How often should you replace your PCs? That all depends.

Computerworld  August 11, 2008

By Patrick Thibodeau

August 11, 2008 (Computerworld) Ask what seems like a simple question — How often should PCs be replaced? — and you'll find that for IT managers, the answer isn't so simple. And it's certainly not universal.

...For IT execs in general, financing arrangements, the ways PCs have been used, the need for more processing power to run resource-intensive applications, and "softer" issues — such as keeping younger employees happy by giving them new technology — can all be considerations in deciding when to replace systems.

But while there may not be any real consensus among companies, the broader IT trends point to an expanding period between PC refreshes.

Many companies have settled on a three-year refresh cycle for laptops and a four-year window for desktops, said Gartner Inc. analyst Leslie Fiering, who added that the replacement cycles have increased over the past few years. Four years isn't even out of the question for laptops or notebook PCs, Fiering said.

Of all the factors that can influence a PC replacement schedule, accounting may be the most important. And while the slowing economy may prompt some companies that treat their PCs as a capital expense to hold on to the systems longer, many businesses lease their equipment and are sticking with the refresh schedules in their contracts, as is the case at Grant Thornton.

...William Lewkowski, CIO at Metro Health Corp. in Wyoming, Mich., leases most of the health care provider's technology, including PCs and data center equipment. Lewkowski likes how the leasing approach drives IT upgrades.

"It forces us to keep current every three or three and a half years," he said.

But Lewkowski said he doesn't doubt that he could extend the life spans of some of his desktop systems in particular to four or five years, especially as he starts using virtualization technology to deliver applications to end users.

On the other hand, Virgin Entertainment CIO Robert Fort buys his IT gear and treats the purchases as a capital expense, which gives him more flexibility than he would have if he was leasing equipment. Then it becomes a question of how best to spend the company's IT dollars ...?

Fort's answer to that question is that replacing PCs on an as-needed basis makes the most sense. ...

The NYSE uses a combination of blanket upgrades and replacements based on use. For instance, some developers may still be walking around with four-year-old laptops, while frequent travelers may get new machines much sooner.

"The rule of thumb is still three years," said Steve Rubinow, CIO at NYSE Euronext Inc., which operates the New York Stock Exchange. But, he added, "it's as much driven by accounting mentality as it is by technology changes."

Baseline Magazine May 2008

By Elizabeth Millard

Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn can have positive and negative impacts on future job prospects for employers. Learn how to use your profile to your advantage.

...“If you approach online profiles as a way to present your professional side to the world, then you have a great opportunity,” says John Challenger, CEO of outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Facebook ... has become a standard in the business world, Challenger explains. Recruiters regularly surf its online pages and read about potential candidates, and many profiles tend to be more professional than that Wild West of online profile sites, MySpace, he adds.
Even more respected is LinkedIn, ... Potential employers can scan a candidate’s connections list and job history, and make initial decisions about their “fit” for a company.
“Recruiters are taking a close look at those networks, since it’s like going through someone’s Rolodex,” Challenger says. ...
But these sites are just part of a larger online identity, notes Tuck Rickards, who leads the Technology Sector for the Americas for Russell Reynolds Association, a firm specializing in CEO and other senior-level recruiting.
“People have to think about their online footprint,” he says, ... by inserting one’s own name into a search engine. Facebook and blogs might come up, but also ...comments written on an alumni page, executive bio pages, press releases and other random bits of digital data.
... “You have to be careful about what you say, ...” says Rickards. “You can leverage these ... as tools to create a nice profile of yourself with controls wrapped around it.”

Watch That Trumpet Volume
Because online sites like Facebook, MySpace ... can provide an opportunity for people to present a certain image to specific employers, in addition to looking good to the whole professional world, notes Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com.
“Write about your passions and ideas, and employers ... get to know you,” he advises. About 75 percent of employers admit to using Google to do background research on candidates, he notes, and a growing number are using the sites to include candidates rather than exclude them.
...Having an impressive roster of contacts is usually proof that a person can cultivate important professional relationships and nurture them ...
Also, there’s the danger of looking too wrapped up in one’s online self, says Terry Gudaitis, cyber intelligence director at security firm Cyveillance.
...People who are particularly open about discussing their personal lives may spark concern in managers who fret about their being equally candid about details on a project, client or other sensitive business matter.... ”How you present yourself online is a snapshot of your decision-making ability and your integrity,” Gudaitis says.

