Festive Greetings from all of us at MMC

Our Last Seminar of the Year – A Resounding Success

MMC hosts four informational seminars each year covering pertinent topics that assist to build the knowledge of our client’s IT Personnel and Business Management. These seminars are free for clients to attend and include a sumptuous breakfast and an array of exciting surprises during each presentation.

Our last seminar of 2009 focused on highlighting features that are available within the software our clients already use and which are able to add significant, additional value to business process efficiencies. We staged various scenarios that organisations encounter on a day to day basis, including how to streamline electronic Leave Applications, Procurement Processes to streamline the fulfilment of RFP requirements etc.

Many of our clients who attended our seminar walked away with MP3 players amongst other spot prizes and of course our overall winner of the day received a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate – a really valuable prize indeed!

MMC will be releasing the expected dates of our four seminars for 2010 in our January newsletter to enable clients to plan their attendance in advance, so be sure to keep an eye out for our next newsletter for details.

Seven Windows 7 keyboard shortcuts

If you're like us, you hardly ever touch your Windows key. Well, dust it off! This handy collection of Windows 7 keyboard shortcuts makes heavy use of that oft-neglected key.

Want a quick glance at what's on your desktop without having to close all your windows? Win + Space makes all windows transparent.

• Press Win + Up Arrow to maximize the active window.

• Dock the active window to either side of the screen with Win + Left/Right Arrow.

• Zoom in or out with Win + (+/-).

• Win + P opens Windows' presentation settings so you can quickly adjust display settings.

Clear your desktop

And now to bring a little whimsy to your humdrum computing life - To minimize all windows except the one that's currently active, click and hold the title bar of the window you want to keep while you shake the mouse. Repeat to restore the minimized windows.

Or you could click Win + Home. But really, what fun is that?

Create new folder

If you remember just one shortcut, make it this one: Ctrl-Shift-N to create a new folder.

IT World

Cyber war now a reality

In its fifth annual Virtual Criminology report, McAfee found that five countries, the US, Russia, France, Israel and China, are now armed with cyber weapons.

"Several nations around the world are actively engaged in cyber war-like preparations and attacks. Today, the weapons are not nuclear, but virtual, and everyone must adapt to these threats," says Jayson O'Reilly, regional manager for Africa at McAfee.

Experts are calling for a clear definition and an open debate on cyber warfare, according to McAfee. “Without an open discussion among the government, private sector and the public, future cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure could be devastating,” it says in a statement.

Targeting infrastructure

Nations are targeting government networks and critical infrastructures, with past targets including the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the US Secret Service, and the Department of Defence (in the US alone), notes McAfee.

The report also shows attackers are targeting infrastructure such as power grids, transportation, telecommunication, finance and water supplies. These are, in most developed countries, connected to the Internet and lack proper security functions.

The rules of engagement are not clearly defined, according to the report. This lack of definition makes it difficult to determine when a political response or threat of military action is warranted.

Private sector risks

Critical infrastructure is privately-owned in many developed countries. If virtual shooting starts, governments, corporations and private citizens may get caught in the crossfire, notes McAfee. Without insight into the government's cyber defence strategy, the private sector is not able to be proactive and take the proper precautions.

"Over the next 20 to 30 years, cyber attacks will increasingly become a component of war," William Crowell, a former deputy director of the US National Security Agency, says in the report.

IT Web

More attacks but fewer losses, survey finds

While more companies reported malware infections, denial-of-service attacks, financial fraud and password sniffing in the last year, claimed damages due to the attacks had shrunk, according to the latest survey of security managers and corporate executives conducted by the Computer Security Institute.

The report, released on Tuesday and covering from July 2008 to June 2009, revealed that more than 64 percent of companies reported malware infections, up from 50 percent during the same period the prior year. Similarly, 29 percent of companies reported being the target of a denial-of-service attack, up from 21 percent the prior year. Despite the increased incidents, losses fell to less than $235,000 per company on average, a decrease of 19 percent compared to the prior year.

The Computer Security Institute, which has conducted the survey for the past 14 years, highlighted the discrepancy and suggested caution in reading too much into the trend.

"This sounds like good news ... but it must be noted that, despite anonymity, only 102 respondents -- less than 25 percent -- were willing to share details of their financial losses, thus continuing a troublesome downward trend," the report stated.

Companies were adequately satisfied with security technology, but tools that purportedly gave managers visibility into the security of their networks — such as log management, intrusion detection systems, and data-loss prevention tools — ranked lowest in terms of satisfaction.

"Generally speaking, respondents did not seem to feel that their challenges were attributable to a lack of investment in their security programs or dissatisfaction with the security tools, but rather that, despite all their efforts, they still could not be certain about what was really going on in their environments, nor whether all their efforts were truly effective," the report stated.

SecurityFocus

Anti-spam test finds more is better

Using multiple spam filters increases the chance that junk e-mail will be blocked, while decreasing the chance that legitimate messages will be mistakenly classified as spam, Virus Bulletin, an industry intelligence firm, said on Monday.

