The Daily Network Monitor

Browsing around, I found this piece in India New England (yes, that’s the name of the publication) called Network downtime can be big expense for business.  Tim Hebert is definitely singing our song.  To wit:

Unplanned downtime is what keeps IT professionals, executives and business owners awake at night. Natural disasters and utility failures only account for three percent of all outages. Hardware failures account for less than 10 percent of all network failures. Systems errors account for less than eight percent of failures; application errors, 19 percent.

Industry experts estimate that almost 60 percent of network failures are caused by human error. This problem can be attacked through better training for IT organizations and end-users, better network documentation, better change-management controls and processes and better network monitoring and management.

Sixty percent of network failures caused by human error?  Wow.  There’s no citation to back that up, but it has the ring of truth.  After all, if downtime came from more controllable sources, there wouldn’t be so much of it, right?

In any case, Tim’s piece makes clear the case for effective network management and network monitoring.  I hope IT managers take heed and make a small investment in protection against what could be a huge loss.

I’m proud to report that the geeks here at The Daily Network Monitor did not tune in to the liveblogging or the live video of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote today. We were out eating sushi. But to ignore Apple makes no more sense than to ignore open source, to ignore Windows, or to ignore Cisco. I’ll leave it to the Apple fanboys to slobber over the latest iPhone enhancements, the new 8-core Mac pro and the frighteningly thin MacBook Air. I want to talk about the Time Capsule.

This is classic Apple. They didn’t invent the category or particularly innovate the technology, but they put together a set of existing technologies in a beautiful package that’s beautifully integrated with their other offerings. The Time Capsule is a wifi base station (seen those before) that allows USB print sharing (been there done that) and boasts up to a terabyte of network storage (yawn). So what makes this more appealing than, for example, Iomega’s StorCenter? How about out of the box integration with Apple’s Time Machine, a Vista-busting backup feature of the latest cat-themed Mac OS X? (Also, the StorCenter costs a little more, has one more USB port and RAID, and is very, very ugly.)

Sure, home network storage and backup are child’s play (sometimes literally) to the average networking pro. But ask yourself, network dudes, why can’t it be this elegant and easy at work, too?

Well, it’s not all as earth-shaking as that, but I’m getting tired of grabby headlines that loudly announce or predict the death of this or that.  Starting with disco, hardly anything is as dead as people like to say.  Cultural trends and technologies alike are much more prone to mutate and evolve or get reborn or remixed than to actually die. (Has anybody else noticed that the Apple Newton didn’t quite die, but got reborn first as the Palm Pilot and then the iPod Touch, and you can bet next week’s MacWorld will give birth to more…)

So you can understand my mixed feelings at Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s well-reasoned but poorly-headlined piece in Network World, The IT department is dead, author argues, which reviews Nicholas Carr’s book of the moment, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.  You may remember Carr for asking Does IT Matter? in his 2004 book of the same title.

IT isn’t dead, IT departments are not dead, and IT professionals are not dead.  Far from it.  In fact, I think they’re all feeling much better and might even get up and go for a walk.

Now, that said, this certainly doesn’t mean that IT departments are going to be able to sit around and do what they’ve always done for years and get away with it.  They will adapt or they will in fact die.  To borrow one of Carr’s analogies, just because few if any businesses today generate their own power on-site does’t mean that there’s no market for power or people skilled in generating it.  Those professionals just had to make some adjustments in their skills and career paths.

What Carr and many others - notably Google - are getting at is that lots of parts of IT are getting commodified (that means made into a commodity, not thrown in the commode), getting turned into utilities and getting outsourced or shared.  The role of a small or mid-sized business IT pro is going to evolve in two ways because of this:

1. In-house IT will have to get skilled at managing the IT utilites: they will have to select, monitor and integrate rather than provide these kinds of services themselves

2. In-house IT will become more and more concerned with applications and business results and less concerned with infrastructure and connectivity

I think you’ll agree that neither trend will do much to reduce the demand for in-house IT.  Web-based software sold on the ASP model hasn’t put IT managers out on the street, it’s just given them new and even more interesting and valuable responsibilities.  If that’s dead, then I’ve got a deathwish, for sure.