This year IT spending in education is already surging, says a new research report from Gartner.

The report, titled “Forecast Alert: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 2008-2014, 1Q10 Update, shows that worldwide enterprise IT spending in education will increase in 2010 by 4.1%, to nearly $64 billion. In 2009, total IT spend in education was $61.46 billion.

Yet, despite its projected growth, education IT spend is the smallest of all the vertical segments tracked by Gartner. The end of 2010 will see IT spend make up just 2.64% of the overall vertical enterprise IT market worldwide. That’s about the same as its share of the overall picture in 2009.

Just in case you’re wondering what the bigger picture looks like, Gartner forecasts that enterprise IT spending globally across all vertical segments will increase by $96.7 billion – to nearly $2.43 trillion in 2010. Interesting, though, that the overall average growth rate will be 4.1% (compared to a 5.6% decline from 2008-2009), the same as what lays ahead for spend on education IT.

Part of the increase in education IT spend is coming from colleges and universities adopting more efficient methods to monitor the security of their IT infrastructure…their databases and applications. The end goal is to keep things running worry-free, kind of like an advanced math student in a regular math class.

Of course, the Cloud figures prominently in education IT spend, and cloud-based monitoring solutions are proving affordable and effective for monitoring everything from servers and networks to education management applications like Moodle and Blackboard. Schools are voting for cloud monitoring, too, because the technology doesn’t depend on networks being up. Cloud-based tools, such as Monitis, can send notifications when things go wrong in a variety of ways, including phone, instant messaging and email; Again, no network uptime necessary.

Often, schools are making the switch to cloud-based monitoring from open-source products such as Nagios, Zabbix, Zenos, Cacti and others. One big advantage to cloud-based monitoring, , is that it is automatically updated, and IT administrators don’t have to spend valuable time and resources on keeping software current and installed – whether it’s open-source or proprietary.

Gartner’s prediction for IT spend is confirmation enough for me that cloud-based monitoring has a big future at schools and universities.

Sometimes, even the technology you employ to simplify computing makes things a bit more complicated, and then you need a fix for that, too.

For example, as enterprises adopt a decentralized computing model based on distributed systems with a wide variety of configurations, it often becomes impractical to staff an operations center with people who know all the skills to address all of the specific troubleshooting required. That’s why many organizations, including educational institutions, are using event management systems (EMS) that are capable of handling alerts from monitoring tools; they consolidate, standardize, and centralize the management of distributed environments.

But combining EMSs with monitoring tools can be a complex proposition, too. You want to make sure that event notifications come from all across your enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment – a unified system that encompasses all of the essential business processes that support an organization’s operations.

Integration within an ERP may make sense from a business perspective, but there are higher risks, too. For example, using an ERP forces an organization to put “all of its eggs in one basket.” An outage impacts all operations, and an extended outage can often be devastating. Organizations can take additional steps to keep their ERP system running smoothly, for example, by ensuring that unscheduled outages be quickly identified and that the proper support teams are alerted.

This is a goal for educational institutions as well as companies, and I recently read about how Temple University Computer Services has built an EMS within its ERP. Rather than solely relying on its small team of IT folks monitoring varied software services 24/7/365, the school began using a broad mix of proprietary and open-source monitoring solutions that spawn numerous alerts.

Yet, the challenge raised by this is that each of these tools issue many alerts, a lot of which are in a non-standard format. And then there’s the job of determining the seriousness of alerts and which situation should be addressed first.

One of the great things about cloud-based monitoring solutions, such as Monitis, is that they automatically perform a variety of tasks, including managing alerts, that would otherwise require a great deal of manual labor. That frees up IT staff to focus on more strategic projects and plan for future growth.

Big news from Hewlett-Packard today – with huge ramifications for the cloud.

The company said that it would invest $9 billion in automating its data centers and other parts of its Enterprise Services business, in the process cutting 9,000 jobs over the course of several years.  But in the same breath, HP declared a heavy focus on cloud computing as its future.

