At the end of the 20th century technology entered into the next millennium the focus of the worlds media. The big question was would the world melt down at midnight on the 31 December 1999  as the worlds computers fell foul to the Year 2000 (Y2K) bug. This  Y2K bug was caused by the practice of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits in many of the early computer systems that the world now relied on. Some programs could not distinguish between the year 2000 and the year 1900 and it was feared that this practise by IT professionals to save precious computer memory could bring a much feared melt down of computers around the world. However, clocks ticked, parties were held, fireworks flood lighted the sky in major cities around the world and for a moment we all held our breath at the thought of what the next millennium and decade would bring. More importantly, would our technology survive the transition into the 21st century?

In the UK, a new term “e-rage” has been identified in a survey by the Internet service provider Eclipse Internet. This survey looked at the effects of email downtime on staff in a selection of businesses types, and demonstrated that “the frustration of not having access to email can see them resort to extreme measures in an attempt to fix the problem”. This extreme behaviour extends to both agitated “mouse-clicking”, kicking computers and verbally abusing IT staff. There is also the human aspect of being connoted on a 24/7 basis.  In 2001, the technology author Gil Gordon coined the phrase “defensive overworking”, which suggested that people now worked longer hours because of technology and a fear of unemployment. Gordon suggested that this “may be why some people who in the mid-1980’s would never have dreamed of interpreting their holiday to contact the office now carry a Blackberry and check their voicemail and email regardless of the fact they are supposed to be enjoying a break. In 2008 by the UK recruitment company Office Angles carried out a survey which identified how UK office staff  who were provided with remote technology like smartphones or Blackberry's were giving back around 20 days a year to their employers. Of the 1000 sample base 10% admitted to checking-in constantly outside working hours. However, there was a positive view of this use of technology in this research, as the group surveyed reported that 40% of the sample base felt grateful for the technology. Core reasons cited were they were more efficient (41%).  Of a positive note, 15% reported that Blackberries reduced their stress levels by preventing email build-up and 39% said it allowed  for flexible working giving them a better life-work-balance which helped balance the impact of technology on their lives.

Technology has changed everything in the last ten years, how we listen to music, take photographs, watch movies, communicate, socialise, shop and even meet people for sexual encounters, love and marriage. We have a generation of children that have grown up digital, that have no idea what is is like to not to have the Internet or a mobile phone at the centre of their social world. This has in turn brought problems with it as the darker side of society found that lurking in digital meeting places was another way of accessing the vulnerable and naive. For every new digital product realised there is a new digital challenge for IT professionals to ensure data is protected and a company's intellectual property is not stolen. However, a number of other key technology events have helped highlight the importance of technology and in particular the use of consumer technology in this digital age. When President Barack Obama took office as the first black American President on 20 January 2009 history was made. By embracing technology, and in particular social networking and instant messaging, he has helped on his journey to the White House. The use of the website barackobama.com, set up by the 23-year old Chris Hughes changed the way politics is played on the Internet, and on the ground.  Obama connected to a new generation of voters across America by allowing his campaign and message to become viral through sites like Facebook, You Tube and the short message blog service Twitter. The main devices these messages were viewed on were consumer mobile phones and laptops of this new  generation of voters who went on to spread the Obama message to their physical and virtual friends. The digital tools Hughes put on Obama's social networking site helped create an online community with over one million people. This use of always on consumer led technology is also being used in the UK by the office of the Prime Minster who uses services like twitter.com and youtube.com to provide updates on the work of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As the Guardian newspaper reported in 2008 "In the new digital age, it appears Brown has found his own outlet for getting straight to real people: the internet."

The impact of digital decadence does present a challenge to IT professionals and the workforce who rely on it. It impacts on the fine line between what is work and what is home life due to the now ubiquitous nature of email and access to work systems. But in a digital age society adapts as we have done before with previous new technology. It is thanks to technology that water can reach our homes. Food can be processed and preserved helping make it easier for us [the human race] to satisfy our basic needs. It could be said that many people in many countries can lead a luxurious life, thanks to technology. As knowledge becomes the new basic need we now see a new generation of workforce and consumer seize upon its access [to connect online] at every opportunity.

