IT Management
Gartner, 7/11/03: MSBs Must Prioritize to Reduce Application Portfolio Costs
By managing and prioritizing their established base of applications, midsize businesses can save as much as 20 percent in annual expenses related to their application portfolios.
In the last decade, many midsize businesses (MSBs) spent tremendous amounts of time and money on business automation and enabling technology. Recent Gartner surveys reveal that at least 30 percent of hose investments created business value in the eyes of business executives. Despite these gains and because of fallout from the Y2K build-up, the subsequent dot-com implosion, and the recent struggling economy — the credibility of many MSB IT departments in aligning technology investments with business objectives has been questioned.
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Computerworld, 7/14/03: Tips for Securing Your Windows Operating System
By Joseph Sturonas, Spirian Technologies
Maintaining a secure Windows environment in the enterprise may seem a daunting task. Though there are many elements to consider -- antivirus protection, intrusion detection and personal firewalls -- perhaps the most important job is keeping up to date with operating system patches.
However, due to the risk of improper interaction with other operating system components and applications, there is a danger in applying every patch that's released. Blindly installing every fix on your systems can render them every bit as inoperable as never patching them in the first place. Thus, IT administrators must devise a sound philosophy for when and how to apply Windows patches, while ensuring that the philosophy can be reliably deployed.
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Security
Infoworld, 7/15/03: Thwarting the enemy within
Collaboration tools are evolving to supplement traditional ways of compartmentalizing networks
By Jon Udell , P.J. Connolly
Reality plays havoc with the convenient fiction that the corporate firewall separates the safe zone it encloses from the dangerous world outside. Insiders with means, motive, and opportunity are always a major threat, and our survey shows that IT professionals are increasingly aware of it. The respondents to the 2003 InfoWorld Security Survey indicate that the possibility of damage from unintended employee errors and sabotage -- by former or current employees -- is keeping executives and security professionals up at night (for more on the top threats readers are facing, see chart below). The question is not whether to compartmentalize the internal network, but how.
VLANs (virtual LANs) and internal firewalls are part of the answer. As with external firewalls, these solutions are administratively costly but feasible when people and equipment exist in stable configurations over time. An agile enterprise, however, must be able to create new configurations at will, without requiring users to define them or IT administrators to implement them. It should be a no-brainer for a small group to form, to recruit members from inside or outside the organization, and to communicate securely. A few software-based solutions exist, although none is as well-known or widely used as it should be.
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Computerworld, 7/14/03: Ten ways to defend against viruses
By Chris Belthoff, Sophos
JULY 14, 2003
Keeping antivirus software up to date is critically important for all platforms, even if some of the operating systems, such as Macintosh and Linux, aren't as widely targeted by virus threats. But the key to ensuring that your network remains virus-free is something beyond the deployment of dependable antivirus solutions. Companies must educate employees about safe computing practices and enforce policies to safeguard the network. Here are some ways to help prevent malicious code from wreaking havoc at your company.
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Mobile Workstyle
Giga, 7/11/03: The Evolution of Wireless LAN Architecture: Which Solution Is Best for Your Network Environment?
Stan Schatt
Wireless local area network (WLAN) architecture is evolving toward a hybrid of fat and thin access points. This approach appears to offer the optimal distribution of WLAN processing and a centralized switch’s ability to offer superior network management and monitoring. As enterprises begin to deploy larger networks, vendors will move to add even more functionality to the hybrid model in an effort to scale more effectively.
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The New York Times, 7/15/03: Sound, Fury and Cellphone Users
By ELIZABETH OLSON
A woman sought out Amtrak conductor Walter Garrett recently on the Metroliner's Washington-New York run to complain that a fellow commuter had grabbed her cellphone and thrown it against the wall, smashing it into pieces. The incident took place in one of the "quiet cars" that Amtrak has designated on certain trains as cellphone-free for riders who treasure tranquillity. The company started the experiment in January 2001 and says it has been a great success.
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Grid Computing
The New York Times, 7/15/03: Teaching Computers to Work in Unison
By STEVE LOHR
Computers do wondrous things, but computer science itself is largely a discipline of step-by-step progress as a steady stream of innovations in hardware, software and networking pile up. It is an engineering science whose frontiers are pushed ahead by people building new tools rendered in silicon and programming code rather than the breathtaking epiphanies and grand unifying theories of mathematics or physics.
Yet computer science does have its revelatory moments, typically when several advances come together to create a new computing experience. One of those memorable episodes took place in December 1995 at a supercomputing conference in San Diego. For three days, a prototype project, called I-Way, linked more than a dozen big computer centers in the United States to work as if a single machine on computationally daunting simulations, like the collision of neutron stars and the movement of cloud patterns around the globe.
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