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CA Technologies And SAP Reduce The Risk In Risk Management
July 27, 2010 10:00 AM
CA Technologies and SAP recently announced a collaborative partnership to help their customers better manage risk and compliance initiatives across both business and IT infrastructure processes. That has the potential of both reducing the risk in risk management, as well as the risk in not being compliant. Before we examine the CA Technologies and SAP partnership specifically, let's consider its broader context. Beyond the "real" physical world our five senses were designed to perceive lies the non-physical world of information and its related processes. Despite being intangible, information is one of the foundations of our society for individuals and organizations. Consider the consequences if your bank account information electronically disappeared.
RPost Delivers Key Capabilities For Outbound E-mails
July 2, 2010 12:30 PM
Everyone knows that e-mail is ubiquitous. In fact, if you are reading this, you can probably not conceive of being without e-mail. Although much e-mail is mundane and routine (at best!), many are very serious business indeed, such as proposals, contracts, orders and invoices, legal documents and other critical and/or sensitive correspondence. For these, you want features, such as certifying that a message was actually delivered or including an electronic signature. For this type of functionality, RPost as a Los Angeles-based software company has made a business of providing managed outbound messaging services.
Openness vs. Privacy: The Important Role Data Redaction Plays In Data Privacy
June 17, 2010 12:30 PM
Data privacy is a hot topic for all enterprises, both private and public, and data redaction often has an important role in these efforts. That said, redaction is a term that some IT organizations have never heard of. Even if they have, they would probably be hard pressed to define it or explain its importance to their organizations, but that situation is changing quickly as organizations realize that redaction offers a solution that balances the need for data openness with the need for data privacy.
IBM Continues To Expand Midrange Storage
May 27, 2010 1:19 PM
Over the past several years, one of IBM's continuing areas of emphasis has been midrange storage. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the company has launched the latest model in its DS3000 line, the DS3500 Express. In addition, IBM announced the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Disk Midrange Edition software that works with the DS3500, as well as its other midrange storage products. IBM has four primary disk array storage families: the DS3000, the DS5000, and the DS8000, along with XIV (there is also a DS4000 family, but it is being phased out). IBM views the DS3000 family as its entry-level storage system, the DS5000 as the high-end midrange family and the DS8000 as the enterprise-class storage family.
EMC World: Steps To A Private Cloud
May 20, 2010 10:15 AM
The unifying theme at the recent EMC World 2010 conference in Boston was that the journey to the private cloud starts now. While that vision permeated company executives' keynote presentations, do not make the mistake that EMC has its head in the clouds. Large vendors need to take a leadership role so that customers believe that they will be able to meet their evolving requirements. Those vendors also have to have a clear understanding of what customer requirements are today, a point to which EMC has always paid close attention.
IBM Adds Punch To LTO 5 Tape
April 23, 2010 8:00 AM
Along with other vendors, IBM is announcing the latest generation in Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape technology--Ultrium 5 tape drives. This new generation is attractive to IT organizations that either use or may be planning to use LTO tape technology in terms of feeds and speeds that follow the typical high-technology, evolutionary path of providing "better, faster, cheaper" capabilities. But IBM is also offering two new differentiating capabilities that add extra punch to its announcement.
Iron Mountain Sets Its Sights High
April 12, 2010 11:00 AM
When we hear the term "information technology" (IT), most of us think of digitally generated information, yet physical information, such as paper documents and printed photographs, still play a large role in our lives. Iron Mountain is a unique IT vendor in that its spans both the physical and digital information worlds, as well as the hybrid territory that links the two. That is significantly different from traditional hardware, software, and services vendors, so it should come as no surprise that Iron Mountain has an interesting business model story to tell.
LSI: The Building Block Supplier For Storage And Networking
April 6, 2010 9:00 AM
What large multi-product IT vendors do is hard to describe in a few words, and LSI is no exception. Saying that LSI is a storage and networking solutions company is a good start. Saying that LSI is an IT infrastructure component building block supplier helps define it a bit further. LSI views itself as delivering the foundation for innovation in IT infrastructure, and although IT organizations may not know it, they probably could be called (with apologies to Intel) "LSI Inside," embedded as part of their storage and networking products. Examining LSI a little deeper may help illuminate a company that not only affects IT infrastructures today but is likely to have an even greater impact tomorrow.
Viridity's EnergyCenter Brings Energy Management To The Data Center
March 31, 2010 11:16 AM
Mark Twain famously said, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Conversely, in IT everyone talks about data center energy efficiency, and many vendors are trying to do something about it. The introduction of Viridity's new EnergyCenter offers a particularly intriguing example. Viridity, a start-up company, tackles the data center energy-efficiency problem head on with EnergyCenter, a software approach to enabling data center energy optimization. Now corporate initiatives to go "green" are well and good, but there a couple of pragmatic business reasons why energy efficiency is being increasingly scrutinized within IT organizations.
HP Intends To Stay King Of The IT Vendor Hill
March 26, 2010 11:08 AM
Hewlett-Packard (HP) broke into the top 10 Fortune 500 at #9 in 2009 with roughly $115 billion in annual sales. It's an impressive feat, but what's more interesting is where HP goes from here. But before we examine what HP is doing and plans to do, we need a little perspective. IT in its broadest sense is, and will continue to be, one of the major drivers of economic productivity and wealth creation. Yet the number of large IT information infrastructure companies is relatively small, undercutting the conventional 80-20 rule (80% of revenue is generated by 20% of the players in the industry).
