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Disaster Recovery, IT Service Management, IT Job Description, Sarbanes Oxley, and IT Salary
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May 14th, 2008

Merger of HP and EDS Will Eliminate Thousands of Jobs in India

With the acquisition of EDS by HP there will be a reduction in the number of IT service jobs. That will have a large impact on Outsources. There are over 137,000 EDS jobs, with almost 25,000 in India, and many of those jobs will be eliminated in a consolidation and automation of the combined companies data centers.

The elimination of jobs will put more pressure on outsource providers as there will be a surplus of employees who will be out of work.

In the 1970s that occurred in the US and that drove a recession. The question is will that be good for the US job market or not. Only time will tell.

May 10th, 2008

Encryption is a must to meet mandated requirement

The California privacy protection act, SB 1386, which is a model for many states including New York, exempts companies that can prove lost data was encrypted from the requirement that they notify consumers. When mobile data is encrypted, thieves hoping for gold bars of valuable data are left instead with a solid, impenetrable and useless brick.

When protecting data on mobile computers, companies have two primary choices:

File and Folder Encryption: This type of technology allows users to encrypt sensitive files themselves.
Whole-Disk Encryption (Full-Disk Encryption): Centrally managed, this process relies on software and hardware products.

May 2nd, 2008

Over 25% of All Enterprises Faced a Disaster in the Last 5 Years

Janco has found that more than a 26% of its client firms have faced some sort of a disaster over the past five years. CIOs need to convince executives in their enterprise to invest in business continuity and disaster recovery systems. CIO need to effectively communicate that business continuity and disaster recovery planning is not just an insurance policy.

CIOs know their systems are vulnerable and they want to do something about it. In these tough economic times, it is hard to get funding for business continuity and disaster recovery. CIOs who tie business continuity and disaster recovery planning to mandated compliance needs are more successful in obtaining the necessary funding.

Many of these same companies consider disaster recovery investment as a rolling upgrade that consistently augments existing infrastructure and application investments rather than a one-time event that can be delayed.

In one research study by another firm many CIOs blamed disasters on non-natural disruptions and incidents. The data shows that 42% of the firms surveyed said power failure was the most common cause of declared disasters and downtime, while 32% cited hardware failure, and 21% cited network failure.

May 1st, 2008

LoJack for Laptop Systems Soon to be a Reality

Absolute Software Corporation is collaborating with Intel to integrate its Computrace asset management, data protection, and theft recovery technology and services into Intel's Anti-Theft Technology (ATT). The technology will be a key component of Intels Anti-Theft Technology (ATT) to be delivered on the upcoming Centrino processor platform later this year.

Absolute is known for its Computrace LoJack for Laptop system, which is currently available and has been responsible for the recovery of over 6,000 stolen notebook computers, including Macs, since it debuted. Additional products in the Computrace family can add comprehensive laptop management features such as IT asset management, remote data delete and software license management.

For more than a decade, Absolute Software has single-handedly created and developed the market for BIOS-persistent, Internet-based tracking of mobile computers. Computrace is also capable of remotely deleting data and physically recovering lost or stolen computers -- assisting customers in complying with data privacy regulations, said the CEO of Absolute Software.

April 25th, 2008

Since IBM in the 60s Vendor Have Helped to Recruit Staff for Customers

Many vendors offer free headhunting services to customers, fulfilling what is often an acute need. They achieve two goals with that effort: first they do a favor for both the customer and the employee who is hired; and second they have some in the employ of their customer who will not be reluctant to push some business their way.

A small group of solution providers in recent years has started a for fee headhunting serivice. Though playing headhunter was not exactly in their original business plans, these solution providers have tackled recruitment as another service for their customers.

April 21st, 2008

What is the True Cost of Data Loss

(Symantec) Information drives a business. The success and viability of that information hinge on an administratorÂ’s ability to protect its integrity while keeping it available throughout the enterprise at all times. However, the exponential growth rate of data volumes; shrinking backup windows; the demand for more effective change management; and the need for fast, reliable recovery create stiff challenges for disaster recovery efforts. TodayÂ’s solutions must offer best-of-breed data protection and system recovery. An essential part of such a solution is granular data protection. Businesses cannot afford to waste valuable time and resources restoring a complete data volume or database when all a user needs is a single file or email message.

