Stories about: Gartner

Environmental issues exposed by the media and driven by consumers have placed IT departments under pressure to develop "green" data centers. Factors including the reduction of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in large data centers often provide the impetus for becoming green. A recent report issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlights the need for data center efficiency and demonstrates the increased pressure that IT departments are under.

The overall economic cost of Wall Street's collapse has yet to be totaled. But it's clear that IT departments will be laboring under some changed conditions in the months ahead.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

Executive expectations for IT have evolved from technology services to business contribution. CEOs now want IT to contribute to strategic differentiation and growth. They are increasingly asking their CIOs: Do I have the right IT? And how do I know?

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has issued a practical guide to businesses and government agencies showing them how best to respond in the event of a personal information security breach.

The Australian Law Reform Commission this week concluded its largest ever research and public consultation exercise ever with the launch of its report For Your Information: Australian Privacy Law and Practice, which recommends a re-write of the nation's 20-year-old privacy laws to keep pace with the information age.

E-discovery is a relatively new concept that describes the process by which information is recovered from corporate networks, usually to answer the demands of regulators or the law. It is a subject close to the hearts of CEOs everywhere, given the stringent penalties and resulting brand damage that have been applied to companies unable to provide information on demand.

As long as there have been CIOs, there have been people claiming that IT executives get fired a lot more than any of their C level colleagues. In the early '90s, some sharp-witted observer quipped that CIO was coming to stand for "Career Is Over." Conventional wisdom held that the average tenure of a CIO was 2.5 years (it seems that Paul Strassmann may have been the originator of this data point); in fact, as little as a few years ago people were still citing that number, which hadn't been true since at least the mid-90s - if it ever was true at all. It began to feel like some overworked Rodney Dangerfield skit.

Working for a frozen water company must have seemed like a sensible career move in New England during the 1850s. During the age of steam, America's ice traders carved 10 million tons of the stuff out of local rivers and lakes every year. They kept it cool in specially constructed icehouses, wrapped it in hay and then exported it around the world.

Cloud:

The high-profile sabotage this month of the city of San Francisco's fiber backbone network clearly shows both the extent of damage a disgruntled employee can cause and the need for controls to mitigate the risk of such actions.