In its latest tests of 14 anti-spam filters, the company found that a hypothetical filter — when given its test data, a collection of 200,000 messages — was 99.89 percent accurate, if it only categorized an e-mail message as spam when at least five of the individual engines classified the message as such. In addition, the meta-filter did not misclassify any legitimate e-mail message as spam.

"Anyone who has ever worked with an anti-spam solution will know that some spam emails are notoriously hard to filter, while some legitimate messages end up being marked as spam," Martijn Grooten, the firm's anti-spam test director, said in a statement. "It's therefore no surprise that no spam filter is faultless. However, the results of VB's test demonstrate that what is easy to filter for one product may cause trouble for another and vice versa."

The experiment matches results in the antivirus industry. University of Michigan researchers found that a single antivirus engine only detects 40 to 80 percent of malicious code in the first week following detection. Using multiple engines increased the chance of detecting new code. For example, four engines would increase to 90 percent the likelihood of identifying a malicious program.

Virus Bulletin called on anti-spam companies to cooperate and share information in an attempt to better detect spam.

SecurityFocus

10 tricks used by spammers to get into your inbox

Everybody hates email spam. It is annoying and wastes time, takes up disk space and can slow down the network. And despite the increasingly advanced efforts by the companies that make money from combating spam, it continues to grow at a startling rate. From June 2005 to June 2009 the amount of email spam more than quadrupled.

Money is of course the driver of spammers, who are mostly sales people looking to sell products and services. Email is a cheap way to get a message to millions of people – even if most of them do not even read it, the few that do respond make the spammers efforts profitable. In order to keep sending out their messages, spammers have had to have a few tricks up their sleeve in order to bypass spam filters.

1st trick: botnets and zombies

Spammers use ‘botnets’, a collection of computer systems or ‘zombies’, which are all linked to a common control structure. These zombies can be instructed to send out spam, phishing, viruses and other malware. Because IP addresses guilty of sending out too much spam get a ‘bad reputation’,

2nd trick: borrowing a good reputation

As mentioned, analysing the reputation of the Sender IP address is a common method used by spam filters to block spam. To counteract this defense, spammers ‘borrow’ IP addresses with a good or neutral reputation. They either create email accounts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) all around the world, or buy access to a hacked email server and exploit the reputation of the company whose server has been hacked.

3rd trick – getting around authentication

Authentication involves establishing whether an email really is from the domain it says it is. Organisations need to publish a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record, which tells email receivers that a given IP address is allowed to send email for a given domain. With strict set-up of an SPF record, no third party services can send out email on the company’s behalf. Despite the fact that many companies set up authentication, they often leave the option open for other IP addresses to send email, providing a loophole for spammers. Spammers can also set up a domain name of their own to authenticate properly and send spam from it.

4th trick – word salad

Spam filters evaluate the words in an email message and group them into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ words – bad ones being the ones typically found in spam emails. The term ‘word salad’ refers to the spammer’s trick, whereby extra ‘good’ words are added to an email message (those typically not associated with spam). The spam filter will pick up more good words than bad words, and decide that the message is ‘good’.

5th trick – light reading

Taking it a step further than the ‘word salad’ technique, some spam messages contain entire extra sentences and paragraphs added to the message – with the same aim, to add in good words and phrases to skew the spam filters evaluation of the whole message. The use of complete sentences makes it harder for the filter to exclude the good words.

6th trick – tiny text

Another way spammers trick spam filters is by changing the size of the font of some letters, yet making those that make up a message readable. The recipient can read the message, while the spam filter sees a line of gibberish.

7th trick – scrabble spam

While the human brain can decipher a scrambled message like ‘Crteae a more ppsorerous future for yuoserf’, spam filters cannot. And because slang, acronyms, abbreviations and human error feature regularly in our legitimate daily emails, it isn’t feasible to program spam filters to block emails with misspelled words in them. By scrambling the letters in words, spammers are often able to get past spam filters.

8th trick – bad words in disguise

Yet another way spammers get around spam filters is by using symbols, special characters and different character sets to spell out words. For example, VIAGRA becomes \/!ǺGRĂ – and it is estimated that there are over 600 quadrillion ways to spell this word using different variations.

9th trick – image tricks

If you receive a spam email with an image in it, by sending it to ‘junk’ you expect that your spam filter will stop the same message from reaching you again. But spammers get around this by making small, unnoticeable changes to the message or image –changing its size by one or two percent, changing the background colour, and making small adjustments to the layout.

10th trick – social engineering

Spammers play on our social relationships and expectations to make the email seem more legitimate - whether it is using the latest news headlines in the subject line to arouse our interest, or in the case of phishing emails, pretending to be a trustworthy source such as a bank to obtain account details. They also send messages with subject lines like ‘check this out’ and a PDF attachment containing the spam message – in this case most people won’t immediately think it is spam.

The solution?