To calculate the annual loss expectancy (ALE) of an asset, you use the quantitative risk analysis method. This calculation is determined by first figuring the annual ra te of occurrence (ARO) and the single loss expectancy (SLE).

Once those values are known, ARO x SLE = ALE. Suppose the SLE is US$35,000, and the ARO is 12 (i.e., the cost of the server being down for a day is US$35,000, and this attack happens once every month). In this example, US$35,000 x 12 = US$420,000 per machine.

To protect your financial viability, you need to be able to perform data restoration and bare metal system recoveries more efficiently and faster than ever.

With Continuous Data Protection added to your data protection efforts, you can take advantage of application data protection in remote offices while reducing costs and minimizing the IT workload. Continuous Data Protection helps eliminate the hassle and expense of tape-based backups at remote sites by replicating data from remote office servers to a central location at the corporate office, where data can be reliably backed up and stored. Centralizing backups minimizes the costs associated with hardware, media, and administration investments at remote offices.

April 17th, 2008

Many are not ready for VoIP
ItÂ’s safe to say Internet Protocol (IP) telephony has arrived as a feasible communications technology for business. And for good reason. Now that the telecom industry has had time to refine it and more organizations are deploying it, IP telephony is delivering on its claims of reducing calling costs, simplifying administration, and providing greater communications flexibility with software applications taking the place of traditional hardware systems. IT chiefs and corporate level decision-makers also are looking more closely at IP telephony as voice quality continues to improve, and as organizations that use IP continue to consistently reach the Â“Five 9Â’sÂ” level of reliability with 99.999% system uptimes.

But perhaps the most compelling argument for implementing IP telephony is that Private Branch Exchange (PBX) telephone systems Â— the systems the business world has used the last 30+ years to generate calls Â— are expected to be near extinction by year-end 2008. Gartner, Synergy, Forrester and other industry analysts made that prediction as early as 2003, and their collective forecast is coming true as a number of PBX manufacturers announce plans to cease development and support of their PBX products. IP telephony, after all, is forcing their hand. Compared to IPÂ’s standards-based software approach and ability to converge voice on a data network, traditional proprietary PBX systems are more difficult to integrate with an organizationÂ’s business applications and business rules, and have increasingly become more expensive to maintain or update.
more info

April 13th, 2008

Wireless policy is critical to meet mandated requirements

Wireless security is critically important. If the wireless device of an executive slipped out of his briefcase while in a taxi cab, all of your critical data and statistics could be exposed.

With wireless security, a single point of control is needed so IT can manage how users interact with your systems. This point of control must sit behind the corporate firewall. Make sure you have the ability to mandate passwords for users, the ability to wipe data from the device remotely, as well as the ability to lock the device remotely. Being able to establish settings through policies or parameters and providing robust control across all devices is extremely important to corporate security.

End-to-end security is a top priority for most companies and government organizations. IT departments also need to be concerned about exposure to viruses, denial of service attacks and malware. Organizations need to ensure that their wireless platform meets appropriate standards to protect their corporate systems and data.

All transmissions from the wireless device to servers behind the corporate firewall should be secure from end to end. Think about confidentiality, integrity and authenticity. Confidentiality is typically achieved using advanced encryption. Integrity ensures a message has not been tampered within transit. Authenticity allows the recipient to identify the sender and trust that the sender actually sent the message.

For additional application security, features such as code-signing can ensure that every application loaded onto a device is tied to an author, which locks out potentially malicious or unauthorized applications. System administrators, once again, should be able to maintain control by setting an IT policy that blocks third-party applications from being loaded on the handheld.

