Learn Google Search Tips From the Pros
Written on 6:38 PM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
A Techie Holiday Wish List
Written on 8:10 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
CIO — By Kristin Burnham
Gadget makers hope you have some money to spend this holiday season
Look, No Hands!
If hands-free legislation has crimped your cell phone usage, Funkwerk Americas' Ego Flash—a Bluetooth-enabled, hands-free car kit—is the solution. Its OLED display allows you to view phone contacts (it stores up to 10,000), call logs and caller ID; make phone calls via voice recognition; and it can even read aloud incoming text messages. The console also integrates with your car's stereo system and can play MP3 music downloaded to your mobile phone or any other Bluetooth-enabled player. $240 www.egohandsfree.com
Hunt and Peck With Style
Spice up your workspace with this hand-crafted, retro-inspired keyboard, The Aviator. This custom-made keyboard is constructed with a brushed aluminum frame, a black, felt faceplate and jewel-style LEDs similar to those on an airplane's instrument panel. $1,200-$1,500 www.datamancer.net
Watch While You Work
Late nights at the office don't mean you need to miss The Office. Sling Media's Slingbox PRO-HD streams HD content from a home television source, such as a cable box or satellite dish, to a laptop, desktop or smartphone. System requirements include a high-speed network connection with upload speeds of 1.5 megabits per second and an HD-compatible laptop or desktop computer. $300 www.slingmedia.com
No Outlet? No Problem!
A BlackBerry or iPod battery that is dying—especially when there's no outlet or charger in sight—is the ultimate inconvenience. But Solio has developed what it boasts is "the world's most advanced hybrid charger," the Magnesium Edition. Solar panels collect and store power—one hour of sun will power your iPod for an hour—and its adapter tips plug in to a variety of mobile devices, limiting the need to lug multiple chargers around. $170 www.solio.com
Can You Hear Me Now?
Crying baby on your six-hour flight? Get some shut-eye with Sennheiser's PXC 450 NoiseGard travel headphones, which reduce ambient noise by up to 90 percent. They also include a talk-through function to help distinguish between sounds such as those of a plane's engines versus the voice of person—enabling you to communicate while wearing them. The headphones collapse for easy transport and come with adapters for in-flight entertainment systems. $400 www.sennheiserusa.com
How to Recession-Proof Yourself
Written on 8:08 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
By Meridith Levinson
November 17, 2008 — CIO — Layoff fears are sending a shiver through the workforce as the U.S. economy lurches toward a full-blown recession. And no one is safe as corporate cost-cutters sharpen their axes. Though senior executives are less vulnerable to losing their jobs than the employees below them, they, too, can be casualties of restructurings.
How To Motivate Your Employees During Layoffs Whether you're a CIO or a help desk technician, career coaches say you can take measures to prevent the hatchet from falling on your neck. Here's a list of actions they say you can take to help safeguard your job.
1. Know your value and communicate it. "If you're flying under the radar, you're going to be the first to be eliminated," says Kirsten Dixson, author of Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand. This goes for CIOs, too.
Dixson recommends compiling a weekly status report that outlines the project or projects you're working on, your progress on those projects and your key performance indicators, and sending that report to your boss each week.
If you're known as a "growth and innovation CIO," now is also the time to prove that you're as adept at cost cutting as you are at generating ideas, says Joanne Dustin, a 25-year IT veteran who's now a career coach and an organizational development consultant.
Dustin says CIOs need to talk up the efficiencies and cost savings that their innovations have achieved as well as the revenue they've generated. Your company may still decide that it needs someone with a different skill set in the CIO role, but at least you've given it your best shot.
2. Be a team player. Getting along with others—in the boardroom or elsewhere—is critical when downsizing is on the table, especially for IT professionals who tend to be independent, says Dustin, who's worked as a programmer, project manager and systems manager. "These times require cooperation, flexibility and a willingness to go the extra mile," she says.
IT professionals who "just sit at their desk or in the server room and do their eight-to-five" are at risk, says Ed Longanacre, senior vice president of IT at Amerisafe, a provider of workers' compensation insurance. The problem with hunkering down, he says, is that it gives the impression that you're not interested in the organization.
3. Keep your ear to the ground. Staying attuned to what's going on inside your company, including gossip, can help you anticipate changes, says Patricia Stepanski Plouffe, president of Career Management Consultants. "If there's a rumor that your department is going to fold or downsize, you can identify other areas of the company where you could transfer your skills," she says. Just remember that you can't trust everything you hear, whether it comes from the water cooler or the CFO.
4. Adapt to change quickly. "If you can develop an attitude that nothing is going to stay the same and that your organization and your job will always be in flux, that will help you cope," says Stepanski Plouffe. "Be ready for whatever change may come up."
5. Get out and lead. "Executives are expected to set the vision and reassure people of the path the company is on," says Dixson. "This is not the time to go in your office and shut the door. Show decisiveness, strength and integrity. Show that you're combating the rumor mill."
ABC: An Introduction to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
Written on 11:22 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events—whether an event might be a hurricane or simply a power outage caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. Management's involvement in this process can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency. This primer (compiled from articles in CSO magazine) explains the basic concepts of business continuity planning and also directs you to more CSO magazine resources on the topic.
