Janco News Feed
Information Technology News - XML News Feed
Security, Disaster Planning, ITSM, Metrics, and Salary Survey
The Information Technology News feed is an XML news feed that you can subscribe to and re-publish on your web site or blog. The only requirement that you need to meet is that the feed is included with no modifications and that the links within the feed are retained as is.
If you wish to subscribe to this news feed the options that you have are:
- Information Technology News for the full feed - 25 items
- Information Technology News for short feed - 10 items
- Information Technology News for historic feed - 40 items
Creating a disaster recovery plan
April 29th, 2012
The process of developing a disater recovery & buisness conintuity plan requires that you:
- more info
- 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.
CIOs have many new concerns
April 13th, 2012
The challenges today's CIOs face go beyond traditional business and information technology concerns. In addition to making sure the business is profitable, CIOs are worrying about R&D challenges, meeting compliance rules, and staying ahead of the curve on customer sentiment, Mother Nature, global unrest and the lingering debt woes facing Europe, according to recent research from PwC.
While many CIOs have confidence in their company's potential for future growth, a number believe that business leaders face ongoing pressures. For example, the competition for what appears to be a shrinking pool of talent is expected to increase. It is difficult to hire and retain the 'right' employees. Given how crucial talent is to achieving a company's objectives, more CIOs are looking for fresh approaches to attract, engage and retain a workforce that will remain loyal to their company. And current employees could see the biggest benefit from this trend as many CIOs are looking to promote from within.
- more info
Necessary Steps in Developing a Business Continuity Plan That Works
April 2nd, 2012
The process of developing a disater recovery & buisness contintuity plan requires that you:
- more info
- 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.
BYOD Policy Released
March 13th, 2012
Janco, in concert with a number of world class enterprises had created a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy that provides solutions for the following questions:
- more info
- What are the legal implication - What is the impact of the Stored Communication Act - Record Retention and Destruction?
- What happens to the data and audit trail when an employee leaves the company?
- What about lost or stolen devices?
- How is a device configured to receive and transmit corporate data?
- What kind of passwords are acceptable to use?
- What kind of encryption standards are acceptable?
- What types of devices are allowed and what types are not?
- What about jail broken, rooted or compromised devices?
Metrics are more important than ever
March 1st, 2012
In today's competitive business environment, all corporate functions are expected to reduce operating costs while improving the business value they deliver. Yet many executives lack the essential tools they need: a detailed picture of their function's performance along key dimensions, and how that performance measures up against its peers, both internal and external.
Metrics are an essential tool in helping executives reduce costs while delivering more value-and thus is an invaluable lever of high performance. Metrics also provides companies with the concrete baseline and comparative data they need to identify performance gaps and ways to bridge them.
- more info
State CIO Priorities Reflect Enterprise IT Trends
February 24th, 2012
Their budgets are being slashed, yet they're still asked to go out and innovate. These are the challenges facing state CIOs and they're strikingly similar to challenges that their private-sector counterparts battle. In 2012, public-sector technology leaders say they will be looking at increased consolidation, cloud-computing services, exploring mobility and sharing services and network connectivity, according to a recent survey of state CIOs from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.
The role of the CIO and CTO is changing as more enterprises more towards a "Value Added" role for the Information Technology function. Those changes are depicted in the detail job descriptions that have been created for all of the functions with IT -- especially for the CIO and CTO.
- more info
How to manage security weaknesses
February 16th, 2012
With any large, complex enterprise you are always going to find security weaknesses. It is very hard to get an end-to-end view of the enterprise, and therefore hard to get a handle on just what is on the network and what weaknesses there are.
It is also difficult to be proactive. That is important when you consider the 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of the intrusions you can see and can avoid with proactive security. The other 20 percent are unknown and hidden, what are known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). With those you need a little more predictive ability in order to get a level of resiliency.
The most urgent actions are those that give people a better understanding of the threat environment, and that give them the ability to apply appropriate actions and resources to mitigate the risks and threats. And that they understand that it is really hard to have 100 percent security, but that they can have controls in place that are good enough to protect assets that are business/mission critical.
- more info
Disaster Plan is key to business survival
February 11th, 2012
The risks of poor disaster recovery (DR) planning can be catastrophic. It has been estimated that between 60-90 percent of small and medium-sized companies (less than 1000 employees) without proactive DR plans find themselves out of business within 24 months of experiencing a major disaster.
