- Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction (Volume 2)
29 Oct 09 | LEF Technology Program Report
Abstraction, long used in IT to mask complexity, is an essential ingredient for cloud computing. It's the secret sauce that sets up hardware and software to be delivered as services from the cloud. Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction shows clients how to mix that sauce for their specific needs.
Abstraction includes the many variations of virtualization, as well as services and multitenancy. In addition to enabling new combinations of IT components, abstraction helps the enterprise reduce cycle times. With abstraction, we can do in minutes what used to take days or weeks. Further, we can match IT demand to supply far more accurately, doing away with excess IT inventory.
The Cloud rEvolution series explores IT and business implications, covering technology advances, examples, concerns and practical guidelines. The four-volume series is as follows:
Volume 1: Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation
Volume 2: Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction
Volume 3: Cloud rEvolution: The Cloud Effect
Volume 4: Cloud rEvolution: A Workbook for Cloud Computing in the Enterprise
- Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation (Volume 1)
30 Sep 09 | LEF Technology Program Report
Cloud computing is taking IT by storm, and with it enterprises across the commercial and government sectors. As cloud computing changes the game in IT and opens up enormous agility and innovation for the business, enterprises are seeking to understand how they can benefit from cloud.
According to economist Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute, cloud computing represents a morphing of the digital domain. This morphing is evolutionary from a technology standpoint, and potentially revolutionary for its business impact, as cloud (the latest major phase of IT) infiltrates all aspects of the economy over time. Or as Arthur puts it, "The economy is an expression of its technologies."
Volume 1, Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation, examines the core building blocks of the cloud, focusing on three areas: universal power, universal information and universal access. Armed with a solid understanding of cloud's foundations, enterprises will be better equipped to take advantage of advances in cloud computing, address its current limitations, and cut through the hype and doubt that currently surround cloud.
Volume 1 kicks off the four-volume Cloud rEvolution series, which probes the cloud continuum from its foundational technologies to abstracted technologies to the ultimate abstraction: the cloud itself. The series explores IT and business implications, covering technology advances, examples, concerns and practical guidelines. The four-volume series is as follows:
Volume 1: Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation
Volume 2: Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction
Volume 3: Cloud rEvolution: The Cloud Effect
Volume 4: Cloud rEvolution: A Workbook for Cloud Computing in the Enterprise
- Digital Disruptions: Technology Innovations Powering 21st Century Business
28 Oct 08 | LEF Technology Program Report
Listen to Lem Lasher, Chief Innovation Officer for CSC and Chairman of the Leading Edge Forum, talking to Business Week (30 June 2009) on the key digital disruptions that are affecting organisations today and in the future: Less IT Doesn't Mean Less Innovation
YouTube challenges TV. Internet radio usurps traditional local AM/FM broadcasts. Facebook and MySpace redefine political dialogue. Virtual worlds and augmented reality transform how we live, work and learn.
These are just some of the digital disruptions rocking today’s marketplace.
"Digital disruptions are about information and communication technologies that change business models deeply, and often shockingly," says Digital Disruptions (PDF, 7.5MB), a new report by CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF). "These disruptions, on par with the telephone and automobile, transform the marketplace and society so completely that it can take decades for their full effects to be realized."
CSC has been applying a digital lens to disruptive technologies since 1999. This new report identifies the latest disruptions being generated by the information technology and communications industry.
"With digital disruptions, all the rules change," asserts Alex Fuss, LEF associate and the report’s lead researcher. "It doesn’t matter how good your current business plan is. You need to adapt to the new realities of the disruptive technology and, in many cases, ’roll your own’."
Fuss examines seven major digital disruptions in the report — New Media, Living in a New Reality, Social Power, Information Transparency, New Wave of Waves, Platform Makeover and Smart(er) World. - LEF Report, Digital Trust Series: Volume 8, Digital Trust: Epilogue and Strategic Roadmap, Available Now:
18 Jul 08 | LEF Technology Program Report
This last volume in the year-long Digital Trust series provides key conclusions from the digital trust research and a roadmap to guide enterprises in their digital trust journey. In addition, volume 8 gives updates on topics covered in previous volumes, including identity management, intellectual property protection, compliance management, liquid security, eThreats, and transparency and assurance.