- What’s the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning?
- What does a disaster recovery and business continuity plan include?
- How do I get started?
- Is it really necessary to disrupt business by testing the plan?
- What kinds of things have companies discovered when testing a plan?
- What are the top mistakes that companies make in disaster recovery?
- I still have a binder with our Y2K plan. Will that work?
- Can we outsource our contingency measures?
- How can I sell this business continuity planning to other executives?
- How do I make sure the plans aren’t overkill for my company?
Q: "Disaster recovery" seems pretty self-explanatory. Is there any difference between that and "business continuity planning"?
A: Disaster recovery is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.
Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. "Business continuity planning" suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep making money. Often, the two terms are married under the acronym BC/DR. At any rate, DR and/or BC determines how a company will keep functioning after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are restored.
What do these plans include?
All BC/DR plans need to encompass how employees will communicate, where they will go and how they will keep doing their jobs. The details can vary greatly, depending on the size and scope of a company and the way it does business. For some businesses, issues such as supply chain logistics are most crucial and are the focus on the plan. For others, information technology may play a more pivotal role, and the BC/DR plan may have more of a focus on systems recovery. For example, the plan at one global manufacturing company would restore critical mainframes with vital data at a backup site within four to six days of a disruptive event, obtain a mobile PBX unit with 3,000 telephones within two days, recover the company's 1,000-plus LANs in order of business need, and set up a temporary call center for 100 agents at a nearby training facility.
But the critical point is that neither element can be ignored, and physical, IT and human resources plans cannot be developed in isolation from each other. At its heart, BC/DR is about constant communication. Business leaders and IT leaders should work together to determine what kind of plan is necessary and which systems and business units are most crucial to the company. Together, they should decide which people are responsible for declaring a disruptive event and mitigating its effects. Most importantly, the plan should establish a process for locating and communicating with employees after such an event. In a catastrophic event (Hurricane Katrina being a recent example), the plan will also need to take into account that many of those employees will have more pressing concerns than getting back to work.
Where do I start?
A good first step is a business impact analysis (BIA). This will identify the business's most crucial systems and processes and the effect an outage would have on the business. The greater the potential impact, the more money a company should spend to restore a system or process quickly. For instance, a stock trading company may decide to pay for completely redundant IT systems that would allow it to immediately start processing trades at another location. On the other hand, a manufacturing company may decide that it can wait 24 hours to resume shipping. A BIA will help companies set a restoration sequence to determine which parts of the business should be restored first.
Here are 10 absolute basics your plan should cover:
1. Develop and practice a contingency plan that includes a succession plan for your CEO.
2. Train backup employees to perform emergency tasks. The employees you count on to lead in an emergency will not always be available.
3. Determine offsite crisis meeting places for top executives.
4. Make sure that all employees-as well as executives-are involved in the exercises so that they get practice in responding to an emergency.
5. Make exercises realistic enough to tap into employees' emotions so that you can see how they'll react when the situation gets stressful.
6. Practice crisis communication with employees, customers and the outside world.
7. Invest in an alternate means of communication in case the phone networks go down.
8. Form partnerships with local emergency response groups-firefighters, police and EMTs-to establish a good working relationship. Let them become familiar with your company and site.
9. Evaluate your company's performance during each test, and work toward constant improvement. Continuity exercises should reveal weaknesses.
10. Test your continuity plan regularly to reveal and accommodate changes. Technology, personnel and facilities are in a constant state of flux at any company.
Hold it. Actual live-action tests would, themselves, be the "disruptive events." If I get enough people involved in writing and examining our plans, won't that be sufficient?
Let us give you an example of a company that thinks tabletops and paper simulations aren't enough. And why their experience suggests they're right.
When CIO Steve Yates joined USAA, a financial services company, business continuity exercises existed only on paper. Every year or so, top-level staffers would gather in a conference room to role-play; they would spend a day examining different scenarios, talking them out-discussing how they thought the procedures should be defined and how they thought people would respond to them.
Live exercises were confined to the company's technology assets. USAA would conduct periodic data recovery tests of different business units-like taking a piece of the life insurance department and recovering it from backup data.
Yates wondered if such passive exercises reflected reality. He also wondered if USAA's employees would really know how to follow such a plan in a real emergency. When Sept. 11 came along, Yates realized that the company had to do more. "Sept. 11 forced us to raise the bar on ourselves," says Yates.
Yates engaged outside consultants who suggested that the company build a second data center in the area as a backup. After weighing the costs and benefits of such a project, USAA initially concluded that it would be more efficient to rent space on the East Coast. But after the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when air traffic came to a halt, Yates knew it was foolhardy to have a data center so far away. Ironically, USAA was set to sign the lease contract the week of Sept. 11.
Instead, USAA built a center in Texas, only 200 miles away from its offices-close enough to drive to, but far enough away to pull power from a different grid and water from a different source. The company has also made plans to deploy critical employees to other office locations around the country.
