Now as an information technology provider, it is not our place to speculate on who is in the right or wrong, or why it happened. What I can comment on however is the market as a whole, and what the industry of the future could look like.
It was Nobel Prize winner Gérard Debreu who came up with general equilibrium theory which would result in Pareto Optimum, or the conditions of a perfect market. In a perfect market, he outlined that individuals cannot maximise profits at the expense of others. This would be inefficient and signal market failure. The purpose of the market is to efficiently allocate resources and to maximise the welfare of consumers and producers alike. This market would exist within the following conditions:

1. Perfect market information
2. No participant with market power to set prices
3. No barriers to entry or exit
4. Equal access to production technology

It is the area of perfect market information that interests me most (the rest is best left to the regulator).

So what conditions would have to exist to achieve this? Well the fuel position of all generators would need to publicly accessible. This would include lake levels, forecast weather for rain and wind and ambient temperature, gas reserves, coal reserves, and geothermal outputs. We would need the details of all available generation assets, including performance, asset life, and maintenance. We would also need to have a transparent view on all transmission, including asset information, performance, constraints, maintenance schedules, planned outages. And we would also need to have an accurate view of consumption, where, when, how much, and accurate forecasts.

Taking all of these data inputs into complex mathematical models we could then produce detailed forecasting for load, available market generation, transmission capabilities and price. This could also be designed with modern computing power to learn. Sounds too futuristic? IBM recently achieved something vastly more complex than this with the Watson Jeopardy! Project.

Now having worked in the industry for the last decade, I know that this information is available, and that generators can (and do) pull together this information to gain a view. But it takes a lot of effort, it is slow, and no one party has a collective view.

But what if they did have this view? And it was available to all market players? Would this result in the most efficient allocation of resources to maximise value to all market players and consumers equally? And would it enable market players and consumers to shape their behaviour both ahead of time, and in real time to ensure that market abuse does not occur? And would it highlight hedge capabilities? I think that it would.
So what is required to build such a view? Leadership. And a powerful vision for a new market paradigm which involves systems thinking and a systems approach. The data and the information already exist in pockets. It’s the bringing of this together that would be the real challenge. But it could be done. And the capability exists to undertake complex analysis and optimisation.

In a future market of transparent (maybe not perfect) information, there would be few places to hide. And few avenues to seize market power.
In a Mugabe-efficient market where one party gains the ability to maximise profits at the expense of others, you invariably create an uprising at some point in time.

We can create a smarter market. Or we will have one that is more regulated.

Virtual desktops are already widely in use in call centers and a couple of other very specific business environments. These environments have a large number of desktop computers concentrated in a single location, all using the same set of applications. Often, as in company service centers, they also depend heavily on server-based applications and databases, for instance to create and migrate trouble tickets through a standardized service system. In hospitals VDI is becoming popular in part because it keeps all patient data on a central server, making the high security and privacy required by law for those records easier to enforce. Today, however, a growing number of experts believe that desktop virtualisation technology is ready to break out of those limited environments into more general business use and that the migration to Windows 7 may trigger that shift in office computing.

What is Desktop Virtualisation?

Basically in VDI, a central server replaces the functionality of the C drives on the virtualised desktop computers. The desktop operating system, the applications, and the data associated with those applications, reside on that server rather than on the individual internal C drives. When a virtualised computer is booted, the microcode boots the OS across the LAN from this server, and similarly when an employee opens an application or a document or database within an application, those are sent across the LAN from the server. The desktop handles the graphics, creating the displays for the user, and may also do the actual computation, although much of that may also be done on the server.

This has several advantages. First, it can save a company a fair amount of money, depending on the number of desktops. Obviously the company still has to pay a license for each seat using the operating system and each application. However, in an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, for instance, VDI will hugely simplify implementation of the new operating environment and may allow the company to continue using older hardware that would not be able to run the new operating system at acceptable performance levels. It also greatly simplifies initial installation, maintenance and upgrades since these only have to be installed once, on the server, rather than hundreds of times across a large desktop population. Similarly most service is done once on the server. Desktop problems are limited to hardware failures.