It has been found that only 6 percent of mid-sized companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive - 43 percent never reopen, and 51 percent close within two years of the disaster. Implementation of a reliable DR strategy has traditionally been expensive and overly complex, largely because of equipment and networking requirements along with costly replication csoftware licenses As a result, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) were required to make difficult compromises, such as limiting disaster coverage only to critical applications, employing manual recovery processes on dissimilar equipment, or simply backing up to tape and hoping they will have access to working backups when needed.
Many companies are therefore forced into operating their businesses with insufficient protection in terms of application coverage, acceptable downtime and reliability of recovery.
- more info
Recession continues in IT
January 28th, 2012
Lockheed Martin Corp. expects sales in its IT division to continue downward in 2012 as it did in 2011, during which net sales decreased by 5 percent.
Sales in the companys Information Systems and Global Solutions (IS&GS) segment decreased $92 million, or 3 percent, during the forth quarter, which ended Dec. 31, compared to the last quarter of 2010. It also declined by $540 million, or 5 percent, for all of 2011, compared to the previous year, according to financial figures released Jan. 26.
Overall though, the business segment was hit by the fiscal pressures the government is under, which keep agencies from spending as much on IT products and services in 2011. Executives expect the segment's annual operating margins in 2012 to be similar to the annual 2011 figures.
- more info
Recession drags on
January 20th, 2012
IT spending by banks will grow to $173.3 billion this year, up just 2.8% over 2011 and well short of an earlier forecast that pegged growth at 4.3% in 2012, according to research firm Celent. In fact, IT spending in banking is expected to be weak over the next couple of years.
IT Job Market Employment Trends
In a new report, Celent said the tumultuous state of the banking industry since 2009 continues to affect tech spending. For instance, when Celent published its report on worldwide banking last year, it appeared that a turnaround had begun. "This is no longer the case; there is still plenty of uncertainty," Celent stated.
- more info
Security is still an issue
January 8th, 2012
What Information Do You Need to Implement a Complete Security Plan?
January 8th, 2012 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
Downtime is a lost opportunity
December 16th, 2011
Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, often translates into lost opportunities and increased costs - and for many enterprises today, any amount of downtime is unacceptable.
Having an effective recovery strategy and a set of coherent disaster recovery plans is essential to helping avoid downtime during a crisis. The need for enhanced quality, efficiency, and predictability for disaster recovery and business continuity has increased significantly, highlighting the necessity of a well-defined set of recovery plans and regular testing. However, as the required scope of critical processes, production applications, and enterprise demands increases, sustaining the timeliness and effectiveness of a recovery plan can become increasingly difficult.
For most organizations, disaster recovery is extremely labor intensive, often requiring the manual coordination of hundreds of recovery tasks. So although the importance of having an effective disaster recovery plan is clear, organizations often find it difficult to achieve the level of protection they need.
- more info
IT Pros are reluctant to change companies
November 5th, 2011
Many IT workers are staying put at their current jobs due to a combination of lingering economic concerns and improving conditions at work.
In a survey of 500 IT pros, a staffing firm found the vast majority (89 percent) are currently happy with their jobs. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) said they intend to stay with their current employer, and 25 percent said they'd only leave if the right opportunity came along. Just 11 percent are unhappy with their current position, which includes 4 percent of respondents who are actively searching for a new job.
Part of the reason IT pros are staying put is caution. Employees are nervous about unemployment levels, an unstable economy, and the possibility of a double-dip recession. Marketplace paranoia is keeping people where they are.
In addition, companies are working hard to keep their current IT teams intact. A lot of employers are creating environments that are hard to leave. Perks such as the opportunity to telecommute, flexible schedules, and onsite daycare are helping with retention efforts. They've made it endearing so that people think twice about moving on to something else.
- more info
Security driven by how enterprise governs the process
October 27th, 2011
When the information security function adopts governance, it raises its game, engaging with senior management and other corporate governance functions. This not only minimises information risk and reputational damage, it also delivers continuing added value from information technology.
New technologies are constantly increasing the complexity of business information, while more sophisticated technology and processes are needed to manage it. Furthermore, that information is simultaneously more critical to the business and more susceptible to attack or abuse.
