Category: News

In recent years, many organizations have moved to centralize their help desk operations and establish a single point of contact for workers, said Roy Atkinson, an analyst at HDI, whose members represent a help desk community of about 50,000 people. Atkinson said another part of the explanation could be the fact that IT complexity is actually increasing, especially as users seek to connect multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops to corporate networks.

Earl Begley, who heads HDI’s desktop advisory board and is an IT project manager at the University of Kentucky, said incident volumes for the university’s healthcare help desk, which serves the UK hospital, have increased by 15% to 20% a year.

For those organizations reporting an increase in help desk calls, about 41% attributed the uptick to infrastructure or product changes, upgrades or conversions; 26% cited expanded service offerings by the support center; and 22.5% said they have more customers, according to the HDI study.

The increase in the number of help desk support requests is happening at the same time IT managers are cutting money spent on supporting help desks, according to another new study that was released recently by Computer Economics.

In its survey of IT organizations, the IT research firm found that help desk employees now represent about 6% of the total IT staff, after accounting for about 6.9% of the average IT staff for the past several years.

The report said that this decrease “represents a relatively substantial dip and indicates that providing high-quality support to users assumed a lower priority amid the wave of operational budget-cutting and staff reductions that accompanied the official end of the recession.” Computer Economics also said that a number of factors affect the size of a help desk, including the use of outsourcing, an increase in the number of workers with smartphones, ITIL adoption, and improvements in applications and devices.

“Some of these trends are working to diminish the size and function of the help desk, while others are putting more pressure on help desk staff,” the research organization said in its report.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9203218/Help_desk_calls_on_the_rise?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2011-01-05

Panic
Panic can take all sorts of forms:
A failure to communicate It can manifest it’s self in a communicative denial where the person or team fails to call in help from other groups or people. This can be very damaging and costly. There was one crisis I was brought to perform a post mortem on, where the team had failed to notify the management of a lost laptop. Expensive and wasteful expense.

Reacting without following process or procedure Just reacting or “shooting from the hip” can cause all sorts of chaos, both short term and long term.

Overreacting It is very important to ensure that the organization responds with the appropriate level of urgency and energy. Too much and you can excerabate the situation by having users or customers losing their trust in the organization. This is damaging short term and long term. Delivering the information in a calm and clear manner is very essential and the emotional.

How do you not panic? Have a plan, have the right people and the right attitude.

Loose focus on the objectives. Focus on the technologies issues and not the business..
At all times,the following should be the goals of everyone involved: Protecting people, Protecting the environment, Protecting the business

Waste times and resources
Before a crisis occurs, make sure you have a good idea of the people, the capabilities and objectives of the organization.

Focus on the immediate and forget about the long term implications.
In the heat of the moment, you might be tempted to use an approach that might be ethically unsound Respect the law and regulations, and people.

For instance, users can send “direct messages” to a specified follower so that only the specific author and recipient can view the message. Twitter users can also click a button labeled “Protect my tweets,” which means only approved followers can view them.

According to the FTC, the privacy policy posted on Twitter’s website stated that “Twitter is very concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information.

In January 2009, a hacker used an automated password-guessing tool to gain administrative control of Twitter after submitting thousands of guesses into Twitter’s login website. The hacker reset at least one Twitter user’s password, and could access nonpublic user information and tweets for any Twitter users.

According to the FTC’s complaint, Twitter was vulnerable to these attacks because it failed to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system, including reasonable steps in password management among administrators and employees.

http://www.darkreading.com/securityservices/security/privacy/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225701520&cid=RSSfeed_DR_News

Prepared by the association’s End-to-End Encryption Technical Working Group, the newly released SPVA guideline allows companies to engage different solutions and select products that can be trusted and are secure. The SPVA defines end-to-end as: the transmission of cardholder data in an encrypted form, from its point of presentment, such that it prevents the data from being known in plain text until the point of decryption.

Against this backdrop, our goal is to use existing published standards and provide an auditable set of requirements that creates a secure payment environment.” Its aim is to develop an end-to-end security framework and to enhance security elements of payment solutions which protect cardholder information and defend merchants and acquirers against security breaches, while helping reducing fraud and lowering risk for all electronic payment stakeholders.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS125798+27-May-2010+MW20100527

Trust Digital, based in McLean, Va., is used by companies to secure data that travels through mobile networks, using such devices as Apple’s iPhone and iPad. McAfee said the acquisition will extend its business into the mobile market, especially as employees increasingly use smart phones for work.The deal is expected to close by June 30.

With the VeriSign deal, announced May 19, Symantec will have spent nearly $3 billion in two years acquiring technologies that make it a bigger player in other parts of the security market, such as protecting data on mobile phones and delivering software over the Internet. Meanwhile, VeriSign, whose brand is ubiquitous on the Web for protecting online transactions, wants to secure fewer things. Some were curious choices for VeriSign to have in the first place, such as a division that did billing services for telecommunications companies and another that sold ring tones and insurance for mobile phones. The VeriSign division that Symantec is buying sells “certificates” to websites that want protection for their customers’ data. The competition has forced VeriSign to sell more of its cheaper SSL certificates, too, even though their security measures are weaker.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37343927/ns/technology_and_science-security/