April 3rd, 2008

What security threats do businesses face today

From spyware and phishing to intrusion attempts, the threats attacking computer networks are more dangerous than ever. Many threats are targeting specific industries with convincing-looking e-mail and phone calls. The hackers hope to direct employees to counterfeit Web sites, in order to harvest passwords and private financial information or steal computer and network resources. Some analysts now say that the revenue from cybercrime in the United States now exceeds that of illegal drug activity.

There is a change in the threat landscape, before they were noisy and targeting the perimeter of the network, now they are becoming much more silent, difficult to detect and highly targeted,. Â“

Many attacks are targeting Web browsers and the client applications on the computer itself. And while a small business network may not be as complicated as an enterprise network, they still have desktop and mobile clients.

Because small businesses have fewer IT resources at their disposal, they need solutions that provide comparable protection, at affordable costs and requiring minimal administration.

March 28th, 2008

What are the advantages of VoIP for enterprises with PBxs?

What are the advantages of VoIP for enterprises with PBxs?

Traditional

VoIP

Conference Calls

Special equipment is required for more than three people

Easily conference large numbers

Mobility

Very difficult to set remote users up in systems if they are local

Easily add remote users of any kind

Phones

Can only provide traditional phone services, albeit complex ones

Can be programmed to provide internal and external apps of all kinds

Efficiency

Dedicated voice lines provide known quality levels but no flexibility

More efficient use of network

March 25th, 2008

Web 2.0 is a Security Nightmare for Many

CIOs and IT managers are excited about leveraging Web 2.0 technologiesÂ—wikis, blogs, content tagging, and social networks, for exampleÂ—to drive collaboration, improve knowledge management, and spur innovation. But Web 2.0 comes with a raft of security vulnerabilities, and the fallout from data theft and network compromises can be devastating.

Why is Web 2.0 so dangerous? Because it opens corporate applications to user contributions via the Internet, and thatÂ’s where hackers and thieves are waiting to launch their attacks.

Download the complimentary white paper, Â“Web 2.0: Worth the Risk?Â” to learn how malware can turn your Web 2.0 implementation into a liability, and about how hackers exploit new threats to:

Compromise individual PCs
Compromise Web sites
Steal data
Gain control of Web-based management consoles
Misappropriate corporate data

March 20th, 2008

Help Desk and service requests better served by Internet based support

Centralization was the first great innovation of technical support. As mainframes with their dedicated cadre of IT professionals increasingly gave way to the widespread deployment of complex software running on a broad array of off-the-shelf hardware, on-site support with local help desks was no longer practical. But in the process, something important was lost. Field service technicians were with the equipment, but User Help desks in remote centers had to work through customer intermediaries. While some of these customers were quite skilled, it was never quite the same as working on the systems in person. Resolutions simply took longer. Stopgap measures evolved, but are cumbersome, often less secure, and donÂ’t scale across todayÂ’s heterogeneous, many-to-many Internet environment.

Internet-Based Support to the Rescue

In recent years, support centers have discovered and adopted a new breed of remote support. It provides the next best thing to being there in person, letting User Help Desks virtually sit next to customers, see what is on their screens, and take over if appropriate. They make it easy to upload and download files to diagnose and resolve issues. And their architecture lets them do this in a way that is secure, under the customers control, fast, and scalable. They do not require time-consuming or undesired software installations on the customer machine. Setting up a connection is fast, no matter how the computers are connected to the Internet.

The results have been dramatic:

Faster time to resolution, as phone tag and data gathering steps are eliminated, and more issues are resolved at first contact.
Higher TSR productivity, as support engineers can work directly on the system, and see exactly what is happening without needing to recreate customer environments on lab computers.
Better root cause analysis, as engineers can see defects exactly as they present themselves at customer sites.
Training as a byproduct of support, as the customers watches, learns, and duplicates expert resolution processes.
New tools for workforce monitoring and coaching as Quality Assurance teams can review remote session recordings.
Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty as a natural side effect of faster, more accurate, and more transparent resolutions.