Information security governance enables the direction and oversight of information security-related activities across an enterprise, as an integrated part of corporate governance. It shows customers, business partners, shareholders and regulators that information is being protected according to industry best practice. It provides the agility to deal with incidents quickly and effectively, and enables better management of all of information security activities decreasing the chances of headline-grabbing incidents.
- more info
Remote Branch Offices are a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Risk
October 16th, 2011
Distributed data at remote and branch offices (ROBOs) continues to grow substantially year after year. Leaving this data unprotected or inadequately protected poses, serious business risks for organizations. Protection approaches require careful consideration as factors such as technical complexity, capital and operational costs, and expertise of personnel must be taken into account.
Local disk-based data protection strategies improve backup efficiency and reliability over tape-based ones. Consolidation of edge data to the core data center may introduce further efficiencies. Data de-duplication can drive both backup-to-disk and consolidation adoption.
- more info
Security as a concept is out-dated
October 10th, 2011
The current focus on complying with the myriad of assurance frameworks is taking focus away from the obligations placed on organizations to identify and manage the risks to their information assets; which, in turn, places an inordinate and inappropriate burden on external service providers to satisfy the concerns of organizations with no common terms of reference.
While security in the cloud services environment is clearly a concern for many IT security professionals, there is still a lack of assurance within the external supply chain as whole.
The message on security is getting through to businesses, there is no consistent language to determine whether the service provider will operate the controls to a level that assures the client that their risks are managed appropriately. This proves that the current security mindset is little more than managing risks to achieving compliance rather than empowering organizations to understand the controls required to manage the risks to their information.
All organizations on both sides of the public/private sector divide, have an explicit obligation under law to ensure that personal and corporate information is managed in a safe manner.
The current compliance overload over the past four or five years has led to an inordinate focus on managing risks to compliance rather than understanding the risks to information - and this focus has meant that we look to overuse of technical controls to show due diligence to ensure that when a breach occurs, that penalties will not be levied; it is not designed to reduce the likelihood of breaches themselves.
This approach is unsustainable, as it does not look to the implementation of the controls and fails to address the business risk management issue that exists in most organizations. This is turn has no more benefit to the business than placing money in the shredder.
The current lack of corporate information governance in today's businesses will soon result in increased penalties. This proves that the current focus on compliance risk management as we know it is nearing an end, and something else is required to assist organizations to understand and manage the risks to their information going forward.
- more info
Future Evolution of Technology
October 1st, 2011
During the next two to three years there will be a continued advancement in web-based technology that will ease integration and facilitate integrated enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) and analytics into business infrastructure software applications.
Key business dynamics could alter this progress. Include the possibility of double-dip recession in the United States and European countries, continuous credit and derivative losses that threaten business expansion. These developments would cause many business to reduce their total IT spending budgets and make lower-cost, lower-automation system improvements. Business will, however, continue strategic cost reduction initiatives that drive ITO and BPO spending.
A number of technologies are generating interest but little spending or are early in their growth cycle. For example, research and development for mobile business infrastructure applications is accelerating although spending on mobile is still very low compared with spending on other distribution channels. The continued growth of the installed base of mobile devices will eventually create "network effects" that accelerate adoption beyond mobile status information into more customer relationship management applications.
Social media and peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and IT spending are in their infancy. The combination of social media with P2P transactions could spur P2P application development.
- more info
Necessary Steps in Developing a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan That Works
September 12th, 2011
The process of developing a disater recovery & buisness conintuity plan requires that you:
- more info
- 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.
Mobility Risks
September 8th, 2011
Indirect costs associated with security breaches are often far greater than the direct costs of mitigating damages. Beyond costs of data remediation and possible fines for compliance rule violations, security breaches can cost companies their competitive advantage. They can embarrass companies or key people in those companies, creating bad publicity and legal problems.
They can cause a loss of customer and partner confidence. Ultimately security breaches can damage a companys brand and its ability to do business. As mobility becomes a more important part of routine operations, companies who are developing a mobility strategy must address the issue of mobile security. To do that, its important to understand the vulnerabilities.
There are four areas of vulnerability in mobile business operations:
- more info
- Lost or stolen devices
- Unauthorized data access
- Risks arising from combining personal and work use in one device
- Gaps in device management and policy enforcement