We spoke recently with Jim Rhyne, a distinguished engineer and eServer tools and enterprise modernization architect with IBM. Our discussion ranged from the scope of enterprise modernization (hint, companies often fail to adequately anticipate skills modernization), the phenomenon of mainframe brain drain (Rhyne isn’t convinced that there’s anything to it), application modernization strategies and, of course, the maturity of the Web services standards themselves.
Customers losing patience with negotiating database licenses are increasingly adopting open source DBMSes such as MySQL
Spending on storage and software should grow fastest next year. Among CIOs' top priorities next year: cost reduction, security, application integration, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
Worldwide disk storage systems sales could easily reach an exabyte by next year.
Analysts from professional services firm Tallán explain the trends IT must manage next year.
Clustered file system advocates have positioned their solutions as alternatives to the monolithic file systems (such as WAFL).
Companies must protect their data as well as their reputations.
Top growth areas: firewalls, IDS/IPS, virus scanning, and vulnerability assessment. By 2005, security managers plan to buy all-in-one appliances that combine these functions. Infonetics Research also
Oracle releases most, but not all patches, necessary to protect against SSL vulnerability. Kaspersky Labs reveals the top troublemakers in November. Yahoo's popular instant messaging program vulnerabilities.
Tool providers recognize the lack of interoperability is a serious problem, but solutions vary greatly.
New SEC rules among the reasons fewer companies will offer the benefit next year
WAFL enabled a new type of appliance-based storage hardware and set the bar for all other NAS vendors—which makes Network Appliance’s purchase of Spinnaker Networks all the more puzzling.
Installing a spam filter helped one Atlanta firm eliminate 95% of unsolicited e-mail.
Security incidents are up 15 percent, and the gap between vulnerability disclosure and exploit shrinks
F-Secure releases a dozen tips to help users avoid common worm problems
Down time, different maintenance cycles cited as problems.
Big Blue announces two new Itanium 2-based systems in just six months
New legislation will doubtless require encryption of data traversing networks and Fibre Channel fabrics.
Bluetooth can be found in newer versions of everything from PDAs to cell phones, but the technology is far from secure. Companies can employ a number of defenses against Bluetooth's risks.
Vulnerabilities found in IE, Word, Excel, FrontPage Server Extensions, and Windows Workstation Service.