There’s a significant mismatch between how well IT believes it serves the business, and how business users regard IT’s value, according to an InformationWeek survey.
Network Computing
IT Perceptions, End User Realities
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Categories: General.
Intel Hedges Bets, Gets Cozy With Android
It seems Intel and Microsoft have always been joined at the hip, like Batman and Robin, Fred and Ginger, or Lindsay and vodka. But with the so-called Wintel monopoly a thing of the past, the partnership is under strain. Microsoft last year broke ranks when it tapped ARM chipmakers for some Windows 8 devices, including Surface RT. Now it’s Intel’s turn. At CES on Monday, the company left little doubt that it’s betting much of its future on Google’s Android OS.
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Categories: General.
Security experts stress urgency of patching Windows XML flaw
Happy Patch Tuesday! Microsoft is kicking off the year with seven new security bulletins. There are five rated as Important, and two rated as Critical—but one in particular that has security experts concerned.
Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, stresses that MS13-002 will be a popular target for attackers and should be the top priority. “If you can’t do anything else right away, at least patch this one post haste. This critical XML bug affects every version of Windows in one way or another because XML is used by a wide range of operating system components.”
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Categories: General.
7 Modeling Tools To Help Assess Cloud ROI
Cloud services promise faster deployment and more flexibility, but if you want your CFO to back your cloud gambit, show her a solid financial analysis–preferably one with a good ROI. Here are 7 tools that can help.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
5 Things VMware Should Do In 2013
In 2012, VMware accomplished a lot by sketching out a vision of the software-defined data center as the direction it’s headed. It sees virtualization not as the one-time technology transition early implementers expected, rather as an ongoing process of applying more automation to all forms of data center operations.
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Categories: General.
Four ways to compete against Google in the wake of the FTC ruling
The Federal Trade Commission has spent the past year investigating allegations that Google abused its power as the dominant search engine to block smaller rivals and promote its own sites and services. On Friday, the FTC announced that it would not pursue the action any further, nor will it impose any penalties on Google—and that’s cause for concern for smaller companies trying to compete against Google.
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Categories: General.
10 CES Trends That Matter To Business
The Consumer Electronics Show, scheduled to run January 8-11 in Las Vegas, is about consumer electronics, of course. But the consumerization (terrible word, by the way) of IT has been much of what the business press has focused on over the past year, what with BYOD, cloud computing, social networks and such. So CES, which has managed to do quite well without Apple, and will again this year without a Microsoft keynote, has a lot to show the business community what is coming next for the business-to-business world.
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5 WLAN Resolutions for 2013
It’s time to make resolutions for the new year. Here are five suggestions for WLAN pros that can make 2013 more productive.
Network Computing
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VC Money—Who Needs It?
A pair of storage companies are turning their backs on the traditional venture capital model and its demands of tight control and fast returns.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Amazon’s EC2 Outage: A Closer Look
On Christmas Eve, Amazon Web services experienced an outage at its Northern Virginia data center. In a prompt follow up, it issued an explanation on Dec. 29, apologized to customers and said it wouldn’t happen again. It was the fourth outage of the year in its most heavily trafficked data center complex.
Explanations in the press of what happened, based on the Dec. 29 statement, were relatively brief. The Wall Street Journal, for example, stated that Amazon spokesmen blamed the outage “on a developer who accidentally deleted some key data … Amazon said the disruption affected its Elastic Load Balancing Service, which distributes incoming data from applications to be handled by different computing hardware.”
To an IT manager thinking of using Amazon, that leaves as much unexplained as explained. A developer disrupted running production systems? Development and production are kept distinctly separate in enterprise data centers for exactly the reason demonstrated in the Dec. 24 outage. The developer, Amazon took pains to explain, was “one of a very small number of developers who have access to this production environment.” Amazon is a large organization with many developers; how many developers had access?
Network Computing
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Categories: General.