Cory Doctorow, one of the lead authors of Boing Boing, writes in the technology section of the British newspaper “The Guardian” his thoughts on cloud computing. And those thoughts, summed up, are:

The main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

We talk about cloud computing upsides a whole lot. And for companies, being able to essentially outsource your IT needs to an external company is an option that may reduce costs under certain situations. It may increase costs over the long term in others. Knowing which is which – which apps benefit from “cloudification” and which are better left in-house, is a big part of IT management and budgeting these days.

Can you live with the performance downgrade? Cloud computing typically isn’t a solution for “doing more with less,” it is often a solution for “doing less with less” – but that may be all that your company needs. It comes down to knowing what your requirements are, and monitoring your networks to make sure that you can meet them.

But Doctorow points out that the main difference between cloud services and traditional IT is that cloud services are designed to get you to pay-per-X, where X could be Gigabytes, CPU Cycles, storage size, virtual server deployments… and to pay-per-X repeatedly through a rental, rather than ownership model. In other words, what were once capital costs are now being shifted to operational costs.

To the average person, however, Doctorow points out that cloud services are a reversal of the trend that we had been seeing throughout most of the 21^st century so far – the idea of charging per service giving way to ownership of software and dumb Internet pipes bringing you the services you chose to access. Even if that “charge” is indirect – for example, through on-screen advertising – the idea is that you pay something for the cloud service every time you use it.

Personally, cloud computing has its place, but network access has a performance price that I sometimes don’t want to pay.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing a non-fiction book in my spare time, and have gotten 30,000 words done so far. I started out using Google Docs, as I could access Google Docs from anywhere with an Internet connection – my laptop, my work computer, or my desktop, and have access to the most current version of the document.

But around that 30,000 word mark, the document started to slow down, with noticeable lag when I typed. My performance suffered, so I did what, I suppose, was inevitable. I now edit the document in the OpenOffice.org desktop application, using Google Docs more as a storage platform than an editing platform.

It is important to remember that despite the wonderful advances – and they are wonderful – that cloud computing gives us, cloud computing is just one option out of many.

By Keith Bendy
Business Development Manager, NetQoS

It’s hard to miss the “human network” theme in virtually all of Cisco’s recent commercials. They are clearly advocating a lot of converged network capabilities – voice, video, and other interpersonal communication or information methods.

It makes sense – video and voice are bandwidth heavy applications, and it’s a logical growth area for Cisco if they can provide more information about video and voice traffic. The challenge, however, is that despite all the video products they’ve brought into the market, (from Telepresence to the acquisition of Flip), there aren’t a lot of robust capabilities built into the products in order to troubleshoot performance.

Medianet is one of the largest initiative in Cisco’s history, and it’s focused on bringing those exact troubleshooting capabilities to the market. The objective is to integrate media traffic reporting into Cisco products and IOS, and get the ability to really understand what performance is for video and voice traffic. And in addition to troubleshooting, even having the ability to have the infrastructure react to changes in performance (i.e., “Autoprovisioning”) is really what the overall goal is for MediaNet.

MediaNet is just starting up, but Cisco is addressing a need that is very real, so I anticipate that its adoption will be high. Cisco may be ahead of the demand curve, but the need is pretty well established.

At a very high level, what's important to MediaNet customers is the ability to understand what performance looks like, find out where the issues are, and then drill in to get the information required to get the issue on the path to resolution. And so, when Cisco wanted to demonstrate the MediaNet capabilities at Cisco Live, they used NetQoS Performance Center because they have a lot of experience working with NetQoS (on products like WAAS, ACE and NAM) and it can take advantage of capabilities that exist today (like NBAR, IPSLA, and Netflow)

With Netflow, the NetQoS Performance Center is able to show how much video is on the network, and use TOS values to determine how the traffic is tagged. We can also see what the end-point IP addresses are. But NBAR provides deeper recognition of the protocols than what Netflow will typically give you. NBAR reports on specific tags for various traffic - instead of saying "This particular TOS queue is all my video traffic, and I don't know what kind of video it is," the NBAR identifiers would say: "This is telepresence traffic, this is security camera traffic, this is WebEx traffic, this is a video-capable phone” - and tag all of it appropriately.

Below is a video, from Cisco’s YouTube page, where Aamer Akhter, Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, demos the Cisco Medianet 1.0 network.

