike Woeller. During our conversation, I passionately described how our software allows IT to more quickly virtualize, consolidate and become much more efficient and agile.
Mike acknowledged the importance of making efficient use of infrastructure but stated “quite frankly Gerry; it is a distant second to reliability. I lose my day job when things don’t work”. It was a good reminder that data centers are so tremendously complex today, that keeping the lights on can be an enormous challenge unto itself.
The simple fact is that virtualization, while releasing us from many of the limitations of physically bound computing, introduces new complexity and challenges that can also raise the risk profile.
One of our customers recently discovered during analysis that security and permissions could have created a disastrous situation post virtualization. Settings that were once isolated to one server suddenly had implications for everything else that was to be combined on the same host. This of course highlights the need to plan carefully prior to leaping.
How does risk factor into your decisions around virtualization and consolidation?
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