It also centralizes control of the desktops and simplifies security and backup/restore. Individual users cannot add their own games and other personal applications to virtual desktops since those would have to be installed by IT on the server. Similarly, malware cannot install itself on a desktop and then migrate through the company. That alone can greatly simplify service. Similarly, because all data resides on the server, IT can handle backup, and in the event of a disk drive failure it can do all restoration once, on the server.

Sourced from Infoboom

Based in Washington D.C, Mr Clark focuses on emerging trends and directions in the public sector and works with governments on strategies for implementing innovative programs and services, designed to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of citizens, business, and government employees. The IBM Institute for Electronic Government, in conjunction with the IBM’s Centre for the Business of Government, serves as IBM’s focal point for thought leadership – sharing research, experience and best practices with public sector clients – focusing on public policy issues, organisational and management practices, and technologies that can enable innovation in the public sector.

Mr Clark shares his insights on Smarter Government in New Zealand in the video below.

Follow Daryl on Twitter @Darylfrench or Send Daryl an email

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Small Businesses are busy places, very very busy places and often anything IT related gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile. This occurs for no other reason than the fact that there aren’t enough knowledgeable people with spare cycles to investigate this area whilst doing their day job.

Social media, or rather the use of Social media to generate positive business outcomes, certainly falls into this box. On top of that it is a fact that in a number of small businesses the pragmatic view of running the day to day jobs, collecting the monies and balancing the cash flow just doesn’t leave the owner/manager with any spare time at all.

Unfortunately businesses in this situation already have a foot in the wrong direction as in any business you must make time to step up on deck and survey the horizon. For the companies I am involved with I try and keep my advice in this area quite simple and clear. How about this for starters ?

• If you have no internet involvement at all apart from having a static, out of date website, then maybe try and little advertising using Google Add words … it’s cheap and they work.
• If you’re never logged on to Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin then make an effort to learn  … if you have children of any age past about 5 they can probably help.. Don’t be proud I often get my children to explain new stuff to me, after all no-one else knows you asked them.
• Pick one type of media and just log on, get an ID and have ” play”
• If any of what you find rings just half a bell of opportunity for your business then organise a small trial
• As always if you can afford or know of any “hired guns” in this area then engaged with them now, as there certainly are tricks to this trade.

All that said, none of this will ever happen if the owners can’t make some time to get above the day to day churn, which is such a reoccurring and limiting theme with any advisory or Governance work I do in the SME space.

A good question to leave you with is what would your starting advice be to a SME in this area??

Based on the intelligence gathered through research of public vulnerability disclosures, and the monitoring and analysis of more than 150,000 security events per second during every day of 2010, key observations from the IBM X-Force Research team included:

More than 8,000 new vulnerabilities were documented, a 27 percent rise from 2009. Public exploit releases were also up 21 percent from 2009 to 2010. This data points to an expanding threat landscape in which sophisticated attacks are being launched against increasingly complex computing environments.

The historically high growth in spam volume leveled off by the end of 2010. This indicates that spammers may be seeing less value from increasing the volume of spam, and instead are focused on making sure it is bypassing filters.

While overall there were significantly fewer phishing attacks relative to previous years, “spear phishing,” a more targeted attack technique, grew in importance in 2010. This further indicates that cyber criminals have become more focused on quality of attacks, rather than quantity.

As end user adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices increased, IT security departments have struggled to determine the right way to bring these devices safely into corporate networks. Although attacks against the latest generation of mobile devices were not yet widely prevalent in 2010, IBM X-Force data showed a rise in vulnerability disclosures and exploits that target these devices.

“From Stuxnet to Zeus Botnets to mobile exploits, a widening variety of attack methodologies is popping up each day,” said Tom Cross, threat intelligence manager, IBM X-Force. “The numerous, high profile targeted attacks in 2010 shed light on a crop of highly sophisticated cyber criminals, who may be well-funded and operating with knowledge of security vulnerabilities that no one else has. Staying ahead of these growing threats and designing software and services that are secure from the start has never been more critical.”

In conjunction with this year’s report, IBM is launching the IBM Institute for Advanced Security in Europe to combat growing security threats in the region. The IBM X-Force report stated that in 2010, nearly a quarter of all financial phishing emails targeted banks located in Europe. It also identified the UK, Germany, Ukraine and Romania among the top 10 countries sending spam in 2010. This Institute joins its predecessor in Washington, D.C., focused on U.S. clients.