For some organizations, reducing the energy consumed by IT equipment is becoming a selling point with customers and even potential new hires.

Computerworld

By Patrick Thibodeau

June 30, 2008

When Enterprise Rent-A-Car Co. completes a move from PCs to thin clients this summer ... it expects to cut internal energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours.

That will save about $500,000 annually while reducing the company's carbon dioxide emissions by 6.5 million pounds each year, according to Enterprise officials. ... [The] company issued a press release in April to let the public know how its shift to thin clients would help the environment.

That Enterprise would trumpet the environmental benefits of an IT upgrade says something about how going green is now viewed as a potential competitive advantage for companies. ...

... Using a metric developed by The Green Grid, a vendor consortium that focuses on IT energy efficiency, Enterprise found that only 40% of the energy consumed within the data center was being used by IT equipment, as opposed to air handlers, cooling systems and uninterruptible power supplies.

By turning off unused equipment and better managing its cooling processes, the company increased that percentage to 44%. "...

The municipal government in San Francisco is taking an approach similar to the one at Enterprise, as part of an effort to meet an IT energy-efficiency mandate issued by Mayor Gavin Newsom in February.

At this point, San Francisco officials don't even know exactly how much the city spends to power its IT and communications equipment. ...

Chris Vein, the city's CIO, is currently overseeing a project in which IT staffers are measuring the energy-usage levels of everything with a plug in some municipal buildings, in an effort to develop estimates that could be applied citywide.

Newsom's mandate also calls for Vein to develop a framework for considering the environmental impact of new technologies. One result is that desktop printers are out and network printers are in. The idea, Vein said, is that if workers have to walk down the hall to a printer instead of using one at their desks, they will likely do less printing.

In addition, San Francisco is moving from a three-year refresh cycle on its laptops to a four-year cycle in order to keep them out of landfills for a longer period of time. And Newsom ordered that ... all new PCs and monitors must have at least a silver rating under the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool standard, with a gold rating being preferred. EPEAT, which was developed by the Green Electronics Council in Portland, Ore., is used to rate systems on the basis of their energy efficiency and use of environmentally friendly materials.

Vein ... hopes that the green computing push will also help him achieve his wider IT goals. ...

At some organizations, the motivations for moving to greener systems are still grounded in the need to solve data center problems... For instance, Denis Muras, a systems administrator at a medical facility that he asked not be identified, said his employer is installing blade servers and retiring older, less energy-efficient systems ...

Although the new servers are expected to generate savings on energy costs, Muras said the upgrades are being driven by a need to fit more computing capacity into a data center that's short on available space....

Jim Gordon, a senior network engineer at Computer Marketing Group Inc., which resells systems and manages them for customers, said that some of the Charlotte, N.C.-based company's clients would like to reduce their energy costs by using centralized power management capabilities to put their PCs into sleep mode during off-hours.

But, Gordon added, there's a problem: When systems running Windows XP "go to sleep, they don't always wake up" automatically. That can be a problem when IT workers try to apply software updates in the overnight hours, he said.

... Bob Carson, an IT manager at Reynolds Electric Co., an electrical contractor and IT services firm in Lima, Ohio, said he has seen a change in attitude toward energy efficiency among his IT customers over the past year.

... But now they're measuring the energy consumption of systems as well as their total IT power costs, and using the data as a tool for selling business managers on the merits of new IT approaches and investments in energy-saving technologies....

Meanwhile, Enterprise isn't just touting its green computing exploits to the general public. The committee that's evaluating the environmental impact of new technologies includes a representative from the human resources department. Jim Miller, assistant vice president of IT, said the company has found that green computing is a strong selling point in attracting IT job prospects, and it wants HR to know what it's doing in that area.

(Editor's note: This story originally listed the wrong vendor of the thin clients being installed by Enterprise Rent-A-Car. It was corrected at about 11:30 a.m. EDT on July 18.)

IT groups rethinking the "save everything forever" approach find deletion and retention policies and tools must be razor sharp to cut through a morass of regulations.

