On October 30, I published Jake Sorofman’s great article “Cutting with a Scalpel: IT Budget Planning in a Down Economy” here at this blog. For a full story, please click here.

To make the long story short,  Jake opinioned that as IT has become rather entwiened with business models, cutting IT budgets with a hatchet will translate to trouble as the business picks up again, because the degraded IT infrastructure will not be able to scale up as business starts expanding again. Given this, smart CIOs cut costs during economic downturn with scalpels rather than hatchets, to make sure that business-critical infrastructure continues to be maintained and developed regardless of the economic landscape.

At least as far as I’m concerned, this makes perfect sense: when it comes to networking technologies in general, and D-services (DNS & DHCP) and IP address management (IPAM) in specific, there are at least three emerging technology trends that will have a huge impact on business infrastructure and operations carried out using it. These are server virtualization, IPv6 and DNSSEC. Here’s why.

Despite the economic turmoil that has been going on over the last few months, IT departments all over the world are looking at new emerging technologies creating discontinuities in the way in which networks and applications are being consumed and run. Some of the most profound discontinuities include the following:

1. Virtualization is gaining further momentum as organizations continue the consolidation of their computing resources. This creates a paradigm shift in how applications and network services are being run, as the only way to show ROI on virtualization investment is to migrate as many services and applications as possible to the virtual computing environment.
2. RIPE will be running out of IPv4 blocks that it can allocate over the course of next 18 months or so. This makes public IPv4 addresses a scarce resource, requiring organizations to make their networks IPv6 compliant sooner rather than later. Gradual shift to IPv6 enabled networks also places IP Address Management (IPAM) at the center stage, as the number of IPs that have to be managed doubles during the transition period from IPv4 to IPv6.
3. The Kaminsky vulnerability announced in July 2008 has made DNS one of the most urgent Internet security problems. While a new technology called DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has been introduced to address the related security concerns, it makes DNS management an increasingly complicated and time-consuming task, as it adds new zone signing and key management task to DNS management processes.

Now, back in the 90s when organizations were initially designing and implementing their existing computing and network environments, on which business operations continue to trust today, organizations had ample resources set aside for designing and implementing them. This time around, however, it looks like the second generation of ICT infrastructure will have to designed and implemented with significantly lesser resources. Luckily, there are now solutions out there allowing organizations to accomplish this seemingly impossible goal successfully.

Nixu Software specializes in virtualization-ready software appliances designed for DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management, with a mission to create the benchmark for the combination of security, ease-of-use, and lowest TCO in its industry. Thanks to its technology alliances with virtualization industry leaders VMware and Citrix, and with product portfolio already supporting DNSSEC and IPv6, Nixu Software is uniquely positioned to provide your company with the goods your customers are looking for.

In practice, Nixu Software’s mission is to make it as easy and cost-efficient as possible for organizations to address these future trends, thereby ensuring the viability of their business infrastructure and operations as we enter into 2010s. For further details on Nixu Products, please visit our website.