Yates made site visits to companies such as FedEx, First Union, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia to hear about their approach to contingency planning. USAA also consulted with PR firm Fleishman-Hillard about how USAA, in a crisis situation, could communicate most effectively with its customers and employees.
Finally, Yates put together a series of large-scale business continuity exercises designed to test the performance of individual business units and the company at large in the event of wide-scale business disruption. When the company simulated a loss of the primary data center for its federal savings bank unit, Yates found that it was able to recover the systems, applications and all 19 of the third-party vendor connections. USAA also ran similar exercises with other business units.
For the main event, however, Yates wanted to test more than the company's technology procedures; he wanted to incorporate the most unpredictable element in any contingency planning exercise: the people.
USAA ultimately found that employees who walked through the simulation were in a position to observe flaws in the plans and offer suggestions. Furthermore, those who practice for emergency situations are less likely to panic and more likely to remember the plan.
Can you give me some examples of things companies have discovered through testing?
Some companies have discovered that while they back up their servers or data centers, they've overlooked backup plans for laptops. Many businesses fail to realize the importance of data stored locally on laptops. Because of their mobile nature, laptops can easily be lost or damaged. It doesn't take a catastrophic event to disrupt business if employees are carting critical or irreplaceable data around on laptops.
One company reports that it is looking into buying MREs (meals ready-to-eat) from the company that sells them to the military. MREs have a long shelf life, and they don't take up much space. If employees are stuck at your facility for a long time, this could prove a worthwhile investment.
Mike Hager, former head of information security and disaster recovery for OppenhiemerFunds, says 9/11 brought issues like these to light. Many companies, he said, were able to recover data, but had no plans for alternative work places. The World Trade Center had provided more than 20 million square feet of office space, and after Sept. 11th there was only 10 million square feet of office space available in Manhattan. The issue of where employees go immediately after a disaster and where they will be housed during recovery should be addressed before something happens, not after.
USAA discovered that while it had designated a nearby relocation area, the setup process for computers and phones took nearly two hours. During that time, employees were left standing outside in the hot Texas sun. Seeing the plan in action raised several questions that hadn't been fully addressed before: Was there a safer place to put those employees in the interim? How should USAA determine if or when employees could be allowed back in the building? How would thousands of people access their vehicle if their car keys were still sitting on their desk? And was there an alternate transportation plan if the company needed to send employees home?
What are the top mistakes that companies make in disaster recovery?
Hager and other experts note the following pitfalls:
1. Inadequate planning: Have you identified all critical systems, and do you have detailed plans to recover them to the current day? (Everybody thinks they know what they have on their networks, but most people don't really know how many servers they have, or how they're configured, or what applications reside on them-what services were running, what version of software or operating systems they were using. Asset management tools claim to do the trick here, but they often fail to capture important details about software revisions and so on.
2. Failure to bring the business into the planning and testing of your recovery efforts.
3. Failure to gain support from senior-level managers. The largest problems here are:
1. Not demonstrating the level of effort required for full recovery.
2. Not conducting a business impact analysis and addressing all gaps in your recovery model.
3. Not building adequate recovery plans that outline your recovery time objective, critical systems and applications, vital documents needed by the business, and business functions by building plans for operational activities to be continued after a disaster.
4. Not having proper funding that will allow for a minimum of semiannual testing.
I still have a binder with our Y2K contingency plan. Will that work?
Absolutely not (unless your computers, employees and business priorities are exactly the same as they were in 1999). Plus, most Y2K plans cover only computer system-based failure. Potential physical calamities like blackouts, natural disasters or terrorist events bring additional issues to the table.
Can we outsource our contingency measures?
Disaster recovery services-offsite data storage, mobile phone units, remote workstations and the like-are often outsourced, simply because it makes more sense than purchasing extra equipment or space that may never be used. In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, disaster recovery vendors restored systems and provided temporary office space, complete with telephones and Internet access for dozens of displaced companies.
What advice would you give to security executives who need to convince their CEO or board of the need for disaster recovery plans and capabilities? What arguments are most effective with an executive audience?
Hager advises chief security officers to address the need for disaster recovery through analysis and documentation of the potential financial losses. Work with your legal and financial departments to document the total losses per day that your company would face if you were not capable of quick recovery. By thoroughly reviewing your business continuance and disaster recovery plans, you can identify the gaps that may lead to a successful recovery. Remember: Disaster recovery and business continuance are nothing more than risk avoidance. Senior managers understand more clearly when you can demonstrate how much risk they are taking."
Hager also says that smaller companies have more (and cheaper) options for disaster recovery than bigger ones. For example, the data can be taken home at night. That's certainly a low-cost way to do offsite backup.
Some of this sounds like overkill for my company. Isn't it a bit much?
The elaborate machinations that USAA goes through in developing and testing its contingency plans might strike the average CSO (or CEO, anyway) as being over the top. And for some businesses, that's absolutely true. After all, HazMat training and an evacuation plan for 20,000 employees is not a necessity for every company.
Like many security issues, continuity planning comes down to basic risk management: How much risk can your company tolerate, and how much is it willing to spend to mitigate various risks?
