As was my custom during my daily commute to work about fifteen years ago, I was listening to National Public Radio. They had a fascinating interview that I vividly remember to this day. The host was interviewing a five-year-old girl that had HER OWN WEB SITE! This was big news. My first thought was, “How did this child build a website?” My second thought was, “Why on earth would she need her own Web site!?”
As it turns out, of course, her dad had taught himself HTML and built the pages for her. She created content such as drawings and little stories about herself. It was almost like she had published a novel or something-- I mean, she was on the World Wide Web! It was a landmark story at the infancy of the commercialized Internet, which has now become vastly complex and crucial to business success.
Today, many millions of people have their own Web presence in a variety of forms: blogs, social network profiles, personal Web sites, and the list goes on. Facebook alone has recently topped 100 million daily active users.
Such advances in “social networking” have also converged with our IT environments. For example, many companies today have product support sites in which customers, not employees, actually provide support for the company’s products. In this example, because data from such solutions has to be available to the business, the company’s IT organization is responsible for integrating business and e-commerce functionality and social computing capabilities with enterprise IT infrastructure.
As the Web and social computing become increasingly ingrained in day-to-day business, IT must consider how this functionality interacts with the company’s entire technology platform. You need to assess how each solution pattern affects the other solutions patterns as they intersect.
For example, security is a high-priority concern for CIOs in all industries. Deploying a social computing solution could potentially attract many people from the one billion strong population of Internet users. Both honest consumers and dangerous hackers will be on the site. Not only your Web site, but also your business network could be at risk because of business integration of your online infrastructure. Thus, it is critical to perform a thorough security assessment of your IT infrastructure, as well as your Web applications, and implement a solid security and management solution.
Unfortunately, the wide variety of threats against networks, social computing applications and e-commerce sites has led to a hodgepodge of security solutions to protect your network edge that security managers have pieced together from multiple vendors. This approach results in lost time and money for IT administrators and increased risk in security coverage. Implementing a common, integrated solution to protect your edge, applications and servers is a superior strategy.
Before you know it, your organization can have tens if not hundreds of Web sites to support. And that is the problem today. How do you manage the tremendous growth in this pervasive technology? The answer is by having an integrated IT strategy that enhances productivity, security, management, and scalability.
My guess is that you already have mission critical web solutions in your IT environment, and the list of requests for more sites, more capabilities, and more features is growing daily. Take a step back. Evaluate your organization’s decisions in regards to technology selection and think about what would happen to productivity and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) if you standardized across the platform.
Subscribe