Novatel has come out with a new device it’s calling “Mi-Fi” – specifically, the “Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.” Mi-Fi is essentially a wireless Wi-Fi router which connects to the Internet using a 3G data network over the cellular service.  Five users can connect at once, and the particular device is about the size of an old, first-gen iPod.  Current solutions for connecting a router to 3G or EV-DO networks are bigger, bulkier, often require an additional card, and don’t have a cool, marketing friendly name. 

Which begs the question, if it’s the first Mi-Fi device, where do they get off numbering it as “2200?” Were there 2199 prototypes that we don’t know about?  Will it hit the market in the year 2200 A.D.? Is it really 2.2, but someone accidentally misplaced the decimal point? I miss the days when technology started at 1, and worked its way up to… 3.11, then skipped ahead to 95, then 98, then ME, then 2000, then XP, and then back again to 7. 

But back to the matter at hand – a mobile router that is smaller than a cellphone would have multiple uses in an enterprise environment.  Note that I did not say that would have multiple uses for an enterprise environment. The way I envision this thing heading into most organizations is via being smuggled in, to bypass restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, or other sites. 

Of course, a computer that can connect to either the corporate network or to the unsecured general internet provides unique security problems, but also some infrastructure problems.  Who wants to tell the CEO on the 3^rd floor that the data entry team on the 2^nd floor is using a 3G router and the signals are interfering and that’s why he can’t go online?  What happens when a crucial piece of equipment auto-connects to the wrong network? 

We’ve mentioned the hurdles and headaches in supporting 3G devices like the iPhone in the enterprise; though when we did so in January 2007, it was speculation, and since then Network World has written an article with more concrete real-world examples of the problems that IT pros face in integrating iPhone tech with the rest of the enterprise.   Supporting not just 3G devices, but, essentially, 3G networks which can spring up anywhere at anytime is likely to be far worse. 

And now, the obligatory pitch: how do you catch someone using illicit or misconfigured 3G network devices?  Simple – the same way you catch someone operating an illicit FTP server, or a malware outbreak.  You baseline your data, analyze the traffic, and look for anomalies.  Interestingly enough, most problems in the network are marked by a severe increase of traffic over the norm.  Illicit and misconfigured 3G traffic will show up – not as an unusually large traffic volume on the corporate network, but an unusually small one.  But with visibility into the network, these things should be detectable. 

Readers of this blog will remember “The Strange Case of Julie Amero,” which we’ve covered extensively here:

• Introduction
  
• Commentary by defense expert Herb Horner
  
• Quick info from CEO of forensic software
  
• Commentary by Prosecution Expert Det. Mark Lounsbury
  
• Conclusions

Julie Amero’s conviction was overturned after the Internet community, led by Alex Eckleberry of Sunbelt Software, rallied around her cause.  It’s rare for a judge to throw out a case after a conviction, but the evidence was overwhelming.  A new trial was ordered.

You could have argued that the prosecutors in this case were computer illiterate, but for months, prosecutors held the threat of a new trial over Ms. Amero’s head, and then, instead of dropping the charges, to suggest a plea bargain - $100 fine, loss of state teaching license, and a conviction for disorderly conduct. 

Ms. Amero took the plea bargain, and with the case concluded, she finally was able to speak out in an interview with ComputerWorld.  Here’s a bit of information that we didn’t know:

What was on the screen?
Little itty bitty tiny pictures of sites: Viagra sites, sex enhancement creams, women in lingerie, things of that sort. Nothing lewd.
So no pornography?
No.
Was there nudity?
There was no nudity. There were sites listed. And the things they said [in court] I clicked on and went and looked at have been proven that they never were clicked on and looked at. The things that were on there were just inappropriate things to be looked at in a classroom; Victoria's Secret kind of stuff, you know….

So there was never anything pornographic?
[The prosecution] said there was one site visited, where there was a thumb-sized picture of oral sex.
So they found one picture of oral sex on the computer, but you didn't see that?
No.

The prosecution in this case knew full well that Ms. Amero was completely innocent.  And had an opportunity to try to mitigate the damage by dropping the charges when the wrongful conviction was overturned after the evidence came to light.  They did not.  And eventually they got what they wanted – some sort of conviction of an innocent woman for a crime that turned out never to have happened.