There is no singular technology capable of blocking all spam – as soon as a technology proves to be efficient, as we’ve seen above, spammers work out a way to get around it. Currently, the best solution is using multiple anti-spam techniques together, which include both reputation analysis and content analysis. Reputation analysis should analyse not only the Sender IP Address and content, but the links/URLs, images, attachments, the emails structure and more. Effective content analysis techniques can include Bayesian filtering (a method whereby an email’s probability of being spam is determined)), lexigraphical distancing (checking for variations on spam words) and image inference analysis (whereby core features of an image that a spammer cannot manipulate are extracted to help determine if an e-mail is spam), as well as simpler checks like block/allow lists and SPF checks, which combine to work out the true intent of email messages.

IT News Africa

How Cloud Economics Will Change IT

Any IT department that has not embraced cloud computing had better be prepared to talk about it, at the very least, and that means getting a grasp on some wispy concepts. What are the true costs of cloud services? Does the cloud model support a corporation's overall economic goals? Is an internal cloud viable? Is cloud availability adequate?

As we approach the end of 2009, the hands-down winner of the hot IT trends award continues to be cloud computing. Yet the reality is that for many, cloud deployment strategies remain somewhat ethereal -- part theoretical, part vendor/marketing hype, and part vaguely defined future model.

At the same time, the intensity of interest in the cloud approach has been almost unprecedented. The promise of the cloud has struck a deep chord that resonates strongly, making it a phenomenon that IT organizations simply cannot ignore - or do so at their peril.

In one sense, the profound interest in the cloud model can be viewed as an indicator of a rather profound level of dissatisfaction with IT as it is currently practiced. Often viewed as unresponsive or at least non-empathetic, IT is too often perceived as an inhibitor to progress -- and a very expensive one at that. Along comes cloud computing, promising unimpeded flexibility, instantaneous provisioning, and unlimited capacity, with no upfront investment and pay as you go pricing. At 50,000 feet, at least, what's not to like?

Challenges come at lower altitudes, and much has already been written about hurdles related to performance, security, availability and other attributes. Clearly, cloud computing is still maturing: In its "Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2009," Gartner (NYSE: IT) indicates that the vast majority of cloud computing technologies are "more than two years from mainstream adoption."

As cloud options become more viable, they will begin to undergo more detailed economic scrutiny, but it's worth examining the state of cloud economics today and how this model is likely to evolve.

Server Utilization

Earlier this year, McKinsey & Company published a widely reported and much debated discussion document entitled "Clearing the air on cloud computing" (registration required), which included an analysis suggesting that the costs for many of Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) EC2 services rather quickly exceeded those of a traditional IT infrastructure when scaled to mid- to large-sized environments.

Since then, there have been several other efforts to evaluate "traditional IT build" versus "cloud buy" using Amazon's pricing as comparison points. It's interesting to note that Amazon is consistently the benchmark used in these comparisons presumably because it is widely regarded as a cloud infrastructure leader, but especially because its prices are incredibly easy to obtain. This is, in itself, a big deal.

How many IT organizations can provide the true costs for compute and storage services so readily? Regardless of the actual level of service, the cloud providers can at least quickly tell you what you get from their service and how much it will cost.

Invariably, these comparisons have demonstrated that it is often still technically cheaper to build server infrastructure configurations than to buy them, but with some caveats. One fundamental consideration is what assumptions are made concerning utilization. If systems are in use 24x7x365, then the build scenario looks more attractive.

Since Amazon bills by the hour, if a server is not fully utilized, then at some point the cost balance tips to Amazon's favor. Low utilization of servers is far from unlikely - in fact, it is the high probability of low utilization that underlies the success of server virtualization. Our virtualization practice regularly identifies large quantities of servers with CPU utilization rates of less than 10 percent!

Corporate Objectives

Another major factor in cloud economics is nontechnical, relating to corporate finance objectives and practices. Depending on the organization, having a balance sheet that is heavy with capital assets may be viewed as undesirable, and IT spending often impacts this significantly.

In organizations for which the cost of capital is high or that have other reasons for wishing to minimize capital purchases, the cloud approach, like other hosted options, affords an opportunity for cap-ex avoidance.

Unlike other options that typically involve time commitments and other contractual obligations, cloud services can be expanded or contracted on a much more granular basis. For some, this degree of flexibility alone may be enough to tip the scale in favor of the cloud.

Private Clouds

The avoidance of cap-ex is clearly an economic attraction for public cloud services, but what about private cloud infrastructures, with IT organizations building and operating their own cloud environments? Here the picture gets a bit cloudier. (Sorry!)

An internal cloud certainly requires infrastructure, which means buying (or leasing) gear to support demand. The key opportunity -- and challenge -- is achieving greater efficiency through improved utilization. However, this requires that IT adopt a model -- and mentality -- similar to that of a service provider, including the following:

• effective capacity planning to avoid buying too far ahead of the curve;

• standardized service offerings to simplify provisioning, maximize utilization, and minimize the inefficiencies of specialized, or "one-off," builds; and

• a cost-management capability that offers simplicity at the customer-facing request and provisioning stage, but is able to manage the back-end complexities of incorporating and allocating the various cost elements.

