Outsourcing
Giga, 9/18/03: Outsourcers Developing Targeted User- and Business-Focused SLAs
Robert McNeill
How are outsourcing SLAs changing within distributed desk-side outsourcing support?
Outsourcers are increasingly replacing traditional infrastructurewide service levels with more targeted, business-focused and user-based service-level agreements (SLAs). Technically oriented service levels have traditionally been held as the benchmark for gauging whether technology is meeting its commitment to the business or whether an outsourcer is meeting its contractual obligations. However, since lines-of-business managers in Global 2000 companies are no longer willing to cross-subsidize IT infrastructure costs of other parts of the organization and are therefore demanding spending transparency, it is becoming critical to map the business value of infrastructure services to business-oriented metrics.
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IT Services
Gartner, 9/5/03: Providers Can Learn From Failures Among the ASP Pioneers
Many early application service providers failed because they ignored basic business rules. New service providers must concentrate on the customer and avoid branding themselves purely on the basis of their delivery model.
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Personal Computers
eWeek, 9/30/03: Phoenix, Microsoft Ink BIOS Pact for More Reliable Windows
By Mark Hachman
Seeking a way to improve the reliability of Windows, BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies LLC and Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced an agreement to develop device-level management services for future versions of the Windows OS.
The deal will tie together the Phoenix "Core" BIOS software more closely to the Microsoft OS. These forthcoming services will deliver more, sophisticated information about the state of a system to Windows and give IT managers a clearer picture of the current state of the machine, the companies said.
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Security
Gartner, 9/22/03: How to Select Spam-Filtering Products and Services
Choose a spam-filtering solution by evaluating anti-spam providers' management, research and service capabilities, as well as your architecture, business and user requirements for spam-filtering technologies.
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Gartner, 9/22/03: Eliminate Spam to Improve E-Mail Security
The emergence of worms that propagate via spammer techniques and the use of worm variants by spammers make spam control a security imperative.
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The Register, 10/1/03: Worms spread faster, blended threats grow
By John Leyden
Virus writers are increasingly targeting more recent security vulnerabilities in their attempts to spread malicious code.
The latest bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec found that 64 per cent of all new attacks targeted vulnerabilities less than one year old. The Blaster worm, for example, appeared only 26 days after the vulnerability it exploited was announced.
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eWeek, 9/30/03: Pair of Flaws Found in OpenSSL
By Dennis Fisher
Security researchers have discovered a pair of vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL software package, one of which may allow an attacker to execute code on vulnerable machines.
Both vulnerabilities have to do with the way the package interacts with ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One), a low-level language used to describe abstract syntax. OpenSSL implements both the SSL and TLS security protocols, and though neither protocol is based on ASN.1, they do handle ASN.1 objects.
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Optimism
Gartner, 9/1/03: Revised Figures Show Smaller Decline in IT Services Market
Gartner has completed its research of the size of the IT services market in 2002 and vendors' shares of this market. New results show that end-user spending declined by only 0.3 percent worldwide in 2002. This is better than the 0.6 percent decline estimated in "IT Services Market Suffers First Worldwide Decline,"
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