The Triangle of Amplification

Posted by Roel Gloudemans on 14 February 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: System Management, Support Organization

SOA, SOX Compliance, Virtualisation, Security, Identity Management, Outsourcing; all trends of the current time. Organizations are struggling to adapt and incorporate. Consultancy bureaus thrive on this (I belong in this category). Now is the time to step back and look on how all of these trends interact and what the demands are on he organization from a holistic point of view.

There are three key concepts in technical infrastructure trends:

• Fragmentation
  
  • Services are built from increasingly small parts. This fits the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model, but at the same time complicates infrastructure management. Especially if those parts are the responsibility of different entities
    
  • Grid; having a large pool of resources that is dynamically allocated to the most needy task sounds and is great. But how to ever guarantee service levels on such an infrastructure; what is the pool of resources is spread over multiple separate entities?
    
  • ...
• Security
  
  • Identity management simplifies the maintenance of authorization and authentication records and makes life easier for all users involved, but also makes any security incident more widespread
    
  • More and more laws are posing boundary conditions on services and infrastructures
    
  • ...
• Virtualisation
  
  • Potentially brings down hardware and license cost
    
  • But eradicates the traditional boundaries in the infrastructure. Separation of responsibilities as implemented in most organizations is gone (see also http://www.gloudemans.info/virtualisation-overview)
    
  • ...

Other trends are more or less related to one or more of these concepts.

These three concepts enhance/amplify each other in every way. They enable each other, but also amplify each others problems. Examples:

• Because of the fragmentation of services, each component needs authentication and security services
  
• Virtualisation allows for many smaller service components to run on one piece of hardware, thus enabling fragmentation
  
• Virtualisation poses a new security challenge in the area of infrastructure and service management
  
• Chinese wall policies might encumber the full usage of virtualisation and grid technologies
  
• A successful identity management implementation enables implementation of SOA
  

Outsourcing commonly plays at least on one of these concepts. For example: Outsourcing means new trust relations (playing on security), fragmentation (more than one outsourcings partner is common) and virtualisation (giving the outsourcing partner(s) a piece of infrastructure to test on).

Triggering one area will trigger the other two as well, directly of in the future.

Ground rules for support organizations on how to deal with modern infrastructures:

• Awareness; be aware of the service chains and how they interact, be aware of security implications if a component changes. This is a business responsibility, but in todays highly complex infrastructures mistakes are easy to make and can have a devastating influence on the business
  
• Multi-Domain knowledge. The era of the system and network manager are past. The new IT professional is skilled in several areas and is a team player by definition. No one can have complete overview, so IT professionals must increasingly rely on the knowledge of their peers
  
• The support organization must have as little interfaces as possible. Depending on the user to identify the problem and calling the right service desk of the right service component is not possible. The user will be more heavily involved in identifying the real problem, but relaying him from service desk to service desk is counter productive.
  
• No boundaries. Boundaries between entities in the same organization cannot exist if a complicated/fragmented service is to be managed efficiently. Different roles still must exists (something to do with security), but unhampered interaction between these roles is mandatory.
  
• The governance model for the support organization must be excellent. Not only for the complex services under its own control, but for interfacing to the organizations which have other parts of the same service under control as well.