The world of smartphones, tablets and mobile devices is evolving rapidly and
is changing the way CIOs think about topics ranging from telework to disaster
recovery to information security.

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width=91 height=117>CIO concerns include include:

• Mobile Device Security: Before you can make your
  users more productive with mobile devices, you need to make certain that those
  devices are highly secure and remotely managed.


• Custom Applications: The rapid advances in COTS
  smartphone technology have changed the game for creating custom,
  multi-platform applications that can dramatically boost your mobile users’
  productivity.


• Disaster Recovery and Emergency Response: New
  commercial wireless technologies can be a key part of your disaster
  response/Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans.


• Mandated Mobile Security: While modern cellular
  networks provide security good enough for everyday usage, there are some
  situations – such as when you’re dealing with sensitive or classified
  information – where you need a higher grade of information assurance for your
  wireless voice communications.


• Mobile Resource Management: Whether you’re
  tracking vehicles or other transportable assets, Wireless asset management
  systems enables CIOs to increase your asset protection and tracking
  capabilities and save money at the same time.


• Field Force Automation: Virtually any job process
  that is done with paper-based forms or on unconnected terminals can be adapted
  to mobile handheld or tablet devices.

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6fusion, a provider of cloud infrastructure management software and services, this morning announced that it has raised $7 million in a Series B round of funding led by Grotech Ventures.

Previous backer Intersouth Partners also participated in the round.

The company provides an end-to-end cloud management platform that enables global workload distribution by turning companies’ public and private clouds into pay-per-use billable utilities.

6fusion has developed a metering algorithm, dubbed the Workload Allocation Cube, which it says standardizes the quantification of supply and demand for compute resources.

The company’s UC6 Cloud Management Platform federates private data center and third party cloud operators, providing a single console to allow IT organizations to meter, manage and optimize hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Lawson DeVries of Grotech Ventures will join 6fusion’s board.

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CenturyLink this morning announced that it will acquire all outstanding shares of Savvis common stock in a cash and stock merger valued at $40 per share, or a total of approximately $2.5 billion, plus net debt of approximately $0.7 billion which will be assumed or refinanced at close.

CenturyLink is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States, providing a range of broadband, voice and wireless services to consumers and businesses across the entire country. The company just merged with Qwest in a stock-for-stock transaction.

Savvis provides cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises.

Under the terms of the transaction, Savvis stockholders will receive $30 per share in cash and $10 in shares of CenturyLink common stock. The consideration represents an 11 percent premium over Savvis’ closing stock price as of the close of trading on April 26, 2011.

With the addition of the company, CenturyLink says it aims to achieve global scale as a managed hosting and colocation provider to its existing and potential new business and government customers. CenturyLink anticipates integrating its hosting business and Savvis’ managed hosting and cloud services into a single CenturyLink business unit.

Together, CenturyLink and Savvis say they will operate 48 data centers located in North America, Europe, and Asia with more than 1.9 million square feet of gross floor space, a national 207,000 route mile fiber network and a 190,000 mile global access network.

CenturyLink expects to realize approximately $70 million in full run-rate annual operating cost and capital expenditure synergies. The transaction is expected to be accretive to CenturyLink’s free cash flow per share in the first full year following the close.

The integrated hosting business will be based in St. Louis and led primarily by key members of the Savvis leadership team, including CEO James Ousley, who will head the unit. Following the closing of the transaction, CenturyLink will employ approximately 50,000 people.

The companies anticipate closing the transaction in the second half of 2011.

CenturyLink notes that it has received a commitment letter from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Barclays Bank for bridge debt facilities aggregating up to $2 billion to fund a portion of the acquisition and refinancing of Savvis’ current debt.

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Enabling business continuity, reliable disaster recovery, and ongoing access
to applications and data for employees, partners, and customers is critical.
Failed applications can lead to lost data and lengthy recovery times, and can
negatively affect the company’s reputation\ and profitability.

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While most companies employ some backup processes, they are difficult to
test. Planned downtime for activities such as hardware maintenance either
impacts business operations or must be done after hours. Small and midsize
companies need proven methods for backing up and restoring systems while
minimizing downtime.

