It is impossible to deny how important disaster recovery and business continuity are in today's digital economy. Without systems in place to keep applications and data flowing after a natural disaster or other interruption, an enterprise risks losses that extend far beyond a manufacturing plant or data center. It is possible to incur ongoing financial problems, damage to a firm's reputation, and possible regulatory and legal sanctions. In a worst - case scenario, a company can find its existence threatened.

To be sure, an online retailer cannot conduct business if its e-commerce application, database and customer records are unavailable. A bank that cannot dispense money from ATMs and a hospital that cannot access electronic patient records is at risk - but so too are its customers. Not only can the resulting damage to a company's reputation lead to lost revenues, it can endanger pubic health or welfare. And these days, no industry or company is immune.

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(Computerworld)  Google Inc. has found itself immersed in a blogger brouhaha after its Blogger subsidiary shut down the postings of several political bloggers opposing the election of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president.

At least seven bloggers who use the Google self-publishing blog service noted that their sites were shut down last week. The blogs were reinstated by Monday, and some of the bloggers posted an e-mail apology from Google.

A blogger who blogs about her support for Sen. Hillary Clinton for president at a site called Blue Lyon, posted the e-mail apology sent to her by Google. In the note, Google said that the Blogger spam filters caused some accounts "to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts."

Google went on to note that the company believes that the mistake may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the Just Say No Deal network of anti-Obama blogs, which caused Blogger's system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam.

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A hardware vendor performed a survey of nearly 145,000 desktop and laptop PCs within businesses to determine how they compared to Microsoft’s recommended hardware requirements for Windows Vista:

Recommended Minimum Requirements (Premium-Ready PCs):

• 1 GB RAM
• 1 GHz microprocessor
• 40 GB hard drive
• 15 GB free hard drive space

The survey concluded that:

• 69.5% of machines do not have the required RAM
• 62.4% of machines do not have the required hard drive
• 18.4% of machines do not have the required free hard drive space
• 6.7% of machines do not have the required processor speed
• 79.9% of machines do not meet at least one of the above listed requirements
• 93.8% of companies have at least one machine that does not meet the above requirements

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(Computerworld) Some offshore outsourcers that want more IT work from companies in the U.S. are expanding their operations here, with the latest example being Brazilian vendor Politec SA.

Brasilia-based Politec, which has about 7,000 employees and $300 million in annual revenue, currently provides outsourcing services primarily to companies in Latin America. The vendor has just 50 employees in the U.S. now. But by 2010, it intends to have as many as 800 people working in development centers in Atlanta, New York and the Miami area, said Dalton Luz, Politec's vice president of corporate affairs.

In April, Politec received an $80 million investment commitment from Mitsubishi Corp., and Luz said the financial infusion is increasing its ability to expand internationally. He added that most of the people who staff the planned U.S. offices will be hired locally.

Brazil's total outsourcing market is about $8 billion annually, according to the Everest Group, a Dallas-based outsourcing consulting firm. But the offshore component - meaning services delivered to companies based outside of Brazil - amounts to only about $700 million, Everest said. By comparison, the company added, India's offshore market reached about $40 billion last year. Everest is forecasting that the offshore business in Brazil will increase to $1.25 billion within two years.

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Execurives are getting targeted by "whale phishing" attacks — malicious e-mails and Web sites designed to coerce them into giving up valuable personal and business data. How are you going to protect your top managers? And while you are  thinking scary thoughts, have you taken adequate steps to protect all your employees from the aggressive and adaptive Storm worm, which exploits e-mail and Web 2.0 vulnerabilities to propagate spam-churning malware across business networks? And do you have measures in place to prevent staff from accidentally "leaking" sensitive customer data in e-mails, a crucial element of compliance with PCI, HIPAA, and global privacy regulations? What need to know information about whale phishing, the Storm worm, and e-mail leakage, plus details on a cutting-edge solution that can protect your staff, executives and data from all three are you missing? more info

(Computerworld) Chengdu, near the epicenter of the massive earthquake, is as wired into the global economy as any U.S. city. As soon as the massive earthquake struck, news from the capital city of the Sichuan province in China traveled via Twitter and blogs and into corporate e-mail accounts.

