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GCN Home > 08/27/07 issue

Toby Ford | At your service

GCN Interview with Toby Ford, USi chief technology officer

By Joab Jackson

Many government agencies are testing virtualization, but application service provider USi is increasingly relying on the technology to stay in business. “We differentiate ourselves just by being a little bit ahead,” said Chief Technology Officer Toby Ford. The company, which AT&T purchased last year, hosts large enterprise applications such as e-commerce systems for large corporations and government agencies. So any gain in efficiency translates directly into enhanced financial well-being for the company. We spoke with Ford to find out a bit more about how virtualization — and other cutting-edge technologies, such as thin provisioning and the Business Process Execution Language — could help large organizations.

GCN: What are the challenges to offering software as a service?

Ford: The main challenge for us is compliance. We have a number of different markets we deal with — financial, health care, government. They all work under different auditing regimes. We are constantly trying to keep up with these things.

Lately, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI) has been heading in the direction that — for credit card information — all servers, firewalls and networks must be dedicated. And that is a challenge for us. Over time, we’ve evolved toward having a lot of shared functionality. It’s shared functionality with security. We have good boundaries, and we have good controls over security, but the PCI group is feeling more comfortable having things separated.

GCN: Can a virtualized environment be considered dedicated?

Ford: Not in the current set of PCI definitions. They’re ambiguous. That’s something we’re currently working [on] with the PCI group — to try to convince them to be more specific. You read it one way and could conclude virtual local-area networks are bad. [If that were the case], we’d have to have dedicated network switches, which would be ridiculous.

GCN: So USi is bullish on virtualization?

Ford: We are. It’s a great way to use assets more efficiently. Even if you buy a small server, most of the time it has way more [power] than what you need. In an analysis we did a few years ago, we found that we were only utilizing 5 to 10 percent of our assets. That’s when we got into virtualization.

In the beginning, it made sense to use virtualization in a nonproduction lab role, but about 18 months ago, we fully committed to use virtualized environments using VMware. Two milestones…recently put us over the edge.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Enterprise Architecture, IT Management, Software Applications



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