March 15th, 2008

Disaster Planning and Server Consolidation
The cutting edge of virtualization technology may have set its sights on virtual PCs, unified network fabrics and other esoteric applications, but server consolidation remains the primary driver for most data centers. In fact, only a handful of enterprises have begun the process of virtualizing their server farms, according to most recent surveys, although the pace is likely to pick up as energy costs and competitive pressures drive organizations to increase performance even while paring down their hardware infrastructures. But as those who have already taken the virtual plunge have no doubt realized, consolidating servers is not just a matter of powering up the virtualization layer and then pulling equipment out of racks. There is a long list of factors to consider with any centralization project and a wide range of land mines that need to be avoided to prevent service failures. One of the main concerns is the resiliency of remaining hardware. more info

March 5th, 2008

Electronic Banking is Not as Safe as You Think

Customers of HSBC, Bank of America and Washington Mutual may want to think twice about banking online. Quickly. The three banks are identified in a study by a UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law researcher as the most victimized by identity theft. Researcher Chris Hoofnagle used numbers received under a Freedom of Information Act request. He ran the numbers from three randomly chosen months in 2006.

The results were that HSBC had 21 incidents per billion of dollars on deposit, BoA had 17 and WaMu 16. ING was the most secure, with a lone incident per billion on deposit, the study said. The findings dovetail with a 2007 report from Cambridge University that said BoA and WaMu phishing sites usually stayed afloat for more than 100 hours, while Chase and PayPal general got such sites taken down in less than two days.

March 2nd, 2008

PCI Compliance Leaves Consumers at Risk

PCI Merchant Compliance is spotty with smaller merchants. According to Visa and CyberTrust there is a long way to go before customer data is protect from identity theft exposures. Compliance is shown in the table below.

*Level*	*Transaction Volume*	*Number of Companies*	*Percent PCI Compliant*	*Percent Working Towards Compliance*	*Percent Just Beginning the Process*
1	6,000,000 plus	326	77%	23%	O%
2	1,000,000 to 6,000,000	709	62%	30%	8%
3	20,000 to 1,000,000	2,596	54%	20%	25%
4	Less than 20,000	200,000 plus	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown

February 28th, 2008

Over 46,000 Identity Theft Incidents Reported to the FCC in Three Months

The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology issued a report measuring identity theft at top bank in the United States. The report concluded that identity theft is a major issue. In a three month period of 2006 they found there were over 46,000 incidents reported to FCC.

The top 20 insttitutions are a combination of Banks, Telephone (Cellular) companies, Credit Card issuers, and consumer retail firms.

Institution
Identify Theft Incidents

Bank of America / MBNA
            3,351

AT&T / Cingular / SBC
            2,290

Sprint / Nextel
            2,095

JP Morgan / Chase / Bank One
            1,839

Capital One
            1,328

CitiBank             1,240

Verizon                932

American Express                910

Washinton Mutual / Providian                885

Well Fargo                788

Tmobile                706

Discover                667

Target                660

Sears                601

Dish Network                575

HSBC                571

WalMart                500

Dell Computer                481

Wachovia                441

AFNI                395

February 21st, 2008

Password Management Chews Up Help Desk Time
In companies across the globe, computer users on average find themselves with 10 or more passwords. Therefore users take common short cuts with their passwords such as using the same password to access every system or writing their passwords down in insecure locations (i.e. the old yellow sticky note problem).

When users do use strong passwords, or are requested to change them often, it is inevitable that they will forget them. As a result help desks constantly field requests for password retrieves and resets, causing a waste of time and resources that could be devoted to solving other problems, not to mention increased user frustration and low employee morale. more info

February 11th, 2008

EU Tells Phone Companies to Reduce Data-Roaming Rates
After forcing all of the EU mobile operators to cut rates for making and receiving phone calls abroad, the European Unions top telecommunications regulator has set thier sights on prices for downloading and surfing the Web wirelessly.

The EU Commissioner has already warned carriers that prices for so-called data roaming have to fall by the summer. The Industry claims they do not need regulation. The commissioner says, get it done.

