Transitioning portions of IT applications and services into the cloud is something that’s starting to emerge in the minds of IT professionals across organizations of all sizes.

As the saying widely attributed (correctly or incorrectly, you be the judge) to the great Albert Einstein goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Considering the ongoing onslaught of payment system breaches, one of the things that operators of online shopping systems might want to evaluate is the security of their own shopping cart software.

Perhaps one of the more notable evolutionary developments in technology is converged infrastructure.

Following my return from TechEd and Cisco Live! in June, I promised a recap of my experiences and impressions from VMworld, which was held late last month in San Francisco.

Last month, I outlined the need to move towards a more application-centric approach to IT monitoring, but what I didn’t specifically discuss is how the enduser fits into the equation.

As the world of technology continues to evolve around us and the boundaries between network and systems become less defined, systems administrators and network administrators need to evolve their monitoring practices to take on a more application-centered focus, rather than the traditional silos of systems monitoring or network monitoring.

Quite often, I encounter prospective software buyers who ask the question, “Is this product pick-your-regulation compliant?”

This past month saw the annual trade shows of two out of the three major vendors who affect almost every data center in existence.

Hardly a day goes by in my travels and discourses that I don’t encounter an IT pro new to an organization that discovers they’ve inherited some server, application, service, etc. that doesn’t make sense in its current implementation.