By Andrew Conry-Murray
InformationWeek
June 7, 2008 12:02 AM (From the June 9, 2008 issue)

While the oil and gas refined by CVR Energy will someday run out, the company generates a seemingly inexhaustible supply of data: 3 to 5 TB of information in 2008 alone, says CIO and senior VP Mike Brooks. He expects that load to double every year for the foreseeable future.

Though disk may still be cheap, Brooks says, it just doesn't make financial sense for CVR to store every bit of electronic information indefinitely. Besides raising hardware, software, and utilities costs, outsized data stores make backups and enterprise search less efficient, and legal e-discovery more burdensome. ...

Illustration by Sek Leung

That's why CVR ... is undertaking a massive data disposition project, hammering out policies that will govern how long the company stores its information and when it can be disposed. Between deletions based on the new rules and other technology approaches, such as deduplication, Brooks hopes to cut CVR Energy's disk use in half.

But this is one area CIOs must approach with caution. There are significant technological, regulatory, and organizational hurdles to clear before organizations can eliminate data with confidence. At the top of the list are compliance and legal. Every industry has government-mandated retention requirements. On the legal side, general counsel and human resources may worry that critical pieces of information that could support their positions--in case of employment discrimination or harassment claims, for example--may be destroyed.

... Before you can dispose of information, you must identify it and know every place it resides--not a simple task. And users aren't quick to give up the mail and documents they produce. ...

TEAR IT UP
Getting rid of data generally goes against the corporate grain. ...

... An evolving legal landscape is encouraging enterprises to reconsider this preservation instinct. In December 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which set litigation guidelines at the federal level, were updated to include electronically stored information in discovery requests, in which one party asks the opposition for records relevant to a lawsuit. ...

... Fiona Schrader, principal product manager of EMC (NYSE: EMC)'s compliance division, says DuPont estimates that one legal discovery bill came to $11 million. ... [I]t spent that amount on the discovery portion. In that same discovery effort, DuPont found that $4 million to $6 million worth of records had already met their retention deadlines and should have been destroyed. ...

There are three main reasons for this foot dragging. First, some companies aren't sure it's legal to get rid of data. It is. The Supreme Court has ruled that it's permissible--though usually under very specific circumstances. A large constellation of rules and regulations governs how long various types of information must be stored: ... But once mandated compliance periods are met, information should be destroyed.

Companies also must be aware of another stipulation to legal data destruction: the litigation hold. This is a procedure in which information that may be relevant to a case is preserved, even if it's nearing or has reached the end of its retention period . ...

Companies also are reluctant to dispose of data because they think they'll find information to help them prove their case during litigation. They probably won't. "As a litigator," says Michael Sands, a partner at law firm Fenwick & West and chairman of the firm's electronic information management group, "the number of instances we find a document we wished wasn't there far outweighs the times we find something where we say 'Whew! Glad we saved this!'"

It's no coincidence that companies that have been through litigation at least once are more amenable to implementing data disposition policies, Sands says.

The third reason organizations are slow to get rid of data is technological. Before information can be destroyed, IT has to know where it is, what it is, and which retention rules must be followed. ...

IDENTIFY YOURSELF
Before you can chuck a piece of information, you have to know what it is. Thus, index and classification technologies are key. ...

The next step is to categorize all this information for retention and disposition. CVR is still working through its disposition policy, though Brooks expects it to be in place by the first quarter of 2009. "Our objective is to take out the human element," he says. "Two people can look at the same document and categorize it differently. Any time there's human intervention, courts can question your consistency." By automating the process, he hopes to avoid dispute on the final disposition of a file.

...Because CVR's policy isn't finalized, the company hasn't gotten rid of any data. Brooks also says that once information reaches its retention limit, the company will start with a manual review to ensure the data should be destroyed. But his ultimate goal is to automate the destruction. "The manual intervention is where you get in trouble--everything becomes a judgment call," he says. "If the machine is doing it based on algorithms and parameters, at least your company can be consistent."...

BLIND SPOTS
While classifying information is a challenge, finding it often proves an even higher hurdle.