This is a tall order. Furthermore, all but the largest organizations are likely to be at somewhat of a disadvantage relative to public cloud providers when it comes to economies of scale.

For these reasons, external hosting providers that can offer services that act as an extension to the internal private cloud are likely to play a growing role in IT cloud plans. While not necessarily offering the instant on/off option of public providers, they do afford companies some flexibility to, for example, expand or contract their infrastructure based on cyclical needs, mitigating the requirement to purchase infrastructure capacity whose primary purpose is to accommodate infrequent peak loads.

The Cost of Five 9s

A crucial factor to consider when evaluating any cloud option is to understand exactly what you are getting for a given price and how well it aligns to what you need. Most public cloud infrastructure vendors currently position their services in the range of three 9s or so (99.9 percent to 99.95 percent) of availability. For most enterprises, availability expectations for production platforms are more likely to land in the five-9s realm, which would make the cloud a non-starter in these situations. Can this level of availability be addressed by the cloud? If so, at what cost?

A recent article detailing the Pentagon's Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) cloud services provides a somewhat startling answer. The cost of production servers offering 99.999 percent can be had at the seemingly not-so-bargain price of US$1,200 a month! Now, to be fair, the article does not provide details about what specifically is included. I would expect a system offering such a level of availability to be highly redundant, and considering the targeted user base, incorporate a high degree of security as well.

Determining whether this price is reasonable or excessive requires a specific understanding of what it would cost to deliver a comparable set of services in a traditional environment - price without context is meaningless. So, ultimately, the key to evaluating cloud economic viability is an understanding of both technical requirements and usage patterns. The ability - or lack thereof - of an IT organization to articulate these details will go a long way toward determining the appropriateness of a cloud solution.

Cloud evolution is advancing rapidly, and pricing is somewhat of a moving target (mostly downward) as technologies mature and service providers refine their models and respond to competition. The message for IT organizations should be clear: The cloud concept -- whether formally embraced or not -- is changing the IT conversation, and those organizations hoping to thrive must be prepared to participate in the discussion.

E-Commerce Times

Windows 7 features IT managers should be thankful for

Windows 7 is worth a closer look by IT managers, particularly those who have to replace their aging XP laptop fleet, writes David Strom. Here are 5 of his favorite Windows 7 mobility features:

1. Easier wireless connection process. You know how in the Mac OS you can just click on the drop-down little wireless symbol on the top menu bar and immediately see which networks are broadcasting? How you can just click on one of them and you are connected? Windows 7 has that too.
2. Printers that follow your choices. Now when you switch between different wireless networks, your default selection of printers also switches, so you don't queue up documents for the wrong printer. Your firewall, file sharing and other networking preferences can follow you among different network settings as well.
3. Better VPN features. There is a new feature called VPN Reconnect that allows Windows 7 to automatically re-establish active VPN connections when Internet connectivity is interrupted.
4. Better remote control/assistance. Windows Remote Desktop has been improved so that you can actually watch hi-def video and listen to audio across the Internet from your remote PC. There is also a better Remote Assistance program that brings ease of use closer to the third-party GoToMyPC and LogMeIn services.
5. Bitlocker to go. Windows had its own drive encryption software in Vista that was pretty much useless. Now in Win 7 you can encrypt an entire USB key and more importantly, IT managers can decrypt it when someone loses their password.

IT World

Employee-Owned Notebooks

Businesses are increasingly considering the use of employee-owned notebooks, and more than 40 per cent of organisations have a policy regarding the use of employee-owned PCs, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. Companies in the sample expect the average number of workers using employee-owned notebooks as their primary work PC to increase from 10 per cent in 2009 to 14 per cent by mid-2010.

The survey took place in the second quarter of 2009 and involved 528 IT managers in organisations with more than 500 employees in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom via a combination of phone-based and web-based interviews.

During the past two years, nine out of ten companies have addressed the issue of employee-owned devices. Nearly half (48 per cent) prohibit their use outright; many others (43 per cent) have specific policies that allow their use.

“While employee-owned notebook programmes started to appear a couple of years ago, the acceptance of such schemes by organisations varies greatly,” said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. “However, in the current climate of cost containment, large businesses are exploring all possibilities offered by alternative client computing architectures and device solution, and that includes employee-owned PCs.”

The Gartner survey found that service companies, such as insurance and telecommunications companies, are more likely to allow employee-owned PCs than organisations in the manufacturing, wholesale or government sectors. There were also differences from a country point of view with 60 per cent of the German companies in the sample currently allowing the use of employee-owned PCs versus only 30 per cent of US and UK companies.

Across all three surveyed countries, organisations expect to see an increase in the average number of notebook users that are using employee-owned PCs in the next 12 to 18 months. US companies expect to see the biggest increases in employee-owned PCs with approximately a 60 per cent increase. German companies expect a nearly 40 per cent increase, while UK organisations expect only modest increases of approximately 15 per cent in the next year.