In planning for the unexpected, companies have to weigh the risk versus the cost of creating such a contingency plan. That's a trade-off that Pete Hugdahl, USAA's assistant vice president of security, frequently confronts. "It gets really difficult when the cost factor comes into play," he says. "Are we going to spend $100,000 to fence in the property? How do we know if it's worth it?"
And-make no mistake-there is no absolute answer. Whether you spend the money or accept the risk is an executive decision, and it should be an informed decision. Half-hearted disaster recovery planning (in light of the 2005 hurricane season, 9/11, the Northeast blackout of 2003, and so on) is a failure to perform due diligence.
This document was compiled from articles published in CSOand CIO magazines. Contributing writers include Scott Berinato, Kathleen Carr, Daintry Duffy, Michael Goldberg, and Sarah Scalet. Send feedback to CSO Executive Editor Derek Slater at dslater@cxo.com.
Five Tips: Make Virtualization Work Better Across the WAN
Written on 10:27 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
– Jeff Aaron, VP Marketing, Silver Peak Systems, CIO November 18, 2008
IT departments can reap enormous benefits from virtualizing applications and implementing Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). However, the management and cost savings of virtualization can be lost if performance is so bad that it hampers productivity, as can happen when virtual applications and desktops are delivered across a Wide Area Network (WAN).
For an in-depth look at a WAN revamp, see CIO.com's related article, "How to Make Your WAN a Fast Lane: One Company's Story."
How can enterprises overcome poor performance to reap the rewards of virtualization?
Jeff Aaron, VP of marketing at Silver Peak Systems, suggests these five tips.
1. Understand The Network Issues
For starters, it makes sense to understand why your virtualized applications and virtual desktops perform poorly across the WAN. It's typically not due to the application or VDI components, but due to the network. More specifically, virtualized environments are sensitive to the following WAN characteristics:
Latency: the time it takes for data to travel from one location to one another.
Packet loss: when packets get dropped or delivered out of order due to network congestion they must be re-transmitted across the WAN. This can turn a 200 millisecond roundtrip into one second. To end users, the virtual application or desktop seems unresponsive when packets are being re-transmitted. They start to re-hit the keys on their client machines, which compounds the problem.
Bandwidth: WAN bandwidth may or may not be an issue depending on the type of traffic being sent. While most virtualized applications are fairly efficient when it comes to bandwidth consumption, some activities (such as file transfers and print jobs) consume significant bandwidth, which can present a performance challenge.
2. Examine WAN Optimization Techniques
WAN optimization devices can be deployed on both ends of a WAN link to improve the performance of all enterprise applications. The following WAN optimization techniques are used by these devices to improve the performance of virtual applications and desktops:
Latency can be overcome by mitigating the "chattiness" of TCP, the transport protocol used to by virtual applications for communication across the WAN. More specifically, WAN optimization devices can be configured to send more data within specific windows, and minimize the number of back and forth acknowledgements required prior to sending data. This improves the responsiveness of keystrokes in a virtual environment.
Loss can be mitigated by rebuilding dropped packets on the far end of a WAN link, and re-sequencing packets that are delivered out of order in real-time. This eliminates the need to re-transmit packets every time they are dropped or delivered out-of-order. By avoiding re-transmissions, virtual applications and desktops appear much more responsive across the WAN.
Bandwidth can be reduced using WAN deduplication. By monitoring all data sent across the WAN, repetitive information can be detected and delivered locally rather than resent across the network. This significantly improves bandwidth utilization in some (but not all) virtualized environments.
3. Set Application Priorities
The average enterprise has more than 80 applications that are accessed across the WAN. That means that critical applications, including terminal services and VDI, are vying for the same resources as less important traffic, such as Internet browsing. Because virtual applications and desktops are sensitive to latency, it often makes sense to prioritize this traffic over other applications using Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. In addition, QoS can guarantee bandwidth for VDI and virtual applications.
4. Compress and Encrypt in the Right Place
Often times host machines compress information prior to transmission. This is meant to improve bandwidth utilization in a virtual environment. However, compression obfuscates visibility into the actual data, which makes it difficult for downstream WAN optimization devices to provide their full value. Therefore, it may be a better choice to turn off compression functionality in the virtual host (if possible), and instead enable it in the WAN optimization device.
Moving compression into the WAN optimization device has another added benefit: it frees up CPU cycles within the host machine. This can lead to better performance and scalability throughout a virtual environment.
IT staff should also consider where encryption takes place in a virtual infrastructure, since encryption also consumes CPU cycles in the host.
5. Go With the Flows
Network scalability can have an important impact on the performance of virtual applications and VDI. The average thin client machine has 10 to15 TCP flows open at any given time. If thousands of clients are accessing host machines in the same centralized facility, that location must be equipped to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous sessions.
When it comes to supporting large numbers of flows, there are two "best practice" recommendations. First, as discussed above, it is recommended that compression and encryption be moved off the host machine to free up CPU cycles. Second, make sure your WAN acceleration device supports the right amount of flows for your environment. The last thing you want to do is create an artificial bottleneck within the very devices deployed to remove your WAN's bottlenecks.
