I am responsible for managing the Operations and Infrastructure for ninemsn business services including technology vendors/partners who supply content and application services to ninemsn.

I began in Electrical Engineering and completed an honours degree in Computer & Information Engineering from London University. I’m a Chartered Engineer and have the ITIL Service Managers and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) qualifications.

My career started in computer networking, moving on to manage networks and systems for publishing companies and newspapers (ft.com). I then diversified into management of information security and risk. I decided to move back to in the corporate world with the challenge of ninemsn – an organisation that was developing rapidly from its start-up roots 10 years ago.

It’s a complex network! Like many organisation that have heterogeneous IT systems, ninemsn’s has grown to meet the demands of the business strategically, organically or through acquisition. In ‘New Media’ those demands come thick and fast – driven by the pace of change of the Internet consumer. ninemsn creates approximately 200 products each quarter, which translates to 150 releases per month through my team. We are responsible for maintaining the availability of operational services, including incident management. We also manage change to production systems, including release of all changes relating to new products or services. There is also a strategic programme of works to ensure the underlying infrastructure continues to support the current and future business/technical needs.

There are 4 separate technology platforms (all Microsoft products of course!) managed directly - Content Delivery, Content Syndication, SMS Gateway and a legacy CMS. The primary platform incorporates the ninemsn Content Management System (CMS) which is undergoing significant investment for a 4 year period. For a media company, content or ‘digital asset’ management is critical to our business. We host in different locations depending on the service, primarily with Hostworks in South Australia, but also with Microsoft globally for MS based services (Bing, MSN Video, Messenger, Hotmail, Ad Systems) and use Content Delivery Networks selectively. ninemsn also takes feeds and data from many sources to deliver the suite of content services to our customers.

With the advent of ‘super’ Internet speeds and the NBN, focus will move from static content to rich media and video. Interactive HD live/on-demand will completely change the landscape of our living rooms, work environments and aggregation of content through social networks and portals. Just like the Internet 15 years ago, it will take some time to fathom what we are going to do with all the available bandwidth.

Managing big news days are always a challenge due to the huge spikes in traffic that we experience. Unfortunately it is mostly tragic stories that drive traffic in media. Whilst the Victorian bushfires were awful to go through, it was all hands on deck to make sure we continued to stay ahead of business and consumer needs. This traffic was 3 times higher than the previous peak when Heath Ledger tragically passed away the previous year. Other big days were Michael Jackson’s death and Obama winning the US election. Purists would argue that one should always be able to predict future traffic; realists know that this is not as easy to do as it is to say. Past predictable/unpredictable is trended but I am constantly amazed by how much rich media content and online interaction changes each year. One needs to factor this with not wanting to have to maintain an F1 engine when you only go to the race track twice per year.

Cloud Cloud and Cloud, In/Outsourcing and the risk of Web Applications.

We may be tired of the buzzwords, the endless calls from conference organisers, vendors offering the next nirvana-solve-all-your-issues services. Whether we like it or not, most environments will be hosted, delivered or written for ‘cloud’ based services in 5 years.

Hosting, Application/Content Delivery (which I separate out) and Application Development (A key player will be Microsoft’s AzureTM platform) will be predominantly outsourced. Many IT departments are caught up in core infrastructure issues which organisations just don’t care for (‘just make it work!’). Outside of direct cost constraints which are not a true representation of value, there are few reasons to maintain a local data centre or management of bespoke core application management when they are well catered for externally. This will allow IT to be ‘released from the infrastructure shackles’ and get closer to the management of business information.

Key to this migration is transparency, both from Application/Services that are developed to run anywhere without hooks into supporting infrastructure, and Information/Content Delivery teams (inc. Information Security) ensuring content is not tied to any specific hardware. ‘Source’ content infrastructure will shrink as ‘destination’ delivery infrastructure expands as use of Content Delivery Networks increases.

In/outsourcing or Sourcing Strategy. Driven by network hosted, or cloud written/delivered applications, technical IT services will move out of organisations to partners. Organisations will focus more on their core competencies, of which IT is normally a supporting service, so selective outsourcing will increase. Definition of the Sourcing Strategy is needed including when to outsource, when to use consultants, Intellectual Property/copyright issues, costs, service boundaries, governance and systems integration. The Sourcing Strategy will define what one needs to ensure flexible outsourcing partnerships (partner being the key word) and the supporting contracts/SLAs to meet the ongoing and changing organisational needs. Organisations should look externally (as this is impartial) to assess their management activities and technical competencies against ‘good’ practices to assess whether they are best placed to complete or whether outsourcing is a better approach.

Longer term technology services and roles/skills will move to specialist hosting and application management firms whilst technology management will remain internal – starting with bespoke applications and finally moving (which will take time) to proprietary in-house applications. Internal ‘IT’ will become mostly one of Service Desks for triage and tier one remediation using junior or highly commoditised skills Internally there will also be Business Analysts to clearly interpret business requirements, Programme/Project Managers to deliver and Service Managers with the appropriate IT Service Management skills to strategise, transition and operate.

Risk of Web Applications. Front line protection of organisations information will move, as the focus should already be, with Software/Application Development teams. That is not to say that the traditional physical/environmental, process and other network/technical controls will not be mandatory (firewalls, intrusion prevention, anti-virus...), only that most vulnerabilities will be exploited through the web application/service tier, which will be the primary point of attack. The fact remains that most compromises are not detected for more than a few months and that traditional anti-virus is only as good as the latest definitions which are never current. So organisation should place emphasis on Secure Software Development Lifecycle skills including Secure QA.

Absolutely, it already plays a major part today. Outside of the broader environmental issues, it’s a prudent thing to do that can result in significant cost savings. Virtualisation and Cloud based hosting will ensure better use of system resources and will also allow for hosting providers to provide offsetting as part of their services. This is related to management of capacity but we only need to have sufficient capacity at times of peak load; currently many still pay for standby capacity which is rarely used – this is why centralisation of service delivery will allow resources to be moved, like the electric grid, on demand, thereby lowering the overall usage. These cost savings should be passed onto the customer to drive promotion and good behaviour (in a similar way to a feed-in-tariff).

Click here to return to the Digital Pigeon