Category: Trends

Several factors will contribute to the decline in capital IT spending, including lower costs for commodities and volatile energy costs, according to Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels.

While software sales will grow, computing hardware sales will essentially be flat, according to Forrester. That forecast is in stark contrast to what market leader Cisco Systems is telling Wall Street: that it expects growth for the 2007 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, to be in the range of 15 to 20 percent. The most recent Goldman Sachs CIO panel survey, released last month, shows that 67 percent of Cisco customers expect to increase their spending with the vendor. The Goldman Sachs survey also raises a red flag that networking spending overall could be flat. While 65 percent said they will increase their network spending, that’s a drop from 76 percent two months earlier.

Spending growth on security, while a key priority among all customers, may start to slow in 2007, Forrester’s Bartels says.

On the software side, Forrester’s Bartels says many customers will be preparing for the release of next-generation ERP suites from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

In terms of new application rollouts, those will be more spotty, with demand up for contract and project management and invoice presentment, while procurement will be more flat.

One area in software that most expect to be reasonably strong is infrastructure management, including virtualization platforms.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193500339&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

“Years back, when you brought physical and cyber security guys together they weren’t even speaking the same language,” said CA Senior Vice President and Chief Security Strategist Ron Moritz, one of four featured panelists Wednesday at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.

Senior Vice President and Chief of Security for Indymac Bank, Boulton Fernando, said corporate decision-makers should realize that they are likely to reap cost-saving benefits of convergence in three years, not immediately.

Irene Lam, senior products manager of American Dynamics IP Video Edge Solutions, said that the consolidation of security and networking companies — evidenced by recent Cisco acquisitions and EMC’s purchase of RSA — is good news.

James Henry, chairman, CEO and Founder of Henry Bros. “One of the things we did not see happening is the eyeballs moving offshore, at least on the third shift,” he said.

Fernando and Moritz said that foreign workers are taking more security precautions than Americans take. Moritz pointed out that, while Americans seek assurances that foreign environments are secure, foreigners are sometimes skeptical about the safety of products from beyond their borders.

http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193402341

“Regulatory requirements such as [Sarbanes Oxley] and [the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act] are forcing organizations to take a closer look at their people and processes,” Allan Carey, senior research director at International Data, which conducted the study, noted.

While the number of security professionals increased 8.1 percent worldwide in the past year, “you can look at any jobs site and see that there are a lot of open positions out there,” Carey noted. As a result, many organizations are giving more responsibility to junior-level staffers and security outsourcing organizations, the report says. “If they can’t hire somebody with the skills they need, a lot of companies are taking a junior staffer and investing in the training and certifications they need within the organization,” Carey said.

In the study, respondents rated biometrics, wireless security, intrusion prevention, and forensics tools as high priorities. “Biometrics rated either number one or number two across all regions, which is a relatively new trend,” said Carey

The study can be found at: http://www.isc2.org/workforcestudy

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=108163&WT.svl=news2_1

Seventy-eight percent of 75 senior IT and business continuity professionals (8 percent of whom represent financial services organizations) surveyed report that their organizations have installed or are in the process of upgrading technology to support telecommuting or remote customer access in case of a disaster. However, only 9 percent of…

“It’s back to the future with some of this,” says Andrew Jaquith, program manager for security research at the Yankee Group. Jaquith says the current approach of identifying and blocking the bad is starting to fail, with malware samples increasing at a rate of around 50 percent annually. “Whitelisting is increasingly becoming part of a well-balanced diet on the client,” he says.

And it’s quietly and slowly catching on beyond vendors such as SecureWave, Savant Protection, and Bit9 that have made a business out of whitelisting applications.

Many of the early whitelisting adopters today are small- to medium-sized organizations, where deploying this technology across desktops wouldn’t be as major an undertaking at say, a major Fortune 100 company. SourceMedia has been testing Savant Protection’s endpoint software with whitelisting for several months. “Conceptually, it makes a ton of sense,” says Ivan Latanision, vice president of information technology for SourceMedia, who adds the company hasn’t made its final decision on whether to purchase the tool yet.

Savant uses unique cryptographic algorithms and signature keys for each application on each desktop, rather than a server-based access control list. Patton Harris Rust & Associates has been running SecureWave’s Sanctuary software for whitelisting since last year — initially for device control and later for application control as well. John Loyd, vice president and director of IT for PHR&A, says the company installed the software for protection against zero-day attacks, ensuring its users aren’t installing illegal software, and to ensure the quality of apps its engineers use. Dennis Szerszen, vice president of marketing and corporate strategy of SecureWave, says antivirus blacklisting and Sanctuary’s whitelisting work best together. “We need to be triggering the AV processes so they can clean up what” they found.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=107320&WT.svl=news2_1

For example, many companies are maxing out the power equipment in their data centers, which is needed to run and cool computing gear.

Virtualization technology will allow customers to potentially power down under-used resources and consolidate the computing load on other servers, Douglas said.

In addition, Sun is in negotiations with several utility providers in the United States to replicate a rebate program around Sun servers that the company established with California’s Pacific Gas and Electric, he said.

http://news.com.com/Data+centers+eye+power+costs/2100-1015_3-6124586.html?tag=nefd.top