8 Reasons Tech Will Survive the Economic Recession
Written on 10:05 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
– Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World November 13, 2008
The global economy is in as bad shape as we've ever seen. In the last two months, U.S. consumers have stopped spending money on discretionary items, including electronic gear, prompting this week's bankruptcy filing by Circuit City. Retailers are worried that Black Friday will indeed be black, as holiday shoppers cut back on spending and choose lower-priced cell phones and notebook computers.
Yet despite all of the bailouts and layoffs, most IT industry experts are predicting that sales of computer hardware, software and services will be growing at a healthy clip again within 18 months.
Here's a synopsis of what experts are saying about the short- and long-term prognosis for the tech industry:
1. The global IT market is still growing, although barely.
IDC this week recast its projections for global IT spending in 2009, forecasting that the market will grow 2.6 percent next year instead of the 5.9 percent predicted prior to the financial crisis. In the United States, IT spending will eke out 0.9 percent growth.
IDC predicts the slowest IT markets will be the United States, Japan and Western Europe, which all will experience around 1 percent growth. The healthiest economies will be in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
Similarly, Gartner's worst-case scenario for 2009 is that IT spending will increase 2.3 percent, according to a report released in mid-October. Gartner said the U.S. tech industry will be flat. Hardest hit will be Europe, where IT expenditures are expected to shrink in 2009.
Overall, Gartner said global IT spending will reach $3.8 trillion in 2008, up from $3.15 trillion in 2007.
"We expect a gradual recovery throughout 2010, and by 2011 we should be back into a more normal kind of environment," said IDC Analyst Stephen Minton. If the recession turns out to be deeper or last longer than four quarters as most economics expect, "it could turn into a contraction in IT spending," Minton added. "In that case, the IT market would still be weak in 2010 but we'd see a gradual recovery in 2011, and we'd be back to normal by 2012."
2. It's not as bad as 2001.
Even the grimmest predictions for global IT spending during the next two years aren't as severe as the declines the tech industry experienced between 2001 and 2003.
"Global economic problems are impacting IT budgets, however the IT industry will not see the dramatic reductions that were seen during the dot.com bust. . . . At that time, budgets were slashed from mid-double-digit growth to low-single-digit growth," Gartner said in a statement.
Gartner said the reason IT won't suffer as badly in 2009 as it did during the 2001 recession is that "operations now view IT as a way to transform their businesses and adopt operating models that are leaner. . . . IT is embedded in running all aspects of the business."
IDC's Minton said that in 2001 many companies had unused data center capacity, excess network bandwidth and software applications that weren't integrated in a way that could drive productivity.
"This time around, none of that is true," Minton said. "Today, there isn't a glut of bandwidth. There is high utilization of software applications, which are purchased in a more modular way and integrated much faster into business operations. Unlike in 2001, companies aren't waking up to find that they should be cutting back on IT spending. They're only cutting back on new initiatives because of economic conditions."
"We're anxious about whether the economy will resemble what the most pessimistic economists are saying or the more mainstream economists," Minton said. "But we don't see any reason that it will turn into a disaster like 2001. It shouldn’t get anywhere near that bad."
3. Consumers won't give up their cell phones.
They may lose their jobs and even their homes, but consumers seem unwilling to disconnect their cell phones.
"I would sleep in my car before I would give up my mobile phone," says Yankee Group Analyst Carl Howe. "Consumers buy services like broadband and mobile phones, and even if they lose their jobs they need these services more than ever."
Yankee Group says the demand for network-based services—what it dubs "The Anywhere Economy"—will overcome the short-term obstacles posed by the global financial crisis and will be back on track for significant growth by 2012.
Yankee Group predicts continued strong sales for basic mobile phone services at the low end, as well as high-end services such as Apple iPhones and Blackberry Storms. Where the mobile market will get squeezed is in the middle, where many vendors have similar feature sets. One advantage for mobile carriers: they have two-year contracts locked in.
Telecom services "are not quite on the level of food, shelter and clothing, but increasingly it satisfies a deep personal need," Howe says. "When bad things happen to us, we want to talk about it. And in today's world, that's increasingly done electronically."
4. Notebook computers are still hot.
Worldwide demand for notebooks—particularly the sub-$500 models—has been strong all year. But that may change in the fourth quarter given Intel's latest warnings about flagging demand for its processors.
Both IDC and Gartner reported that PC shipments grew 15 percent in the third quarter of 2008, driven primarily by sales of low-cost notebook computers. Altogether, more than 80 million PCs were shipped during the third quarter of 2008, which was down from estimates earlier in the year but still represents healthy growth.
IDC said notebook sales topped desktop sales—55 percent to 45 percent—for the first time ever during the third quarter of 2008. This is a trend that will help prop up popular notebook vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple. Apple, for example, saw its Mac shipments rise 32 percent in the third quarter of 2008, powered primarily by its notebooks.
The big unknown is what will happen to notebook sales during the holiday season. Analysts have noted sluggishness in U.S. corporate PC sales this fall as well as home sales, where most demand is for ultra-low-priced notebooks.
"The impact will come this quarter. People will be looking for cheaper products. . . . They will not be spending as much as they did a year ago," IDC's Minton said.
