optimize

Risk assessments are used to determine the likelihood and magnitude of information system harm, in the event of a security breach. This in turn determines how much of that risk should be mitigated and what controls should be used to achieve that mitigation.

Without risk assessments, the potential exists for organizations to leverage inappropriate (i.e. either too strict or too lax) security controls to protect information systems. Use the attached:

Info-Tech provides tools for use in reporting vendor issues, determining escalation channels, tracking resolution progress, and addressing areas for follow-up and improvement. There are two tools included in this bundle:

• Vendor contact escalation list
• Vendor issue log

Used together these tools deliver useful information for use in driving higher levels of performance from vendor relationships. To read more, click the link below...

Understanding vendor attitudes towards IT and the organization is essential for maintaining and improving the overall quality of vendor performance. This Satisfaction Survey offers a series of questions that an IT department can present to its vendors to get their feedback in order to address issues and improve the vendor performance and overall relationship. 

To effectively manage vendor relationships, organizations must track vendor performance on key metrics. Our tool allows you to view performance results at both the portfolio and individual vendor levels to aid in decision-making.

Use Info-Tech's dashboard tool on a monthly basis to input and analyze metrics. It allows you to track up to 15 metrics each for up to 20 vendors, and provides a list of standard, pre-populated metrics. To read more, click the link below...

Vendor performance metrics provide a common understanding between you and the vendor delivering the products/services. Measuring progress against metrics allows you to set targets for higher performance or address a vendor’s substandard performance before it becomes a larger problem.

Small enterprises have adopted blade servers at faster rates than mid-sized enterprises. As a result, there are many older blade platforms in use. These blade servers, purchased for one-applicationone- server operations, are being recast as consolidation and virtualization platforms.

In many cases, minor upgrades can extend the life of those servers and support virtualization as well. By judicious optimization of software and hardware combinations and possible upgrades, IT can extend the life of existing blade servers and gain the benefits of virtualization.

Beyond consolidation: building an optimized Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) internal Cloud is the next low-hanging fruit.

As the proportion of servers that are virtual increases, IT is also tasked with being more agile, service oriented, and cost effective. Now is the time to focus on building a core Infrastructure-as-a-Service architecture that leverages virtualization for efficiency, robust service levels, and cost effectiveness.

Find the optimal path to shared services governance with this whitepaper. Ineffective governance frequently undermines the benefits of shared services, with over a third of implementations increasing costs.

This research will explain three governance models for shared services:

One financial enterprise, which has been running Windows Virtual Server for several years, was able to dramatically reduce the number of servers thanks to virtualization. In this case the average utilization was about 5% when running one-server-one-application. Moving to a virtualized environment allowed this firm to consolidate enough applications on each server to raise the utilization to a consistent 80%. This also had some unexpected consequences.

IT budgets can be adversely impacted by the very threat of economic recession. IT spending is often delayed or
frozen as a precautionary measure, before budgets may actually be cut.