Like clean water and sanitation was a must to our forefathers, 24/7 access to to information is a necessity for our digital decadence generation, not only to survive but also to proposer, Here's to the next decade of digital decadence and all the innovation it may bring!

Amazon provides several different Web services, but this series will focus only on the basic building block services that fulfill some of the core needs of most systems: storage, computing, messaging, and datasets. You can architect complex and diverse enterprise applications by layering functions on top of the reliable, cost-effective building block services provided by Amazon. The Web services themselves live in a cloud outside your environment and are highly available. If you need CPU cycles, you can spin up virtual machines with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If it's data you want to store, you can park objects of up to 5GB in the Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon has also built a limited database on top of the S3. To wrap it all up, your machines can talk among themselves with the Simple Queue Service (SQS), a message-passing API. All of these services are open to the Web and accessible as Web services. The documentation provided is extensive, and Amazon makes it relatively easy to wade through the options. The ease, though, is relative because almost everything you do needs a command line.

Amazon built a great set of tools with sophisticated security options for sending orders to your collection of machines in the sky, but they all run from the command line. I found myself cutting and pasting commands from documentation because it was too easy to mistype some certificate file name, for example. It's hard to go into enough detail about all of the offerings described here, but Amazon is the most difficult because it has the most extensive solutions. Amazon is thoroughly committed to the cloud paradigm, rethinking how we design these systems and producing some innovative tools. Freedom from the shackles of big infrastructure investment and its maintenance opens up great opportunities for innovation. You can now focus on your business ideas instead of fretting over the number of servers you have, worrying about running out of disk space, and so on. According to Amazon estimates, businesses spend about 70 percent of their time on building and maintaining their infrastructures while using only 30 percent of their precious time actually working on the ideas that power their businesses. Amazon worries about the mundane details of the hardware and infrastructure and how to make it highly available while you can concentrate on bringing your ideas to life.

Now that 21st century computing...

For most organizations that have a large user base [actually small as well] the enforcement of password compliance can sometimes seem like an odorise task for the IT security team. The strange thing is though is that our lives are full of secrets like passwords and other such secret codes.

In his excellent book about passwords the author Mark Burnett describes how intricate they are to our modern way of living and doing business. “We need them to withdraw money from an ATM or to connect to our online banking account. We use them to authorize financial transactions and to buy and sell items on the Internet”. In fact the list could go on and this is indeed one of the biggest challenges, humans are just not that good at carrying around so many passwords and therefore we tend not to stray from simple variations of a theme. “When it comes to passwords, we just aren’t that clever… superman12, superman23, superman95, Wonderwoman.”  So  just what are the best ways of enforcing user compliance with a password policy?

Password polices, or password management has become harder to enforce as more and more passwords enter our lives. The more we depend on computerised systems the more we should expect our user base to reuse the passwords they are expected to know, this reuse of passwords will  expose serious vulnerabilities. Recognising this problem allows an organisation to move to a managed system using strong two factor authentication like the RSA SecureID token to authenticate onto protected systems, but is this enough? Well the worrying thing is, probably not.  We still have the human factor, most likely the weakest link in the security chain. Managers could still give their SecureID fob to their assistant and tell them the PIN. Key logging could capture the PIN and then the SecureID fob stolen, in the worst case scenario what if the PIN is written on the reverse of the SecureID fob? 