 

Chengdu may not be as widely known as the other major Chinese cities, but its IT services operations are on the radar of many U.S. firms. The 7.9 magnitude earthquake near Chengdu, similar in magnitude to the earthquake that struck San Francisco in 1906  affected a fast growing software development center.

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The worldwide shift from stationary desktop computers to highly-portable laptop and tablet PC computers offers organizations increased productivity, flexible work schedules and greater work/life balance. Driven by the need for increased productivity and the ability to present up-to-date information at a moment’s notice, secure mobile computing can be an organization’s greatest strength. However, research indicates that lost or stolen laptop computers cause nearly 50% of public data breaches.  With recently expanded state data breach legislation, even a single lost or stolen computer can expose organizations to the negative publicity and increased costs associated with public data breaches.

 

 

To protect themselves, many organizations have developed sophisticated IT asset use policies while others have combined policy with encryption technology in hopes of better securing computers and the sensitive information they contain. While these are necessary steps, organizations still struggle to compensate for the human factor.

 

 

 

According to a recent survey of 1,400 enterprises, more than 60% of data breaches are the work of those operating within the firewall – insiders such as employees, contractors and others with ready access to sensitive information. Accidently or by design, employees will always be the weakest link in computer security strategies that rely on their diligence to provide consistent protection.

 

    

 

Rather than imposing strangling IT asset policies aimed at forcing end users to comply, endpoint security strategies use centrally-managed technology to ensure that mobile devices such as laptops secure themselves. Using readily-available computer theft recovery, remote data delete and Internet-based IT asset management, organizations can free end-users from computer security responsibilities while ensuring maximum protection for computers and the information stored on them.

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(C/Net News) A technical glitch in an upcoming BlackBerry release will prevent an iPhone-Blackberry showdown in June, according to Fortune. AT&T will delay the launch of the BlackBerry 8900 from June to August after concerns about call quality, the magazine reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources. The 8900 will be Research in Motion's first 3G BlackBerry for AT&T, and it had been expected to make its debut right around the same time as Apple is expected to launch a 3G version of the iPhone. UPDATED 6:10pm PT - The device would be the first 3G BlackBerry for AT&T's network, in response to the BlackBerry 8830 Global Edition which was launched last year and runs on Verizon's 3G EV-DO network.

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The process of developing a disater recovery & buisness conintuity plan requires that you:

• Provide management with a comprehensive understanding of the total effort required to develop and maintain an effective recovery plan;
• Obtain commitment from appropriate management to support and participate in the effort;
• Define recovery requirements from the perspective of business functions;
• Document the impact of an extended loss to operations and key business functions;
• Focus appropriately on disaster prevention and impact minimization, as well as orderly recovery;
• Select project teams that ensure the proper balance required for plan development;
• Develope a contingency plan that is understandable, easy to use and easy to maintain; and
• Define how contingency planning considerations must be integrated into ongoing business planning and system development processes in order for the plan to remain viable over time.

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According to reports published in Australia Chinese hackers are scheduled to attack media sites in the West that are publishing pro Tibet stories.  Web sites that are targeted include, CNN FOX News and the BBC.

So far it is nothing more than Anonymous has done in its efforts to protest against Scientology, but nationalistic Chinese hackers have issued a call for a distributed denial of service attack against CNN to coincide with the street protests.

While there is no apparent link between Anti-CNN and the hackers calling for the denial-of-service attack, the team at The Dark Visitor, who have been tracking Chinese hacking activity for some time, believe that it may be members of the Red Hacker Alliance that are pushing for the online attack to accompany the physical demonstrations.

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(Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.

It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched until January 2007. Given Microsoft's recent track record - Vista arrived more than five years after XP -- most outsiders had pegged sometime in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7's arrival.

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There is no question that today massive databases provide immeasurable benefits for organizations. They make it easier to manage accounts, they provide the tools to engage in highly targeted marketing campaigns, and they provide insights into customer value and profitability.

But there is a dark side to maintaining vast electronic records: the vandalism or theft of data can wreak havoc on an organization’s reputation; it can torpedo revenues and lead to severe sanctions and fines.