EMC Lays Down The Virtual Storage Gauntlet
March 22, 2010 8:00 AM
In a recent event focused on "virtual storage," EMC fearlessly stated that "this changes everything." Thus, the company audaciously claims to "boldly go where no one has gone before." We industry analysts love that type of claim as it stirs up controversy, discussion and the need to write millions of words analyzing and dissecting its meaning, value and validity not only now, but also over the next few years. So, in a thumbnail sketch (relatively speaking) rather than a million words, let's begin to examine what is happening and what it means.
IBM's Integrated Service Management Quickens Pulse
March 16, 2010 9:54 AM
Despite all the buzz about software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), IT as a service is nothing new. That is what IT, when provided by support organizations, always has been and always will be. However, making that service better and extending its reach and range beyond traditional boundaries is critical to forward movement. That is where service management comes in.
IBM Bolsters The Case For Information Governance
March 3, 2010 9:26 AM
IBM recently staged a coming of age party for information governance. Information governance is nothing new for the company, its latest announcement simply heightens its growing emphasis. IBM, along with some other vendors, is increasing the drumbeat for a very good reason: governance is critical to leveraging information as effectively as possible. Since many enterprises are still unclear on what information governance is--let alone its benefits and how to do it--putting an information governance strategy in place is not intuitively obvious. But before we discuss the subject more fully, a little history lesson is appropriate to put in context how we have come to the need for a formal information governance strategy and program.
Enterprises Need to Pay More Attention to Data Privacy
February 15, 2010 12:00 PM
Many enterprises are still under the delusion that they can do more or less what they want with individuals' personal information. The European Union, many states (including California with its data breach law), and now Massachusetts are attempting to disabuse them of that notion. But this situation is not only about how to achieve compliance with disparate laws; it should also be a wakeup call informing enterprises that they now have to manage information for more than what they consider to be their primary business processes.
Wave Systems Rides The Wave Of Self-Encrypting Disk Drives
February 9, 2010 9:13 AM
Protecting the confidentiality of data on mobile devices is an increasingly critical issue. For example, the loss or theft of laptop computers has led to numerous breaches of data privacy laws for exposing confidential information, such as Social Security and credit card numbers. Public admission of such a data breach is not only a matter of embarrassment and direct costs, such as notifying individuals of the thefts, but may also subject the company to fines and other sanctions.
CommVault Delivers A Cloud-Enabled Platform
February 5, 2010 1:00 PM
Everybody wants to go to heaven someday, but nobody seems to want to go now. Why so? Perhaps it's mere uncertainty. If we substitute the cloud for "heaven," the same seems to be true today. That is why it is so important for vendors to create products and services that can actually get clients to the cloud today while still keeping their feet on the ground. With that in mind, CommVault's ability to effectively extend its data management platform into the cloud provides a positive illustration that the cloud can provide real value today and not just someday. Such examples are important so that the cloud is not just dismissed as hype.
Opternity Knocks
January 29, 2010 11:00 AM
You probably haven't heard of Opternity, a start-up company that promises a new "laser" tape technology for enterprise space that increases the capacity of a tape cartridge by nearly an order of magnitude, or 10 times, that of existing tape technology for the same media cost while at the same time dramatically increasing the tape's shelf life to fifty years. Why is this important? Consider first all the predictions about the continuing deluge of data. To paraphrase Mark Twain on the weather (and to exaggerate a bit), everyone talks about innovation, but nobody does anything about it. If Opternity misses its opportunity, we will all be missing an opportunity, but we won't know it.
Compellent Makes A Strong Case In Midrange Storage
January 18, 2010 10:00 AM
Compellent Technologies is a player in the midrange storage market that does not get the recognition that it deserves. The reason for that is simple: When customer attention turns to storage, their first focus is on the large players, such as EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp, whose market presence and mind share, wide product diversity and strategic visions tend to dominate (and rightfully so) any discussions of how the storage market is being shaped. Next come startups and emerging companies that focus on a hot new technology in the hopes that they may be the next Data Domain (data deduplication) or Riverbed (WAN acceleration), or the surprise player in emerging SSD and cloud computing markets.
Should An Expectation Of Employee Privacy Exist?
January 8, 2010 1:00 PM
Continuing our previous discussion on U.S. Supreme Court case on a data privacy issue related to whether or not an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy for personal messages sent on devices owned by an employer, we have to ask, does it matter that employees know that personal information will be captured and monitored by employers?
Will The U.S. Supreme Court Provide Clarity On Employee Privacy?
January 7, 2010 1:44 PM
The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to accept a case on a data privacy issue related to whether or not an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy for personal messages sent on devices owned by an employer. The legal question revolves around whether or not such personal messages are protected under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Ostensibly, this is about a narrow situation where a public employee had his pager messages transcribed into text and read by his superior. Practically, it touches a much broader and more important issue of how employee data privacy affects the management of information that organizations, including business, governmental and non-profit entities, need to keep and examine for legitimate purposes, such as compliance with government regulations or discovery related to a court case.
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