A new section in the IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report is dedicated to the security trends and best practices for the emerging technologies of mobile devices and cloud computing.

Cloud Computing — The report highlighted a shift in perception about cloud security as adoption continued to evolve and knowledge around this emerging technology increased. Since security is still considered an inhibitor to cloud adoption, cloud providers must earn their customers’ trust. This is achieved by providing an infrastructure that is secure by design with purpose-built security capabilities that meet the needs of the specific applications moving into the cloud. As more sensitive workloads move into the cloud, the security capabilities will become more sophisticated. Over time, IBM predicts the market will drive the cloud to provide access to security capabilities and expertise that is more cost effective than in-house implementations. This may turn questions about cloud security on their head by making an interest in better security a driver for cloud adoption, rather than an inhibitor.

Mobile Devices — Organizations are increasingly concerned about the security implications of personal mobile devices used by employees. Organizations must ensure control of their data regardless of where it is, including employee-owned or business-issued smartphones. In 2010, IBM X-Force documented increases in the volume of vulnerabilities disclosed in mobile devices as well as the disclosure of exploits that target them. The desire to “jailbreak” or “root” mobile devices has motivated the distribution of mature exploit code that has been reused in malicious attacks. Nevertheless, malware is not yet common on the latest generation of mobile devices and most IT professionals view the data stored on them and how that can be misused or lost as the main security threats associated with these devices. According to the IBM X-Force Report, best practices for mobile security are evolving with enhanced password management and data encryption capabilities.

The new, sophisticated face of cyber crime — From a security standpoint, 2010 is most remembered as a year marked by some of the most high profile, targeted attacks that the industry has ever witnessed. For example, the Stuxnet worm demonstrated that the risk of attacks against highly specialized industrial control systems is not just theoretical. These types of attacks are indicative of the high level of organization and funding behind computer espionage and sabotage that continues to threaten a widening variety of public and private networks.

A significant decline in phishing — If the IT security world is looking for a victory to chalk up in 2010, they should consider the relative decline in phishing attacks. Although phishing attacks still occurred, the peak volume of phishing emails in 2010 was less than a quarter of the peak volumes in the previous two years. This may indicate a shift toward other, more profitable, attack methodologies such as botnets and ATM skimming. Despite this decline, spear phishing, a more targeted attack technique, grew in importance in 2010, as meticulously crafted emails with malicious attachments or links became one of the hallmarks of sophisticated attacks launched against enterprise networks.

Spam volumes peaked, and then leveled off — In 2010, spam volumes increased dramatically, reaching their highest levels in history. However, the growth in volume leveled off by the end of the year. In fact, by year’s end, spammers seemed to go on vacation, with a 70 percent decline in traffic volumes occurring just before Christmas and returning early in the new year. Has the market for spam become saturated? It is possible that there are diminishing returns associated with increasing the total volume of spam, and spammers are starting to focus more on bypassing spam filters.

Web applications accounted for nearly half of vulnerabilities disclosed in 2010 — Web applications continued to be the category of software affected by the largest number of vulnerability disclosures, representing 49 percent in 2010. The majority represented cross site scripting and SQL injection issues, and the IBM X-Force data showed that these vulnerabilities are being targeted by attackers. According to the report results, every summer for the past three years there has been a globally scaled SQL injection attack some time during the months of May through August. The anatomy of these attacks has been similar across the board, targeting .asp pages that are vulnerable to SQL injection.

A secure by design approach can improve security — IBM X-Force has determined that taking proactive steps to evaluate web application security and improve development and quality assurance processes can result in a significant improvement in the security of web application software. The report included data showing that web applications scanned for vulnerabilities often showed significant improvements upon being retested – exhibiting less than half of the number of particular classes of vulnerabilities, on average, the second time they are assessed. This encouraging information points the way toward sustained improvements in Internet security.

Nearly half of vulnerabilities remain unpatched — To help prevent attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities, organizations must focus on shortening the window of time between vulnerability disclosure and patch installation. Forty-four percent of all security vulnerabilities had no vendor-supplied patch at the end of 2010. However, even in cases where patches are made available on the same day that a vulnerability is publicly disclosed, there may be a significant gap in time before those patches are installed on vulnerable systems. Computer criminals often privately develop exploits that target publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities, and use those exploits to launch attacks. Later, when these private exploits have ceased to be valuable as attack tools, they are publicly disclosed. The IBM X-Force report data showed that exploits are often publicly disclosed tens or hundreds of days after the vulnerabilities they target. If it is taking a long time for these exploits to surface, it may be taking a long time for networks to patch.