In a conference call to reporters, HP’s executive vice president of enterprise business Ann Livermore said the company will be increasingly focusing on inventing ways to automate services for customers, predicting that the “next 10 years are going to be about who can automate the delivery of services.”

Livermore said that HP will “push very hard to have a management position in the cloud as well as a management position in on-premise,” later adding that the “cloud aspects of [the restructuring] are important.” With no details given, HP said it will invest in its Desktop as a Service offerings. 

According to a Wall Street Journal report, HP will also hire 6,000 new workers for its sales force and global delivery centers.

Even though technology giants are trying to become one-stop shops (for consumers and businesses to buy both IT hardware, software and services), HP’s core PC business is still its anchor.  In HP’s latest quarter, profits rose as shipments of PCs climbed on growing consumer demand.

Personally, I’m sorry that 9,000 jobs have to go, but automating services continues to be the wave of the future. And, while HP didn’t specify just exactly how it will transform cloud services, its “Everything as a Service” vision includes development of an enterprise cloud software platform called Cirious.  

The federal government needs to step up continuous monitoring of its IT infrastructure and move beyond outdated security reporting methods, says a recent panel at a trade organization conference, in a story I read online. That’s entirely consistent with the wish list that I’ve been hearing from government customers. And the need for 24/7 monitoring, for example, from a cloud-based platform, is totally in line with some new government guidance that’s coming on monitoring, increased oversight and expected legislation.

At the Management of Change conference held by American Council of Technology and Industry Advisory Council, Marianne Swanson, senior advisor for information system security at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), said that federal agencies should focus on three strategies when it comes to continuous network monitoring. She said monitoring should occur at the:

• organization level
• mission level
• system level

Some new developments coming down the pike will make continuous monitoring more likely to be a reality soon. For one, NIST is developing new guidelines on security strategy, performance metrics, risk tolerance and the frequency and types of monitoring controls agencies should consider using organization-wide.  In the past, the group’s guidelines were more focused on certification requirements and authorization. NIST will also offer guidelines for managing, configuring, gathering and reporting monitoring results at the mission level and ways to implement monitoring tools and assessing automated security controls at the system level.

Another important advancement that will make it easier for federal agencies to adopt continuous monitoring is a coming NIST guide on how to manage supply-chain risks, and it will offer best practices that agencies should follow when buying software and hardware products. Private industry can also use these when developing supply-chain practices in order to meet government contract requirements.

The Department of Homeland Security is also working on new processes for assessing threats,  influencing security policy; enabling agencies to execute those policies, through best practices; and measuring how successful agencies are at preventing security breaches.

There’s also greater oversight and more legislation on the horizon. Last week, a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved a bill that will reform the current rules by the Federal Information Security Management Act, called the FISMA Act of 2010, that requires continuous cybersecurity automated monitoring.  Expect action on that bill by year’s end.

Despite the promise of progress, the fact remains that, today, many federal agencies are still operating aging software systems trying to cover security demands being imposed on them that they weren’t designed to handle.

Given the state of government agency software and the new demand for continuous monitoring, the best, most efficient way to look after networks and protect against breaches of security is via cloud-based monitoring systems. They’re always on, for one. And, there is no need for government IT folks to continuously update installed software. In addition, a series of versatile notifications – via phone, SMS, email and other methods – can immediately warn managers of database security breaches or outages. Another advantage is that cloud-based monitoring tools offer great reporting (addressing the performance area that DHS is reassessing), for example, historical data on each virtual server start and stop and performance data, and that allows IT managers to analyze failures and their root causes.

Cloud-based monitoring tools are the most efficient and versatile stewards of the $10 billion that the American people spend yearly on security.

I got lots of inspiration, personally, from reading an account of an interview with Justin Crotty, the vice president of services sales at Ingram Micro, a Santa Ana, CA-based wholesale provider of tech products and supply chain services.

In the interview, Crotty said he was tired of hearing that the cloud held no value proposition for solution providers and distributors. I immediately took notice because I’m a solution provider – of cloud-based monitoring services. “Just because you buy something or provision something doesn’t mean it’s going to work,” said Crotty.

