By Charles Rattray, Tideway Systems

Global financial services organisations today face a major challenge - the growing realisation that not knowing what they have is the first barrier to delivering better IT. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, but you can’t measure what you can’t see. Unfortunately, as any business leader can confirm, barriers such as these cost money to break down, and entering a new phase of IT efficiency and operational excellence will come with some cost. Equally unfortunate, return on investment is typically difficult to justify prior to the expenditure - and the net benefit even harder to articulate – two points often raised in defense of doing nothing. Yet what we tend to miss is the idea that what we really want to know is how does one asset we have in our infrastructure relate to other assets – where are its dependencies?

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By Allan Mertner, Tideway Systems

As one of Europe’s most active financial centers, London has been in the news lately due to the shrinking datacentre real estate available to support countless large financial institutions. Experts now estimate that the vacancy rate in London’s co-location facilities will approach 0% by 2009. And London is not alone – Tier1 Research reports that in 2006, global datacentre demand rose nearly 13% percent while facility supply rose only 4%.

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By Tim Coote, Tideway Systems

Anyone who’s worked in IT knows the old GIGO saw – ‘Garbage in, Garbage out.’ However, even I was surprised when one of my customers told me that he and his bank had been dealing with this for fifteen years and are just now really beginning to understand the point. They’d spent much of that time building and layering business processes to run the IT business more effectively. One of the main results was that they had multiple processes, checks and cross checks, but none that had added hugely to business effectiveness. In fact, effectiveness actually declined.

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By Richard Muirhead, Tideway Systems

There’s no doubt virtualisation is a hot topic – in fact, an October 2007 Gartner report cited “Virtualization 2.0” as one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008. As power, space and budget constraints continue to weigh heavily on financial firms, many are turning to virtualisation to help them free-up critical data center resources. Unfortunately, the rush to solve these escalating data centre challenges and stay on the cutting edge of technology can cause organisations to undertake enormous companywide virtualisation initiatives - without first designing a clear plan of attack.

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