Major data stores, such as network-attached storage filers or e-mail archives, are the low-hanging fruit. ... But other data stores are trickier. SharePoint servers, for example, are relatively easy to deploy, which means line-of-business managers can set up one or two on their own, without IT's permission or knowledge. After a recent audit, one of HP (NYSE: HPQ)'s bank customers found more than 5,000 SharePoint implementations it wasn't aware of, says Jonathan Martin, chief marketing officer for HP's information management software group. ...

Online collaboration tools--such as Socialtext, PBwiki, and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs--are another area of concern. Users can upload business content to these sites in seconds with IT none the wiser, and the data moves beyond the reach of classification and disposition systems. Proactive IT organizations will provide sanctioned collaboration tools that blend administrative controls, such as provisioning, deprovisioning, and authorization, with the ease of use of Web 2.0 apps. This way, you can ensure that content created in these collaborative environments can be discovered--and destroyed--in accordance with policy.

Just as significant are user desktops and laptops. User hard drives are chock-full of corporate data, as are portable flash drives and other removable storage media....

Data disposition has clear benefits for IT and for the business. A sound disposition policy will help enterprises reduce storage costs and reclaim disk space. The tools needed to find and classify data can be leveraged as part of an information management strategy. Regular purging also will reduce discovery costs in the event of litigation. It's shredding time.

 

Records Retention: Practice What You Preach

Be sure to have a retention and disposition policy -- and follow it.

By Andrew Conry-Murray
InformationWeek
June 7, 2008 12:00 AM (From the June 9, 2008 issue)

If your organization is going to claim in court that records aren't available because they've been destroyed, be prepared to back up that assertion with a retention and disposition policy--in writing. You also should have records that demonstrate how the policy is implemented and how employees are trained in retention and disposition. ...

"Users are in favor [of disposition] unless it's their data," says Mike Brooks, CIO and senior VP of CVR Energy. A disposition policy has to be cognizant of users' desire to have some information that lives forever. Overly strict policies will prompt users to find ways to thwart the rules--and that could have harmful compliance or legal repercussions.

Photo illustration by Sek Leung

You also need to have an audit trail, such as electronic log files, to show that disposition is applied regularly and uniformly in accordance with the written policy. ...

Whatever you do, don't write a policy and then fail to follow it. "That's arguably worse than not having a policy at all," says Michael Sands, partner at law firm Fenwick & West. ...

"When a company has a 'policy' that they aren't following, they have defined their own standard of care that they have then failed to meet," Sands says, adding that if your opponent can show that you say one thing but do another, you've already lost.

Note also that there are different levels of "deleted." ... When it comes to data disposition and federal civil court cases, a simple overwrite is sufficient. Courts are less interested in the method used to delete data than in a litigant's ability to demonstrate a comprehensive and repeatable disposition system. ...

Every manager wants an ultra­smart staff. In IT, the good and bad news is that you're likely to get one.

ComputerWorld

By Mary Brandel

May 19, 2008 (Computerworld) It's a management axiom that the smarter the employees are, the harder they are to manage. Employees with a high degree of left-brain intelligence, which is common among IT professionals, can be demanding, blind to the opinions of others, easily bored and bent on being "right," according to the people who manage them.

"Highly intelligent, highly technical people inhabit a subculture where knowledge is social status and power, and correctness is key," says Clinton Nixon, a senior developer at Viget Labs LLC, a Web design, development and consulting firm in Falls Church, Va. ...

Clinton Nixon

So, while you may dream of supervising a brilliant staff, be careful what you wish for -- or at least learn the best way to manage ultrasmart people. Here are six tips from those in the know.

Do Manage Results, Not Process.

It's perfectly reasonable for bosses to tell you what to do, Nixon says, but when it comes to how the work gets done, a controlling atmosphere can be frustrating. ...

"You can't take people who have a passion for something and then start to build walls around them," says Jack Hughes, CEO of TopCoder Inc., a Glastonbury, Conn.-based company that stages coding competitions. A staff made up of those types of people does need structure, but that structure should be geared more around results than process, he says.

"You should format things in terms of the results you're looking for rather than proscribing the way in which they need to get those results," Hughes says.

Do Take a Socratic Approach.

Extremely smart people rarely want to feel managed, but that doesn't mean they don't need to be, says Paul Glen, founder of the GeekLeaders.com Web community and a Computerworld columnist. To pull off this sleight of hand, he says, ask questions that will lead these employees to see your point of view. ...

