Opinions
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Ticked Off at Tick the Box Mentality 04 February, 2008 13:01:15
Does your executive search firm know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients?Does your executive search firm know its MIS managers from its elbow? Does it even know the difference between an MIS manager and a CIO, and if it does, can it explain that difference to its corporate clients? - +
Reconcilable Differences 06 August, 2007 13:03:30
Companies that ignore IT during a merger or acquisition do so at their own peril. Without a carefully considered and well-managed road map, IT risks an imperfect integration, loss of key staff, business disruption, and an unnecessarily complex environmentThe health-care company had been planning to install a state-of-the-art system, which would have been all but guaranteed to slash operational costs. It had completed the preliminary research, selected a system and begun the implementation process - +
Your World. . . Hacked 02 October, 2007 10:51:23
As your business becomes more collaborative and global, the risks to your company’s trade secrets rise proportionally. Fortunately, there are new strategies to protect the data that allows you to competeThe call to Bob Bailey, an IT executive with a major US government contractor, came on an otherwise ordinary day in October 2003. "Why are you attacking us?" demanded the caller, an IT leader with a Silicon Valley manufacturer. He wanted to know why Bailey's company had launched a denial-of-service attack against his network - +
Doing Your Sums on . . . Build, Buy or Rent 05 November, 2007 13:32:30
You’re trying to build a world-class IT team, but everyone’s going after the same talent pool. What mix works best? Should you grow your own, draft your players or barter your way to the line-up you want to field?CIOs should never forget that while new technologies have a maturity cycle, the maturity cycle for human beings in IT is even longer - +
Crash 03 September, 2007 15:12:00
CIO Alan Boehme had a typical business continuity and succession plan, but one terrible moment on a California highway revealed its weaknessesThis past February 2, at 5.15pm, Alan Boehme, 47, VP and CIO of Juniper Networks, left his office and climbed into his black 2004 Infiniti G-35. He pulled out of the company parking lot and began the 90-minute drive to his home in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town in Northern California's San Mateo County. Boehme's work had been going well. In December, he had completed an ambitious restructuring of the $US2.5 billion networking company's IT infrastructure, globalizing its operations and laying the foundation for its future growth.
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SAN, NAS, ILM, SAS -- your boss doesn't care 06 July, 2007 09:16:50
Storage acronyms: one confusing mess?Storage is awash in TLAs (three-letter acronyms). LUN, SAN, NAS, ILM, SWD, SAS, HBA, DAS, CAS and FAN are all acronyms that regularly appear in storage-related literature, publications and columns. But to many IT managers, they provide no meaningful information, and for storage technicians who use them too frequently without context, they may alienate rather than connect them with their manager. - +
Networking's greatest debates in the Data Center 29 October, 2007 07:34:19
All time classic debates include Mac Vs PC, Tape storage vs. disk storage and AMD vs. IntelA look at the greatest all time Data Center controversies in the history of the networking industry. - +
10 things we hate about laptops 16 November, 2007 12:40:09
Sure, laptops have revolutionized the way we compute. That doesn't mean they don't drive IT bonkers.Damaged. Lost. Stolen. Too big, too small. Insecure and unreliable. And just plain annoying. If you're in IT, there's just not much to like about laptops. - +
Leopard Server vs. Windows Server 07 November, 2007 12:13:43
Server platform competition heats upComparing any Mac OS release with Windows is often like comparing aphids and orangutans. That is particularly true when looking at Apple's Mac OS X Leopard Server and Microsoft's Windows 2003 Server. Although they ultimately provide very similar features -- directory services, file and print services, various Internet services, and so forth -- the two platforms seem to be designed from completely different mind-sets. - +
Leopard's hits and misses: A spotty record 06 November, 2007 12:04:49
Now that we've used Apple's new OS for a week, what do we like and what falls short?Macintosh fans can be a peculiar lot. They may follow Apple's every move with rapt attention, but they're not shy about sharing their thoughts when they think the company has fallen short. That even applies to such feverishly anticipated developments as the release of a new version of OS X: Just check out almost any Apple OS forum these days for a sampling of Leopard-related snark, mere days after it shipped.