Intel said yesterday that it was seeing significantly weaker demand across its entire product line and dropped its revenue forecast for the fourth quarter by $1 billion.
The brunt of the slowdown in IT spending will hit servers and PCs, predicts Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels. Forrester is adjusting its IT spending forecast for 2009 downward, and plans to release new numbers after Thanksgiving, he adds.
"PCs and servers may see declines similar to 2001, but we're not going to be seeing that across the whole tech industry," Bartels says. "Software is a bright spot. Much of software spending comes in the form of maintenance and subscriptions. The licensing part may go down, but that's only a quarter of total software revenues."
The biggest U.S. carriers—including AT&T and Verizon—are in much better shape going into this recession than they were during the dot.com bust. So while consumer spending will fall in 2009, it is expected to have less of an impact on the telecom sector than it did after 2001.
Yankee Group says the financial crisis will not significantly impact network build-outs by carriers because most of the financing for 3G, Fios, WiMAX and other next-generation networks is already in place.
"These are multibillion-dollar build-outs, and most of the financing has been arranged months if not years in advance," Yankee Group's Howe says. "We were projecting that in 2009 carriers would spend over $70 billion on these network build-outs in the U.S. Now we're saying that there will be $2 billion or $3 billion less in spending. . . . We're talking single-digit percentage declines, not wholesale cuts."
This doesn't mean that the network industry will emerge from the chaos unscathed. Carriers will squeeze their equipment providers, and companies like Cisco are already feeling the pinch. When Cisco announced its latest earnings last week, CEO John Chambers reported the company had seen its sales shift from solid-single-digit growth in August to a 9 percent decline in October.
Forrester says computer and communications equipment vendors will bear the brunt of IT cost-cutting from enterprise customers.
6. Corporate data storage needs keep rising during recessions.
Every segment of the IT market is weaker today than it was six months ago. But some segments are less weak than others, and one of the healthiest is storage.
“Storage is relatively stable because of the fact that companies are using a lot more of their storage capacity and they are still dealing with an increasing amount of data that requires storage on a weekly basis. That’s not going to change,” IDC’s Minton said. “It’s not just the hardware, but the storage software that will be relative bright spots in the years ahead.”
One storage industry bellwether is EMC, which continued to demonstrate strong demand for storage hardware and software in its recent quarterly results. EMC’s revenue grew 13 percent in the third quarter of 2008 compared to a year ago. Unlike many other network industry leaders, EMC is projecting continued revenue gains in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Similarly, this week Brocade issued a preliminary release indicating strong sales for the quarter ending in October. CEO Michael Klayko said the company will outperform its sales projections from August 2008.
“Storage needs are on the rise, and storage investments will continue,” Forrester’s Bartels says. “We don’t see cloud storage as having a meaningful impact yet.”
7. New IT markets will continue to emerge, although more slowly.
Emerging economies such as China and Latin America are slowing down, but they are still expected to have IT sales increases in 2009. The Latin American market, in particular, is a solid one for IT companies such as IBM, HP and Microsoft, which have a strong foothold south of the border.
“In the past two to three years, Latin America has had some of the fastest growth rates in IT spending,” IDC’s Minton said. “Brazil is the biggest market, and it has been growing at double digits. But all of the markets in Latin America have been growing by more than 10 percent a year. With some exceptions, the economies there are relatively stable and have had less political turmoil than in the past. . . . This is one of the regions that we think will bounce back pretty quickly.”
Other emerging markets that will continue to post growth in IT spending in 2009 are Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, IDC predicts. While these markets won’t experience double-digit gains next year, they will help offset sharp declines in IT purchasing in the United States, Japan and Western Europe.
Forrester warns that IT vendors shouldn’t count on so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China— to bail them out of the financial crisis altogether.
“The BRIC markets are performing better than the industrial markets, but they are also slowing down,” Forrester’s Bartels says. “Among those markets, China looks to be the strongest, then Brazil and Mexico. Russia is weakening, and India is weakening. They’re not going to go into a contraction, but the growth rates could slow to the point that they feel like a contraction.”
One issue for IT vendors is the rising strength of the U.S. dollar, which means U.S. tech vendors will bring home fewer dollars from their foreign sales when they convert currencies.
“The dollar has been strengthening against every currency except the Chinese currency,” Bartels says. “Even if a vendor is successful in sales in Brazil or Russia, they will bring back fewer dollars, which was not the case six months ago.”
8. Outsourcing helps companies stretch their IT budgets.
Many companies will freeze new IT initiatives for the next three to six months as they absorb the Wall Street crash. But one segment that’s likely to continue is IT outsourcing because it provides near-term cost reductions.
“While IT outsourcing will benefit from an economic slowdown in 2008 as companies turn to IT outsourcing vendors to help cut costs, trends toward use of lower-cost offshore resources and smaller-scale outsourcing deals will keep growth modest,” says Forrester Research.
Forrester predicts IT outsourcing will grow around 5 percent in 2009 and 2010.
“When you sign an outsourcing agreement, you’re locked into it barring going out of business,” Forrester’s Bartels says. “Outsourcing revenues are not going to be variable.”
