Information Age (London, UK) articles from April 2005

Information Age (London, UK) archives from April 2005

From cradle to grave.(Data Protection Act 1998 of United Kingdom and Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 of United States)
April 10, 2005... Storing data is costly and it is going to get more expensive. The volume of data - emails, documents, records and so on - that organisations are generating and storing is already rising exponentially. But technological advances in areas such as...

Non-stop compliance.(data security laws)
April 10, 2005... Compliance and business continuity are inextricably linked. Directly cited in several of the major pieces of compliance legislation, the provision of highly reliable access to information is no longer an option but a requirement for many...

Intelligent view.(rules to use business intelligence tools)
April 10, 2005... f all the many advanced technologies thrust upon businesses by eager vendors, the humble spreadsheet remains one of the most popular. Undoubtedly, this has much to do with its simplicity and usability: people know where they are with a...

Mail monitors.(laws for data security)
April 10, 2005... Email is now the primary means of business communication. On any working day in 2005, an average of 35 billion emails will be sent; that is up from 10 billion in 2000. And analysts at Gartner estimate that as much as 75% of an organisation's...

A sense of security.(management)
April 10, 2005... When it comes to compliance, security has a major role to play - but not everyone is sure they are applying the right technology and processes to meet all the requirements. A recent survey by Computer Associates' identity management...

Compliance toolbox.(analysis on corporate performance management software)
April 10, 2005... There are literally hundreds of technologies that organisations can use to help them meet the demands imposed by the flood of new regulations. The core products may be enhanced enterprise resource planning packages, the storage management and...

Core compliance.(management of the regulatory compliance)(International Financial Reporting Standards)
April 10, 2005... In order to achieve the levels of transparency of operations demanded by recent corporate governance legislation, companies must look to the heart of their business processes and to the applications that underpin those processes. This means...

Siebel "changes the game" for CRM.(customer relationship management, Siebel Systems Inc.)
April 10, 2005... Having once dismissed it as economically unviable to offer customer relationship management (CRM) software as a service, rather than as a package, market leader Siebel watched the success of young rival Salesforce.com and decided it could not...

Steady rise in worldwide server revenues.
April 10, 2005... Worldwide revenues from servers grew 6.2% in 2004, bringing the value of the market to $49 billion, according to analysts at IDC. The sector continues to be dominated by its two giants, with IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP) taking 60% of sales...

Financial Results.
April 10, 2005... The battle for the number two slot in the IT industry is hotting up as a buoyant Dell takes aim at Hewlett-Packard's weak spots. Announcing DELL's fourth-quarter results, CEO Kevin Rollins said the PC, storage and server company was now on...

CIOs seek governance packages.(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... Six out of 10 European blue chip businesses will have deployed packages for managing IT resources and projects within the next two years, according to a survey of CIOs by IT management software company Niku. Nearly half of the 114 CIOs and...

WiFi equipment sales up but revenues down.(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... Worldwide shipments of WiFi equipment grew by over 50% in 2004 and will reach roughly 80 million units in 2008, according to research by Infonetics. But revenues in the market are declining and will continue to do so for the next few years, the...

Western European IT spending grows.(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... IT spending in the Western European business sector grew by 3.4% in 2004 to reach around $267 billion, according to analyst group IDC. Medium-sized companies set the pace with a 5.4% rise in IT spending, a trend IDC attributes to the...

"RFID is the way of the future.".(radio frequency identification)
April 10, 2005... Action... In January 2005, Tesco revealed that it had bought 4,000 radio frequency identification (RFID) readers and 16,000 antennas, one of the most substantial investments in the technology seen in Europe so far. The efficiencies and...

Readers' letters - February 2005.
April 10, 2005... Ably retentive? A raft of new legislative and regulatory demands are causing companies to store massive amounts of data without due regard as to whether they actually need it. Directors are understandably flummoxed by conflicting...

Carly loses hearts and minds.(Carly Fiorina services)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... "Challenge the mind and capture the heart," was Carly Fiorina's management mantra, according to the Fortune magazine article published in 2000 that named her, for the second year running, as the most powerful female CEO in America. In...

Outer space.(atmospheric temperature for computers, analysis)
April 10, 2005... Recently Information Age has covered CIOs' concerns about the "melting data centre" and other challenges presented by computers overheating. But their temperature troubles seem trivial next to those faced by technicians installing IT equipment...