“Growing numbers of employees are asking to use personally owned notebooks for work and an increasing proportion of companies will meet these requests through employee-owned notebook programmes, which define policies for usage, technical requirements and process for maintenance and support,” said Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Gartner analysts said that successful employee-owned notebook programs have the potential to improve predictability and manageability of the users’ software environment. Compared with less-managed deployment scenarios, a managed virtual machine on an employee-owned notebook offers total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of between 9 per cent and 40 per cent when compared with company provided notebooks.

Gartner maintains that most of the cost savings with employee-owned notebooks are in indirect management costs. The direct costs of a virtual machine on an employee-owned mobile PC are actually higher than for a company-provided mobile PC, but this is more than compensated for by the greater worker satisfaction and potential increased productivity.

“PC vendors cannot afford to miss the phenomenon of employee-owned notebooks and we advise them to create employee-purchase programmes that not only include hardware devices but also services and support options for users,” Ms Jump said. “PC vendors selling to the enterprise and midsize business segments should create PC products that combine features of business and consumer PCs.”

“Starting in 2010 in selected mature markets, PC vendors could create specific bundles, marketed through commercial retail channels, specifically for those using their own PC in the enterprise,” said Ms Escherich. “The hardware and software combination should include virtualisation software, productivity applications and the consumer’s favourite applications.”

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Employee-Owned Notebooks Gaining Popularity in Mature Markets.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1210414.

IT News Africa

Tech Transformation in 2010

The year ahead will bring significant advances in enterprise cloud computing, mobile technology convergence and business analytics as the world begins to recover from an economic beating.

In recent weeks, technology research firms revealed their predictions for 2010, identifying the industry developments likely to have a significant impact on IT and business planning.

According to the trends outlined, next year will bring both revival and radical change, as the industry "witnesses the potent combination of transformation tipping points in a year of economic upswing", according to the IDC http://cdn.idc.com/research/predictions10/downloads/Top10Predictions.pdf it adds that this will have an amplifying effect, for better or worse, on organisations' strategic choices.

At your service

One of the trends topping the lists is cloud computing, which the IDC predicts will greatly mature in 2010, bringing "enterprise-grade" cloud services to support the more demanding security and manageability needs of traditional IT.

According to Gartner, in its 2010 outlook http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613, enterprises consuming cloud services will increasingly act as cloud providers, delivering applications and services to business partners and customers.

David Cearley, vice-president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says the recession's impact on cloud computing has been twofold. "It makes people much more interested in the cloud because of its potential for a reduction in costs. If they're developing a new application, for example, they can reduce capital spent on infrastructure, so the financial side is driving interest."

At the same time, notes Cearley, organisations can move to more advanced systems by extending, say, an existing CRM system with Salesforce.com's cloud offering.

Cloud computing involves a major shift in the industry, with various IT-enabled capabilities - infrastructure, platforms, software, information and business process solutions - being delivered as a service.

"The key paradigm shift has been the 'as-a-service' model," notes Cearley.

"IT has originally been an intertwined stack of capabilities, while a key aspect of cloud computing is layers and the separation of concerns between the provider and customer."

IBM SA predicts a convergence of solutions, which will allow organisations to employ a hybrid cloud model. "This model will provide a simplified cloud management layer, enabling the customer to implement a private cloud environment, while also leveraging a public cloud service to address fluctuations in their computing environment, or to offload non-critical applications," says IBM SA representative Bandile Sikwane.

According to the IDC, this will bring a growing number of hybrid cloud offerings for managing private and public clouds, as well as a race to establish public cloud solution platforms, as major tech players battle it out for a leadership position.

Analyse this

Analytics is another one of Gartner's technologies to watch, with business intelligence (BI) being the number one technology priority for CIOs for the fourth year in a row, in Gartner's annual survey of 1 600 CIOs around the globe.

Mobile takeover

The dominance of the desktop is fading.

The firm predicts organisations will increasingly use analytical tools to maximise business decision-making by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after processes are implemented. "The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimisation and other analytics, not simply information," says Gartner.

"We are seeing a shift from reactive analysis to more active analytics," notes Cearley. He explains that the trend is moving data to a point of decision-making, and from an explanatory to a predictive pattern.

This will be a crucial consideration in a world where the amount of data doubles every two years, according to IBM. By next year, it expects the amount of digital information will reach 988 exabytes. "That's roughly the equivalent of a stack of books from the Sun, to Pluto, and back.

"To address these challenges, organisations are increasingly depending on analysing hidden information patterns for a variety of transactions," says Sikwane. "Business analytics help an organisation take control of its data, gain valuable insight from it, and move from sensing and responding, to predicting and acting."

Cearley suggests there will also be a move from structured data to unstructured data, and the convergence of the two. "Increasingly, the focus will shift from internal data to external data and bringing the two together, so meta data will become important."

