IT WEEK • 8 NOVEMBER 2004
44 COMMENT Benefits
of virtual computing
CONTENTS
44 INTERVIEW Citrix chief Mark Templeton explains how
to improve access management to safeguard business data
44 COMMENT Firms that adopt virtual
computing can look forward to
lower costs, greater transparency,
more security and better management control, writes Mark Street
37 INTERVIEW Mark Templeton, chief
executive of Citrix Systems,
explains how access management
technology is becoming smarter,
simpler and more flexible
MANAGEMENTWEEK
WHERE TECHNOLOGY BECOMES BUSINESS REALITY
Editor: Madeline Bennett
Skills gaps hold back firms
SHORTAGES HARM BUSINESS
irms are having difficulties filling
high-level IT vacancies, leading to
delayed product development and
loss of business in many cases, according to
a new report. Unless companies and government work to improve training and recruitment, many UK businesses may be
unable to compete internationally within
10 years, experts warned.
Over a third of firms have vacancies
for IT professionals that they have been
unable to fill, according to the report from
skills body E-skills UK and Gartner Consulting. As a result, 76 percent of these
firms have been forced to delay the development of new products and services.
The IT Insights – Trends and UK Skills
Implications report says that 42 percent of
these firms with recruitment problems had
suffered higher operating costs due to
unfilled posts, while 22 percent had lost
business to a competitor.
But companies also appear to be suffering from a lack of more basic technology skills among their employees. More
F
How do IT skills gaps affect your firm?
Delays to product
development
Rise in operating
costs
Lost
business
76%
42%
22%
Source: E-skills UK
than a quarter of the 3,200 respondents
questioned in the survey reported a lack
of everyday IT user skills within their firm.
The IT skills gaps highlighted by the
report could have dire consequences for the
long-term health of the economy, according
to E-skills UK chief executive Karen Price.
“The UK will not be competitive in the
global economy in 10 years’ time if we continue with the level and type of skills being
relied on by business today,” she warned.
Too often, the issue of skills is dismissed as not having a real impact on the
economy, said Price.“To [dismiss it] in this
case would lead to catastrophic damage of
the UK economy,” she added.
E-skills UK said the report showed there
is a need for more government support for
training programmes; that the vast majority of employees will need increasingly
sophisticated IT skills; and that more people will have to be attracted into the sector.
The skills body said up to 179,000 new
IT entrants would be needed each year over
the next decade to meet demand – and
many of these would be expected to emerge
from the education system. However, uptake of IT courses is falling – the number of
computing A-Levels taken this year was
down 16 percent compared with 2003.
There is also a need to address the gender imbalance in the IT industry. Females
accounted for just 12 percent of computing A-Level students in 2004.
E-skills UK plans to publish recommendations for action following regional
consultations.“[Firms] must work together as employers, and with the government,
the education sector and private training
sector to ensure that we are developing the
right skills throughout the entire UK talent
pool,” said Larry Hirst, chief executive at
IBM UK and E-skills UK’s chair.
www.e-skills.com
Spam blockers multiply
TOOLS TACKLE EVOLVING THREATS
network probes to detect evolving attacks
and spam techniques, and removes the need
for updates, said Mirapoint.
Rapid Anti-Spam will be priced on a
per-user basis, and runs on any of Mirapoint’s email server or security appliances.
Meanwhile, CipherTrust has enhanced
its IronMail anti-spam appliance with
Connection Control technology. This technology relies on the company’s Spam Profiler system to identify the IP addresses of
the biggest email abusers. It does this
through a scoring index that assigns incoming messages a score of zero to 100,
based on the likelihood that they are spam.
If a particular IP address racks up too
many messages with high scores, the system drops connection attempts from those
machines for a period, typically a few days.
After the quarantine period expires, IronMail begins accepting connections from
the blocked IP addresses, but will drop
them again if they resume sending spam.
lowing the release of new products
from Mirapoint and CipherTrust.
Both aim to help companies combat
new types of spam attacks.
Madeline Bennett and Dennis Fisher
irms will have new options to block
unwanted email from their corporate
networks following the release of new
products from email security specialists
Mirapoint and CipherTrust.