Continued growth of Internet botnets — IBM X-Force saw an upward trend in Trojan botnet activity during 2010. This growth is significant because despite increasing coordinated efforts to shut down botnet activity, this threat appeared to be gaining momentum. However, IBM X-Force’s data did illustrate the dramatic impact of a successful effort in early 2010 to shutdown the Waledac botnet, which resulted in an instantaneous drop off in observed command and control traffic. On the other hand, the Zeus botnet continued to evolve and constituted a significant portion of the botnet activity detected by IBM X-Force in 2010. Due to its extreme popularity with attackers, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of separate Zeus botnets active at any given time. The Zeus botnet malware is commonly used by attackers to steal banking information from infected computers.

Sourced from Geekzone

Consumers check in on Foursquare. Your employees chat with customers on Facebook. Everyone tweets. Social media is everywhere, right? Not quite.

The one place it isn’t is inside traditional CRM systems. While the marketing department and sales team are busy interacting with customers on social-networking sites, the potentially valuable information created by these exchanges remains largely isolated from core customer databases and analytics systems.

CIOs want to bridge the gap between social media and enterprise CRM to give marketing and sales richer, more complete information about customers. Just as important: avoiding CRM silos, says Todd Michaud, vice president of IT at Focus Brands, the franchisor of specialty restaurants, including Cinnabon and Moe’s Southwest Grill. “I don’t want to worry about maintaining all these separate systems that really just talk about the same customers,” Michaud says.

Advertising and communications firm McCann Worldgroup encourages employees to interact with clients on social media. But McCann has yet to integrate Twitter and Facebook with its CRM applications and databases, says Global CIO Greg Smith. “We’re relying on employees to use their best judgment in noting those interactions in client files,” Smith says.

An immature market

Vendors of so-called “social CRM” software are scurrying to integrate their products with more mature systems, says Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Altimeter Group. For example, Radian6, which makes social-media-monitoring software used by large companies such as Dell and Comcast, recently added features that integrate with Salesforce.com, and Oracle has demonstrated that Radian6 works with its CRM software. By integrating Radian6 with Salesforce.com, users can view online conversations about their chosen keywords, tag and route items to colleagues for follow-up, or respond immediately to the customer. These actions are recorded and attached to customer records in Salesforce.com. However, Owyang notes, “each vendor offers different application-programming interfaces, which makes it very challenging.” Google launched its OpenSocial standard in 2007 as a common API for social software, but key players haven’t adopted it. The holdouts include Facebook, which promotes its own API.

Social sign-on tools, including products by such vendors as Gigya and Janrain, let users log into one social network with credentials from another. These can make it easier to collect data from multiple social-media sites, Owyang says. But analyzing this data must be done outside of an enterprise-CRM or business-intelligence system. That leaves IT departments to develop their own interfaces with enterprise systems for now.

“I would love to have Facebook and Twitter updates flow automatically into CRM, to mine and search,” says McCann’s Smith. But the technology “is just not there yet.”

Sourced from CIO

“The repeated issue every year – what keeps CIOs up at night – is the sales and marketing practices of technology vendors. It’s a cat and mouse game. It’s not efficient for buyers; it’s not efficient for sellers. The whole relationship is problematic.”

Hall recounts the story of the pharmaceutical company CIO-a marquee customer of a major software and services vendor. The CIO was holding two days of strategy meetings attended by the vendor’s very famous president. On day two, the CIO’s administrative assistant messages him that someone from the vendor company is on the phone and transfers the call to the CIO’s cell. “Hello, sir. I’m so-and-so in corporate sales,” says the voice on the line. “And I’d like to find out if you have any software needs.” The cold caller was employed by the very IT vendor whose president was sitting across the table from the CIO. “That’s the kind of disjointed approach to relationships that vendors have,” says Hall. “You’d think the vendor would have a better CRM system than that, but the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. That kind of bungling happens every day.”