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alt="IT Infrastructure Strategy Charter ISO" vspace=3 align=right
src="http://it-toolkits.com/images/IT_Infrastructure_Strategy_Charter.gif"
width=91 height=117>Today’s IT infrastructure is complex. The number of IT
assets in the infrastructure that an enterprise level organisation must manage
can be overwhelming – different platforms, devices, servers, applications
databases and more. And the sheer volume of activity that occurs in this
infrastructure is almost too large to imagine. Many organisations have
technology located in different places around the world. In the retail and
hospitality industries for example, these organizations have corporate data
centers plus thousands of tills and point of sale (POS) devices in stores and
hotels that introduce potential risk.

In addition, to drive down costs, organisations have turned to potential
cost-savings technology such as virtualisation. But such actions introduce new
complications. Virtualisation may provide cost-savings, but managing these
highly dynamic virtual machines introduces a new layer of risk and requires
greater visibility into the activities on these systems.

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Complex security policies
can be difficult for employees to follow, it is unrealistic to leave
security in the hands of mobile employees. An effective enterprise security alt="Security Manual - Sarbanes-Oxley" vspace=3 align=right
src="http://www.it-toolkits.com/images/Security.gif" width=85
longDesc="Security Manual Template - Sarbanes-Oxley" height=110>plan should
provide for simple, automated, scalable, and comprehensive ways to protect IT
investments and maintain worker productivity. Organizations must approach
security from a comprehensive perspective that ranges from the desktop to the
data center, following best practices to help ensure that the plan protects both
physical assets and data. A good strategy for mobile security is based on:

• Protect systems: Asset tags can help simplify
  asset management by identifying individual devices. When used in conjunction
  with server-side asset management toolssoftware, these tags can give IT
  organizations the ability to monitor internal system components. In addition,
  dedicated security locks can help prevent theft. Visual deterrent labels and
  company logos offer an additional layer of protection against common theft
  because they can prevent an easy resale.


• Protect data: When physical protection fails and a
  mobile device is lost, stolen, or damaged, it is critical that organizations
  retain the ability to protect sensitive enterprise data on the system. Data
  protection is linked to efficient access management. If authentication is not
  well managed, data protection can be difficult – especially if it is not
  centrally controlled. With a central security management solution a
  server-side application that interacts with the client-side software for
  central management IT departments can maintain control over key client
  security features and link them back.


• Prevent unauthorized access: Security policies
  must strike the correct balance between providing the right people with access
  to the right level of information and blocking access for improper users.
  Authentication is key to enabling secure data access because it focuses on
  identifying the user. Authentication methods can include smart cards with PIN
  access, contactless cards, or unique biometric verifiers such as Federal
  Information Processing Standards (FIPS) – certified embedded fingerprint
  readers. Multi-factor authentication is the combination of these technologies
  into one strong authentication process, whereby any end user may be asked for
  more than one form of authentication.


• Prevent malicious attacks: Network security should
  focuses on antivirus deployment and securityappliances, targeting three lines
  of
  defense: endpoint protection, which relies on software designed to
  safeguard mobile devices; network traffic monitoring, which uses appliances to
  watch for unusual data traffic patterns on enterprise networks; and Internet
  gateway appliances, which serve as filters and firewalls that selectively
  identify and block potentially dangerous data.

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3scale essentially provides a SaaS API management infrastructure solution that enabled Internet-based companies to secure, control, monitor and generate revenue from the distribution and usage of their data, content and services through APIs and Web services.

The company markets 3scale CONNECT, a self-service, plug-and-play solution that allows small and medium-sized API providers to enjoy a full-fledged API management infrastructure solution that can be deployed in mere minutes.

The product is free for traffic volumes of up to 50.000 hits per day, which is reasonable enough for smaller API providers who are just getting started. If customers reach 1 million hits per day, 3scale charges $340 per month, and the company also boasts enterprise-grade solutions for Internet companies with higher traffic volumes of up to 10 million hits per day.

“The API space is seeing massive acceleration right now and new investment will allow us to both help more new customers launch and grow their APIs and expand our solution with some great new features we have in the pipeline”, says Steven Willmott, co-founder and CEO of 3scale. “3scale solution gives you great control of your infrastructure out of the box and allows you to focus on the functionality and services you’re actually delivering rather than access management, monitoring and other infrastructure functions.”

