Balance of Sensitivity and Marketing Without Crossing into Self-Indulgence or Gratuitous Promotions.
Comedian Gilbert Godfrey lost his job with Aflac for making a joke about the Japanese tsunami. So too did an aide to Mississippi Gov. Hayley Barbour for the same reason. And some government officials and activities are catching criticism for using the crisis to grand stand on their favorite environmental and energy causes.
Orange County Register. Alvaka Networks’ EVP, Kevin McDonald Named President of Tech Coast Venture Network (TCVN)
Irvine-based Tech Coast Venture Network has named Ciaran Foley chairman of the board, replacing Bart Greenberg, who has been chairman since August. 2005. Kevin McDonald is the new TCVN president, a position Foley held for the past year and Greenberg held before that.
Warning – Know Thy Back-Up
Know what you are backing up and know what you need to back-up.
They are not always the same thing.
During the course of writing this series of blogs on backup and disaster recovery I thought I would throw in a few anecdotal stories along the way. I just got out of a meeting with one of my key managers. We were talking about a long time client and a huge backup problem that was just uncovered.
Why The Interest In The VCIO?
We are winding down 2010. As I look back at the recent months to assess the trends for 2011, one thing stands out most prominently. That one thing is the VCIO or the Virtual Chief Information Officer. While I don’t particularly like that term, it is perhaps the most intuitive description for someone who serves in a part-time contract role as the CIO for small to mid-size businesses.
From my vantage point, I see three primary drivers behind the increased demand for IT experts serving in the role. Those three drivers are...
Business Continuity Planning Made Easy
I am flying back from a small, private and exclusive invitation-only conference in Chicago. This conference is only open to industry's most esteemed and established IT service providers. The private technology briefings, at this semi-annual event, provide the best updates on cool new stuff that solves real business problems.
Is 24×7 IT Availability Really Required?
This is a question posed to me by, Aaron Goldberg of Ziff Davis Publishing and Eric Lundquist of Ziff Davis Publishing, during an IBM sponsored webinar this morning.
The fundamental questions focused around two areas, starting with, "Do Information Technology (IT) shops need to staff and prep for 24x7 operations?" In a polling question, 81% said, “Yes” they do need to do that. The subsequent discussion revolved around what options IT shops have to do that since they normally don’t have the budget, nor the human resources, required to do server monitoring and application monitoring combined with after hours staffing and remediation of issues. One solution to avoid building your own, was to contract with a firm that can provide augmented support 16x5 or 1
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.