Ecora Whips Out Crystal Ball

By Greg McNevin

January 8, 2008: As 2007 disappears into the background, predictions of what’s in store for 2008 are rolling in, with audit and analytics software developer Ecora claiming that organisations will have to soon re-examine IT policy in view of a range of upcoming challenges.

The company claims that current IT policies will soon require a rethink in view of what it has titled Emerging and New Compliance Initiatives, Trends in Best Practices and IT Implementations.

For Emerging Compliance Issues, the company claims that while Sarbanes-Oxley has garnered the majority of headlines in 2008, the average US enterprise (or Australian enterprise operating in the US) could be forced to meet between six to 10 federal and state compliance initiatives at any one time.

Ecora says that companies attempting to manage each compliance standard independently will be hamstrung by escalating costs, not to mention a continuing drain on staff resources and threat of failure to meet deadlines for new IT initiatives.

When it comes to Trends in Best Practices, the firm says that companies will be actively pursuing programs to implement Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3, while more widely adopting a "service management" approach for IT. It notes that this will be a definite step away from managing discrete devices, and towards managing services against internal service level agreements (SLA’s).

System reliability expectations are also to expand to the “6th Nine” according to Ecora, with SLA’s expected to hit 99.999 percent uptime and reliability. That extra nine may not sound like a big stretch, however, Ecora says that for industries such as financial services and banking, it can represent recovery of lost revenue in the millions of dollars.