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Disaster Recovery Planning

IT Infrastructure - News

February 21st, 2008

Disaster Planning Takes Good Staff

Good business continuity planning needs to take a broad view, embracing people, human behavior, customers and other factors that lie outside the data center. It is also important to secure the vision and endorsement of executive management. A properly funded, well-prioritized business continuity plan, combined with a regular program of testing and recovery drills, will help to safeguard the organization. Read this white paper to understand the key elements of a successful business continuity plan, see how to develop a plan that clarifies what is critical, and set specific recovery requirements.

- more info

February 5th, 2008

Do You Have the Right Metrics In Place To Be Ready For The Recession?

Recession or not? That is irrelevant to you. You need a plan based on facts, not frightening words. Start collecting them.

Know your CEO. Does your CEO trust you enough to be candid? If so, talk to him. Otherwise, do some research. How has this executive reacted in the past to a tighter business environment by shrinking or by attacking competitors?
Know your business. Real estate is getting ugly, but discount retail may benefit. Some banks are overextended; others see opportunity. Merrill Lynch's Rosenberg predicts consumer discretionary spending, financials and tech will be pummeled badly; telecom, health care and utilities have the least downside risk. How hard will your companys customers be hit?
Know your supply chain. Who is solid? Who is shaky? Who is likely to cut back on the ability to work with your IT initiatives? And downstream, which big customers are likely to make demands on your IT capabilities?
Know your IT shop. You have a portfolio of projects. Which ones are bogged down? Which have lost meaningful support from their business sponsors? Where will you redeploy those analysts and developers?

- more info

January 30th, 2008

Age of Wireless LANs is with us

Because they free users from the need to be cabled to a physical network, wireless LANs are being used as an access vehicle to help businesses better collaborate. Wireless LANs can improve business process efficiencies, provide scalability, improve infrastructure costs, contribute to customer and employee satisfaction, and help resolve business continuity issues. When considering a wireless LAN implementation, users should address security, bandwidth, roaming, and interference issues. - more info

January 27th, 2008

Google Opens Google Maps to User Changes

(Computerworld) Google Inc. has created a real-time viewer that allows users to watch as other users around the world make changes to locations on the maps, the company announced Thursday.

Google began allowing its users to edit locations on Google Maps in November as part of an effort to ensure that homes and businesses are marked in the correct location. While Google restricted access to some listings like hospitals, government buildings and businesses whose listings have been sited through Google's Local Business center, other users could move arrows marking locations. Some edits like moving a marker more than 200 yards from its original location requires a moderator's approval before they show up on Google.

The new viewer lets users "just sit back and watch the world's information improving bit by bit, edit by edit," Charles Spirakis, software engineer at Google Maps, said in a blog post. "I warn you, though, it's highly addictive (almost as addictive as helping make the improvements yourself!)."

Adam Ostrow, a blogger at Mashable, wrote that Google Maps is evolving to become Google's best homegrown social product.

"Although more of a 'that's cool' feature than something incredibly useful, the visualization does highlight the growing importance of social features in Google Maps," Ostrow wrote in a blog post. "They've also recently released collaborative maps, community maps, and in Google Earth, you can now see geo-tagged YouTube videos."

Ostrow said that Google's efforts to ramp up Google Maps seem to be paying off, citing a Hitwise report last week showing that Google is quickly narrowing the gap between its traffic and that of MapQuest. While 426% more users visited MapQuest than Google Maps in 2006, the lead was cut significantly last year as MapQuest pulled in only 126% more traffic than Google Maps.

- more info

January 15th, 2008

IT Infrastructure Policy Template Released by Janco

With the explosion of technology into every facet of the day-to-day business environment there is a need to define an effective infrastructure to support operating environment; have a strategy for the deployment and technology; and clearly define responsibilities and accountabilities for the use and application of technology.

Applications, operating systems, storage, networks and databases need to support high reliability and availability. IT managers need a view across all components of the application infrastructure to maintain service quality. Legacy systems must be brought forward and enabled for XML, Web services and other new technology. Tools crossing middleware, EAI, message brokers, applications servers and database gateways must be combined to meet todays requirements.

- more info

January 10th, 2008

Human side of DRP

The list of natural and manmade disasters with which businesses have had to contend early in the 21st century is long. Many organizations have felt the devastating effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks, acts of bioterrorism involving anthrax, and bombings in London, Madrid and Bali. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina also have had costly, far-reaching impacts on businesses.

Disruptions resulting from these and other disasters have rippled across supply chains, shaken entire industries and taken their toll on employee, customer and partner relations. Not surprisingly, organizations of all types and sizes are making crisis preparedness and response a key focus of their business continuity planning. Chances are, your organization is taking a proactive approach and continually looking at ways to minimize the impact that potential crises can have on your business processes and technology systems. Yet, even though your companys business continuity plan most likely serves to protect your companys physical assets, such as its data, network(s), core business applications and facilities, how well does it address the human side of disasters?

