Sunday, November 29, 2009

Giving Thanks This Holiday Season!

We all have much to be thankful for this holiday season. As with any new season - it is a time for reflection on what has past and hope for a bright future on what is to come. The dismal economic climate can often cloud even the most up beat enthusiasts on the future. Now is the time for change to embrace a new paradigm in desktop computing.

The hardest part for anyone embarking upon deploying virtualization around the desktop or up the stack to the application - is ensuring that one has the right set of skills in place to understand all the requirements.

One of the biggest realizations in terms of skills is remembering our past mistakes. We may find that many of the skills we need are there - either within our lessons learned from deploying physical applications, server virtualization basic principles, or within our network base of peers.

Many of the basic requirements for deploying a virtual application have been solved and identified with deploying physical applications in distributed or server hosted environments. Simply put - service desk will still be critical, as will asset tracking, change management, and having the ability to audit all layers of the stack - regardless of whether the environment is physical or virtual.

One way to identify the required skills sets is to understand what is currently being done today (that sets the minimum bar) and ensure whatever the tool that is being evaluated can meet those minimum requirements from a people, processes and technology perspective.