The 27-nation EU adopted a proposal from the same commissioner last year to cut the cost of making and receiving voice calls outside a persons home country, but the proposal did not include data and text messages.

A study by the European Regulators Group published in January found that transferring 1 megabyte of data while roaming on average cost 5.24 euros ($7.59) in the EU in the third quarter of last year.

By contrast, several operators offer domestic data plans that include a gigabyte of data, or roughly a thousand megabytes, for less than 50 euros. Vodafone, the worlds largest mobile phone company by revenue, said last month that data roaming was less than 1 percent of revenue.

The industry argues that the market for data roaming is still young and that operators are already cutting prices.

Vodafone said that it would reduce prices by up to 45 percent on its monthly data-roaming charge for European business travelers to make it cheaper to use laptop computers wirelessly when abroad. The carrier will charge a maximum of 60 euros ($86.93) per month for 150 megabytes of data.

February 5th, 2008

Poor IT Infrastructure Led to French Bank Trading Losses
(IDG News Service) The huge losses reported by French bank SociÃ©tÃ© GÃ©nÃ©rale, apparently caused by a rogue trader with inside knowledge of the bank's procedures, don't necessarily point to an IT systems failure but rather to poor management of those systems, analysts say.

The bank has accused 31-year-old employee Jerome Kerviel of creating a fraudulent trading position in the bank's computers that ultimately caused it to lose around $7.3 billion.

Kerviel achieved this by, among other things, misappropriating computer passwords, the bank said. It has revealed few other technical details of what caused the losses.

Management of passwords, including rescinding the old passwords of employees who move to different positions within the bank, or modifying the level of access those passwords allow, is often a task given to the lowest-level IT worker.

It is a dull and routine 99 percent of the time, but a vital backstop, said senior analyst at the TowerGroup. Senior IT managers should conduct more frequent reviews of password policies, he said.

In some cases, it may not have been the security of the passwords themselves that posed a problem, but rather the access those passwords allowed, said Ian Walden, professor of information and communications law at Queen Mary, University of London.

Organizations tend to think of access as being binary in nature: you get access to it all, or you don't, Walden said. In reality, there are many more levels of access. In modern, complicated systems, the granularity has to be much more sophisticated.

To make the best use of systems with advanced access controls, the IT department must have a thorough understanding of how the business works and where there is risk.

IT departments and business managers have yet to find a way to wrap security into business processes so it is not an impediment, Walden said.

January 30th, 2008

Power Cost for Cooling Data Centers Doubles

The issue of power and cooling in the datacenter has become a top priority for IT executives. Working with customers and applying IDC data sets against industry standards of datacenter thermal metrics, it is apparent that the evolution of the datacenter has been outpaced by the rate of server technology advancement. Driven by demands for higher levels of compute performance, yet constrained by tight budgets, datacenters have increased in density, with smaller servers running faster processors. The resulting rise in power consumption has become a significant cost factor for the businessÂ’ operating expense, while cooling capacity has become a limiting factor in terms of IT expansion. In 2005, $26.1 billion was spent to power and cool the worldwide installed base of servers. This is more than double the cost from 10 years ago of $10.3 billion. Additional findings include:

Over the next five years, the expense to power and cool the worldwide installed base of servers is projected to grow four times compared with the growth rate for new server spending. IDC expects server power and cooling costs to increase at an 11.2% CAGR to $44.5 billion over the forecast period. This expense is equal to 70% of the overall new server spending in 2010.
IDC has learned that there is an organizational disconnect within most companies between IT purchasers and the facilities personnel who are responsible for utilities within the datacenter. Proactive companies are merging facilities with IT to better measure and manage datacenter operation costs.
It critical that IT vendors position themselves as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. There is significant opportunity for vendors that develop a product message that resonates with the multiple customer stakeholders, including facilities, IT purchasers, datacenter managers, and finance.
Customers are shifting their purchasing criteria, taking into consideration not only system performance but also the power and thermal characteristics. The industry is responding with energy-efficient systems, power management tools, and advanced cooling technology.

ITSM

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