IT for green

According to the IDC, rising energy costs and pressure from the Copenhagen climate change negotiations will make sustainability a source of renewed opportunity for the IT industry in 2010.

"There will be a continuing and steady focus on carbon issues and energy efficiency," says Cearley. "In some cases, IT is only responsible for around 2% of energy consumption in an organisation, but the ability of IT to tackle the impact of other areas in the business will become very important.

"This trend is being driven by increasing regulation and increasing costs, and is strengthened by the fact that many data centres simply can't get more power because of the grid," explains Cearley.

"In the US, the 'green' in green IT thus far has referred to money, and what's been driving most of the interest is a reduction in costs. The biggest change in the US has seen the shift from simply focusing on green IT and the energy use of technology to IT for green - how it can impact energy usage in companies."

Tim James, director of local consultancy Sustainable IT, says companies can use IT solutions to tackle energy usage in two major ways. "In terms of reducing the footprint of the IT service, you need to look at data centre efficiency, PC and server power management, desktop and server virtualisation, storage consolidation, and print management.

"In terms of the application of IT within a business, you need to look at carbon management software, video conferencing, building management systems, smart motors, teleconferencing, fleet management, and so on, depending on the nature of the business," he adds.

Mobile reign

Next year will see the continued rise of mobile devices, not only as access devices, but as software and solution platforms - "challenging for the first time in over two decades, the primacy of the PC", says the IDC.

There is also a focus on multiple cores, rather than single-core processors, notes Cearley. As more applications are written for multiple cores and with mobile devices in mind, greater convergence of the mobile environment and desktop will occur.

A recent In-Stat report http://www.instat.com/press.asp?ID=2601&sku=IN0904447SI predicts single-core processors are likely to become obsolete by 2013, with multi-core processors set to achieve widespread adoption in all mobile devices in three years' time. "With the advent of multi-core netbooks already upon us, ultra-mobile personal computers, multimedia Internet devices and consumer electronics devices will likely follow suit," it says.

Julien Blin, CEO of telecoms consultancy JBB Research, says the consumer mobile space will also see growth. "In developed countries, advanced 3G smartphones, like the iPhone and Android handsets, have become a must-have.

"In developing countries, feature phones with multimedia capabilities have experienced strong growth. Data services like SMS, mobile Web and mobile payment are continuing to gain good traction in emerging markets like Africa," notes Blin.

He foresees greater convergence of mobile and Web technologies. "Look at the mobile app stores. Most of those apps are Web-based. In the future, I expect to see advanced Google Chrome-type mobile browsers capable of pushing Web-based mobile apps."

Environment as computer

A related trend, according to Cearley, is that intelligent handheld devices are driving Flash memory capabilities. While Flash memory is still expensive, Gartner says given the rate of price declines, the technology will enjoy more than a 100% compound annual growth rate during the new few years. "This will see it become strategic in many IT areas, including consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems," the firm adds.

Also, embedded devices will create the "environment as computer", predicts Cearley. "The increasing number of devices people use daily will result in the entire environment becoming a computer," he says, with an evolution of user interfaces away from an individual user device.

The growing convergence of social and business communication brings a shift to a more distributed, flexible model of work, says Sikwane, adding this has important implications for the future of organisations.

"Technological advances of this nature will create a new generation of mobile workers. For these employees, the car, the home office, the hotel, and the customer site have become the nexus of their working lives," explains IBM. "This includes the way people interact with their colleagues, how employees are managed and evaluated, and how work is coordinated and accomplished."

According to Gartner, companies must focus on the use of social media in the enterprise and integrate with externally-facing public communities. "Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together," adds the firm.

Business is back

The IDC expects growth will return to the IT industry next year, with mobile devices, virtualisation solutions and software all likely to rake in the profits. The 3.2% predicted growth will bring the industry back to 2008 spending levels of about $1.5 billion, it adds.

Cearley says economic difficulties have shifted the enterprise's focus on the impact of technology. Solutions have been scrutinised in terms of how direct or indirect their effects will be, in relation to the expenses they incur.

"Where impact is uncertain, projects are put off as people are less willing to spend. The timing has been shortened - rather than focus on the impact they'll have one or two years down the road, companies prefer those technologies that have an immediate impact."

In 2010, says Cearley, some of this rigid control is being loosened, and enterprises are willing to look at projects which may have more of an indirect impact.

Consequently, executives expect technology spending to increase in their organisation either selectively (47%) or across the board (10%) in the next 12 months.

"The results of the survey show that firms recognise the need to invest in technology to defend and accelerate their competitive position, even in difficult times, which has not always been the case in the past," said Keith Haviland, Accenture's global MD of systems integration consulting.

IT Web

Windows 7 to speak South African

Microsoft will release the Windows 7 operating system in 10 African languages in 2011, five of which are South African official languages.

The company will make available freely downloadable language interface packs for people who prefer to access programs such as Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Vista and XP in their home languages.