Naturally, I agree. Our Monitis end-to-end monitoring solution service lots of companies daily who find that their apps or website or cloud provider is not working smoothly. What’s more, the value proposition for me is in making them aware of the situation—through a menu of notification services we offer.

But what really I really liked about Crotty’s interview with ChannelWeb was his advice for would-be cloud service providers: Cloud computing is still an evolving technology, but solution providers should not be afraid to take risks — and learn from mistakes.

As humans, we hate negative emotions. It’s so much nicer to focus on the pleasant. But sometimes you can’t ignore “bad” feelings. And it seems there’s plenty going around amongst IT pros when it concerns the cloud and security.

A new survey says IT people are just plain scared that putting their data on the cloud will expose their companies’ sensitive information – and put it in the wrong hands. Many say there are plenty of employees who are unaware of the scope of cloud services employed at their firms. And there are a lot of IT executives who, despite their own misgivings about the cloud, suspect that many employees are already using cloud services…that is, without IT’s knowledge. The poll, the Security of Cloud Computing Users study, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by CA Inc., and surveyed IT pros in both Europe and the U.S.

Here are some findings that I thought I’d share:

– 68% noted that financial information and intellectual property were too risky to store outside their company’s own data center. More than half also were convinced that health records shouldn’t be moved to the cloud, while 43% said credit card information should not migrate outside their own data centers.

– more than 50% of U.S. respondents felt that their organizations were unaware of all the cloud services deployed in their enterprise.

“The [survey respondents] said, ‘Yes, in fact, we’re not confident what applications out there are being used within policy and we’re not only not confident in what’s really going on, but we’re also not sure what the problems are we should be dealing with,’” said Mike Spinny, a senior privacy analyst at the Ponemon Institute, who was quoted in an article I read about the survey. “It’s a very concerning situation in that we’re talking to people who are tasked with the responsibility of protecting information.”

What I also found interesting is that there seems to be a lot of confusion out there, too, about security and who’s responsible for it. After reading, I feel even stronger that companies need independent assistance in monitoring cloud services performance and service level agreements (SLAs).

In the study, 27% of U.S. respondents and 38% of Europeans polled believe their organizations’ security executives are most responsible for ensuring safety. Only 38% of U.S. IT people indicated that they’re proactively involved in assessing the sensitivity of data and whether it should be stored in the cloud. ›

Cloud computing continues to appeal to educational institutions like universities, high schools and kindergartens. Not only do teachers depend on cloud services, such as Blackboard and Moodle to construct and manage courses and assignments online, but students love these services, too, because they can access study guides, homework and other educational tools online. And they don’t have to be home to access them, either. Any web connection will do.

Recently, I stumbled across a great cloud/educational blog that presented a few ideas on how cloud usage will reshape education and school management. Cloud tools will:

• Pare software expenses, as many cloud-based apps are free, very low cost or only charge on a pay-for-use basis. Perhaps some schools will pass on these savings to students – in the form of tuition discounts? Nah!
• Allow school-based IT staff to be more strategic, as fewer apps to be hosted and managed internally means that IT pros can concentrate on local infrastructure needs or even devote more time to planning for meeting the future computing needs of their institutions.
• Provide round-the-clock access. It used to be that when you finished school for the day and you left your history homework in your locker, you were assured detention the next day because you couldn’t do your homework. Now staff and students are requiring 24/7 access to their files, applications and social connections – any time, any place, any device. Cloud computing provides a powerful way to do this.
• Reduce/eliminate the need to update software, as cloud-based apps take care of this automatically.
• Allow for greater experimentation, choice and agility for applications. Cloud-based services and applications can provide for more nimble use and access – and allow for lots of smaller products and services to be ‘tried out’ without the requirement of a large-scale commitment.
• Reduce barriers to participation, contribution, sharing. The management of identities and access – a complicated task at best – can be done more readily in a cloud-based environment. That will promote greater degrees of shared access across and among systems and applications. How? Apps will allow for greater participation and contribution from students and teachers because individual accounts can be established and managed more easily. Plus, the content that is created and shared in this way can be stored, managed and retrieved across an entire network.
• Promote relevant, accurate educational tools. Schools want high-quality tools that support teaching and learning. But it’s often difficult to keep up to date and relevant. Cloud computing options provide unlimited opportunities for shared repositories to develop, with access rights and management issues addressed on a wider scale than within an individual school.

