Software Firms Struggle With Upload
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Despite lots of communication with investors, the Symantec-Veritas combo is still generating unease.
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Service Oriented Architecture isn't getting any easier despite the raft of acquisitions.
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Businesses may be spending millions on expensive security technologies aimed at thwarting data leakage and compliance violations, but many companies are still failing to sufficiently address access controls for protected information and IT systems.
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Corporations are interested in open source, but barriers to adoption remain, Forrester analysts say.
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Newer computer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software and programmers are having a hard time keeping up.
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Software maker considering online and perhaps ad-funded versions of the low-end productivity software.
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Faced with an explosion of communications tools such as wikis, blogs and instant messaging, companies continue to wrestle with the logistics of compliance and control. Some enterprises, however, are finding a positive path.
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Backup volumes in many organizations have grown so large that they are causing business disruption by tying up systems, storage, and network capacity and hogging valuable IT resources, according to a recent survey commissioned by storage management software vendor BridgeHead Software.More than half (59 percent) of IT executives said that the volume of data they are forced to backup is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually, according to a survey of 472 IT executives in the U.K. and North America. And the problem is not going away, with 93 percent saying that their routine backup volumes are continuing to increase.The problem is consuming IT resources for long periods with 37 percent admitting that daily backups of primary data now take them more than nine hours, while 19 percent said it took them more than 12 hours.More than two-thirds (84 percent) of those polled felt they could benefit by reducing the volume of data they routinely back up. Among the chief advantages highlighted were:* Less IT time devoted to backup and other business continuity processes (69 percent) * A reduction in the impact of backup and replication on network utilization and capacity (60 percent) * A reduction in disk resources devoted to data snapshotting, replication, and mirroring (58 percent) * Reduced disruption to the live application environment (45 percent)One of the most effective ways of reducing the pressure on backups is to take information that is static or seldom accessed and archive it off primary storage systems according to BridgeHead Software CEO Tony Cotterill."Sixty-one percent of organizations in our survey admit that between 30 to 50 percent of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again, yet they are squandering time and resources on backing up and replicating this big chunk of static data. It's a very poor use of resources," said Cotterill.BridgeHead said its research reveals that many organizations are starting to use archiving for specific types of data, such as e-mails, motivated by compliance and disaster recovery. According to the company, a lot of archiving activity is currently championed by finance and other business departments outside of IT's control.But to have a major impact on backup volumes, BridgeHead reckoned that there needs to be an IT-driven move away from point solutions or isolated archive appliances towards taking an organization-wide approach to archiving, allowing IT to retrieve control by archiving all data types across the organization from a single point."If you can take an organization-wide approach to archiving, then the volume of data you're taking off the primary store will start to reach a critical mass that will help call a halt to increasing backup volumes," said Cotterill.The survey was part of BridgeHead Software's Annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit, conducted by eMedia on behalf of BridgeHead Software during August 2007. eMedia surveyed 324 senior level executives, IT managers, system and network administrators and engineers from North America and 148 from the U.K.Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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What happens to open source in a cloud-based computing world?  Or when the enterprise runs dry?
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As organizations consolidate their systems and prepare for new versions of key software such as Windows Server 2008, major server-related projects are getting put on the front burner.
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Businesses may be spending millions on expensive security technologies aimed at thwarting data leakage and compliance violations, but many companies are still failing to sufficiently address access controls for protected information and IT systems.According to the latest report from Ponemon Institute, most IT workers readily admit that their companies are doing a sub-standard job of keeping tabs on the level of access available to employees, temporary workers, and independent contractors.In Ponemon's 2008 National Survey on Access Governance, based on interviews conducted with roughly 700 IT professionals, 78 percent of those people surveyed reported that their employers are not regularly reviewing policies or tools that control admittance to their systems or information.The situation has resulted in an environment where many workers retain the ability to view sensitive data or manipulate IT systems that they should not be able to access based on their job responsibilities, researchers said.Some 69 percent of those interviewed said that their companies' access policies were either enforced poorly or not at all, with only 30 percent of respondents stating that their organizations go to the trouble of validating their guidelines.The overwhelming lack of proactive efforts to keep a handle on issues of access are somewhat shocking based on all the attention being given to data security and compliance issues over the last several years, and many business could greatly improve their overall standing simply by improving their policies and enforcement capabilities, said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of research firm."Traditional approaches, including homegrown technologies and manual management processes, have proven to be fraught with failure and risk. Unless enterprises acknowledge business as usual is failing, we believe rampant access mismanagement will continue to plague organizations," Ponemon said. "When it comes to access rights, companies don't want to constrain workers and make their jobs harder, but they have to manage things in a more systemic way that look at the risk versus the benefits, and many organizations are obviously having difficulties with that."Approximately 55 percent of those participating in the survey said that their employers' ability to grant access based on a worker's role and job function is either poor or nonexistent, including 42 percent who said that their companies have no policy to manage things in such a manner.The rapid pace of change in the responsibilities among today's workforce is one of the biggest hurdles that companies struggle to overcome, said executives with Aveksa, a maker of access control software that sponsored the Ponemon report."This entitlement drag issue is a major problem. IT organizations are under pressure and often either valued or devalued by business based on how quickly they deliver access," said Brian Cleary, vice president of Marketing for Aveksa. "Clearly, the findings here show that that while companies are doing a good job of providing initial or changed access, there is no automated way to go back and make a determination to understand if a workers' current level of access is appropriate."Lessons learned from Jerome Kerviel Issues of access control are of fundamental importance to corporate risk management, perhaps best exemplified by the recent reports of the activities of Jerome Kerviel, a stock trader at French firm Soci?t? G?n?rale who is accused of losing nearly $8 billion of his company's capital in unapproved transactions carried out by circumventing rules built into the brokerage's IT systems.Had Soci?t? G?n?rale been actively monitoring the access controls for its transactional systems, Kerviel likely would have been caught long before he gambled away such a stunning amount of money, the experts contend.A major factor contributing to the continued loopholes in access management is a lack of support for improving policies and applying technologies used to govern the issue by senior management in many companies, according to the report. Some 74 percent of respondents indicated that senior management in their companies does not view access governance as a strategic security imperative. "It seems that the perception is that it's still tough to get senior executives to sign off on the necessary funding, but situations like Soci?t? G?n?rale may help prove how big of concern this really needs to be," said Ponemon.Another major contributor to the problem is the need for cross-organization collaboration, which complicates issues of access dramatically.And while 83 percent of those people responding to the survey said that collaboration among business units, audit and compliance groups, and IT security departments is vital to keeping their operations in line with government regulations, 57 percent said those teams never partner to oversee access issues."This has to be an area of great concern, because if companies consistently score poorly on compliance audits it's been proven that this actually starts to diminish their reputation and brands," Ponemon said. "And as more organizations suffer losses, there will likely be new regulations put in place that make it even harder to operate; most businesses I know don't want more regulations, but if more people fail to create their own controls, more regulators will get involved."
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Globalization and technical transitions have not always gone smoothly for SAP, a big German software company.
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It's hardware upgrade time for this company's remote sites, and the server team is getting pressure to use a new brand of UPS -- by the company's network group.
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Blog: As an industry we are terrible at working on interoperability.  The open source world should be the one to fix this.
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Companies are taking several paths to overcome user- and vendor-created hurdles to the implementation of virtualization technologies.
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Even though the practice was common in mainframes of old, convincing today's data center operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy.
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One of the factors that could put a damper on the server virtualization market is the lack of formal commitments by software vendors to support their applications on virtual systems.