Protecting data is an extremely serious matter. Information security has become a high risk area. These days, a glance at the headlines offers chilling evidence that data theft is a growing problem.
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(Computerworld) Members of the ISO standards body have voted to approve the Microsoft Corp Office Open XML document format as an international standard, according to unofficial tallies being circulated on the Internet.

ISO does not plan to announce the results of a second round of balloting on the Open XML standards proposal until later. But the organization sent the results to national standards bodies yesterday. And Microsoft claimed victory today, issuing a press release saying that Open XML appears have won approval as a standard in the voting, which ended on Saturday.

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IDC came out with a new report estimating that data requirements are increasing by about 60 percent a year, averaging about 45 gigs per person now for a total "data universe" of about 281 exabytes. And in three short years, that universe will exceed 1.8 zettabytes (that's 1.8 x 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).

While numbers like those tend to send cold shivers up the spines of storage professionals, there are a couple of things to keep in mind: 1) The remedy isn't necessarily more storage hardware, but more efficient means of managing data; and 2) the study was backed by EMC, which just introduced new data management tools for the Centera operating system. A parsing of the numbers reveals that only 35 percent of today's data is generated by the enterprise, with only 5 percent directly attributable to the server farm. The vast majority of it comes from individuals, largely in the form of increased video and image traffic.

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(IDG News Service) An adult Web site whose affiliates sent pornography-related spam to unsuspecting recipients will pay $413,000 to settle a complaint from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Under the settlement, Cyberheat is prohibited from spam e-mail marketing and is required to monitor its affiliates to ensure they are complying with the law, the FTC said.

Cyberheat, in Tucson, Arizona, is the sixth company that has settled FTC complaints about porn spam since 2005. A complaint against a seventh company is pending. The six companies that have settled the 2005 complaints have agreed to pay more than $1.6 million in civil penalties.

The FTC had accused the companies of exposing children and others to sexual images. The spam e-mail was the equivalent of "electronic flashing," the FTC said.

The FTC alleged that Cyberheat violated the agencys FTCs Adult Labeling Rule and the Can-Spam Act, which require commercial e-mailers of sexually explicit material to use the phrase sexually explicit in subject lines. The rule and law also require that e-mail senders ensure that the initially viewable area of the e-mail does not contain graphic sexual images.

Cyberheats affiliate markets also did not provide adequate opt-out mechanisms in their e-mail and did not provide a postal address for the company, the FTC said. Can-Spam requires both.

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(ZD Net) More businesses across the globe are stepping up their IT governance efforts, with North America and Europe leading the way, according to a study.

The IT Governance Global Status Report 2008 claims that 34 percent of respondents, compared to 19 percent in 2005, are implementing practices that address IT governance--an organization's management, from the boardroom on down, of the performance and security of its IT system. Commissioned by the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) and conducted every two years, the study surveyed about 750 C-level executives from 23 countries between July and October last year.

The survey also determined that 24 percent of companies are considering plans to introduce IT governance practices, compared to 22 percent in 2005 and 18 percent in 2003. In addition, only 20 percent said their organisations were not considering implementing such practices, compared to 36 percent in 2005 and 42 percent in 2003.

By region, North America and Europe have the highest adoption of IT governance initiatives globally, with 50 percent of respondents from each of these two regions indicating that they have already implemented, or are in the process of implementing, such processes and practices. Forty-four percent of executives from Asia and 27 percent of South American respondents reported similar plans.

The bottom line is that many organizations around the world are needlessly sacrificing money, productivity, and competitive advantage by not implementing effective IT governance. Well-governed enterprises have been shown to provide better returns to stakeholders, and the same goes for governance over information technology.

The survey also found that the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), with the ISO 20000 standard, is used by 24 percent of organizations polled and is the preferred framework associated with IT governance. The ISO 20000 covers the IT service management aspects under Itil.

The ITGI-developed Control objectives for information and related technology framework, on the other hand, has doubled its user base. In addition, over 50 percent of respondents indicated they were aware of the framework, compared to 27 percent two years ago.

With regards to leading IT governance projects, the chief information officer was identified as the ideal champion by the majority of respondents (40 percent). Some 25 percent said the chief executive should be in charge, while the next-most-frequently cited roles for heading IT governance were the chief financial officer and IT manager.