Hall says he wants to level the playing field between IT buyers and sellers and xPeerient has introduced a platform for CIOs to anonymously initiate the buying process with vendors. But his own sales pitch aside, Hall says somethings got to give-particularly in outsourcing, a relationship business where starting off on the right foot is critical. “The core problem is how buyers and sellers are introduced,” Halls says. “It’s fraught with friction.”

CIO.com talked to Hall about how much money technology vendors waste on lead generation, the trickiest techniques IT leaders have developed for evading dogged salespeople, and how to fix the broken tech services marketplace.

CIO.com: IT spending around the globe continues to grow. IT organisations spent more than $3 trillion in 2010, more than $800 million of that on outsourcing. But you say vendor sales tactics are stuck in the dark ages.

Mark Hall, CEO of xPeerient: The core problem is the way buyers and sellers are introduced. It’s inefficient. It’s built around the language of war, with sales teams talking about campaigns and ground fire. There’s friction and distrust. IT vendors spend $25 billion a year doing lead generation for internal sales, according to IDC.

I know of one tier one software and service provider whose lead generation starts in a call center in Bangalore – 3000 full-time employees with its own physical and management infrastructure. Those employees come in at night and start calling US and European companies to verify contact information [for corporate IT leaders]. Once they validate the lead, it’s sent to the inside sales organisation where someone else makes a follow up call to determine interest. Then it goes to the channel manager who conducts an interview with the lead. Then it goes to the channel partner for that region. The ratio they’re looking at is 1000 to 1: 1,000 phone calls for one opportunity. And the IT buyer community is doing a better and better job of disguising themselves to avoid the whole process.

It’s all based on consumer advertising models originally conceived in the 19th century. It’s the demand generation model. You put juicy hamburger on the TV screen and you load it up with cheese and bacon. You make it look really good, and put a lot of sex behind it, and people will say, ‘Wow, I want that!’ and go to Burger King and buy it. But that doesn’t work in corporate IT. You don’t have a CIO in the enterprise saying, ‘I didn’t think I needed storage. But, wow; now I do!’

CIO.com: The process, you note, breeds discontent and distrust. Can that work its way into the day-to-day outsourcing relationship that results?

Hall: I think that everyone knows to differentiate between sales and the ongoing relationship. Salespeople are their own breed.

One thing I think it does make a difference in is the outsourcing decision. A good salesperson-one that’s good at building relationships-can sell you a bad service. And a bad salesperson may actually have the better service. What wins the day is the best salesperson rather than the best outsourcer. If you’re looking for better outcomes, you have to cut through the noise and make a decision based on rational assessment.

CIO.com: What about after you sign a contract-does the hard selling continue?

Hall: If it’s an IT services relationship, there’s always the question of renewal. The salespeople love you for two months prior to the purchase decision. Then they may go away for ten months. Then two months before renewal, you get a new salesperson calling you. That’s the way accounts are managed.

If you’re already in relationship with an IT services company, the switching costs can be enormous. The vendor’s goal is to get ingrained as much as possible so the switching costs are even higher.

CIO.com: What’s the best way to handle the upsell or renewal calls from an outsourcer?

Hall: Just to keep the company honest, I’d have a competitive bid process to bring things back to a head. Create a policy to review every vendor relationship every two years. Look at the financials and force them to go through the bid process. The vendors don’t like it, but it’s effective.

CIO.com: How do CIOs deal with the barrage of vendor sales calls today?

Hall: They develop evasion techniques. A lot of them set up vendor relations portal. When the salesperson calls, the admin tells them to go there and enter their name in the queue. Others have developed solutions that are very tricky. If a call from an IT vendor comes in, they tell them they’re transferring them to Dan Heller in the procurement office. The salesperson gets a voice mail greeting, ‘Hi, this is Dan Heller, leave a message.’ Only there is no Dan Heller.

CIO.com: If the IT sales process is so inefficient-and even drives customers into hiding-aren’t the vendors working on new techniques themselves?

Hall: What could they do that they haven’t already tried? What they need to do is build relationships. What we’re trying to do is change the hunted into the hunter. Rather than the vendor pursuing the buyer, why not have the buyer who has a need pursue the vendor. Then you say to the vendor, ‘Here’s an active buyer that’s doing a project that needs you because they said so.’

CIO.com: But isn’t that how the traditional outsourcing RFP process works-I tell you what I need and you give me your best proposal?