This takes time and patience, especially when you think you already know the decision that ultimately needs to be made, says Edward Martinez, CIO at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Fla., who has several Ph.D.s on staff.

"You have to vet their ideas and let them come back with a recommendation that you reject or agree with," he says. "Even though you want to just make the decision, you need to give them an opportunity to be part of it."

Do Be Open to Learning New Things.

It would be wasteful not to let some of the ideas of a highly intelligent staff become reality. That's why Patrick Reagan, development director at Viget Labs, is open to exploring where experimentation may lead. ...

"You have to be willing to be bested," Glen notes. However, be sure to make your star staffers justify their positions in a way that's reasoned and convincing. "You can't abdicate your managerial responsibilities," he says.

Don't Pretend to Know More Than You Do.

The worst response to recognizing that a direct report is smarter than you is to feel insecure and threatened, Glen says. ...

It's better to accept that your role isn't to be the one with the best ideas, but rather to be the one who can determine which ideas are best, Glen says.

In fact, taking action on ideas is where you earn the respect of the highly intelligent, Martinez says. ... "Really intelligent people want to see action and results, however it gets done."...

"I think it's important for every technical manager to realize he or she is a guide, not a chief," Nixon notes...

Do Find Ways to Stretch Them.

Mundanity is the bane of highly intelligent staffers, who like to be challenged -- sometimes to a fault. ...

Be careful not to underuse smart people, Martinez adds. ...

Don't Be Blinded by Brilliance.

Just because a person is smart doesn't mean she should run the show. Staying out of the way of smart people doesn't mean abdicating managerial authority, Martinez says. Instead, balance when to give them room to run with their own ideas, when to monitor them and when to intervene. After all, there are many types of intelligence. A brilliant coder, for instance, may not always see big-picture strategy....

Do Maintain Your Humility.

As a technical manager, you will inevitably work with people smarter than you. "If not, you're doing a terrible job of hiring," says Nixon, who has been a manager for two and a half of his 10 years in development....

Try not to feel threatened by not being the smartest one in the room. "I've seen so many managers -- especially those who came from the programming ranks -- feel threatened by their team," Nixon says. "Feeling threatened by someone else being good at their job is poisonous."

Brandel is a Computerworld contributing writer in Newton, Mass. Contact her at marybrandel@verizon.net.

Are you a genius but your manager isn't? See our related story, "When your boss is a dunce."

SmallBizResource.com: The Essential IT Blog For Small Businesses

Posted by Gayle Kesten Thursday, May 15, 2008, 02:49 PM ET

Some things are just *so* simple...if only someone lets me know about it in the first place.

A few months ago I began noticing these "TinyURL" addresses. ...

As it turns out, TinyURL.com is a handy little service that lets you plug in a ginormous URL, hit enter and then receive right back on-screen an abbreviated address that won't break up when you paste it in an e-mail. ...

Plain and simple, doing so makes for a cleaner presentation and lets your email recipient click on the link to launch the Web site, rather than having to cut and paste the URL piece by piece. TinyURLs also work when you want to redirect a visitor within your site or if you don't want people to know the address you're posting is an affiliate link.

For what it's worth, TinyURLs also comes in handy when posting a message on Twitter, which only allots 140 characters for you to communicate with your faithful followers.

...

Internet

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Reducing IT's energy bill is the easy part. Going green gets complicated when you try to master issues like renewable energy and responsible recycling.

Computerworld Magazine

By Mary Brandel

February 15, 2008 (Computerworld) ...Clearly, environmental concerns are near and dear to [the] heart [of] Jeff Saper, CIO at strategic communications firm Robinson Lerer & Montgomery LLC, and not just for the sake of the bottom line. ... Through his own IT-initiated green program, backed by the CEO, he has reduced servers by 50% to 75% through virtualization; has adjusted the data center's cooling system for peak efficiency; and purchases only Energy Star equipment that also meets environmental criteria set by the Green Electronics Council and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The firm also donates old equipment to charitable organizations or uses Dell Inc.'s asset recovery program; has moved some users to thin clients and all to LCD monitors; equipped employees with laptops and broadband so they can telecommute; purchased solar-powered battery adapters for users' BlackBerry devices and Razr phones; and configured Microsoft Active Directory to automatically power down users' PCs and monitors. Plus, employees are continuously educated on environmental actions they can take, like printing documents double-sided and buying reusable water bottles and coffee mugs. ...