On the horizon is cloud computing, which also holds the promise of reducing corporate IT overhead but requires more up-front spending than outsourcing.
“Over the longer term, we’re pretty bullish about cloud computing,” IDC’s Minton said. “But there will be a lot of hurdles for a bigger corporation. It’s difficult for them psychologically to give up control, and there are quite a lot of up-front costs to engage consultants, to roll out applications to a large number of employees, and there’s training involved. But ultimately these projects save money.”
Working Virtually: You can easily provide secured remote access to employees
Written on 1:26 PM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
Definition from Whatis.com
Remote access is the ability to get access to a computer or a network from a remote distance. In corporations, people at branch offices, telecommuters, and people who are traveling may need access to the corporation's network. Access can go through an ISP, ISDN, DSL or other wireless mobile method.
Right Click Can Set up Remote Access for Your Team!
The playing field is beginning to be level, technology to link remote offices to headquarters is not just for big companies. Small and medium sized businesses need to have their remote sites dialed in just like their main office. At Right Click we can work with your existing internet connections and setup hardware VPN’s for remote offices and power home users. This allows these remote users to securely access files, emails and programs when they are outside the main office and minimizes the need for emailing files and trying to keep track of versions.
If you have a need to give access to a large application for your remote users, Right Click's experts can set-up cost-effective Terminal and Citrix Servers for this task. We will work with you to determine the best solution for your team, architect the system to fit into your budget and make sure that it performs to your standards.
How can you make sure your Network Security is compliant and meets today's requirements?
Written on 11:59 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
Definition provided by Wikipedia
Network security consists of the provisions made in an underlying computer networkpolicies adopted by the network administrator to protect the network and the network-accessible resources from unauthorized access and consistent and continuous monitoring and measurement of its effectiveness (or lack) combined together.
In today’s world where your most valuable data can be taken from you on a device the size of key, ensuring you have proper network security is critical.
With a USB key drive holding an average of 8 gigabytes and an IPod holding 80GB of data, nearly all proprietary or sensitive information can be copied from your network in a matter of minutes. Additionally, there is the ever present threat of viruses, spy ware and hackers to further impact the network.
At Right Click we look at your network and come up with a plan to cost effectively ensure network security. Our goal is to ensure that your company has effective security without onerous management and allows your employees to work with ease.
Many of our clients operate in regulated industries such as health care and financial services, Right Click is positioned to ensure that the networks are in compliance with all HIPAA and SOX regulations.
Let us come out and do a network security survey to proactively ensure that all network security requirements are met or exceeded. Give us a call or email us at Right Click.
The Benefits of Outsourcing for Small Businesses
Written on 5:50 PM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
From AllBusiness.com
Outsourcing, the practice of using outside firms to handle work normally performed within a company, is a familiar concept to many entrepreneurs. Small companies routinely outsource their payroll processing, accounting, distribution, and many other important functions — often because they have no other choice. Many large companies turn to outsourcing to cut costs. In response, entire industries have evolved to serve companies' outsourcing needs.
Wise outsourcing, however, can provide a number of long-term benefits:
Outsourcing, the practice of using outside firms to handle work normally performed within a company, is a familiar concept to many entrepreneurs. Small companies routinely outsource their payroll processing, accounting, distribution, and many other important functions — often because they have no other choice. Many large companies turn to outsourcing to cut costs. In response, entire industries have evolved to serve companies' outsourcing needs.
Wise outsourcing, however, can provide a number of long-term benefits:
Control capital costs. Cost-cutting may not be the only reason to outsource, but it's certainly a major factor. Outsourcing converts fixed costs into variable costs, releases capital for investment elsewhere in your business, and allows you to avoid large expenditures in the early stages of your business. Outsourcing can also make your firm more attractive to investors, since you're able to pump more capital directly into revenue-producing activities.
Increase efficiency. Companies that do everything themselves have much higher research, development, marketing, and distribution expenses, all of which must be passed on to customers. An outside provider's cost structure and economy of scale can give your firm an important competitive advantage.
Reduce labor costs. Hiring and training staff for short-term or peripheral projects can be very expensive, and temporary employees don't always live up to your expectations. Outsourcing lets you focus your human resources where you need them most.
Start new projects quickly. A good outsourcing firm has the resources to start a project right away. Handling the same project in-house might involve taking weeks or months to hire the right people, train them, and provide the support they need. And if a project requires major capital investments (such as building a series of distribution centers), the startup process can be even more difficult.
Focus on your core business. Every business has limited resources, and every manager has limited time and attention. Outsourcing can help your business to shift its focus from peripheral activities toward work that serves the customer, and it can help managers set their priorities more clearly.
Level the playing field. Most small firms simply can't afford to match the in-house support services that larger companies maintain. Outsourcing can help small firms act "big" by giving them access to the same economies of scale, efficiency, and expertise that large companies enjoy.
Reduce risk. Every business investment carries a certain amount of risk. Markets, competition, government regulations, financial conditions, and technologies all change very quickly. Outsourcing providers assume and manage this risk for you, and they generally are much better at deciding how to avoid risk in their areas of expertise
Let Right Click help augment your IT services needs with the "right" size IT staff, available to fit your project needs.