Vis Naidoo, of Microsoft SA, said studies shown that people learnt better in their mother tongues.

Providing access to computer technology in local languages would open new worlds for education and economic participation to millions, he added.

The language packs would be available in Afrikaans, Sotho, Xhosa, Zulu and Tswana as well as Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria, Swahili in Kenya and Amharic in Ethiopia.

Microsoft translation teams have started translating Windows 7 and the upcoming Office 2010 productivity suite into these languages.

IOL Technology

IT gears up for a showdown in Copenhagen

With less than a week to go until the UN climate talks begin, delegates from around the world are preparing to descend on Copenhagen, each with an idea of what they want to see in the final agreement.

One of these delegations is the UN body for IT, known as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU will run sessions at Copenhagen aimed at persuading delegates and negotiators of the benefits of mentioning IT in the text of the final agreement.

Such a move would be key to gaining worldwide recognition of the role that IT could play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to Malcolm Johnson, director of the ITU’s standardisation bureau.

“We are only going to achieve the necessary reductions [in greenhouse gases] if the contribution that ICTs can make is recognised,” he said.

A study by NGO The Climate Group found that IT alone could reduce C02 emissions by 15 per cent by 2020, and some in the industry feel that this figure could be as high as 20 per cent.

Benefits of using IT to cut C02

Mentioning IT’s ability to reduce emissions in the agreement’s text would be a catalyst for two reasons.

First, it would force governments and businesses to see IT as an enabler, rather than a cost.

Second, it would help spur the rapid transfer of IT-based emission-reduction solutions to the developing world by enabling firms to receive carbon credits for investing in projects overseas, said Catalina Macgregor, the ITU’s green IT liaison officer.

“Once the sector is mentioned in the Copenhagen text, you can start on a framework for including IT projects in the Clean Development Mechanism,” she said.

Under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), governments and businesses in the developed world can receive carbon credits for investing in certain types of carbon reduction projects in the developing world. But it does not recognise IT projects yet.

Doing so would facilitate the transfer of a number of technologies with huge potential to prevent carbon and other greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere by the developing nations.

Technologies with carbon-saving potential

These technologies fall into three main areas: transport, buildings and electricity supply.

In transport, technologies such as road pricing, Oyster pay systems and intelligent transport systems could all help reduce traffic.

In the building sector, low-energy LED lighting systems and building management systems can help reduce emissions, while better logistics software could help reduce the estimated 12 per cent of materials delivered to work sites that are left unused.

But the biggest potential for IT to tackle emissions is in the electricity supply sector. A report by the Electric Power Research Institute found that smart meter and smart grid technologies alone could reduce emissions in the US by almost five per cent by 2030.

Even in major economies, these technologies have not been pushed hard enough by governments, according to Emma Fryer, head of climate change programmes at IT industry body Intellect.

“IT is a hopelessly undertapped resource. People still see it as a polluter and not a tool. Getting a mention in the Copenhagen text will help change that attitude,” she said.

Fryer partly blames a Gartner study from 2007 widely cited in the media, which claimed IT was responsible for two per cent of global emissions – the same as airlines.

Coupled with a general ignorance of IT, this statistic led political and business leaders to ignore the benefits it could offer.

Carbon credits for IT projects in the CDM will help remedy this, said Fryer.

“It will spur research and development and drive competition. Most importantly, it will help developing countries to leapfrog inefficient technologies to more efficient ones,” she said.

The Greening Government ICT Strategy

The UK’s Greening Government ICT Strategy was launched in July 2008. It has two aims: to make the energy consumption of our IT systems carbon neutral by 2012, and to make them carbon neutral across their whole lifetime, from manufacture to disposal, by 2020. One year on from the launch of the strategy, the government has reduced its carbon emissions by more than 12,000 tonnes, but there is still some way to go. Next summer it will update the strategy and produce a handbook for all public sector CIOs and CTOs with clear guidelines on the actions they need to take in every area.

Catalina Macgregor, founder of the CIO Council Green ICT Delivery Unit in the Cabinet Office, said: “The workbook contains a code of conduct for datacentres, printers, mobile phones, paper, ink cartridges and many other things. The CIOs will review it from January and the new targets will be announced in September next year.”

Computing.co.uk

Gain the Most from your IT Investment with our November Seminar

Leading IT for Business Prosperity – this is our slogan and the title of our next seminar which will be held on the 24th of November 2009 at The Vineyard Hotel in Newlands Cape Town.

In the majority of cases, we find that our clients could be streamlining processes, enhancing operations and ultimately gaining so much additional value through using more of the functionality that the technologies they already have in place, provide.

Our November seminar is aimed at presenting Business Leaders, Senior Management and IT Personnel with more insight into how to maximise their use of the range of features they already have access to.

MMC is committed to ensuring you gain the most benefit from your IT investment and with this seminar, we hope to help you prepare for an even more prosperous and successful year in 2010.