Compared to the 2005 survey, more respondents were able to identify organizations which can help their companies implement IT governance. Large IT services providers or consultancy companies were the most frequently cited, followed by audit firms and smaller, niche IT players.

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(C.Net) Firefox downloads crossed the 500 million threshold.

It's an arbitrary but interesting milestone for the open-source Web browser, whose development is overseen by Mozilla but that's also developed and extended by a large number of outside programmers. In September 2007, Firefox crossed the 400 million download mark, indicating an average rate a bit shy of 20 million per month at present.

According to the Spread Firefox site, there had been 500,168,448 downloads as of 6:15 a.m. PST. About 12 hours earlier, there had been more than 499,900,000.

Firefox has spread widely in the years since its release. The project originally was named Phoenix to symbolize a rising from the ashes of the Netscape open-source browser project that began in 1998 but languished for many years as Microsoft's Internet Explorer solidified its lead.

Now Firefox programmers are working on version 3, which brings performance improvements and interface changes, and Mozilla also is working on a mobile version of the browser for handheld devices.

A sister subsidiary of Mozilla, Mozilla Messaging, is working to reproduce the successes of Firefox with the open-source Thunderbird e-mail software.

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Momentum is gaining behind solid state drive (SSD) technology, with the newest systems making strides in both transfer speed and capacity to the point that they are making a serious run for the enterprise. The latest advance comes from BitMicro, which just released the 1.6 TB Altima E3S320. The 3.5-inch drive offers SCSI connectivity capable of a sustained transfer rate of 320 MBps on a single-level cell NAND flash design. The drive is expected to be available by the third quarter, aimed primarily at military, enterprise and industrial applications. The new Altima comes only a few weeks after Texas Memory Systems hit new speed benchmarks with its RamSan-40 SSD. The device exceeded 290,000 IOPS under SPC-1 benchmarks. The company also claims to have hit a new price-performance level of $0.67 per IOPS. These new benchmarks are coming at a time when demand for SSDs is increasing. more info

Boosting the ranks of federal employees who telework is a slow, sometimes painful process, despite numerous incentives and legislative edicts lobbed at U.S. agencies over the years.

Take the situation at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which last month was ordered by a federal arbitration panel to allow its legal instrument examiners to telework on a pilot basis.

ATF was against letting these specialists telework because it says the material they need to remove from agency offices in order to telework posed a security risk. The Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP) became involved at the request of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which successfully argued its case for allowing the examiners to telework on a pilot basis.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said on Sunday it will begin an international roll-out this year of its digital music store that offers songs without copy-protection technology known as digital rights management.

Amazon said it is the only retailer to offer DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as thousands of independent labels.

Amazon MP3, launched in September 2007, offers DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes more than 3.3 million songs.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday its digital music store will now offer songs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment without copy-protection technology, or digital rights management.

Amazon said the deal makes it the first retailer to offer customers DRM-free songs from all four major music companies in the MP3 format.

Songs in MP3 format can play on the widest range of digital music players including Apple Inc's iPod, Microsoft Corp's Zune and various mobile phones.

Sony BMG, which is the second largest music company in the world, is home to such artists as Beyonce, Britney Spears and Celine Dion.

Earlier this week, Sony BMG became the last of the four major music companies to start selling its digital songs without copy protection with the launch of its MusicPass service.

The music industry posted a 15 percent drop in U.S. album sales in 2007 as fans bought fewer CDs. Though digital music sales have been rising, they have not made up for the revenue shortfall, forcing executives to consider new business models and methods to boost sales.

One of the issues for music companies in 2007 was whether dropping DRM protection would help drive digital music sales.

Fans have been frustrated by the limitations imposed by DRM, which can prevent a user from playing a digital song on an incompatible PC or portable media player.

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Steve Jobs at Macworld noted that Apple had sold 4 million iPhones through mid January and 3.7 million at the end of December. But AT&T has activated about 2 million of those. Theories abound about where those missing iPhones may be stashed.

Pondering the case of the missing iPhones has been a hot topic every since Apple reported its financial results. In fact, it is almost become a sport. Here is a look at some the two primary theories being floated about iPhone inventory and my take.

