CIO Agenda Blog

From skills, Web 2.0 to green IT issues: CBR takes a look at the challenges facing CIOs.

Revealed: number one security issue for IT directors
November 26, 2008

86% of all IT directors polled believe that the most likely cause of an IT security issue comes from their own employees. Hardly surprising – human error or even malfeasance is nearly always the top cause of security breaches in the enterprise.

But according to research commissioned by network security vendor Clavister and conducted by researchers YouGov, basic human error still poses the most likely threat to a company’s IT security.

The reasons for this were down to staff ignoring, not being made aware of or not being sufficiently trained on security policies, as well as making mistakes or committing industrial espionage.

And the story appears to be similar regardless of where the company is based and how big it is. Despite security policies and training being implemented, security problems continue to occur due to the “human temperament”, according to the research.

Released today, the findings show that 31% of IT directors surveyed believe the most likely cause of IT security issues is staff consciously ignoring security policies; 37% put it down to human error; 13% said it was due to insufficient training and awareness of policies and a further 5% to industrial espionage.

“The purpose of a security policy is rather simple - to keep malicious users out of a network while monitoring potential risky users within an organization,” commented Andreas Åsander, VP product management, Clavister. “To ensure compliance, however, is no simple task. Security policy documents tend to be very long and technical, and not written in a way which has meaning or importance for the average employee.”

“For security rules to be adopted, users need to understand why they are important, and what the rules mean to them personally and professionally,” said Åsander.

Rather than write this off as an issue too broad to address, Clavister has developed a set of six recommendations for companies to consider…[click continue reading for the 6 recommendations]…

Continue reading "Revealed: number one security issue for IT directors"

Posted by Jason Stamper at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

 

Revealed: how to recruit ‘Generation Y’
November 20, 2008

In an age of Web 2.0 speculation, the career aspirations and wants of Generation Y are more traditional in focus than many realise, according to a new research report entitled ‘Understanding Emerging Talent’, by recruitment outsourcing firm Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS)...[click continue reading for more ways to attract Generation Y]...

Continue reading "Revealed: how to recruit ‘Generation Y’"

Posted by Jason Stamper at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)

 

37,000 IT women have ‘gone missing’
November 13, 2008

The British Computing Society said that around 37,000 women computing professionals have ‘gone missing’ between 2001 and 2007.

The number of women computing professionals peaked at 229,440 in 2001, representing 23 per cent of the UK’s computing professional workforce at that time. By last year however, this had fallen to 192,580 -- a fall of six per cent, or nearly 37,000 women.

This is despite the fact the overall number of UK IT professionals grew from 989,120 to 1,034,290 during the same period

The BCS said the ‘missing’ female IT professionals are a, “pool of talent which could help alleviate the industry’s much publicised skills shortage”.

The BCS has published a guide to retaining female IT workers. The guide, Returners and Re-entrants: Making the Most of a Lost Talent Pool, published in association with Intellect, points out that having too few women in IT teams could also hit a company’s bottom line, by affecting its ability to secure public sector contracts.

BCS Women’s Forum manager Dr Jan Peters says: “Credit crunch or not, IT industry leaders are still predicting skills shortages. And yet the number of women exiting the IT profession continues to rise alarmingly, mainly due to the lack of flexibility offered by employers.”

In February, BCS and recruitment portal womenintechnology.co.uk are hosting a careers showcase in London aimed at women who want to develop their career, or get back into the IT industry after a break. The event will include expert speakers, plus workshops on a range of topics from creating a winning CV to asking for a pay rise. See www.wtech-event.co.uk

Posted by Jason Stamper at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

 

ITV sees SOA benefits
November 11, 2008

While once ITV only had to worry about its own broadcasting, today it must be mindful too of the third-party content distributors and new media channels that rely on its content to serve their own customers.

Today ITV – formed in early 2004 through the merger of Granada and Carlton -- is a multi-channel, multi-platform, content-driven media company. ITV owns all the regional Channel 3 licences in England and Wales, accounting for over 90% of ITV1 advertising revenues.

It also has several fast-growing free-to-air digital channels, the UK’s largest commercial production company, world-leading production and distribution businesses, a major regional news division, and a cinema screen advertising business in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Richard Lumsden, head of E-Business Suite Architecture at ITV, was responsible for building the business case for investment in Oracle’s SOA Suite two years ago. Implementing the SOA Suite to help to bring automation and reuse to the integration between ITV and its third-party content distributors, Lumsden told CBR this month that, “Without a doubt the SOA Suite has led to a dramatic acceleration in creating or recovering those interfaces after an outage.”

Lumsden, who made the business case for investment in the SOA Suite, says ITV had been a user of Oracle’s E-Business applications for some time. “During a test of the disaster recovery process for E-Business Suite, we found we could get back online quite quickly,” says Lumsden, “but the interfaces to our third parties we need to work with were taking longer to bring back up.”

Those interfaces are to providers and platforms like iTunes, Amazon, ITV.com, and soon, Kangaroo -- the Internet TV joint venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4.

“We envisaged the use of SOA Suite not just as a chance to reimplement the E-Business Suite with a SOA layer in place, but as part of a SOA journey,” says Lumsden. “We’re trying to get to the point where we are doing process-oriented orchestration. Today, we’ve probably got as far as SOA-enabled integration.”

The majority of ITV’s applications run on SUSE Linux, though there is a sizable Windows Server estate, too.

According to Lumsden, while the firm envisaged payback from the SOA Suite inside of two years thanks to the increased recovery times, greater flexibility in writing new interfaces and the reusability that comes from an SOA approach, “In fact we have used the SOA Suite in so many ways that we got payback faster than we expected.”

Lumsden noted that ITV has had to use the occasional workaround when “throwing very large XML invoicing firms at the SOA Suite,” because they can cause problems.

“We’re keen to get hold of the next release [of SOA Suite] because that will apparently solve those problems,” Lumsden said. “But it’s still been worth it. We have taken some hits along the way but we were aware that there may be some pain in order to get where we want to be, which is along the road to process orchestration.”

Learn more in this Accenture case study, which looks at how ITV started working with Accenture and Oracle on its SOA plans some years ago: www.oracle.com/technologies/soa/docs/itv-soa.pdf

Posted by Jason Stamper at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

 

Corporate UK facing compliance time bomb?
November 06, 2008

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) -- not one to shy away from the odd Armageddon-style headline, it must be said -- says news research shows that corporate UK is facing a "compliance time bomb". But they do have a point.

The research was commissioned by the Software Industry Research Board (SIRB), an initiative of FAST IiS in association with leading software publishers. FAST and Investors in Software (IiS) recently joined forces to deliver what they say is a, "distilled, simplified and unified view of software asset management (SAM) and software license management (SLM) best practice to the end user community."

The research apparently found that 60% of UK companies do not see a risk to their business from pirated software, while 43% do not perceive a risk from a lack of compliance as they claim to have a Software Asset Management (SAM) policy. The research is detailed in an IDC White paper, “Maturity of SAM Practice in the UK Market – Perception and Reality of Risk”, sponsored by FAST IiS...[click continue reading for more]...

Continue reading "Corporate UK facing compliance time bomb?"

Posted by Jason Stamper at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)