IMPORTANT: Remember that admission is free of charge and we provide a sumptuous full English breakfast for all delegates. Booking is essential, so please contact Marc Blumberg telephonically on 021 530 1600 or via email at marc@mmc.za.com to book your seat.

Drowning in Passwords: Tips and Tools to Stay Safe and Sane

Another day, another password: Thanks to Web-based apps, we're all acquiring passwords at quite a clip. How do you remember them all while staying secure? Here are some helpful tools and strategies that don't involve writing your passwords on sticky notes.

Who the heck am I? Am I shopper-Bill, flyer-Bill, reader-Bill, buyer-Bill, potrero-Bill, or this that and the other Bill on the 30 or more sites that comprise my online life? And which of my many passwords do I need right now?

If you spend much time online, you probably have the same problem I do: How to remember your ever-growing list of online usernames and passwords—and stay secure at the same time.

You're savvy enough to know that identity theft and illegal access to personal and financial data are real-world problems that you want to avoid. But what are you doing about it? Odds are, not much, says Andrew Jaquith, a computer security analyst at Forrester Research. "There are two classes of people; those who seem to care about the security of their accounts, and those who act as if they don't." Most people, he says, fall in the latter category.

If you're one of the majority, your security strategy may be nothing more than using a single password for every site you need to access. On the one hand, the chances of it being stolen aren't terribly high and you probably won't forget it. But if it is stolen, the malefactor will have access to your entire online life, including bank accounts and maybe medical records. Not a pretty thought.

It turns out that there are a number of strategies that will help you avoid that ugly scenario. Most of them are simple, free or quite inexpensive, and much more secure than what you're doing now. But some are just halfway measures that could let you down in a pinch.

A Password Safe of Sorts

Let's start with my favorite. A Windows program called RoboForm, ($29.95) from Siber Systems. RoboForm stores your passwords, usernames, personal information, and the URLs of sites you visit on its secure server. Your information is protected by a master password that you'll enter before logging into a site. The program will then log you in, and automatically fill out the kinds of forms you need to do things when shopping online. If you typically work on two computers, say one at home and one in the office, you can synch the two PCs and have your passwords on both systems.

Until recently, RoboForm suffered from the same flaw that most password managers suffer from:it was useless if you were on a public computer. That's a real problem if you're traveling without your laptop and suddenly realize you have bills to pay via your banking site, or want to make an online trade.

RoboForm Online fixes that. It is however, in beta form, and a bit clunky, requiring a double sign on and a few other minor annoyances. But it does work (based on my try out) and the company expects to have a finished, and presumably more polished, version out within a few months.

There's also a version for the iPhone, and it's possible to load RoboForm onto a USB drive and take it with you for use on public computers. The company says the USB version leaves no traces behind.

If you use RoboForm do not forget your master password—it is not recoverable. Although password recovery is a common feature on many Web sites, Siber Systems decided that enhanced security was more important than potential inconvenience.

Tools for Mac Users

By the company's own admission, RoboForm doesn't work very well on a Mac (that's supposed to change next year) but a similar program called 1Password ($39.95) from Agile Web Solutions, offers many of the same features for use on Apple hardware. I haven't tried it out, but it's earned good reviews and gets nod from Forrester's Jaquith. Users of various versions of the Mac OS can also take

advantage of a built-in feature called Keychain that offers password management on a single machine.

Another option that's similar to RoboForm, Callpod's $29.95 Keeper utility, comes in versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux users (The vendor offers a 15-day free trial.) A separate mobile Keeper version serves iPhone and iPod touch users.

If you are a smartphone user, the first step you should take to stay safe is password protect your whole device.

A Free Trick or Two

Don't want to spend money? You could simply put your passwords in a password-protected file. If you use Microsoft Word, it's easy. Simply go to Tools, then Options and click the security tab. You'll have the option to require a password to open the file, or just to modify it. If you're traveling, you can put that file on a USB drive. But don't forget that password. If there's a backdoor that will let you recover the file without it, I haven't heard about it. Warning: Many security gurus, such as Bruce Schneier, don't advocate keeping this type of file on your PC.

Most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, can automatically fill in forms and passwords for you. That's certainly helpful and if you're certain that no one else has access to your computer, it's not terribly risky. However, if your teenager or someone else does use your computer, you could be in trouble.

A simple solution is to delete saved passwords and forms when you get done. In Firefox, for example, go to "Tools," "Options" and then the security tab and look for the "saved passwords" button. Click it and a list of saved passwords and usernames opens up. Simply delete all or some of them. Other browsers have similar features.

Also remember that public computers are often infected with malware, including keyloggers that copy everything you type. Password managers defeat them, since the password is not actually typed on the page.

Finally, Google and some other online heavyweights are reviving an old idea, a secure, single password/username combo, such as your Google or Yahoo ID, that you could use for multiple sites.

Sun and other companies have experimented with similar schemes, but none ever got off the ground. Maybe this attempt will be the charm. But I'm not holding my breath, and will continue to explore password management options that really exist. So should you.

CIO.com