From Rick Green at the Hartford Courant:

New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan told me late Friday the state remained convinced Amero was guilty and was prepared to again go to trial.

"I have no regrets. Things took a course that was unplanned. Unfortunately the computer wasn't examined properly by the Norwich police," Regan said.

"For some reason this case caught the media's attention,'' Regan said.

The good news is that though it may not have resolved satisfactorily, at least it is finally resolved.

Saying that your business should never, never, never use cloud-based applications instead of desktop or network/server based ones is about as ridiculous as saying that cloud-based applications will eventually replace IT completely.  

With an article that begins with “Cloud computing apps are for suckers. If there is an alternative that runs locally on your own machine, it will always be better,” John C Dvorak, seems to be going from “baiting Mac users” to “baiting Google users.”

But let’s just take the argument at face value.  Some of the points he makes are good ones – specifically, the ones with performance issues. 

I don't care if you have 30-megabit-per-second service—you'll get flaky performance from most online apps, especially if they're popular. Always remember that your online speed is only as good as the speed at which data is coming at you: The application server may be swamped, and the various nodes along the route could become clogged, too. Nothing is ever as fast as the machine sitting on top of (or beneath) your own desk.

Your desktop is faster than the cloud – that’s true - but is your car?  Information stored in the cloud can be accessed from any place with a Net connection.  Information stored locally can only be accessed locally – well, unless you connect through a VPN or set up a VNC server.  But even for those of us that know how to do it, a VNC server is a hassle, and a security risk unless you do it exactly right.  90 minutes is horrendous downtime for an enterprise application, and Dvorak is right so far as any application where 90 minutes downtime is unacceptable shouldn’t be put on the cloud. 

But there are plenty of applications – and for small-to-medium companies, e-mail is one of them – where the losses incurred from 90 minutes of downtime is less than the cost of having a dedicated in-house application installed and maintained on the network.  (If the opposite is true, don’t use cloud computing, use the in-house application, and keep an eye on how it performs.)

Dvorak also points out that your data is at the mercy of the service provider and that if the service is cut off, for whatever reason, so is your data.  That’s true, but if you don’t back-up your data, your data can be lost by a hard drive crash.  Both are about as likely to happen, in my experience. 

To Dvorak, “People tend to forget that software is NOT a service; the whole cloud scheme is a scam to lock users into a single product and somehow extract more money from them.”  There is some aspect of vendor lock-in, but mostly cloud computing is a way to provide an application at low startup costs in exchange for revenue over time – whether through advertising, in the case of Google’s apps, or through a subscription model.  Yes, it is very much “renting” rather than “owning,” but that can very well make financial sense in many cases. 

After that, the arguments get a bit silly. 

What happens if the net is attacked and your entire cloud world is gone for days and days? It just happened in the Republic of Georgia, and it can probably happen anywhere.

If the Russians start bombing us, John, I’m sure that the boss will give us a few days off. 

Ask yourself why the heck will we need six-core, high-performance chips if the cloud takes over everything?

Why do we need six-core, high-performance chips now?  In a virtualized server, certainly we’ll need power to spare, but unless you’re doing video editing or animation rendering, a six-core chip is probably overkill.  And if we stop putting the big iron in the datacenters of big companies (very unlikely,) they’ll pop up in the data centers of the SAAS providers. 

When it comes to performance and scalability, absolutely, standard client-server IT applications and local programs are going to have SAAS beat.  Final Cut Pro is not going to the cloud.  Photoshop isn’t going to the cloud (though Photoshop Elements is…).  But the key advantage of cloud computing isn’t performance or scalability – it is portability.  This is why people will pay twice as much for a laptop with the same specs as a desktop computer.  Mobility is important.   

According to this recent article in ComputerWorld:

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman Sachs & Co. released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

My reaction:

According to the article, the study showed that CIOs are:

• Looking to cut resources from contracted IT staff


• Not looking to start or fund “discretionary IT projects”


• Looking for solutions with a “high and fast ROI.”


• See the “greatest potential for cost reduction in IT in the area of networking equipment”


• See server virtualization and server consolidation as their top two priorities, with data center consolidation an additional priority.


• Do not see cloud computing as a priority

Let’s talk about a couple of these. First, the “high and fast ROI.”

