Category: Trends

Whether it is IT outsourcing, business process outsourcing, managed services or utility computing services, any IT service that helps enterprises increase productivity and reduce costs is in demand.

The IT industry has been turned upside down, or inverted, as former technology leaders transform themselves into services leaders, and other companies seek to follow their lead. For instance, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have won the greatest recognition and most significant customer contracts in the utility computing market to date on the strength of their outsourcing and integration capabilities, more than the technical features of their utility computing products.

Technology-centric companies such as EMC and Sun Microsystems are struggling to keep pace in the utility computing market, and have recently begun to shift their business models to emphasize their services as much as their products.

Many organizations are frustrated with the inefficiencies of their current IT operations and concerned about buying more technology and adding more staff to satisfy their business requirements. For many hardware and software technology companies this shift in demand represents a significant challenge.

Even harder than changing the operational processes for many long-standing technology companies is changing the corporate cultures of these places. Many IT companies attempting to restructure their organizations so they can deliver more of their technical capabilities via services are learning how hard it is to invert their business models.

Part of Big Blue’s success has come from internal organizational and cultural changes, and part by acquiring consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Putting services out in front is a dramatic change for the IT industry. Gone are the days when IT installation and maintenance services were slaves to the product side of vendor shops.

As the demand for new technology continues to languish and product differentiation continues to fade, IT services has become a key strategic competitive weapon as well as an essential vehicle for delivering meaningful business solutions.

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While the survey by Compass shows that 98% of an undisclosed number of FTSE 100 firms had a business continuity plan in place, only just over one-third of those companies that had suffered an IT disaster over the last five years (58% of all firms surveyed) had used the measures that they had put in place in the business continuity plan to solve the problem.

Bloor’s own visionary, Robin Bloor, has pointed out recently that the level of security breaches has reached crisis level, with 90% of companies experiencing security breaches of some sort in 2003 – and this is growing at a rate of 50% or more every year.

In addition, a whole host of legislation is either being passed or ratified at the moment – such as the Data Protection Act of the EU, which requires companies to apply a much higher level of protection to the data that the collect, hold in storage or even dispose of.

More info: [url=http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34811.html]http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34811.html[/url]

At the SAS Institute Inc. CIO Suzanne Gordon said that security occupies the top spot on the Cary, N.C., software firm’s 2004 wish list. Gordon said that SAS will have a rolling forecast and look at the budget every quarter, so if the company needs a weapon to combat a Blaster worm is needed, she can get it.

For Tsvi Gal, CIO of Warner Music Group in New York, Web services and service-level management in heterogeneous environments, as well as digital rights management, rank in the upper tiers of his list.

Both said that disaster recovery (DR) investments are high priorities, which is in keeping with Forrester’s prediction that DR will be right behind security on the CIO shopping list. Gal said that his company is moving from a model in which DR is considered an issue only for IT departments to one that gets business divisions involved.

The emphasis on DR and business continuity isn’t only a CIO priority, according to Bob Doyle of Dallas-based RPD Global Consulting and a CIO for more than two decades, most recently with Fleming Companies. Rounding out Forrester’s top five CIO priorities for 2004: upgrading existing applications and desktops (“business-as-usual investments” as Gal called them) and compliance with new laws, namely the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

IT outsourcing, one of the hottest topics in 2003, finished closer to the bottom of the 2004 priority pile, with only 24% of respondents saying that they would be exploring outsourcing alternatives in 2004, and only 17% said that moving IT work offshore was of the utmost importance. Forrester finding — that of the firms that already use offshore providers, 68% will send even more work overseas in 2004.

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There were tens of thousands of threats that affected individual businesses in various ways, depending on what systems and applications they had deployed and what kinds of security systems and practices they had in place.

– In 2000, the CERT Coordination Center, a government-funded security group, recorded 21,756 security-related incidents.
– Four out of five businesses were hit by a virus or worm in 2003, according to a survey of 404 security decision makers by the Yankee Group. Denial-of-service attacks were the second-most-common security incident, hitting about 40% of those surveyed.
– More than half of those surveyed by the Yankee Group expect their security budgets to increase during the next three years, while only 8% expect security spending to decline.

Security analysts and vendors predict that 2004 will bring thousands of new viruses and worms and a huge increase in the use of spyware. They also say that spammers will increasingly adopt tools used by virus writers, adding to the volume of spam and the problems it causes for corporate networks.

“The issue gets serious when it comes to telecommuters using home PCs, which may not have antivirus and firewalls installed,” says Scott Blake, VP of information security at security firm BindView Corp. “The corporation has no control over what software they install on their home PC.” For more than a year, he collected the keystrokes of the customers of the printing and copying chain, including passwords and user names, and used that data to fraudulently open bank accounts.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17100340

The Yankee Group survey reports 54 percent of companies plan to boost their security budgets during the next three years, while only 8% say they’ll be decreasing what they spend to secure their systems.

Antivirus, intrusion-detection and -prevention systems, and firewalls will be the only security technologies in which more than half of respondents expect to increase security spending. Fewer than half of all companies will increase spending in other areas, such as access control, authentication and provisioning, personal firewalls, and digital-rights management. Fighting for scraps will be Web-application security, access control, storage security, anti-spam, authentication technology, and wireless security.

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Revenue from high-tech systems used to protect corporate networks reached $379.1 million, compared to $311.02 million during the same period last year, International Data Corp. said.

Within the overall market, the intrusion detection appliance segment posted an 89 percent growth rate, but the firewall and virtual private network market remained the largest segment, with $317.7 million in factory revenues in the quarter. “IDC expects the security appliance market — particularly the intrusion detection appliance market — to continue its strong growth in 2004,” IDC analyst Charles Kolodgy said in a statement.

The three most expensive price bands for appliances had growth rates of more than 100 percent, with the largest price band, $100,000 to $249,900, experiencing a 348 percent increase in the quarter.

More info: [url=http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031218S0014]http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031218S0014[/url]