Schools advancing toward greater usage of clouds can also depend on monitoring systems to alert them to problems with access or slow app performance. Monitis, for example, helps a growing number of educational institutions monitor their cloud apps via such features as:

• instant failure alerts
• cloud monitoring (to provide information such as number of instances)
• cloud storage monitoring

transaction monitoring of your site (including tracking the load time for each of your pages).

Enterprises today are spending billions of dollars to realize productivity and automation gains from the end-user experience. The processes are critical to the bottom-line of companies, and so that’s why many companies today are embracing end-user monitoring (EUM), as part of their comprehensive IT management strategy.

What is EUM?

EUM is systematic methods and processes that assess systems performance from the user’s perspective, and incorporates two types of approaches:

• Active monitoring or End-user Experience Monitoring (EUEM), which uses scripted transactions to measure performance and availability,
• Passive monitoring or Real User Monitoring (RUM), which tracks user interactions with the system

EUM Benefits Many Parties

EUM is critical for web businesses because competition is just a click away if the end-user experience is bad or negative. For example, Dell has learned that speedy resolution of customer issues builds customer loyalty. Dell makes it a practice to quickly isolate the root cause of an issue, for example, discerning whether something is a server problem, a network issue, or a condition limited to the desktop. This is the first step of problem resolution.

End-user experience monitoring is also important for keeping internal users satisfied. While end-users within a company or organization may not complain about every issue, they often complain to co-workers about problems with an application. And eventually user complaints will make their way to upper management, including the CIO.

Lastly, when end-users are content, IT staff can focus on more strategic tasks that bring value to the business – rather than merely responding to interruptions in an attempt to minimize loss of revenues, productivity and profits. By employing EUM, IT then becomes more of a strategic partner to the business rather than just fighting fires.

How big of a problem is end-user dissatisfaction for companies? A 2004 survey of IT professionals by Forrester Research found that:

• Nearly 85% reported experiencing incidents of significant application performance degradation
• In the previous year, 51% acknowledged instances of poor application performance growing more frequent
• Incidents had at least moderate impact on employee productivity (82%), team productivity (77%) and customer service quality (79%)
• More than half delayed launches of new applications because of network performance concerns

Some areas of EUM that are extremely important include:

- usability issues

- network delays

- sluggish servers

- transaction errors.

And positive results from EUM can include:

- A better understanding of application usage patterns before an application goes live,

- Immediate verification of the impact of configuration and tuning parameter changes,

- Easier researching of a problem isolated to a specific user,

- Quicker recognition of a slowdown, outage or other problem via baselines that can be used as benchmarks,

- Through results, better visibility of areas that need more investment to improve user productivity.

Recommendation: Take the Hybrid Approach

I recommend that enterprises new to monitoring start with a hybrid approach, for example, the Monitis all-in-one on-demand monitoring service. A hybrid solution is comprised of a combination of synthetic and real-user monitoring that covers your most critical applications – plus server and network monitoring. Avoid the rather simplistic tactic of considering end-user monitoring as a new source of event-based data to combine with existing management tools you may be using. It’s more practical to frame the data already collected by existing monitoring products in the context of the end-to-end services.

Lastly, a bit of advice on what your end-user monitoring service should be able to do:

• Measure end-user experience across firewalls, load balancers, web servers, application servers, and database servers.
• Provide data in the context of an end-to-end service delivery chain.
• Provide performance data in a standardized way for active, as well as passive monitoring.
• Support round-the-clock tracking for all HTTP transactions, and from all end user locations—not just sampled data.
• Support non-web based applications, too, for instance, VoIP, SMTP, telnet, TCP.
• Enable rapid time implementation to gain maximum value and minimize administrative costs.
• Help you get to the root of problems rapidly.