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Storage is awash in TLAs (three-letter acronyms). LUN, SAN, NAS, ILM, SWD, SAS, HBA, DAS, CAS and FAN are all acronyms that regularly appear in storage-related literature, publications and columns.
But to many IT managers, they provide no meaningful information, and for storage technicians who use them too frequently without context, they may alienate rather than connect them with their manager.
Storage-area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) are examples of acronyms that can drive a wedge between managers and techs. The acronyms look similar (NAS is SAN spelled backward), they both reference storage networks, and nearly every organization uses both SAN and NAS. Yet to say there is no difference in the acronyms is akin to saying oil and water are the same because they are both liquids.
The trouble with trying to explain the meaning of these acronyms is that it requires using language that confuses rather than clarifies the situation. To the individual steeped in storage, it is intuitively obvious that a SAN only carries block-based storage over either an Ethernet or Fibre Channel infrastructure using iSCSI or Fibre Channel protocols while NAS only carries file-based traffic over an Ethernet network.
Provide that same explanation to your IT manager and he will look at you like you have two heads. Storage techs tend to forget that management lacks the time to learn every storage acronym. Though some managers just don't care, many more are consumed with setting corporate initiatives and meeting quarterly numbers than spending time trying to understand the differences between SAN and NAS.
The use of acronyms is a clever way to appear knowledgeable and smart. But when your use of acronyms confuses the situation and leaves management in the dark, you are probably helping no one and only hurting yourself.
Jerome Wendt is the president and lead analyst with DCIG Inc. He may be reached at jerome.wendt@att.net.
2008 CIO Summit
19th August, 2008 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney Developed in partnership with CIO Magazine, IDC, INTEP and the CIO Executive Council.
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Every year the CIO Summit identifies what is top of mind for CIOs across Australia and New Zealand, and offers insight for CIO benchmarking and vendor strategic planning alike.
Recent IDC research shows that over 59% of CIO's believe that 'to achieve their business strategies, technology should be used more aggressively than today.'
Join us on August 19th to discover how this is possible with the latest technologies including Virtualisation, Web 2.0, IP Surveillance and Software as a Service (Saas).
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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. - +
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. - +
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. - +
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. - +
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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'I have a lost laptop horror story for you' 30 June, 2008 10:08:14
The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow...The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow: Russ Jones tells a tale of woe that isn't particularly dramatic -- or rare -- and yet it's exactly the kind of story that worries me enough to ignore my better judgment and buy identity-theft protection from my insurance provider. - +
SQL attacks lobs onto pro tennis site 02 July, 2008 11:52:19
Wimbledon perfect time for crook's criminal racket.Visitors to the Association of Tennis Professionals Web site have potentially been infected with spyware after apparent lax security allowed a malicious script to be injected across its pages. - +
Hacking tools: A new version of BackTrack helps ethical hackers 30 June, 2008 10:57:21
BackTrack is the quickest way to get access to hundreds of (legal) hacking toolsVersion 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools. - +
Japanese military loses data again 02 July, 2008 08:17:21
Japan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data on joint US-Japan military exerciseJapan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data pertaining to a joint US-Japan military exercise last year, the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. - +
ACLU, EFF sue US gov't over mobile phone tracking 03 July, 2008 08:37:23
Two civil liberties groups sue the US Department of Justice over mobile phone trackingThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are asking a federal court to order the US Department of Justice to turn over records about the agency's tracking of mobile phone users.
Ballarat Grammar Improves Student Access to Computer Based Learning with HP ProCurve 04 July, 2008 16:49:00
Media release: 40 Per Cent of Australian Businesses Do Not Validate Their Data 04 July, 2008 10:29:00
Kaseya helps turbo charge BlueFire’s service delivery model 03 July, 2008 17:23:00
Computershare Selects Symantec for Data Loss Prevention Globally 03 July, 2008 14:52:00
DST International moves to new Shanghai office 03 July, 2008 13:21:00
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