Category: Trends

Prices for hacking insurance are predicted to drop for some businesses as insurers begin to understand the market better.

While the number of vulnerabilities found in software essentially has plateaued, the flaws are increasingly easy to exploit and, more often than not, quite severe, according to a new report.

In the survey of more than 950 CIOs from organizations in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, the Middle East, India, and South Africa, Gartner EXP found that the corporate heads of IT anticipate a technology spending increase of just 1.4 percent during 2004. About 40 percent believe that this increase won’t happen until the second half of the year.

“Even though the global economy is on the up-turn, CIOs still show a lot of caution,” said Marcus Blosch, a vice president and research director for Gartner EXP. “They’re being very conservative, laying down the foundations of growth, but not aggressively pushing for it. “Call it a shifting of gears,” he added, “from a dampened mode to a growth mode.” Global IT spending won’t substantially increase, he added, until CIOs are confident that the recovery is real, and sustainable.

Among the priorities that the CIOs outlined to Gartner EXP, the top one in 2004 will be security, which held the number two spot last year.

“Anything to do with security, data security management, and data privacy and protection will get emphasized by CIOs this year,” said Blosch. With purse strings still tight, CIOs will fight to spend on BI, he said, because “they think that it will help them understand their markets and customers much better.

And the hot-button issue of outsourcing — hot at least with voters and lawmakers in the U.S. — will only get hotter, as CIOs continue to press for lower costs, which leads them to shift services overseas. “Outsourcing is set to continue, and grow quite significantly,” Blosch concluded from the survey. “But while it’s a key initiative in many companies, business process outsourcing remains a bit of a blind spot for many CIOs.”

Rising spam levels are beginning to test the technology we had implemented. It’s out of hand, and implementing a successful solution is a top-5 IT priority for us.

http://informationweek.securitypipeline.com/news/18311537

What are organizations and vendors doing to provide for the security of systems behind the Internet perimeter?

Host security can be broadly defined in a comprehensive host security system that encompasses configuration management, virus scanning, host intrusion detection/protection, and firewall capabilities. However, the deployment of these technologies may still fail if not updated or improperly configured.

Thus, organizations are looking to validate host/endpoint security through checking the correct configuration and operation of host security controls before allowing connections to internal systems. When the workstation connects, whether attached directly to the corporate LAN or remotely via a VPN tunnel, endpoint security verifies that the system is hardened, properly patched, running up to date anti-virus software, and that the host firewall is up and running with the proper rulebase before allowing it to connect to the internal network.

More info: [url=http://www.csoonline.com/analyst/report2170.html]http://www.csoonline.com/analyst/report2170.html[/url]

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.

More info: [url=http://news.com.com/2010-7343_3-5144562.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news]http://news.com.com/2010-7343_3-5144562.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news[/url]

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]