When you trust your data to a cloud service provider, do you automatically assume that it will remain safe? And do you assume that, should a service failure occur and the data appears lost, that the provider will have automatically backed it up somewhere – saving the day?

Don’t assume.

Earlier this month, there were three power outages at Amazon Web Services, and people lost their data. One customer was so angered by it that he/she left a post on Amazon’s blog, entitled: “Amazon EBS sucks; I just lost all my data.” The gist of the disappointment was a notification to the user that they’d “experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and was unable to be recovered.  We recommend recovering from your most recent snapshot.”

But new users to cloud computing shouldn’t assume that AWS’s redundancy will automatically restore any data loss. Amazon actually states that customers’ data depends on its durability – meaning, it depends on the size of a user’s volume and how much the data has changed since the last snapshot. So, really, the responsibility is on the user to plan for failure and continually perform EBS snapshots. Problem is that new users often don’t know this.

I think that using the cloud shouldn’t be this complicated. The cloud promises ease of use and fewer worries for IT administrators. So why not deliver, especially to smaller businesses that don’t have a hearty internal IT infrastructure that prevents data loss?

Best thing is to be prepared, and that’s why it’s smart to employ monitoring tools to track the performance of cloud platforms. Monitis’s Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework gives users the confidence that comes from employing a third-party independent tool to monitor the cloud infrastructure.  Even when cloud computing providers offer monitoring services (like Amazon CloudWatch), there’s often an inherent conflict of interest because they’re more likely to show higher uptime. You want a customized, independent audit of SLAs (service level agreements)!

Monitis’s Cloud Monitoring Framework helps companies:

- Control Amazon Web Services’ costs. Companies often find their cloud computing costs escalating when they use auto-scaling mechanisms to add extra Amazon EC2 virtual servers on demand and, due to bugs or faulty configurations, processes get out of control;

- Stay on top of monitoring and notifications for newly launched URLs — via an automatic discovery process;

- Automates agent deployment on each newly launched virtual server, which saves companies setup time and allows for deep, process-level monitoring and detailed performance analysis.

- Analyze historical data on each virtual server’s start and stop and performance data, enabling IT pros to examine failure and root causes;

- Monitor installed software on each virtual server, along with other parameters, and smoothes the configuration management of large numbers of cloud servers.

Last week I read an interesting article by Jabulani Leffall about the top IT security issues causing sleep-deprivation at University IT departments.    Among the top 10 were 1. Securing remote access, 3. Patching systems, 6. Network use monitoring, 8. Password management and administrative access, and 10. Monitoring system logs.

In all these case, using cloud-based monitoring has advantages over open source.  With Nagios or other open source products, you need to make frequent exceptions to your firewall to configure server monitors and also to make the Nagios dashboard accessible from outside your firewall.  With a SaaS like Monitis, you don’t need to touch your firewall because all data is pushed to the cloud via HTTPS and the dashboard is hosted on our servers, not yours.

Regarding patches, we echo the sentiment that they are a major downside of Nagios and software in general.  They reduce productivity and are a pain.  With Monitis, there are no patches or upgrades to worry about.  All product improvements are released seamlessly without your involvement, even for internal agents.

Password Management and administrative access are doable with open source, but not nearly as simple as in a SaaS, which lets you control user privileges from anywhere.

Monitoring of network use and system logs is possible with both solutions, but here’s where reliability makes a huge difference between cloud-based and open source.  Nagios usually runs on just one server within your firewall, making your entire system vulnerable to the problems of that one server.  If that server goes down you won’t receive critical notifications about your network use or system events. With Monitis, you have not just one server, but an entire monitoring network, so you can rest assured that we will notify you even when your entire network goes down.

There are often concerns about storing proprietary data on cloud servers.  These are legitimate concerns, especially for applications with confidential data like customers, students’ test scores, email, and health records.   Monitoring data shows the performance of servers, websites and applications like Moodle or Blackboard, which is far less confidential.  I think that explains why universities are showing increasing interest in cloud-based products, particularly in monitoring.