Brick Walls

... The fact is, while it's become fairly straightforward to buy energy-efficient PCs and reduce the electrical load of the data center, there's nothing simple about tackling the full gamut of environmental issues raised by the corporate world's dependence on technology.

... Before purchasing an energy-efficient fluorescent light bulb, for instance, you might want to research how to dispose of it, considering that it contains small amounts of mercury. And if you purchase natural products from environmentally conscious companies, you might be surprised to learn how often those Earth-friendly ingredients are shipped from overseas locales, adding to the world's carbon emission load.

... As Simon Mingay, an analyst at Gartner Inc., puts it, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know."

... Mingay also points to the Green Electronics Council's Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), for example. The online tool helps companies compare computer equipment based on a seemingly exhaustive list of environmental attributes, such as percentage of toxic and recycled materials, energy efficiency, ease of disassembly, upgradability, packaging, take-back options and performance criteria. However, EPEAT currently evaluates only monitors and PCs, and it doesn't yet compare the equipment's "embodied energy," or the amount of energy that went into manufacturing, assembling, shipping and distributing the product and all its parts.

"It only looks at the end-use phase, because that's what everyone understands," Mingay says. But research suggests that embodied energy is where the focus should eventually be, because there's about an 80-20 split between the energy consumed in making and distributing the product vs. using it, he says. ...

Not Just About ROI

... A truly green approach involves taking strategic measures like re-architecting your computing infrastructure, researching renewable energy, recycling responsibly and rethinking how technology can improve material efficiency and even reduce carbon and greenhouse-gas emissions. An example is investing in videoconferencing and remote collaboration tools to cut down on travel, or using Web portals rather than paper to disseminate information. ...

Organizations can cut costs 10% to 25% in the first year of an energy-saving program, with little expenditure, Mingay says. "But the challenge will come after the low-hanging fruit -- what do you do then?" he says. "In the U.S., what's motivating most organizations to act is primarily about saving energy or money, and the environmental benefits are at best secondary, if not incidental."

Above the Low-hanging Fruit

One company that's reaching pretty far up the tree is Citigroup Inc. ...

One of the biggest challenges, says James Carney, head of data center planning and analysis in Citigroup's technology infrastructure group, was finding building designers and suppliers who understood that while sustainability was a top goal, the company couldn't compromise on performance and reliability. It also required a lot of research to select materials that were environmentally sound from cradle to grave. For instance, it wasn't easy to find a manufacturer of precast walls that used a large amount of recycled materials and whose plant was relatively close to the building site to keep transportation costs and emissions low. ...

Getting to Square One

...Lloyd Mainers, U.S. East Coast manager for Sandy, Utah-based SubZero Engineering, agrees that awareness is low. His company develops computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models to visually illustrate how hot and cold air is flowing in the data center. Companies can then take simple steps -- like balancing airflow, filling holes in the floor or moving the perforated tiles that blow air -- to more precisely cool its computer equipment, which increases efficiency.

... According to The Green Grid consortium, companies could save 25% of their energy costs by implementing recommendations that result from CFD models.

...Beyond the data center lie even more challenges, [Chris Mines, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.] says, particularly in terms of changing behaviors and developing well-followed green policies and processes. "As hard as it is to reconfigure the data center," he says, "it's even harder to get people to change, even when it comes to basic stuff like turning off the lights." ...

The EPA is all too aware of the difficulty of behavior change. It recently launched a multipronged campaign to educate companies on the merits of using power management features on PCs, which switch the computer to low-power mode after a period of disuse. ...

"Computers have changed drastically in how they handle power management, but the myth and attitude has stayed for a long time," says Steven Ryan, product manager at the EPA. ... According to Ryan, businesses can save $25 to $75 annually per PC using power management.

Despite the challenges of adopting an environmental mind-set, the direction that companies have to head in is clear, and it's clear that IT has a key role to play. According to Gartner, by 2009 one-third of IT organizations will include environmental sustainability in their top-six buying criteria for hardware and services vendors.