Hall: It is. But the model I’m proposing is one in which the IT buyer remains anonymous. The identity of the user organisation is not revealed until they want it to be. This gives the buyer more control over that early stage of the relationship. Say, a CIO wants to outsource a help desk. He does early stage discovery on the service providers, talks to his peers, and then engages the service companies and asks questions-anonymously.

As soon as you reveal your name or your company, it’s like throwing blood in the water. Once you express the slightest bit of interest, you’re suddenly surrounded by sharks. Every potential vendor – even those not in IT services, those that want to sell you office products or real estate-is circling. It’s frustrating, and that’s why CIOs are loathe to give up their identity.

I went to the Taj Mahal recently, and as soon as the local vendors saw me in the back seat of the car, they started swarming-one, two, then 15, 20 of them following the car until I got out. They started a barrage of sales pitches-postcards, photos, guides, trinkets. And they followed me until I looked each on in the eye and said, ‘I’m not going to buy anything today.’ It was humiliating for me, and it was humiliating for them. That’s analogous to the IT marketplace.

Compare that to a typical shopping mall. No one is jumping out or grabbing you. They typically leave you alone to wander around. You enter a store and someone may greet you and ask you if you need help. If you say no, they go away.

CIO.com: What should IT service providers do to fix the broken outsourcing marketplace?

Hall: They need to do a better job leveraging the CIO peer network. The number one decision criteria for the IT buyer is peer feedback. More than anything, they want to talk to a customer of that IT services provider. But they want the whole story. That’s hard to get to right now. If they’re lucky, they get three or four references selected by the service provider as they approach their final decision. And even then they don’t get the full story.

Vendors need to pay attention to the relationship. Don’t treat their IT buyer like a database entry. Don’t assume they’ll all respond the same way. The person on the other end of the line is not just account; they’re not just a customer ID number. There’s a living, breathing person on the other side.

Sourced from CIO

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Like a sucker punch, the iPad’s popularity has taken the enterprise by surprise. Forrester Research (FORR) analyst Ted Schadler recently held a teleconference with 241 IT pros to talk about the impact the iPad and other tablets may have on their organizations.

Did they have questions? You bet.

Of the 15 million iPads on the street, Forrester figures half make their way to work. Forrester released results of a survey of 2,300 IT executives last week that shows one out of four companies using or planning to use tablets.

These figures are sure to rise given the hugely successful iPad 2 debut earlier this month. Demand continues to outstrip supply, with Apple (AAPL) stores selling out of their daily iPad shipments within an hour. Global rollout this week has been impressive, too.

There’s no question iPad productivity apps are gaining momentum, such as QuickOffice, DocuSign, SoundNote and Salesforce Chatter. One company plans to upgrade senior executives to the iPad 2 so they can leverage a new feature on the device: high-def video projector mirroring output.

The enterprise embrace of the iPad has happened quickly, even surprising Apple. “I’ve never seen an adoption rate on the enterprise side like this in my life,” said Apple COO Tim Cook late last year, well before the iPad 2 hit the market.

Such fast enterprise adoption—a trend largely driven by employees—often leaves companies feeling more than a little panicked. Here are three pressing questions about the iPad, based on Forrester’s research:

What’s the business benefit?

Let’s face it: Making an ROI (return on investment) case for a major iPad spend could be a tough job for a CIO. Even Forrester’s Shadler admits the business benefits are “still materializing.” But there are signs that the iPad does improve productivity, especially in areas where perception matters—board meetings, sales presentations, and field service engagements.

“We have heard this from almost every major company: It makes you and your IT organization look great when you can give your C-level staff and board of directors an iPad instead of handing them a 400-page binder,” writes Schadler in a research note.

At Conceptus, a Silicon Valley medical device manufacturer, nearly every executive (as well as salespeople) has an iPad. One top executive rarely touches the iPad, while the head of legal uses it every day. She always brings the iPad to meetings where she’s often asked a legal question. Rather than sift through reams of paper notes, she quickly finds answers on the iPad.

CIO Rob Rennie of Florida State College at Jacksonville, an early adopter of the iPad, has witnessed first-hand solid productivity gains action. In a budget meeting, for instance, department executives with iPads now answer questions about the cost of impromptu items on the spot. Money is allocated or denied based on the real-time information during the meeting, rather than the issue being tabled to another meeting weeks later.

