Articles by 'Ken Phelan'

By Ken Phelan, Posted in

Over time, the value we get from a piece of software generally increases. The software matures. There are more features and, hopefully, fewer bugs. More importantly, we simply use it better. It’s fully deployed. We’ve figured out where and why to use it in our organization. Once we’ve been in production for a couple of years, it’s like any other relationship. We may look wistfully at some green grass on the other side of the fence every now and then, but we’re happy with the de... read more.

• June 13, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Training

The Challenger Channel I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where a speaker talked about The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson. She encouraged us to read it and of course, I did. The book has several great insights about the current B2B selling environment and since that’s what Gotham does for a living I found it very interesting. Two of the author’s key insights are: Customers are more consensus driven than ever. On average there will be 5.4 decision makers at each customer for ea... read more.

• May 17, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in

The Challenger Channel I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where a speaker talked about The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson. She encouraged us to read it and of course, I did. The book has several great insights about the current B2B selling environment and since that’s what Gotham does for a living I found it very interesting. Two of the author’s key insights are: Customers are more consensus driven than ever. On average there will be 5.4 decision makers at each customer for ea... read more.

• May 17, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

Ransomware is all the rage in the news as more and more people are hit by this particularly tough form of malware. I thought I would walk through one of the more prevalent attack patterns and provide some suggestions on how to combat this. Let me start off by saying that the ransomware attack is advanced and designed to get through most of the existing security products that are on the market. But since it’s in the news, every security vendor is talking about how they stop ransomware. It’s a common problem... read more.

• April 18, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

There’s a lot of interest in new converged hardware platforms for VDI. Converged platforms present a scalable architecture where you grow capacity by adding devices that provide both compute and storage capabilities. This would be in comparison to more traditional architectures. People used to just buy servers with disk in them. These were fine as far as they went, but over time, it was a hassle to manage each individual box. Along came storage area networks and servers were relegated to providing the compu... read more.

• April 04, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

I was at the RSA show a couple of weeks ago and my plane reading included The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black Swans are big things that happen unexpectedly, and having happened, change our world significantly. 9/11 was a Black Swan. So was Lehman. In the context of the RSA show, it was hard not to draw some parallels to the new breed of advanced cyber-attacks. Human beings are pattern seeking animals. We’re naturally predisposed to take the noise that everyday life is made of and turn it into... read more.

• March 11, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

“We are at the beginning of the age of planetary computing. Billions of people will be wirelessly interconnected, and the only way to achieve that kind of massive scale usage is by massive scale, brutally efficient cloud-based infrastructure.” - Dan Farber, Editor in Chief CNET News What if the cloud really doesn’t change everything about computing from this point forward? Business managers love the idea of the cloud. IT has always been a bit of a pain. Wouldn’t it be great if they could spend less and ge... read more.

• February 10, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of introducing Bruce Schneier and Larry Ponemon at an event focused on Cyber Resilience. If you’re interested in the material, there’s a recorded version available here. Bruce and Larry are both rock stars, so the content was terrific. I thought I would share some of the things I learned. Cyber resilience is an up and coming term in the cyber security world. It represents the ability to manage, mitigate, and move on from a cyberattack. It kind of reminds me of the... read more.

• February 01, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

In Richard Thaler’s new book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, he explains a number of risk management behaviors that are currently frustrating the IT Risk world. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it if IT risk is part of your job. One of his discussions surrounds a group of senior executives at a large corporate conglomerate. He offered them the following scenario: Suppose you were offered an investment opportunity for your division that will yield one of two payoffs. After th... read more.

• January 20, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

There are a lot of traditions surrounding the New Year. Some people make resolutions. Many people start a new fitness regimen. In IT, we make predictions. Here are some of mine for 2016: Big Data for Business. Big Data and tools like Splunk are great and as they’ve been introduced to technology people, they naturally see ways that these tools can provide value to IT. People are waking up to the real value of these tools – business data. If you’re using Splunk to manage IT stuff, get in front of it as a b... read more.

• January 06, 2016