Tuesday | 7 October, 2008
CIO
If only reducing costs was as easy as security, say CIOs
CIOs terrified of spyware, not vindictive staff.
Darren Pauli (Computerworld) 07 May, 2008 13:25:23

Conquering IT security is a breeze for CIOs, according to an IDC report.

The IDC Annual Forecast for Management report surveyed 363 IT executives from Australia (254 respondents) and New Zealand (109 respondents) across industries including finance, distribution, leisure and the public sector.

Information security was rated last place in the Top 10 challenges for CIOs.

Threats targeting the application layer were cited as the biggest concern (36 percent), while spyware (16 percent) was rated as a bigger threat than disgruntled employees, remote access, and mobile devices.

The CIOs top priority for the next 12 months was reducing costs and addressing a lack of resources. This was followed by meeting user expectations and developing effective business cases.

The top four IT investments for the next year will be in collaborative technologies and knowledge management; systems infrastructure; back office applications; and business intelligence.

Maintenance fees were unsurprisingly identified as the biggest IT expense by almost 35 percent of respondents. The figures in the report suggest a slight increase in expenditure since last year.

Hardware was the second biggest cost chewing up 23 percent of budgets, followed by software and then network costs. Outsourcing was rated the fifth biggest expense with costs set to continue to rise incrementally from 2007 to 2009.

IT expenditure has doubled in five years, according to IDC. Business splurges about 6.2 percent of operating expenses on technology, up from 3 percent in 2003, a figure which remained flat since 1996, with the exception of a .8 percent rise during the dotcom boom.

CIOs will allocate budgets to document management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and workflow management systems.

The top five hottest skills, according to respondents, are networking, IT service management, help desk, and enterprise applications.

More staff are leaving the enterprise than smaller businesses, according to figures which show an average employee turnover of 8 percent.

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    CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00

    For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders.
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    CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25

    For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders.
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    CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00

    Part three in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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    CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00

    Part two in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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    CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05

    Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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    Google blacklists ATUG Web site 07 October, 2008 12:46:00

    ATUG unaware of breach, Google unwilling to discuss details
    Hackers may have hit the Australian Telecommunications User Group (ATUG) Web site, according to Google which has placed security threat warnings across all pages displayed in searches.
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    10 steps to loading dock security 07 October, 2008 11:30:00

    Companies in all industries struggle to secure the loading dock, that sensitive spot where goods come in and go out. Follow these best practices and sleep better tonight.
    It's the stuff of CSO nightmares. Early on the morning of September 2, while most folks were home sleeping off the hot dogs, thieves used bolt cutters to break into an Alltel Communications warehouse and four of its loading docks in Fort Smith, Ark. Sources say they escaped with an estimated US$10 million worth of cell phones, not a bad haul for their Labor Day efforts.
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    Can security's human side stop data breaches? 07 October, 2008 14:29:00

    As human error increasingly becomes the top reason for security breaches, behavior-based strategies are making their way into the workplace to supplement technology
    Shira Rubinoff was a practicing psychologist in 2004. When it came to technology, her experience was simply as a tech user, certainly not a tech guru. Then one day she was phished.
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    Corporate security and the climate crisis 03 October, 2008 11:21:00

    How to adapt security and risk management policies - including IT security - to deal with climate change.
    US military strategists, CIA analysts, international agency officials and Nobel Prize winning economists concur with the consensus of the world's scientific community: the Climate Crisis is a planetary security issue, as well as a national security issue for each of the one hundred ninety two countries that belong to the United Nations. But the Climate Crisis is also, by extension, a corporate security issue, as well as, yes, a cyber security issue.
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    Companies own up to virtual security blind spot 02 October, 2008 11:05:00

    VMWorld attendees reveal vast majority of companies have little or no security in place for their virtual systems.
    The vast majority of companies have little or no security in place for their virtual systems. That is a scary statistic revealed in a survey of attendees at the recent VMWorld 2008 conference in Las Vegas.
CIO Webcast Innovation #8 - What are the biggest roadblocks to IT's involvement in innovation at your company?
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II
Listen to the latest edition of CIO Live which is now available for download.
Listen to the podcast
Sign up to the CIO Live email
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