Mirapoint will release its Rapid AntiSpam technology tomorrow. This is designed to identify and block new spam
attacks in real time when used in combination with the firm’s MailHurdle technology, which blocks unwanted SMTP
connections at the network edge.
The system is based on
Recurrent Pattern Detection technology licensed
from anti-spam vendor
Commtouch. It analyses
information collected via
F
Judge: focus
on deterrence
itweek.co.uk
Martin Veitch
Firms have a wider range of anti• spam
systems to choose from fol-
•
CipherTrust’s Paul Judge said that as
the amount of email continues to increase,
the focus of anti-spam systems needs to
evolve. “The challenge now is to expand
our focus beyond detection to also include
response and deterrence,” he said.
Franklin Warlick of cable provider Cox
Communications said before deployment
of Connection Control the firm handled
40 million incoming emails each day, but
this figure has now been cut by 40 percent.
“We needed something that could protect
us at the edge without letting the bad stuff
get to the network. We haven’t seen any
false positives at all,” he added.
Giants take spammers to court, p28
www.mirapoint.com
www.ciphertrust.com www.eweek.com
© eWeek USA 2004
Madeline Bennett
Why it pays
to be a firm
that cares
Oracle, widely seen as a hard-driving
IT supplier, has discovered that promoting corporate social responsibility
(CSR) can help to attract customers.
The database giant questioned
200 decision-makers in the UK, and
found that 90 percent believe it is
critical for firms to take an interest in
environmental and community issues.
To that end, Oracle encourages staff
to decorate community centres, lets
children visit its offices, and conducts
Perfect Manager courses to promote
a better work-life balance.
“Staff uptake for such activities is
phenomenal but let’s not sound too
pious – it’s also in our interest,” said
Alan Hartwell, Oracle marketing vicepresident. “Only a minority of invitations to tender don’t include a social
responsibility provision and only a
minority of vendors don’t include a
provision.You can easily be excluded
by not buying into it.”
Manufacturing and financial services companies were the most likely
to have a social responsibility policy,
the study found, while IT firms were
least likely – just 12 percent document such policies.
Although many IT firms are notorious for long hours and pressure, the
IT workplace is changing with the
introduction of more flexible working
and understanding of the need for a
work-life balance.“Before, there was
this culture of what happens at home
stays at home but now we recognise
that you don’t want to stress people
out and make them unproductive,”
said Oracle’s Hartwell.
Toshiba is another company that
claims to recognise the need for pastoral care.“I see my biggest job as
ensuring my staff don’t overwork,”
said Alan Thompson, the Japanese
firm’s chief executive for Europe.
43
MANAGEMENTWEEK
IT WEEK • 8 NOVEMBER 2004
Virtualisation soothes all ills
The multiple benefits of virtual technology will soon leave corporates wondering how they
managed before in the face of decreasing budgets and growing demands, says Mark Street
he huge strides that are being
made in virtual computing
will have ramifications for us all.
Virtual computing will soon
become the bedrock of effective IT
management – the thing that separates the good from the bad.
Virtual technology is moving
into all areas of the corporate network, from servers to desktops.
As well as simplifying management
by pooling physical computing
resources into easy-to-deploy
virtual machines, it also offers
tremendous cost-cutting potential
and greater network transparency.
In the past, IT directors have
been offered more than their fair
share of panaceas, including ERP
and CRM systems. The truth is that
most of them have been a big disappointment, a triumph of marketing-led solutions in search of
business requirements.
I would argue that virtual technology is the most exciting trend to
hit the IT industry since the launch
T
of the internet. Like the internet –
and unlike ERP – virtual technology
has enjoyed an evolutionary rather
than revolutionary arrival. Many
firms and individuals have taken a
solid idea and added little bits to it,
making it even more useful and even
more relevant than it was before.
What is more, I believe that virtual computing is the closest thing
to a panacea that we are likely to
see in the next 10 years. It offers an
efficient solution to a range of
thorny management issues that
have plagued IT directors since the
dawn of computing.
Today’s biggest problem for IT
directors – besides security – is the
battle against dwindling resources, as
firms try to make more and more
savings by cutting IT costs.
It is generally accepted that 80
percent of the average IT budget is
spent on maintaining the corporate
infrastructure. Virtual technology
can place a whole layer of management tools on the systems, to give IT
directors much more transparency
and control over their resources.