What’s the status of security?

Apple has made the iPad 2 pretty darn secure, says Forrester. Many companies with strict security requirements have jumped on the iPad bandwagon, such as Lloyd’s of London, Morgan Stanley (MS) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM).

Forrester also expects the upcoming RIM PlayBook to have top-notch security, perhaps besting the iPad. Forrester’s take: iPads and PlayBooks are safe enough for most business scenarios.

What about Android tablets? Not so much. Forrester says Android lags about 18 months behind Apple. When it comes to security, it’ll be a two-horse race between iPad and PlayBook, with Android far behind, Schadler says. Does this mean Android tablets aren’t ready for enterprise primetime?

“While they are much less secure, you can’t put a blanket statement on it because companies have different security requirements,” Schadler says.

Do we have enough bandwidth?

More than security, the strain iPads will put on wireless networks has everyone concerned. There’s simply not enough mobile broadband bandwidth available. While moving from 3G to 4G will help, Schadler says, “It won’t take many FaceTime video chats for the thing to drag down to a halt.”

On the 3G side, this means a company might not be able to deliver mission-critical iPad apps to mobile workers when they need them.

On the WiFi side, companies will have to ramp up their capacity. It’s already expensive to provide WiFi access points for all the employees that want to wirelessly connect to the network on their laptops.

CIOs have been coming up with ways to throttle down the strain on the wireless network, such as limiting the use of desktop video and Youtube streaming. Now iPads, which can only connect wirelessly, along with Apple’s FaceTime video chat, will only exacerbate the problem.

“If you’re a company,” Schadler says, “you’re worried.”

Article sourced from Infoboom

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Ever heard the saying “Failing to plan is planning to fail “.  Well in today’s business environment never a truer word was spoken. Now I know to most small companies business planning seems a very complicated process well beyond their capabilities, but if you break it down into simple steps it’s a process we can all do. Consider the 10 steps I list below, complete them for your business, write it down and you will have yourselves a plan which will allow you to take advantage of life as New Zealand emerges from the recession.

1. What we do – Write one sentence to describe what your company does

2. Our Goal – Write down what you would like the company to look like in 1 or 2 years, and how your will measure success …. “If you can measure it you can get there “

3. SWOT – Complete an analysis of your companies Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

4. Customers – Customers are King at the moment. Understand what they want, why they choose you, what they like about you, what they want more of, but above all go and talk to them.

5. Sales – Look at how you sell now and is it working. Come up with 2 or 3 new ideas on new ways to sell.  Maybe visit one extra customer per week or a competition for the staff or a reward for existing customers referring someone new to you. Set yourselves sales targets and list out some ideas for increasing sales

6. What we sell – Look at what you have and think about what other products and services are in a similar area that your customers would want and you could easily add to your range (maybe if you sell bikes you could arrange finance and insurance) Look at what add-ons or cross sells a customer may want for your product (again for bikes you may offer bike shoes or special “road tested sunscreen “. And finally look at new services (maybe you could offer a bike training course)

7. Marketing – Now you have identified all these new sales ideas above think about whether marketing would help. Use basic marketing analysis like if I spend $200 on advertising how will I measure the success and how many extra sales will I need to get to make it worthwhile

8. Processes/systems/infrastructure – Look at how you do things in the office and identify at least 2 areas you could improve

9. Staff & management – Review all your staff and how they are performing and how they are feeling. It’s been a recession for them to and they want to know that they are doing well and that their job is safe …talk to them, and if you haven’t already have a regular staff meeting (once every two months is a good start)

10. Finances (costs / expenses / budgets) – Finally manage the money. Look at all your costs and expenses to see if they seem reasonable. A simple check is calculate the % of costs to sales and then compare with previous years. If you don’t have budgets then create some. It’s not that hard, just grab last years accounts and pencil a budget column alongside the actuals …then estimate a figure for the following year and see whether you make a profit at the bottom. The results are often very surprising.

I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, so when I got an e-mail from the social networking site telling me “you haven’t been back to Facebook recently” and here are some messages you missed, it didn’t seem odd. I clicked on the link, wondering what one of my friends was doing.

