23 March 2006
Forrester surveyed 700 small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) about their PC upgrade plans for 2006. We found that SMBs will refresh about 26% of their systems this year and increase their adoption of mobile platforms. Dell is the preferred choice with almost two-thirds of SMB firms, followed by HP, Lenovo, and Toshiba.
Storage Service Providers Rise From The Ashes
Today, a number of pressures are fueling renewed interest in storage outsourcing and third-party storage hosting. With IT budgets and staffing levels that are stagnant or slow-growing, most IT departments are struggling to acquire, manage, and protect massive storage infrastructures while responding to new business demands. Therefore, they are once again considering outsourced storage as an alternative.
Server Virtualization Goes Mainstream
Server virtualization has quickly surpassed other forms of infrastructure virtualization, including techniques for virtualizing storage and networks. Globally, 75% of 1,221 enterprises surveyed by Forrester say they are aware of server virtualization technologies, 26% have implemented it, and 8% more will pilot it by the summer of 2006.
The Future Of Data Center Automation
Data center automation (DCA) products have evolved from basic provisioning and software distribution tools into powerful platforms that govern many aspects of data center operations. While many products share a common foundation in configuration management, DCA products have broadened their reach into asset management, compliance auditing, and policy-based automation. As a result, firms are confronted with a wide array of DCA products with overlapping capabilities -- particularly in configuration management.
Power And Cooling Heat Up The Data Center
After a brief day in the sun in the late '90s, concerns about power and cooling as critical limitations in the enterprise data center and corporate IT strategy faded into obscurity along with the dot-com economy. Over the past two years, however, as energy prices have soared and servers have grown denser and hotter, power and cooling have once again become critical issues. Improving energy efficiency and solving the problems generated by increasingly dense server form factors is a community effort that requires contributions from semiconductor, system, software, and data center operation vendors.
Desktop Security Management Trends In 2006
Forrester surveyed 94 IT decision-makers about their approach to patch and security configuration management. Although two-thirds of the firms surveyed had already deployed tools to automate patch assessment and deployment for desktops and laptops, less than half had deployed vulnerability assessment or security configuration management tools with broader functionality. Many desktops remain vulnerable to potential security breaches through incorrect system, network, or application settings. However, regulatory requirements and the ever-narrower window between vulnerability discovery and exploit will force firms to focus greater attention on these problems.
Patch Management Deployment
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By using a technology that combines CMDBs and application dependency mapping, firms can reap many benefits:
Desktop Virtualization Is The Future Of The Corporate PC Desktop virtualization has existed in some form for more than 15 years, but in the past three years, new models have emerged that will dramatically change desktop computing. Firms have long used server-based computing (SBC) to create virtual instances of desktop applications on a server that multiple remote users can access. Today, emerging products like the Hewlett-Packard and ClearCube blade PCs, Softricity SoftGrid, and VMware Workstation and ACE offer new models for virtualizing the desktop. Desktop virtualization offers significant benefits, including better security, manageability, and access to desktop applications in a distributed world. Virtualization is the most important technology to hit the corporate PC space since the thin client. It will force firms to manage software provisioning to internal and external users and to accept more applications from external sources. However, short-term technology challenges limit the utility of virtualization in the enterprise today. Upcoming Research The Forrester Wave™: Disaster Recovery Service Providers, Q1 2006 -- Colin Rankine Making Endpoint Security Proactive -- Natalie Lambert and David Friedlander Will Compute Grid As A Service Fly? -- Frank E. Gillett The CMDB: Beyond BSM (Let's Get Physical) -- Jean-Pierre Garbani Whole-System Automation Meets Configuration Management -- Galen Schreck Disk Storage Implications Of On-Demand Broadcasting -- Stephanie Balaouras The Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewalls, Q2 2006 -- Michael Gavin Events Note We hope to see you all at Forrester's IT Forum 2006: GigaWorld in Las Vegas on April 3-6, where we will focus on "Achieving Business Flexibility Through IT Innovation."
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