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What's the Future of Corporate IT and ITSM? (Video)
Our headline is the title of a survey SysAid did at Fusion, a "gathering of seasoned IT directors, service management implementers, and business analysts" that took place in early November. As Sysaid's marketing VP, Sophie Danby was the person who designed and implemented the survey, which consisted of only three questions: 1) Where do you see the corporate IT department in five years’ time? 2) With the consumerization of IT continuing to drive employee expectations of corporate IT, how will this potentially disrupt the way companies deliver IT? 3) What IT process or activity is the most important in creating superior user experiences to boost user/customer satisfaction? || You can obviously follow the first link above and see the survey's results. But in the video, Sophie adds some insights beyond the numerical survey results into near-future IT changes and what they mean for people currently working in the field.
Is that like BDSM?
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I might as well mention predictions, that may be something that will be something IT shops have to deal with as well:
The main thing is the sea change of malware and active hacking from passive slurping of data to active destruction. This was shown in this past year by CryptoLocker, but driven home by the Sony malware. In the past, a company could just shrug, and continue with their policies because the leaked data didn't mean much -- their original data is still in place. However, if the bad guys start going in with destruction in mind... which is easy, we will start seeing companies actually start going bankrupt. A good example of this is the fact that a lot of businesses are SAN based. An attacker just has to go in on the tier 1 SAN, drop all LUNs, and in the case of a SSD based SAN, do a TRIM against all devices. Depending on how fast the garbage collector is on the controller, there is likely no way in Hell the data would ever be recoverable. Even SANs that replicate data will be affected, as they will just write over the good data.
A lot of companies use tier 2 NAS systems (Isilons, Avamars) for backups because of deduplication. Even though Isilons have SmartLock (for example), an attacker that manages to get root on a node can still do a lot of damage, usually a single command would purge the entire data stored on the cluster. Even with SmartLock, if the attacker gets root, that functionality can be bypassed and the drives zeroed.
In the past, tape drives were used, but because companies were focused on data loss due to hardware failure (which RAID, multipathing, replication, and snapshots help mitigate), backups to deduplicated disk arrays became the target of choice. Now, businesses may be forced to go back to tape in some way, just because it is harder for an attacker to zero out the contents. It can be done (purge a storage pool, tell it to zero out all media), but if there is media offsite, this can be mitigated, since the attacker can't "rm -rf" a tape sitting on a shelf at the local Iron Maiden warehouse.
So, there will be a change in IT so data is stored more robustly, so a purge of the company SAN doesn't kill the company.
On a smaller scale, CryptoLocker and such affect individuals. Again, malware use to "just" read data, now it is actively locked up and destroyed. On a SOHO/SMB scale, this is mitigated by a device that initiates backups, dumps the local desktops to a drive (or array) for backups. The reason it does the backups as opposed to dumping to a share is, again, ensuring that malware can't zero things out with a simple diskpart clean all command.
Another prediction I have is SANs actually using more features in SSD. With SSD moving from disk interfaces to SIMMS/DIMMS, RAID can be handled in a different manner, but still prove results. I saw Pure Storage's dog and pony show where they are running SANs, all on SSD. This is where mainline SAN storage is going to head for the most part (barring extremely large amounts of data that SSD is just too expensive for.) HDD will remain, but likely end up used for backups and archiving as opposed to primary storage.
Of course, the third prediction is that smartphones get enough capacity to be used as personal servers. I don't think the Motorola Atrix like functionality will come around for a number of years, but I wouldn't be surprised in the future that VMs can be stored on one's smartphone, and one's desktop be essentially a compute node, booting ESXi, and using the phone as a backing store. How will this affect IT? Apple and Google are going to have to crack some deals with MS to handle GPOs, perhaps allowing iOS and Android to join AD domains and be managed under SCOM/SCCM/etc.