The creation of virtual machines
within servers ensures there is an
easy way to carry out money-saving
server consolidation projects and
allows servers to be used more efficiently. VMware’s recent announcement that firms will now be able to
take advantage of dual-core chips via
virtual technology is another step in
the right direction, making processor use even more efficient. With
virtual technology, it does seem you
are getting something for nothing.
Another huge challenge for IT
directors is to support mobile workforces. This also seems to be made
for a virtual solution. Virtual
machine (VM) desktops can link to
corporate networks and applications
with precisely-tailored permissions
and access rights. This makes it relatively simple to control access rights
for mobile staff, teleworkers and
contractors as well as outsourcing
partners. At the same time, VMs can
Access systems take control
Citrix’s Mark Templeton explains how firms can boost the
efficiency of online systems by improving access management
ACCESS MANAGEMENT INTERVIEW BY MARK STREET
IT Week: As chief executive of IT infrastructure management specialist Citrix
Systems, how do you think firms should
manage access rights for users?
Mark Templeton: When an employee joins
the company, they should have a standard
role, which will entitle them to a default set
of things they can access under certain circumstances. In some cases managers may
need to change those rights. In a real-world
situation someone may take on a new role
– for example, they might need to get into
a warehouse for a valid business reason.
The manager will evaluate the risks and
decide whether to give
them the key, provided
there are adequate security precautions and
controls in place. That’s
how it works in the real
Templeton:
flexibility is key
44
world and that’s how it works in a virtual
world of access infrastructure.
How would you advise organisations to
enforce access policies?
There should be no one keeper or king of
business rules. This is chiefly because the
amount of change that goes on is way
beyond the scope of one person’s ability to
keep up to date. It’s like a business plan –
as soon as you write it down it’s out of date
because the world just changed again in
the last five minutes. The same thing
applies to a policy system. The change
around policy has to come from a distributed set of points and people.
How does this work in practice?
The answer depends on implementing
both the right technical and business solutions. From a technical perspective, we
believe in federation or the virtualisation
of access rights. That is to say, you should
create a central access point for policy,
rather than a central storage point. Access
policy and its rules are fairly distributed in
terms of where they are stored and where
they need to live. Federation allows things
to live in their natural place while the system operates as if the information is
pooled in a central repository.
And do you feel that technology is making
this a simpler process?
The access technology is becoming even
smarter so the system will be able to understand the identity of a person, a device, a
network and a location, and then it will
put that information to use against the correct policies. In this way you will get a set
of dynamic access control lists that open
up the right access controls based upon
what has been agreed. This is what smart
access is all about.
How important is it for IT managers to
ensure networks are adaptable?
Future-proofing a network is incredibly
important and it’s [the IT department’s]
responsibility. IT directors will not be able
to step up to their role as business leaders
without being able to say they have built a
be configured to ensure that users
do not download rogue software,
another management bugbear.
Furthermore, virtualisation
seems to be the only way to deal
with the flood of emerging corporate governance regulations, which
insist on much tighter control over
mission-critical IT. The beauty of
virtual technology is that you can
pool data across the network to
provide a virtual repository of core
information.
So virtual technology offers
lower costs, greater transparency,
better security, more management
control and efficient use of resources. If that’s not a management
panacea, I don’t know what is. ITW
[email protected]
ABOUT MARK TEMPLETON
Templeton is chief executive
• Mark
at Citrix Systems.
has been instrumental in estab• He
lishing Citrix’s global channel and
•
alliance network of over 7,000
partners, and moving the company
into the internet market.
Before joining Citrix in 1995,Templeton gained 12 years’ management
experience at UB Networks, Keyfile Corporation and LANSystems.
flexible infrastructure that will deal with
the inevitable change of requirements that
will take place. Even though they may not
know exactly what that change will be, it is
crucial that they build a flexible infrastructure that can anticipate a large quantity of predictable types of change.
What sort of changes will companies need
to make provisions for?
We know there will be more application
infrastructures – that’s a given. There will
also be device proliferation. We will see a
change in how people want to use corporate information and where they want to
use it. If you know all of that, even where
you don’t know the specifics, I don’t know
how you could responsibly play your role as
an IT leader in a company without building
the infrastructure to anticipate it. ITW
itweek.co.uk