Oracle's fusion confusion.(acquisition of PeopleSoft Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... "I think the merger integration is complete," says Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, about his successful acquisition of rival software maker PeopleSoft. Perhaps Ellison means that all the pink slips have been sent out to nearly 5,000 superfluous...

CIOs upbeat on business improvement.(survey, chief information officers)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... A new year brings renewed optimism, and CIOs are entering 2005 confident they can use technology to bring real improvements to their businesses, according to a survey of IT chiefs. Analyst group Gartner questioned 1,300 CIOs with a...

Losing it.(laptops are left in London taxis, survey)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... London's Black Cab drivers are proud to proclaim they have 'The Knowledge' - a mental map of the capital's streets. Unfortunately, it appears they may also have your company's laptop, and any data stored on it. Londoners are the city...

Continuity or recovery?(information technology, analysis)
April 10, 2005... Very few IT executives will be blind to the risk of a significant outage and the potentially devastating impact it could have on their business. But at the same time limited budgets make mitigating such risk a major challenge. The chances...

Business continuity futures.
April 10, 2005... There was a time when business continuity meant having a tape back-up to recover lost data. But with many organisations now looking for zero downtime and zero data loss, the requirements of business continuity have changed considerably. ...

The key suppliers in business continuity.(management)
April 10, 2005... 247i The crisis communications services provider offers logistics coordination in the event of a major incident, getting people to the right place and keeping the workforce in touch should the internal communications infrastructure become...

Planning disasters.(data and disk management)
April 10, 2005... The need to improve the reliability of IT systems - and in particular the ability of companies to recover their data following a problem - has driven manufacturers and software companies to innovate around disaster recovery and back-up...

The business challenge.(disaster recovery plans)
April 10, 2005... Planning for the unexpected is never easy. And when it comes to quantifying the risk of an IT interruption and allocating appropriate budget, many organisations struggle to formulate adequate continuity plans - whether for minor interruptions...

Preparing for disaster at BT.(British Telecommunications PLC)
April 10, 2005... As the country's dominant provider of communications infrastructure, BT is under no illusions about the integral role it plays in supporting the business continuity of UK Plc, and the implications this has for its own business continuity...

Abbey's BC habit.(Abbey National PLC business continuity management)
April 10, 2005... For a high street bank like Abbey, every second of infrastructure downtime equals thousands of pounds in lost earnings. Not surprisingly, the company has taken care to protect its data: backing up customer-facing production systems to one...

Red Nose reliability.(Comic Relief uses Oracle 10g, Martin Gill)
April 10, 2005... For Martin Gill, IT director of charity telethon organisers Comic Relief, the challenge is not to provide a constant level of service throughout the year, but to ensure that one evening of extremely high traffic every two years goes off without...

Impact analysis.
April 10, 2005... The business case for continuous system and application availability is clear and is changing as rapidly as the dynamic business environment. To be a credible player in the market place, a commitment to business continuity is a base-level,...

Managing continuity.
April 10, 2005... For some time, companies have been using software tools to manage and automate parts of their IT systems - for example to spot problems before they cause service outages or to automate tasks such as storage provisioning. As well as making...

Retek becomes hot property.(SAP AG acquires Retek Retail Systems)
April 10, 2005... When software giant SAP announced that it had agreed to buy Retek, a specialist in retail systems, the first reaction of most observers was: "Who?" Although the company was ranked the fourth fastest growing software company in the world in the...

Uncompromised data.
April 10, 2005... He who laughs last, so the saying goes, laughs longest. In the world of business continuity planning there is an essential extension to this truism: he who laughs longest, is generally the person who last completed a back-up. Indeed,...

Contintuity guaranteed.
April 10, 2005... For almost three decades, there has been a single, fundamental model of business continuity - duplication. On one level, organisations of all sizes have relied on backing up their data with the assumption that they can roll back to a...

Soft options.(information lifecycle management)
April 10, 2005... Behind the noise and hype surrounding information lifecycle management (ILM), a quieter - but no less significant - revolution is underway in the development of software tools to automate many of the processes that ILM involves. According...

