Articles by 'Ken Phelan'

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

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

One of the things that will pump a little adrenaline into an average Tuesday morning at Gotham is a call from one of our clients in the midst of a genuine cyber crisis. Unfortunately, these calls are more and more common, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes talking about some things you can do get prepared for such a call. I’m glad you’re calling me, but I’d prefer that you also had some type of Cyber Crisis Plan that you prepared for such an occasion. I know it’s customary at this point to spend a para... read more.

• December 16, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

The future of virtual desktops seems a little murky right now. In 2008 Gartner predicted that 40% of desktops would be virtualized by 2010. They continued to predict this target over the next several years and were still maintaining as late as 2012 that 40% of corporate desktops would be virtualized by 2013. After several years of stretching for this goal, in 2012 the rubber band seemed to snap. Brian Madden, one of the top VDI pundits, published his book “The VDI Delusion”. The book seemed to claim that... read more.

• December 04, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

Every business builds itself around the needs for three constituencies - customers, employees, and owners. The CEO acronym is an easy way to remember them. There is always a balance, but generally one of them has a priority role. Customer-driven businesses start with customer experience as their priority. A lot of retail organizations have this focus. Nordstrom’s comes to mind. Service industry’s often make employees a priority, knowing that a good employee will make the service product shine. Starbucks... read more.

• November 06, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

Facebook announced a program this week to have their employees live with 2G data access speeds on Tuesdays (2G Tuesdays). This gives their employees perspective on what it’s like to use Facebook in an emerging market like India. I love this. How many times have you complained to a developer about the speed of their product only to hear them tell you how great the product performs for them? Well, good for you and your super-high-end PC with the local data store. A few years ago, I abandoned my noteb... read more.

• October 28, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

One of the things I like really like about my job is that I spend a lot of time out of my office, visiting clients. Conference calls and web meetings are fine, but nothing communicates like a face-to-face interaction. When you go to someone’s office you simply understand the situation better. One of the telling things I often run into in this physical inspection is something I call Cap-X bloat. Many organizations are fine when it comes to buying things, but they often don’t have the time to implement the... read more.

• October 15, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

There are a lot of new products emerging to secure the end point. This makes sense given the nature of the attacks we’re seeing, but it’s also leading to some confusion. I thought I would try help out with some categorization. Category 1: Signature-based defenses. These are traditional anti-virus and malware products. The signature-based solutions have a serious problem – or rather a deadly combination of two problems. There are so many new signatures that it becomes more and more expensive to manage the... read more.

• September 28, 2015