On a return trip from America recently I arrived at the airport and entered the immigration hall at London’s Heathrow airport. There were long queues as a lot of flights had just arrived. However, I smiled and walked up to the Iris recognition immigration system (IRIS) booth that had no queue. I entered the booth and following instructions had both my irises [eyes] scanned and less than ten seconds later I was back in the UK. There was no human involvement, no password presentation just the science of biometric security at work and the quality assurance of the UK immigration service in establishing my identity before allowing me to register. But this is no panacea to our security needs, as highlighted in his book, Current Security Management & Ethical Issues Of Information Technology, Rasool Azari  wrote about this area of security. “There is a temporal aspect to biometric data. A measurement of a physical characteristic taken at a particular time provides a correspondence between that data and an individual. However, the physical characteristic may quite naturally develop or change over time and future comparisons with that measurement may not match?”. So like today’s password policies that help us enforce password policies the future security models will also need polices and procedures to make sure they stay relevant. This has indeed been already but into place by the UK Immigration IRIS service, my eyes are only valid until 2011 and then I need to re-register myself and my eyes. 

No matter what paradigm of security model we operate within, due diligence, enforcement and quality assurance should remain at the forefront of organisations and their security engineers and IT managers. What ever we do, today tomorrow or the next millennium, we truly need to observe these wise words: 

“Passwords are like toothbrushes; they should never be shared and changed on a regular basis!”
(Unknown).

Further Reading - How to choose a strong password

IT Service Management and ITIL (Information Technology Information Library) are an integrated, process based, set of best practices to manage IT services. The basic premise is that IT is a service provider to the organisation. In this fashion, the parallelism between the nature of ITSM and the core of what Cloud computing is and what it is trying to achieve is readily apparent. It can be derived that ITSM, which is founded in ITIL industry accepted best practices, is the necessary enabler for Cloud computing to achieve its goals and realize its benefits. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce. ITIL gives a detailed description of a number of important IT practices with comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that can be tailored to any IT organization in support of complex environments. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic.

Companies that are investing heavily in IT process re-engineering often use ITIL as a reference point. One of the key elements that this standard introduces s the use of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Used correctly, a CMDB is a system used to track configuration items, requests for change. Work orders, errors, relationships etc. In plain English, this means that by using tools that provide a CMDB, there will be a greater visibility of loud computing and Virtual server systems in place, as well as their configuration and any cause and effect of system failures or defects on other dependant systems. We already know that Cloud computing is more than only desktop or server virtualization although some [most maybe] organisations are working with Cloud computing concepts in this context. Cloud computing is also Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service and Storage as a Service, as well as Web based (hosted) database and application services.

When you continue on this train of thought, you can also think about where the ITIL framework is being utilized: at the delivery side of cloud computing services, or at the receiving side of cloud computing services?

Let’s assume that we are part of an IT organisation that delivers Cloud computing Services (and SaaS in particular). Which areas of ITIL are not coherent with this delivery model? The answer is easy, none. 
All components of ITIL are of interest and importance as the SaaS is a service delivery to external customers so you need to consider all phases in the lifecycle from Strategy to Operations. You will need to have controls and management structures in place to build a sustainable IT infrastructure that has the ability to deliver the Software Services as per the agreed Service Levels. In fact, you probably need more controls in place because you will always have the unknown factor of the service provider or Internet connection to deal with. In our second scenario we will look at a Virtual server environment as part of a data centre that utilizes ITIL processes for Service Management controls. The ‘boxes’ still have to fit in with the overall service offering, you still need to manage their entire lifecycle. The fact is that this is only the process component of IT Service Management, and there is a whole lot more to managing with your IT Services in a consistent and quality way than to simply look at the ITIL books. In fact, most ITIL implementations fail to deliver any value and measurable benefits because of the isolated focus on ITIL and not ITIL in the context of IT Service Management.

ITIL is by no means the Holy Grail to fix all problems within the IT industry and therefore the management of Cloud computing environments. However, the point here is that it shouldn’t make a difference how and where you get your service components, the delivery management controls should stay the same. This is of course from a technical viewpoint of view where a lot of the activities will be only slightly different. However, approach this question from a Service Management point of view and it stays very much the same. Even RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) diagrams for most ITIL roles will be unaffected by the introduction of Cloud computing services therefore making ITIl a strong candidate for Service Delivery for this model of business computing.