Mail order.(information lifecycle management)
April 10, 2005... Imagine the scenario: a company is charged with making defamatory statements about a competitor going back several years, but because it cannot trace emails allegedly sent by its employees, it is in no position to defend the case. Instead, it...

Protect and survive.(Information lifecycle management)
April 10, 2005... Protecting data is an expensive and time-consuming struggle for most IT departments. In fact, says Phil Goodwin, an analyst at IT market research company the Meta Group, back-up and recovery processes remain "a primary pain point for most...

Applying the ILM architecture.(information lifecycle management)
April 10, 2005... Storage costs have never been lower. Data volumes have never been higher. For many hard-pressed IT managers, that makes buying more hardware to accommodate burgeoning data seem a relatively easy option. In a recent survey by market research...

The legislative imperative.(laws for corporate governance)
April 10, 2005... There is a long and growing list of international regulations governing IT practices which have both direct and indirect relevance to business continuity. Those which directly affect an organisation's business continuity plan may require it to...

The cost of uptime.(financial management for information technology)
April 10, 2005... Finance officers tend to be keen on investments which give a tangible return, and at a time when most of the IT budget is under closer scrutiny than ever before, some organisations are finding that business continuity expenditure no longer...

ILOG rides the crest of the BPM wave.(business process management)
April 10, 2005... Business rules engines have failed to live up to their potential for 15 years, says Jim Sinur, analyst at Gartner Research. But changes in the underlying IT framework are finally plucking these products from the "trough of disillusionment",...

Legal roll.(details of few laws)
April 10, 2005... Then executives talk of compliance, they are usually referring to one of the three or four big laws that are having a huge impact at present - Basel II, Sarbanes-Oxley, Freedom of Information, Data Protection and perhaps new accounting...

Resources.
April 10, 2005... REPORTS Aligning Data Protection Strategies with Business Value IDC October 2004 www.idc.com Data Protection and Recovery Strategies Horison Information Strategies November 2004 www.horison.com ECM and ILM: Unite! Meta Group...

Migration mathematics.(movement of protected data, survey)(Brief Article)
April 10, 2005... Migration mathematics A mid-size manufacturing company holds 12 terabytes of primary storage and disk mirroring - 6TB is used for primary application purposes and 6TB for data protection. The company finds that over 50% of that...

Smart storage.(information lifecycle management)
April 10, 2005... It is time for companies to "get smart" about the way they purchase and implement data storage, says Randy Chalfant, chief technologist of storage systems supplier StorageTek. "Everywhere I go, I hear CIOs complaining about high storage costs...

Enterprise insurance.(management)
April 10, 2005... My late grandfather would never countenance the idea of contents insurance. It was anathema to him to hand over 'good money' every year in case something might happen to his possessions. In part, living at the top of a hill and having a...

Reasons to be wary.(method to control data loss)
April 10, 2005... Truly catastrophic disasters are always big news because they very rarely happen. During last year, in fact, only 3% of the world's lost data was as a result of fires, floods or other catastrophes, says Ontrack Data Recovery. The rest of...

Keep a safe distance.(disaster recovery )
April 10, 2005... IT disaster recovery strategies such as mirroring, co-location and the provision of empty standby hot sites can each, in their different ways, play a vital role in ensuring business continuity. Perhaps best of all, they all have one key feature...

Budgeting for uncertainty.(corporates planning information technology)
April 10, 2005... The full cost of a business's failure to allow for interruption of its activities can only be guessed at. Few companies that suffer a truly catastrophic failure to their systems survive to tell the tale. The full costs - in lost trade, unpaid...

The rebirth of the SAP ecosystem.(business management)
April 10, 2005... For five years between 1996 and 2001, companies selling SAP services were hot property. As the world's multinationals became convinced of the efficiencies of using enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to globalise, automate and integrate...

Compliance burden.(management)
April 10, 2005... Compliance is putting major pressure on IT departments at the cost of other, more strategic projects. That was the controversial view expressed by many of the delegates at the last Information Age Roundtable Executive Lunch, sponsored in March...

Manpower.(Rick Davidson)(Interview)
April 10, 2005... Information Age (IA): One of the major themes of IT in recent years has been consolidation. Mostly that has meant centralisation, but the character of Manpower's business has called for a more subtle approach. What structure have you been...