The main message is: Digital trust is real and happening now. Enterprises can aim today for value creation with security technology and services that already exist. And with a digital trust strategy, tomorrow's security technologies will make the payoffs even more powerful.
“We invest billions of dollars every year in information risk reduction, and we don’t expect a payoff ... but we should,” asserts Ron Knode, LEF Associate and the report’s lead researcher. "A digital trust strategy changes the game to focus security investments on value creation, with improvements in information risk management a natural consequence in addition to creating value for the enterprise."
To learn more about the LEF core programme, visit www.csc.com/lef or contact Kristi Hughes at khughes@csc.com.
- Transparency and Assurance: Putting a Measure on Digital Trust, Volume 7
12 Feb 08 | LEF Technology Program Report
Digital trust is a serious, weighty matter, and the enterprise payoffs come most completely when digital trust investments and efforts are recognized and acknowledged by customers and partners. Why is it that digital trust is not uniformly conveyed with the heft of trust emblems as selected by enterprise owners? How else can digital trust be created, measured and represented? How much does digital trust weigh, anyhow?
- Digital Trust: eThreats and Countermeasures: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Out, Volume 6
19 Oct 07 | LEF Technology Program Report
In our examination of digital trust so far, that principle does seem to hold, at least in the major efforts being applied to improve security. For even though security challenges remain, and even though security issues still need constant attention, the security service teams on the front lines of the digital enterprise are spending the information risk management side of the coin pretty well.
- Liquid Security: Digital Trust: When Time, Place and Platform Don’t Matter, Volume 5
19 Oct 07 | LEF Technology Program Report
The digital enterprise is becoming liquid. When the fixed or predictable dimensions of time, place and information technology (IT) platform become variable, the digital enterprise changes character and becomes more agile, efficient and prosperous. Work can happen around the clock, from all sorts of locations, on all manner of computers and mobile devices. This new character of the enterprise reflects the liquid properties of time, place and platform. In taking advantage of these new properties and freeing itself from traditional constraints, the liquid enterprise demands that digital trust be equally liquid to sustain value generation without making assumptions about the clock, geography or equipment involved.
- Digital Trust: Compliance Management: The Business of Keeping the Business in Business, Volume 4
29 Aug 07 | LEF Technology Program Report
All enterprises need rules for their own orderly operation. Charters, articles of incorporation, mission statements, organization charts, role and responsibility descriptions and operating policies, including security policies, are inevitably created by the enterprise for the sake of establishing a productive concept of operations that meets business needs. In many cases, the enterprise applies audit and enforcement techniques to itself to make sure that the standards of operation are being followed. Those audit and enforcement techniques are intended to generate some confidence (a.k.a. “trust”) that the advertised operational practices are actually being followed. Automated audit and enforcement techniques contribute digital trust to that confidence.
- Digital Trust: Intellectual Property Protection: Minding Your Mind Power, Volume 3
29 Aug 07 | LEF Technology Program Report
There is an old adage that the more love you give away, the more you get in return. With intellectual property (IP) exactly the opposite happens: when information, ideas, performances and other expressed products of the mind are given away (or taken), their value is soon lost or compromised. Protecting IP – minding your mind power – is an important business issue.
- Digital Trust: Identity Management - Digitizing your DNA, Volume 2
19 Jul 07 | LEF Technology Program Report
Who are you on the Net? What makes a good digital identity?
Identity Management: Digitizing Your DNA addresses these questions and more as the next installment in the Leading Edge Forum's Digital Trust report series. Identity Management examines identity for human and non-human subjects (e.g., devices, bots), and explores three approaches to identity management and digital trust: the walled garden approach, federated identity management, and the open garden approach.
Unfortunately, there’s no digital equivalent to DNA. "The longtime search for one digital identity that works for all kinds of subjects in all contexts will probably continue," says Ron Knode, LEF Associate and primary contributor to the Digital Trust series. "However, it seems neither possible nor really desirable." On the bright side, though, Ron believes "identity convergence, faster trust negotiations and the promise of Identity 2.0 'open garden' initiatives guarantee that we will need many fewer digital identifiers than we use today."