E-Week this week published their "Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center". The slideshow is a mix of heady, esoteric terms like "server fabrics" with more tenable concepts like "green IT", and closely parallels Gartner Research's top 10 strategic technologies of 2008. But what is a disruptive technology and how to respond to it?

"Disruptive Technology" is a fairly recent term coined to describe technologies that upset the current state of affairs--whether those are business models, industries, or workflow. Want some examples? The Internet has disrupted traditional media like newspapers and TV. Digital music and the iPod has disrupted the music industry. And Google is doing it to just about anything that touches the Web.

So how can you predict the next disruptive technology? Well, you can't. The fact that they come from "outside the box" means that there is little chance of seeing them coming. As this post points out, the next big thing is never a repeat. That is why disruptive technologies are unexpected and unpredictable.

So the best strategy is agility: responding quickly to this new phenomenon. This requires the ability to learn quickly and not stand on bureaucracy, parochialism, or convention. A capacity for reinvention will be a vital survival trait.

Want even more good news? The pace of change is accelerating. Look over the past ten years since e-mail went widespread: now we have Blackberries and iPhones with word processing, cameras and GPS. Imagine what the next ten years will bring. So industries once isolated or downstream of innovative industries will have to react quicker as disruptive technologies will sweep through like wildfires.

We all sleep better having more back-up options, with disk and online either complementing tapes or replacing them altogether. Because these options offer greater reliability, security, and performance, no longer do we ask whether we can back-up. Now we ask: how fast can we recover? The new bottleneck is bandwidth: how much data can we move between the back-up and our restored systems. Recovery takes time; sometimes a long time.

Moving gigabytes and sometimes terabytes of data though LAN or Internet/WAN connections means that backups can sometimes take 24 hours or more. Disk and online back-ups are a blessing and a curse. We back up more data, which means there is more to move. So even when you do everything right and have multiple back-ups in various locations, you may still be down for a day or more just because you are moving data around.

How to address this issue? The obvious but difficult solution is to continually cull data. Remove unwanted files, e-mail messages, and the like. While the cheapest solution, it is the most difficult since it requires asking stressed out professionals and staff to take time out to manage their files. Other solutions like SANs (Storage Area Networks) and real-time backup and replication become real expensive real quick.

Just a little note about how we conduct business here at SAGE. Actually, it is the fact that we are conducting business on this President's Day, just like we were on MLK Day. Granted, a lot of businesses that are not in retail are open on this federal holiday, especially our customers. In response to requests from our customers, especially our SAGE OnSight customers, we are open on "minor" holidays (MLK, President's Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve).

So since our customers are working, so are we because we support (or are) their IT. (And there is no intention to offend anyone if you feel your favorite holiday has been tagged as "minor").

For all of you not working today, enjoy your day off!

Submitted for your perusal is the sophistication of technology in a small to medium-sized businesses. Can one "tech guy" who comes in twice a month have the requisite knowledge and expertise to cover it all?

• Email and messaging (Exchange/Outlook, Blackberries and other mobile devices)
• Office software
• Printers/Scanners
• Remote access (Citrix, VPN, Terminal Services)
• Internet Access
• Firewall
• Storage
• Backup & Recovery (Tape, Disk, Online)
• Threat reduction (antivirus, spam filtering)
• Patch management
• Monitoring

Then throw in industry-specific and specialized applications like docketing, document management, accounting and finance, sales, CRM, and custom databases. Even more, on the horizon even small firms will have some form of server virtualization, online backup, and enhanced mobile communications.

Needless to say, this is too much for one person to handle. Best would be to have a medium-sized IT company managing your firm's IT. That company will assign an engineer representative for site visits and be the point of contact who intimately knows the client's system, but can call on specialists and experts whenever necessary.

By order of firm management, the IT department is engaged in a major project to overhaul the "backroom" systems to bring greater stability and performance. IT would love to immerse its small band of engineers and sysadmins to tackle the project, but one problem is persistently thwarting them: those pesky users.

An attorney's hard drive failed. Someone can't print their mail merge document. A marketing assistant has a question about Excel. Don't these people realize there are bigger problems to be tackled and IT can't coddle them right now?

This is a trap some IT departments fall into, and quite frankly, they need to get over it. If they don't, they fail. Service is a long series of interruptions. IT departments are in the business of reacting, so they better get good at it. The face of the IT department is the help desk/support center. So if users feel they are being neglected, the reputation of IT will be blemished. The better IT is reacting to the needs of their users, preventing failures, and quickly resolving incidents due to unforeseen circumstances, they will have more time for projects.

In an upcoming blog post we will discuss some ways IT departments can improve their "reaction" time.