Theory 1: Apple has a demand problem (and a fat channel). This theory is outlined nicely by Tom Krazit. Given there is a 2 million iPhone gap between Apple and AT&T figures it is quite possible that these devices are wallowing in the channel. An analyst at Sanford Bernstein rings the demand/bloated channel bell. They feel that there is lower demand and slower iPhone sales ahead.

This theory could very well come from a Chinese newspaper report saying that Apples OEMs have cut their production schedule from 2 million iPhones to something more in the range of 1 million to 1.2 million units. We are skeptical of the report largely because other analysts such as BMO Capital Markets feel that Apple has about 500,000 phones in its channel across the globe. They arrive at that 500,000 tally be taking the difference between the AT&T and Apple December figures (2 million and 3.7 million, respectively) and factoring in iPhone sold in Europe (400,000 and sales of unlocked phones). In other words, an inventory level of 500,000 iPhones spread across four carriers globally does not seem unreasonable. A UBS analyst estimates that Apple’s iPhone inventory is about 350,000.

Theory 2: We do not know where the iPhones are because they were sold, unlocked and spread around the globe. Some analysts feel that 20 percent the iPhone sales thus far have been unlocked. That equates to about 750,000 iPhones.

A UBS analyst puts the unlocked iPhone count higher at about 1 million. He writes:

Since AAPL sold over 4mm to date, it could imply that up to 1,000,000 iPhones in 2007 were either unlocked (many shipped overseas) or not activated (we calculate only 350k in channel inventory at 4Q-end). We believe news points to strong interest in iPhone globally, but could mean demand was actually lower in the U.S. and that AAPLs carrier payments could be lower.

Apple is still learning about the unlocked issue, which could account for a lot of the supply chain banter. It is safe to assume that these figure may be closer to the truth when it comes to unlocked iPhone sales. The downside is that Apple gets less revenue. On the upside though, there is a blue print for sales of unlocked iPhone sales if Apple gets out of its AT&T deal in the future.

Meanwhile, Apple CFO said on the companys earnings conference call that the number of unlocked iPhones sold was significant, but he would not elaborate. If unlocked iPhone sales are significant to Apple it is a big issue.

Theory 3: AT&T and other carriers may not have caught the last few days of December in their counts.

This theory is the most boring of the bunch, but also quite plausible. If you got an iPhone Dec. 27 and did not activate it until Jan. 2 you missed the quarter. Does this discrepancy account for 1.7 million iPhones. No. But it does indicate that Apple’s channel is not as bloated as people may think.

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 (Computerworld) -- Merrill Lynch says we are already in a recession. Is that relevant? Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs say a U.S. recession this year is now unavoidable. Is that relevant?

Here's what's relevant: Whether they're right or not, you need a plan. And you need to start working on it right now.

Last Monday, Merrill Lynch's chief North American economist issued a research note to clients saying a recession has already arrived. Rosenberg cited rising unemployment and energy costs, a collapsing housing market and dwindling consumer confidence (the usual suspects).

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley economists issued their own research note last week, predicting a mild recession in the first half of 2008. And Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius predicted late last year that a recession in the U.S. was on the way.

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(Reuters) -- Microsoft will not launch a product that competes directly with Apple's iPhone, Chairman Bill Gates said in an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"No, we won't do that. In the so-called smart phone business we will concentrate solely on software with our Windows Mobile program," Gates was quoted as saying in the interview published on Wednesday.

"We have partnerships with a lot of device manufacturers from Samsung to Motorola and this variety brings us significantly more than if we would make our own mobile phone," he added.

Apple's iPhone, which also plays music and lets users browse the internet, has been a big hit.

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(Janco) Eventhough Microsoft owns the OS market in the commercial marketplace, the market share of Vista is still only a little over 9% after one year.  Currently almost 95% of all systems that browse the internet are some form of the Windows OS. 

In is Browser and OS Market Share study, which is to be release on January 3rd, Jancofound that most users are not really interested in the OS.  Rather they are interested in the way that they can use the systems to meet their needs.

Janco found they are basically two types of Vista users:

• Early adopters - individuals and enterprises who must have the latest technology.
• Developers - individuals and enterprises that develop products either for internal distribution or external sale.

Many users are waiting for Vista Service Pack 1 to be delivered before they will install it on more workstations.

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