It is notoriously difficult to prove IT’s return on investment. There is some truth to the idea that IT is a utility to big companies despite the fact that they do see it as a necessity. They don’t consider electrical power a profit generator either, but without it, the business grinds to a halt.

And unless you work in a software company, chances are that IT isn’t a “profit-generating center.” Troubling.

However, what IT can do is lower costs for the company as a whole. (Indeed, the theory of having all those newfangled computers in the first place is that it saves a fortune on cross-country pneumatic tubing and hundreds of thousands of file clerks sitting on typewriters. Not to mention all the wite-out you’d need). The trick is having a way to prove that you’re lowering costs and to quantify exactly which costs you’re lowering. For that, you need a way to baseline performance and a way to determine what the effect of each IT project and change was.

Additionally, being able to detect and track detrimental changes to the network before people start calling into the help desk shows in a more anecdotal sense the utility and power of a well-functioning IT department.

This is especially important when you consider server consolidation – powered by virtualization, running many servers on one box decreases costs but certainly increases complexity. Being able to rapidly detect problems as they occur not only can decrease mean time to repair, but helps isolate problems. In a complex system, little problems early in the chain tend to cause big problems later on down the chain.

With server consolidation comes data center consolidation – seen as a major cost-cutting measure. But what that does is increase the amount of traffic that’s traveling along low-bandwidth WAN links instead of high-bandwidth LAN links. All things are relative – as you bring the servers closer to home, you’re also moving the users farther out. Being able to monitor end-to-end performance in these conditions – and figure out ways to improve performance on the WAN, is critical.

The one big silver lining in this is that cloud computing is not yet a priority – meaning that there’s still room for in-house IT even as belts get tightened. Focus will be, it seems, on the LAN, WAN, and DAN, er, if you are a network engineer named Dan, for example, our Dan in our IT department. (I suppose that you could worry about LAN, WAN, and BILL, or LAN, WAN, and LAURA but neither of those rhyme.)

These are some of the notes sent to Tier two support from the help desk by a man who is referred to as “George,” on a Web site called: “The Chronicles of George”

[Name] is havening problems with getting on to network,shesays she gets nocked of the network.

[Name] is havening problems connectioning to the network

[Name] needs to dell servers  need to be installed

[Name] needed access microsoft network

she doesnt  have any off her driver install ,she said they aregone so when she went reinstall them back she recieved an error message that said”rp server is not availble”

he tried to install [program].but it said admin right ,he thinks as something with server.

he needs access  to the raz server

[Name] is not able to access her email throught the web base

[Name] needs access  to manger discusion datebase

[Name] needs permission to [Shared Network Drive]

[Name] is havening problems replicating his emails, he says gets and error that says he cannot find mail file server.

[Name] called and he is havening problems getting onto the network.

[Name] is recieving anerror that states  the server is not responding.

I had to type that out in Notepad because Word would automatically correct all the errors. 

So, why am I sharing this with you?  Because the help desk staff are, in far too many companies, the first people, besides the users, to know when there is degraded application performance.  And while 99.999% of help desk personnel are well versed in their field and their written language, sometimes you get George.  (And yes, the author points out that George is a native English speaker who is most likely not dyslexic.)

One of the reasons that it is so important to be proactive with network trouble prevention – having the guys in the NOC be the first to notice application performance problems – is because when you rely on the help desk, you’re hearing about the problem third-hand.  George illustrates the problem with having the end-user, who may not have the technical knowledge to adequately describe the problem to begin with, passing the information along to another person before it gets to the people who might be able to solve the problem.

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Baseline magazine recently put out an article warning IT departments of under-30 "risk takers." Of course. Why not? Everyone knows that the youth are stuck up, and don't fit into corporate culture.

Being 29 years old a week from tomorrow, I was keenly interested (if giddily bemused) in what pejorative things they had to say about us brash young kids who are Ruining-It-For-Everybody™.

"Millenial workers are nearly twice as likely to use personal devices such as cell phones, PDAs and laptops in the workplace as their older counterparts."

Yes, from a security standpoint, an infected laptop or smartphone could provide trouble for the security of the network. But that also means the under-30s are more connected.

