From the dWb website

News Snippets

May 2006 News

  • Do you know what IT costs?
  • Google goes to places no other search engines go.
  • Vista PCs will be more expensive
  • Never mind the complexity its the length that really makes the difference

Do you know what IT costs?

A report from research group Vanson Bourne have identified that 1/3rd of businesses do not know how much their IT actually costs. It found that 53% lacked accurate cost data and 48% were unable to allocate cost by service. Of those that thought they knew the cost, 35% admitted some problems with the accuracy, only 7% thought they had the costs fully under control. The difficult problem is when shared services: web, storage, network, etc. needs to be allocated. The issue to be addressed is the way IT is bought and how it is consumed and the associated business value.

Google goes to places no other search engines go.

Enterprises can now use the OneBox for Enterprise to surf their back-office systems and display them in the standard Google interface. The OneBox suite includes solutions from Cognos, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce and SAS. The search business has become the new battle-ground in the increasingly important information management environment.

Vista PCs will be more expensive

To take full advantage of the Vista operating system the hardware specification will make PCs up to $600 more expensive. The hardware  recommendation from Microsoft is: Dual-core or Pentium-class processor, 1GB dual-channel system memory and Premium graphics card (ATI, Nvidia). This brings the PC into the high-end workstation community so IT organisations will have to reconsider the cascading model to best manage their assets.

Never mind the complexity its the length that really makes the difference

Security policies normally demand complex constructs to be strong. To be complex you need use as many character types as possible: high and low case, numeric and special characters. To be really secure a password really needs to be long - not complex - although complexity can help. An eight character complex password is not as strong as a nine character non-complex password and a password like "thisisasecret" is really very strong. You can get more information from (microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/secmgmt/sm1005.pspx). Remember that nothing adds more strength to a password than adding more characters.

Snippets

  • The Climateprediction.net distributed climate prediction project has a foggy experience. The latest release failed to include the "global dimming" phenomenon that relates to the effects caused by man-made atmospheric sulphate emissions.
  • The Southern England NHS trust care records service implementation causes cancellation in operations and delays in treatments. Many patients have been "lost in the system" so computerisation has not really helped but only it cost only £6.2bn so you get what you pay for.
  • Get your latest 2nd generation RFID tags from Wal-Mart. With the ability to work faster and over larger distances you could be scanned as you walk back to your car.
  • Oracle finally fix the flaw, identified in January, that allowed hackers to take control over back-end database servers. Many experts are criticising Oracle for the time it has taken and the process weaknesses that have been high-lighted.
  • Accenture financial results look poorly as the impact of the NHS Connecting for health project take effect. The NHS IT refresh project has had the same effect on all of the other participants - maybe it is some sort of disease.

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