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ership (TCO), availability, scalability, and security.

For the foreseeable future, virtually all developments in business technology products and services will be connected with one or more of these issues. While there's no particular order to the seven issues in terms of priority, vertical integration and mobility stand out as the two that shape the entire list as well as the way you should be thinking about all the issues. These two issues, and the challenges they represent, are best embodied by customers, suppliers, and other external constituencies within your "vertical" who want access to information anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

The device problem is particularly troubling for technology decision-makers. In the past, you had some measure of control over the type of terminal used by those requiring access to your systems. For internal constituents (such as delivery personnel), you could set the standard for what sort of device and wireless network everyone would use. For those of you who still have this luxury, we will continue our on-going analyses of these devices, their operating systems, and the wireless networks to which they they connect.

But now, external constituents such as customers want and expect access to the information as well. They also have this annoying attitude that, sure, you can change their chosen mobile device -- after you've pried it from their dead fingers. They are accustomed to accessing information on their terms. Ask them to conform to your standards and they'll take their business elsewhere.

Standards will yield several benefits
This problem suggests the pursuit of a highly standards-based strategy (one of the other seven issues) across as much of your IT as possible. Judicious deployment of standards yields several benefits. First, it takes some of the worry out of integrating your systems via networks and to devices and other systems over which you have no control. Second, it affords you the highest degree of flexibility should you become dissatisfied with one particular solution. In terms of mobility and vertical integration, networking, data structure, and presentation standards should reign supreme. So too should the solutions that embrace them -- with minimal proprietary extensions. For example, liberal implementation of some or all Web services standards (XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) will greatly ease the path towards rebuilding your applications as services.

Deploying standards wherever possible will help you address another of the seven critical issues: the total cost of running your technology. By the end of this decade, technology will take up the lion's share of your company's annual operating budget. Some estimates put technology's slice of the pie at 50 percent. With that much at stake, you'll want to make sure things are set up in a way that puts you, and not your technology provider, in control of your technology expenses.

The minute your company starts to rely on a proprietary technology to solve a particular problem, the provider of that technology controls not only the speed and reliability of your solution, but also its cost. This problem was most evident last year when Microsoft decided to change some of its licensing policies. (The change was positive for some, negative for others.) Although Microsoft's products support standards, most of its products also have proprietary features that provide additional benefits. When Microsoft announced plans to change its licensing scheme, the customers that depended heavily on those proprietary features suddenly realized who was in control of that portion of their IT costs.

Taking back control of your IT costs requires reducing your dependency on proprietary features in favor of standards. For example, base your directory services on LDAP and resist the temptation to take advantage of proprietary extensions offered in some solutions. This way, if you don't like your current LDAP directory because it's too slow or because the provider is charging too much, you can more easily replace it with one that is faster, cheaper, or more reliable.

Of course, just because a standards-setting body says something is a standard doesn't really mean it is. And just because no standards setting body ever anointed something else as a standard doesn't mean it isn't. Deciding what is and isn't a standard is an entirely separate issue for a future column.

Making decisions that have a strategic impact on your TCO doesn't stop with the cost of the technology itself. In the case of desktop systems and handhelds, it doesn't even start there. As a side note, we can't think of one good reason (except for specific applications) to buy desktop systems instead of notebooks.

The cost of acquiring some technologies can pale in comparison to the long-term cost of running them. One TCO-reducing trend that seems to be picking up steam is the notion of server consolidation (a.k.a. horizontal scalability). Instead of running 25 separate physical machines, why not run 25 virtual ones (partitions) in a single physical box? Better yet, find virtual machines on an as-needed basis from a grid that lives out on the network. You'll be hearing a lot more about grids this year.

Asset, systems, and network management also plays a significant role in lowering TCO. Proprietary solutions sometimes become irresistible because they often pack TCO-reducing features that standards don't yet address. This year, one of our editorial goals at ZDNet Tech Update is to help you wrestle with such complicated issues.

The host renaissance
The last decade was marked by fat clients connected to fat pipes, and a relatively even distribution of processing between client and host systems. With the current trend toward wireless mobility, this decade will be marked by thinner clients (and many more of them) connected to networks with significantly lower bandwidth. Users are more demanding, client systems less capable, and networks narrower; something has to give. That something is the way clients and servers share in the processing and delivering of information to those users. Taking the load off the clients and networks means shifting as much as possible back to the host.

Placing that additional responsibility on your host systems, especially with more people now relying on them, raises two more of the seven critical issues: availability and scalability. With more users passing through your infrastructure (systems, storage, networks, etc.) and with more of the processing taking place on the host side, you'd better be thinking about whether your systems can meet the demand.

Of course, your hosts can't begin rising to that challenge if they're not available in the first place. With technology playing an increasingly important role in your overall business, it's not hard to envision the connection between system continuity and business continuity. If your systems (especially your hosts) are down, so too could be your business.

Tackling the availability and scalability monsters can sometimes be accomplished with the same solution. Although it's not always the case in the real world, clustering technologies are theoretically supposed to provide the added measures of both performance and reliability. Technologies such as RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) provide the simultaneous benefits of scalability and availability, but for very specific parts of your IT infrastructure.

Not everyone will tackle these priorities in the same way. Some of you will take on the challenges of running highly scalable, highly available hosts yourselves. Others will make it someone else's problem by outsourcing your datacenters, and in some cases, even the applications (ASP-style). At that point, availability and scalability become a contractual issue, and learning how to negotiate service-level agreements becomes as important as knowing whether Oracle's J2EE application server outperforms BEA's or IBM's.

Finally, you could have the most reliable, lowest cost, standards-based, easiest-to-integrate, mobile serving, fastest honkin' infrastructure in the world, but it won't matter a hill o' beans if every bit of it isn't locked down and secured -- the seventh issue. Just after you've completed an aggressive TCO reduction campaign, you may end up spending all of your savings on security technologies.

Security is another of those issues that overlaps with its six sisters. For example, if you are looking into encrypting your company's data--whether it's at rest or in transit--you will also need to reconsider whether your systems can handle the encryption and decryption without grinding to a halt. In other words, are they scalable enough?

Anti-intrusion (whether it's a virus, worm, or whatever) is now a staple of digital security, but it's also an availability problem. Tenacious intruders always seem to be one step ahead of the security specialists. Once an intrusion brings your system down, will your business follow?

Clearly, there's much ground to cover for each of these seven issues. That's why we'll be bringing you much more coverage, in easy-to-digest servings, over the coming year. If you haven't already, do what we've done here at Tech Update. Write them down: vertical integration (a.k.a. Web services), mobility, open-standards, TCO, availability, scalability, and security. Or print them out. Then pin them up in a prominent place. Then write about them. To yourself. To your colleagues. Write to us and let us know what your thoughts are on these and other issues that confront you.