Let's look at this from a holistic standpoint. Yes, network security is important. But if personal computers and handhelds provide a more efficient way to get information, they enhance the power of the network. IT is about application delivery - and mobile devices might just be the most efficient way for Young Turks to get to the application. Yes, they can cause problems, but a NOC with automatic reporting can identify the problems quickly enough that the benefits of the always-connected employee outweigh the risks.

"Millenial workers are more than likely to use their work and personal computers for professional and personal use."

I admit that I do this. Sometimes, I need to use my personal Mac to edit video for work, or I need the computer at work to execute a Windows program. But again, this makes me more efficient. I often (after hours or on my lunch break, of course) use my work computer to send personal e-mail, and in fact, is one of the reasons I use Google Mail. Conversely, I log into Exchange to check, and send, work related e-mail from my personal computer at home if something needs my attention.

"Millenial workers believe they should have the right to use software of their choice on their work computers, regardless of its source."

NetQoS has a policy of allowing everyone to install whatever (legal) software they deem necessary to complete the work (as long as it doesn't affect other's network performance). As research for articles I write, I've got a variety of freeware programs, including GIMP, VirtualBox (virtualization software), various video editing programs and, the big one, Firefox, which I downloaded on day one. (I will never understand companies that make you use Internet Explorer in the name of "security")

I've worked at places where we were severely limited in the programs we could have. There's a reason I'm not working at those places anymore - the lack of trust in the ability for a person to choose their own software - their own tools - shows a lack of trust in the ability of the person. And it paints IT as productivity preventer rather than enabler.

This is not to suggest that there should be complete anarchy on the network. But when the IT department locks down everything, it creates more of a productivity hassle than any damage that a virus or hacker can do. There are unsecure apps out there, and the good judgment of the majority does not make up for the poor judgment of the minority. But with that said, why punish the majority for the transgressions of the minority.

It is not, after all, the downloading of malicious apps which affects the network - it is the traffic that those malicious apps produce. Instead of trying to control the application on the desktop (and relying on security on the user/desktop level is futility at best) it's better to control access to the network. You can put computers with out-of-date antivirus or unauthorized apps on an alternative network. You can use anomaly detection to find malicious traffic before it does damage. But there are a whole host of options between application anarchy and resorting to the draconian measures of a culture of complete control.

"While Millenial workers are more likely to visit unauthorized Web sites and install unauthorized applications, they are also more aware of security risks then their Gen X counterparts."

"Millenial workers are slightly more aware of what it takes to secure their apps and devices."

These could easily translate as: "Don't worry. We know what we're doing." And while those have been famous last words a number of times, in this case, I don't think it's ironic. But more importantly, security should never be left to the end-user. We've tried it countless times, it doesn't work. If you rely on defenses at the edge, your network is only as secure as your least security savvy employee.

This next one is very important:

"While all workers want access to technology and devices, each group reports little to no productivity gains as a result. Millenials, however, are more likely to perceive productivity gains from collaboration and Web-based apps." [Emphasis added]

When you think of Web based apps, you immediately consider the network. This is a generation raised on MySpace and Facebook, and Google Maps, and Google Mail, and Google Analytics, and Yahoo Answers, and Wikipedia - this is the generation of the Web based app. These are the tools that the upcoming generation is comfortable with. And the people who develop tools know this. This is why application performance - especially for Web based apps, is so crucial.

In the end, Baseline put out a separate article a few days later, pointing out that under-30s in IT had benefits as well as drawbacks. But why should we believe them? Everyone knows that you can't trust anyone over thirty.

June 16, 2007, Network World:

"We're telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says. "This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities and it's important that it be recognized as such."

March 6, 2008, Network World:

During a media conference at its San Francisco headquarters today, Apple unwrapped a host of new features that are designed to make the iPhone more attractive to corporate users.

Six months is a long time in the tech world…

We've warned that eventually the iPhone would be appearing on corporate networks and that the new (at that time) devices would introduce vulnerabilities into the corporate network and take additional resources. What we weren't counting on was Apple making overtures to enterprise networking - we had assumed that, much like the original iPhone was hacked to run on multiple carriers, that those who wanted to use the iPhone for enterprise applications would have to provide their own, messy, stop-gap solutions.

Back in January of 2007, when the iPhone was first announced, we wrote:

"That's another question - will this device have VPN support so that traveling employees can get the information they need while on the road? And if they do - how do you secure the data? The iPhone, like all small devices, is easy to lose, and easy to steal. That makes it vulnerable to illicit access. Does the iPhone have cryptographic abilities to make sure data stays safe?"