What is Data Recovery and Computer Forensics?
Written on 11:43 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
Definition From Wikipedia in Italics
Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally.
Often the data are being salvaged from storage media formats such as hard disk drives, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.
If you are missing information on your server or desktop, your hard drive crashed and you did not have a backup Right Click’s data recovery services can help you to get your data back quickly and efficiently. We have done a number of data recoveries saving thousands in lost time and productivity if the files had to be recreated.
Data recovery can also be the process of retrieving and securing deleted information from a storage media for forensic purposes or spying.
Do you think an employee or partner is doing something that may not be in accordance with company policies. Right Click is an expert in examining computers and ensuring that you get an answer that has been thoroughly researched and examined.
Right Click's Jim Harrington, is an Encase Certified Engineer, has testified in court and has tremendous experience in dealing with forensics jobs large or small.
Computer forensics is a branch of forensic science pertaining to legal evidence found in computers and digital storage mediums. Computer forensics is also known as digital forensics.
The goal of computer forensics is to explain the current state of a digital artifact. The term digital artifact can include a computer system, a storage media (such as a hard disk or CD-ROM), an electronic document (e.g. an email message or JPEG image) or even a sequence of packets moving over a computer network. The explanation can be as straightforward as "what information is here?" and as detailed as "what is the sequence of events responsible for the present situation?"
The field of Computer Forensics also has sub branches within it such as Firewall Forensics, Database Forensics and Mobile Device Forensics.
There are many reasons to employ the techniques of computer forensics:
- In legal cases, computer forensic techniques are frequently used to analyze computer systems belonging to defendants (in criminal cases) or litigants (in civil cases).
- To recover data in the event of a hardware or software failure.
- To analyze a computer system after a break-in, for example, to determine how the attacker gained access and what the attacker did.
- To gather evidence against an employee that an organization wishes to terminate.
- To gain information about how computer systems work for the purpose of debugging, performance optimization, or reverse-engineering.
Special measures should be taken when conducting a forensic investigation if it is desired for the results to be used in a court of law. One of the most important measures is to assure that the evidence has been accurately collected and that there is a clear chain of custody from the scene of the crime to the investigator---and ultimately to the court.
Right Click has the field expertise to provide you with the right solution to your Data Recovery and Computer Forensics needs. Give us a call or email us to find out how we can help!
Reduce Energy Costs and Go Green with VMware Virtualization
Written on 11:42 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
Server virtualization is being rapidly adopted by companies of all sizes. Server virtualization with VMware delivers immediate benefits including cost savings, easier application deployment, and simplified management.
Reduce the energy demands of your datacenter by right-sizing your IT infrastructure through consolidation and dynamic management of computer capacity across a pool of servers. Our virtualization solution powered by VMware Infrastructure delivers the resources your infrastructure needs and enables you to:
- Reduce energy costs by 80%.
- Power down servers without affecting applications or users.
- Green your datacenter while decreasing costs and improving service levels.
Learn more about Virtualization for your organization by contacting Right Click today!
What is Server Virtualization?
Written on 11:21 AM by Right Click IT - Technology Services
Server Virtualization
Have you been reading about server virtualization. Heard it is the next big thing, going to save you a lot of money, make IT management easier, decrease the amount of space you need to dedicate to your servers.
At Right Click, we are well equipped to teach you about the pros and cons of virtualizing and make a recommendation if that is the way to go.
What is it? Server virtualization is running multiple copies of a server software on one physical box. For instance with a virtualized server you can have a domain controller, exchange server and a terminal server on one physical box, but you have three separate copies of Windows Server running. It is as though you have three machines, but only one physical box.
Why does it work? If you look at your CPU utilization it hardly ever goes about 10%. With virtualization you can get more out of your existing servers and be able to offer additional services to your users without significant hardware spending.
How does it work? Virtualization begins with base software which can be Microsoft Windows Server 2008 or a small program like VMWare’s hyper visor. Once you have your base software, you begin to setup new machines on your one box. You can install different operating systems, even different platforms on one box.
Why do you want it? There are a number of reasons to virtualize:
- Who makes the software? The leader today is VMWare http://www.vmware.com. They have a two year headstart on their closest competitor. Microsoft and Citrix are making a hard charge to claim some of this space. We believe the battle is just starting to begin amongst these companies.
• Decrease number of servers to maintain. You can put 5 – 7 servers onto one box.
• Spend less money on hardware. If you need a new server, just install a new one on your virtualized machine. • Decrease need for cooling and space. With the price of energy increasing, virtualization is going to become mandatory in the future.
• Easier to manage, no longer do you need to be familiar with 10 different types of machines. As long as you know your one machine you will be ok. Only one set of drivers and bios’ to worry about.
• Easier to test with. Imagine having a test environment you can setup in minutes. If you break something and want to start from scratch, just restore your image you started with and you are good to go.
Why Select Right Click? Jim Harrington and Avi Lall both are VMWare certified. After working with many customers we know what products and add-ons you are going to need. Our installations go smooth and customers enjoy the benefits of virtualization immediately. Please call or email us for a free consultation on how virtualization can help your firm.