3scale Networks is far from the only company to recognize the growing need for API management solutions – it competes heavily with other venture-backed companies like Mashery, StrikeIron and Sonoa Systems.

The latter recently launched Apigee, a Twitter API dashboard.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Many of the largest IT budget
problems can be traced back to five big money drains:

• Storage
  expansion – IT departments are already
  stretching their budgets for storage, and the demand is only going to grow.
  The volume of data an average business collects and stores actually doubles
  every 18-24 months.


• System
  complexity – a survey of Canadian IT workers
  show that many DBAs already devote up to 80 percent of their time to routine
  systems maintenance. Add to that the work
  that needs to get done on strategic projects, and you may be looking at major
  overtime charges.


• Hardware
  sprawl – More systems usually mean more
  complexity and maintenance and more servers
  definitely mean more power and cooling costs. For most companies, data center
  hardware accounts for the bulk of the power and cooling bill. In some cases,
  power costs can even exceed the cost of IT equipment!


• Reliability and
  scalability – most enterprise information is
  contained within IT systems, it is absolutely critical that those systems be
  available whenever your employees or your customers need them. Now you’re
  talking about 24×7 availability, meaning that your systems have to scale along
  with your workloads. But scaling out by adding servers raises hardware and
  maintenance costs, and the wrong storage configuration can cause major delays
  in delivering key information.


• Compliance
  - Organizations face large fines if they are
  found to be out of compliance, and bad press and security breaches can
  dissolve shareholde confidence, destroy customer trust and send stock prices
  plummeting almost overnight.

Janco has solutions for these IT Infrastructure
issues

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alt="CIO Productivity Kit" vspace=5 align=right
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width=85 height=110>NASA has issued a final request for proposal for a menu
of information technology services such as e-mail, security management, instant
messaging and mobile communications. Estimates have pegged the work as worth
$2.5 billion.
The project, Agency Consolidated End User Services (ACES), is
designed to consolidate services across NASA into one agencywide solution. The
requirements are currently met through the Outsourcing Desktop Initiative for
NASA, the ODIN contract.

The ACES contract is expected to be biggest of five contracts that NASA plans
to issue as part of its Information Technology Infrastructure Integration
Program (I3P) acquisition to consolidate the agency’s IT and data services.

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Market research firm Input puts the total value for the five contracts, based
on NASA’s draft RFPs, at $4.3 billion. Input said ACES’ value is $2.5 billion
based on information in the draft RFPs.

According to the final RFP, the winning contractor will be responsible for a
range of services including:

• E-mail and collaborative calendaring services:


• Active Directory services.


• Security management including IT security, emergency management and
  preparedness, and data at rest services.


• Software license management: The contractor shall provide a fully managed
  and supported shared license infrastructure.


• Instant messaging services.


• Mobile communications device services such as cell and smart
  phones.

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VA infrastructure is
changed and projects are cut.

To improve management of ongoing projects,  as of Feb. 15 every IT
project in the department, and about 250 IT projects overall, are being managed
through the Program Management Accountability System introduced in July. The
system requires IT projects to deliver new functionality within six months and
to meet project milestones. The VA also is using an online IT dashboard to
identify and track troubled projects.

The Veterans Affairs Department has terminated its Enrollment System
Redesign, Pharmacy Reengineering and 10 other failing information technology
projects for a projected savings of $54 million this fiscal year, officials
announced today.

The goal is to put IT projects on the accountability system as soon as
possible, it took several months to identify and terminate contracts associated
with the canceled projects.

The enrollment systems project was budgeted at $24 million, and the pharmacy
project at $23 million, for fiscal 2010.

Other canceled VA IT projects included the Barcode Expansion, Delivery
Service, Rights Management Server and VA-Defense Department Laboratory Data
Sharing and Interoperability terminology support.

The 12 canceled IT projects were among 44 IT projects halted by VA officials
in July 2009. Chief Information Officer Roger Baker today released the list of
the 12 terminated projects and 32 restarted projects.

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