Well, apparently, Apple didn't take that as a rhetorical question because the fruit-based tech company is going to support Cisco IPsec VPN in the next iPhone update - the same one that will bring secure Exchange support as well as the possibility of an "iTunes Store for iPhone apps" - current Apple plans are to allow third party development but that Apple would have the final say on whether or not the applications could run on the iPhone. (Of course, clever hackers have already found a way around that.)

At any rate, the iPhone now seems to be competing directly with the Blackberry, which is good in the sense that competition in technical markets lead to innovation, and companies will have to expect new types of devices using different types of traffic, which - well, isn't bad, but which can be frustrating, absent a network device monitor.

Personally, I'm a bit confused by Apple's insistence to cripple the iPhone into only running "acceptable" applications on the iPhone, as A) it's clear that people are going to use it the way they like anyway, and B) if Apple took the same attitudes with their Macintosh/OSX general purpose computers, some of the best Mac apps (Quicksilver, Colloquy, Transmission, Burn,) simply wouldn't exist. Perhaps this increases the security of the device but at the obvious cost of utility.

It's just rhetorical, and I'd love to get some comments on this, but is the tradeoff between security and utility a false one? I'm not sure - havening not worked much in the security side of technology - but it seems to me that if the iPhone can be hacked to make it more useful, it can also be hacked to make it malicious, and so the choice is not between security and utility, but rather between a lack of security with utility, or a lack of security without utility. Hmm… maybe I should ponder this more.

The Wall Street Journal has a column by Amit Basu and Chip Jarnagin about how most companies are failing to recognize the potential of IT, and they list a number of reasons why.

First, Basu and Jarnagin say, the business often sees IT as a basic utility, like plumbing or phone service. This is compounded by the current trend towards SaaS; in which prominent authors like Nick Carr are actually sincerely arguing that IT is indeed a basic utility, and that "IT doesn't matter." We disagreed with that argument on the basis that those companies that use unique IT resources and talent effectively will outperform those companies who do not, but agreed with the general trends that Carr pointed out. The problem that many overlook is that IT as a utility and IT as an innovator are not mutually exclusive propositions. (Remember when your cable company just provided TV?)

Additionally, Basu and Jarnagin argue that there is an effective glass wall isolating IT within the company, and there are five reasons for this wall separating IT and the rest of the business.

"Mind-set differences between management staff and IT staff, language differences, social influences, flaws in IT governance (defined as the specification and control of IT decision rights), and the difficulty of managing rapidly changing technology."

The first case, of mindset differences between IT teams and business leaders is one of abstract vs. logical thinking. IT teams often deal in binary logic; something works or it does not, something is better or it is not. There is a right way, a wrong way, and sometimes a best way, to do things. Business leadership often deals in the grey areas, what ifs, and sometimes illogical intuition.

To oversimplify, IT thinks in the terms of the math class - there is a right and wrong answer. Management is liberal arts - arguments should be well formed but there's no one right way to get to the answer. For all the jokes between management and IT working on totally different wavelengths, there is an absolute truth to this.

Also, as Basu and Jarnagin point out, both business and IT use incomprehensible languages filled with acronyms and specialized terms. I know most of you are familiar with "VoIP," "packet priority," and "ITIL" but to a business manager, they're as alien as "EBITDA," "commodity value," and "ISPL" are to a network engineer.

(A digression: When I first started working at this position, I came from an academic background. It confused me to no end that when the marketing people were talking about "the pipe" and the networking people were talking about "the pipe" they meant two entirely different things.)

There are other, social, factors mentioned in the article as well, but the end result is that business doesn't want to deal with IT, doesn't care about IT, and doesn't understand how IT helps their business. And yet, IT is still crucial to meeting business goals.

We've talked many times about the need for better IT communication, and better understanding of business needs in IT. Mostly, we agree with Basu and Jarnagin's assessments of the situation, and really do recommend that you read the article - and perhaps forward it to your manager.

This is where ITIL can help out considerably. One of the major improvements in ITIL v3 from v2 is the shift from business alignment to business integration, which requires IT to adopt business terms and to create, measure and communicate IT value in financial terms whenever possible.