The Horrors of Systems Management
It may seem that our cover illustration goes over the top this month, but
consider the metaphor. Faced with overwhelming demands for IT systems and
services, IS personnel may feel like the besieged citizens in the classic
zombie movie Night of the Living Dead.
From among the many battlefronts of enterprise computing, UniForum's
IT Solutions has selected three of the most hotly contested: security,
data access and distributed systems. We expect open systems professionals
to see reflections of their situations in at least one and perhaps all of
them.
"Raise
Shields!" examines options in firewall technology and available
products amid the clamor for Internet access.
"Attack
of the Rampaging Data" looks at runaway data growth and shows how
three user organizations have tried to control it.
"Breaking
the Curse of Distributed Environments" offers suggestions for tuning
the performance of far-flung, client/-server-based networks, for which all-in-one
solutions simply don't exist.
While systems administrators and managers have to be concerned with these
issues on a daily basis, we hope that others, whether users or non-IS management,
also will benefit from the discussions and perhaps see the issues from a
new perspective.
--Jeffrey Bartlett