Oops. I was a victim of a hacking technique called “clickjacking.” If it hadn’t been for security measures built into Firefox, I might have been in trouble, because rather than going to Facebook, I was headed for http://sleepingpillsfitnesspills.com.

That site might have simply been an ad for cut-rate, Canadian pills — an annoying, but harmless detour. But it also could have been a site loaded with malware, include rogue applications designed to steal key personal information from me and people in my address book.

Facebook, with its hundreds of millions of users, has become the target of hackers, spammers, and just plain crooks. They’re trying to lure you in via scam surveys, fake applications and poisoned links, according to a report by Sophos Security.

Unfortunately, Facebook is far from the only popular Web site being compromised these days. Amazon, the giant e-tailing site, inadvertently left a door open that hackers could use to steal your password and get access to your credit card info.

And no matter what you’ve read about those evil Russian hacker rings, it turns out no country is the origin of more cyber attacks than the United States, according to Akamai’s quarterly ”State of the Internet” report.

Here are five new threats, including three that target Facebook users:

1. Clickjacking: Sophos Security says this is one of the most common attacks hitting Facebook users. These attacks use maliciously created pages where the true function of a button is concealed beneath an opaque layer showing something entirely different. Often sharing or “liking” the content in question sends the attack out to contacts through news feeds and status updates, propagating the scam.

In my case, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit, I could have avoided the scam page by simply noticing that the address of the e-mail allegedly sent by Facebook was obviously phony.update+qqlvvtxikjpp@facebookmail.com. The lesson here is obvious: When you get an e-mail with a link, notice the return address. If it seems odd, delete it. Additionally, keep your browsers up to date; all are doing a better job screening out dangerous stuff, and since they’re free, why not take advantage of that protection.

2. Fake surveys: This scam is related to clickjacking since it attempts to make you click on something dangerous via a misleading message. Typically, the scam starts with a provocative (sexual or otherwise) message. Here’s one that Sophos highlighted recently:
“OMG! Look What this Kid did to his School after being Expelled!
After this 11 year old child was expelled from his school he went berserk.” Well, that’s intriguing.

However, you have to “like” the page and fill out a quick survey before reading the story. Whoops: you just gave scammers a commission for filling out the survey, and helped the scam spread by sending it to all your friends. The survey earns money for the scammers; they get a commission for every survey completed. And that’s why they’re spreading this message virally across Facebook.

3. Rogue applications: More perniciously, the fake survey can lead to rogue applications. Sometimes the applications will look for your address book and send the fake surveys to everyone in it, hoping to make money. Other rogue applications can hijack data by installing key loggers (apps that record and pass on key strokes) or other malware. Other fake applications can turn your computer into a zombie used to broadcast malware for the bad guys.

4. Amazon vulnerability: A security flaw apparently allows the company’s servers to accept passwords that are nearly — but not entirely — correct. Fortunately, the flaw only appears to affect older passwords.

The flaw lets Amazon accept as valid some passwords that have extra characters added on after the 8th character, and also makes the password case-insensitive. That flaw erases the advantage of a longer password, making passwords much easier to crack via software. This was first noticed by users over at reddit and has been picked up and verified by a number of reputable groups, including Wired.

In any case, it does appear that newer passwords are not affected, but it isn’t clear what the date cutoff is. In any case, you can simply change your Amazon password. If you like, change it back to the same password, but it will still be a new one as far as the server is concerned, and be safe. Amazon has not responded to my query on this topic, or any anyone else’s that I’ve seen.

5. Spearphishing: This is more likely to occur via regular e-mail; but you may also be hit by a spear through a Facebook or Twitter message. Spearphishing (or spear phishing) works like this. You’ll get an e-mail or message that seems quite personal, it may appear to be from a person or company with whom you normally communicate. But it will lead you to a poisoned site. Yes, this sounds like the “phishing” scams you’ve been warned about. In those you might get a message from your e-mail provider saying your inbox is full or you have to verify your identity and so on. Spear phishing takes that a step further by adding personalized information to lull your suspicions.

“Phishing messages usually appear to come from a large and well-known company or Web site with a broad membership base, such as eBay or PayPal. In the case of spear phishing, however, the apparent source of the e-mail is likely to be an individual within the recipient’s own company and generally someone in a position of authority,” according to the Sophos Web site.

Sourced from CIO.com