11:30 AM -- IBM's vision of a Dynamic Infrastructure revolves around the theme of "a smarter planet needs a smarter infrastructure." Achieving a dynamic infrastructure requires an integrated approach leveraging many IT capabilities, including service management, virtualization and consolidation, and security. The company believes enabling the convergence of business and IT infrastructures into one dynamic infrastructure will provide a stimulus for societal and business transformation, and will allow IBM to take a leadership role in helping its clients harness emerging IT capabilities.
Overarching strategic visions such as that of IBM serve two very useful purposes: 1) They let customers understand that IBM knows where it plans to go, and that will benefit them in the long run even though the specifics will have to be filled in over time; and 2) The vision helps build alignment internally for employee buy-in and resource allocation. However, IBM also needed to connect the broader long-term vision with a pragmatic strategy that deals with the here and now -- a world where customers are trying to deal with a challenging economic environment while remaining highly competitive. And IBM does that through its information infrastructure strategy.
IBM believes that its information infrastructure is essential to "manage information more effectively and to mitigate information risks with a dynamic infrastructure." The information infrastructure model follows IBM's CARS (Information Compliance, Information Availability, Information Retention, and Information Security) methodology. According to the company, information compliance mitigates information risks, information availability delivers continuous access to information, information retention supports information retention policies, and information security enables the secure sharing of information.
Trying to pry dollars out of pinched budgets is a challenge for all businesses, since economic conditions are focusing customers on the dollars-and-cents benefits of the solutions and services they buy. IBM sees client requirements for the value of information infrastructure as: consolidation, value, quantified short-term ROI (like, within a year!), and efficiency (which translates into lower asset costs, lower energy costs, and optimized use of existing assets).
Rolling up its sleeves, IBM has announced Wave 2 of its information infrastructure initiative with a number of products, including:
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IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