- more info

December 31st, 2007

AOL Drops Netscape Out of the Brower Market

On December 28, 2007 AOL announced that it stopped development of the Netscape browser, saying the respected brand that launched the commercial Internet in 1994 had little chance of ever regaining market share against its archrival Microsoft. AOL spent $4.2 BILLION dollars in 1994 to

acquire Netscape and has invested well over a billion dollars since then on that product since then. This is has to be one of the WORST investment decision made by any corporation in since the inception of the internet.

AOL will continue to release security patches for the current version (Netscape Version 8) of the browser, Netscape Navigator until February 1, 2008. After February 1, there will be no more active product support for Navigator 9, or any previous Netscape Navigator browser. This includes Netscape v1-v4.x, Netscape v6, Netscape v7 Suite, Netscape Browser v8, and Netscape Navigator/Messenger 9. - more info

December 16th, 2007

Vista is being accepted very slowly

Eventhough Microsoft owns the OS market in the commercial marketplace, the market share of Vista is still only a little over 9% after one year. Currently almost 95% of all systems that browse the internet are some form of the Windows OS.

In is Browser and OS Market Share study, which is to be release on January 3rd, Janco found that most users are not really interested in the OS. Rather they are interested in the way that they can use the systems to meet their needs.

Janco found they are basically two types of Vista users:

Early adopters - individuals and enterprises who must have the latest technology.
Developers - individuals and enterprises that develop products either for internal distribution or external sale.

Many users are waiting for Vista Service Pack 1 to be delivered before they will install it on more workstations.

- more info

November 22nd, 2007

eMail is a security risk

Email today presents a serious risk to security, business productivity, and compliance with government and industry regulations. As the use of email for legitimate business purposes continues to trend upward, so does its use as a tool for unwanted, illegitimate, and occasionally dangerous, business activity. There are three predominant sources of risk that every organization faces: spam, information leakage, and compliance as it relates to email.

Spam currently ranks as the third-greatest threat to enterprise security. Professional spammers continue to clog up to 90 percent of unprotected mail stores and inboxes with unwanted emails that soak up bandwidth, upset end users with irritating or offensive content, and negatively impact employee productivity.
- more info

November 13th, 2007

SOA Best Practices Cookbook

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is creating a lot of buzz across the IT industry. Propelled by standards-based technologies like XML, Web Services, and SOAP, SOA is quickly moving from pilot projects to mainstream applications critical to business operations. One of the key standards accelerating the adoption of SOA is Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for Web Services. - more info

November 9th, 2007

Microsoft To Eliminate Click to Activate ActiveX in IE

Back in April 2006, Microsoft made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages.

This was frustrating to users of IE and did not really offer any addition security that was not already in place.

Some sites required users to click to activate before they could interact with the control.

Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas, removing the click to activate requirement in Internet Explorer. Because of this, Microsoft is removing the click to activate behavior from Internet Explorer!

It is important to note that this change will require no modifications to existing webpages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages.

Microsoft is reverting to the old behavior. Once Internet Explorer is updated, all pages that currently require click to activate will no longer require the control to be activated. They will all just work.

	Before April 2006	After April 2006 IE Active X update	After April 2008 Removal
Controls Injected Via JavaScript	No Click to Activate	No Click To Activate	No Click To Activate
Controls loaded Direct In HTML (<object>, <embed>, <applet>)	No Click to Activate	Click To Activate Required	No Click To Activate

- more info

November 5th, 2007

Best Places to Work

Best Places for Business and Careers

(Forbes) The news on the economy in recent months has been uninspiring. The subprime lending mess threatens to accelerate the housing slowdown. Gas prices are at their highest in eight months. Gross domestic product growth this year is expected to be less than 3% for the first time since 2003. But one part of the country consistently manages to produce strong economic growth and still keep costs down. For the second straight year the Southeast placed 5 metros in the Top 10 of our Best Places for Business and Careers. While most economies in the West have also outperformed their peers in the Northeast and Midwest over the past four years, living costs there have risen dramatically. Housing prices in Phoenix, spurred in part by easy lending, are up 57% in the past two years, knocking it off our Top 10.

The overall rank for the best places to live according to Forbes is:

Rank	Metro Area	Cost Of Doing Business	Job Growth	Educational Attainment	Population (thou)
1	Raleigh NC	27	35	12	978
2	Provo UT	67	17	30	465
3	Boise ID	19	19	84	560
4	Des Moines IA	49	64	50	531
5	Knoxville TN	14	49	88	662
6	Albuquerque NM	34	56	53	813
7	Durham NC	33	124	6	462
8	Fayetteville AR	11	8	140	417
9	Nashville TN	42	47	82	1,438
10	Olympia WA	113	21	40	233
11	Ogden UT	58	33	96	499
12	Gainesville FL	52	67	13	243
13	Naples FL	79	3	46	317
14	Richmond VA	26	72	64	1,193
15	Lincoln NE	15	114	24	284
16	Edison NJ	174	93	25	2,323
17	Tallahassee FL	81	68	16	339
18	Mercer County NJ	156	46	20	368
19	Omaha NE