Meanwhile, Forrester believes customers' efforts will evolve from the short-term ROI of energy efficiency to longer-term programs aimed at reducing their overall carbon footprint.

"When people start understanding the strategic risk and strategic opportunities of climate change in terms of its impact on brand value, their market and their operations," Mingay says, "they'll get engaged in a much broader environmental agenda."

Brandel is a Computerworld contributing writer. Contact her at marybrandel@verizon.net.

  The tech's still in its early days, but tracking a pizza delivery street by street shows what's possible.

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
InformationWeek

February 9, 2008 12:02 AM (From the February 11, 2008 issue)

It's time to pay attention to location-aware technology. Mobile location tracking is starting to pop up in everyday business uses, and companies that push ahead now could grab a powerful advantage with what, in just a couple of years, should be a commonplace tool on mobile phones.

... In Alabama, Papa John's customers can track their pizza delivery street by street via TrackMyPizza.com, which uses data from drivers' GPS-enabled cell phones. ...

...Thanks to less-expensive GPS on mobile devices, Web-based mapping, mobile search, and other related technologies, location-based services are coming to cell phones and other devices. InStat estimates that last year, 153 million cell phones were sold with integrated GPS, and that number will surge to 590 million a year by 2011. Alternatives to GPS, such as triangulation from cell towers, are also being put to new uses. Business IT departments have an opportunity in all this: Lead the way in taking advantage of a new wave of location information to improve sales and productivity.

(click image for larger view)


An update every 15 seconds, if you really must knowTrackMyPizza.com must prove it's more than a novelty.

EARLY ADOPTERS
Most companies tapping into this trend today are relying on vendors--many of them startups--specializing in location data to provide some kind of service.

That's what Wal-Mart's doing with WeatherBug, which has 8,000 weather-tracking stations based at U.S. schools and public-safety facilities. Its weather alert service, announced last summer, combines weather information with data from ESRI, a longtime provider of geographic information software, that can be sent to GPS-equipped Sprint mobile phones and devices. Verizon will be added soon, says WeatherBug VP Chris Brozenick.

For Wal-Mart, the messages are delivered through an arrangement between WeatherBug and Send Word Now, which provides the text message routing based on a store manager's location. Wal-Mart tested it in 40 stores last summer and has since expanded it to 3,000 stores, Brozenick says. Other customers include Broward County, Fla., which uses it to notify school principals, teachers on field trips, and coaches when dangerous weather's coming toward a school group.

At an 11-store chain of Papa John's restaurants in north Alabama, location data is being pushed directly to customers. Using an online-tracking system developed by startup TrackMyPizza, customers can watch online as their deliveries move street by street toward their doors. Drivers carry GPS-enabled handsets that feed location data to a TrackMyPizza server. ...

At Papa John's, pizza tracking is delivering business benefits in its first two months by getting more people ordering online--a 100% jump in online ordering since the rollout, says Tom Van Landingham, the franchise operating partner. Online orders save phone-answering time, and Web customers spend about $2 more per order, since they can see the whole menu. About 18% of all delivery customers in the last 60 days have gone on the Web site to track their pizza. Van Landingham expects to begin using the tracking system to improve productivity behind the scenes, by plotting more efficient delivery routes, for instance. ...

Contra Costa County, an area that includes oil refineries and 1.2 million residents and is prone to brush fires and earthquakes, in January started testing public-safety text-message alerts based on location to "maximize the relevance" of alerts, says Art Botterell, who manages the county's community warning system. ...

Research In Motion has got a sense of the interest since it began offering GPS-enabled BlackBerrys. "We feel this turn-by-turn navigation is the beginning of something very big," says Tyler Lessard, director of software alliances at RIM. ...

... "Location doesn't mean anything unless there's valuable information behind that," Lessard says. "More and more RIM partners are building turn-by-turn apps and integrating it with social networking." ...

INTEGRATION WITH LEGACY SYSTEMS
Con-way Truckload, a division of Con-way, is feeling that pressure, and in the past year it has spent about $6 million installing GPS-enabled hardware that not only helps in tracking its trucks, but also provides directions to drivers. "People think navigation technology has been in trucks for years, but that's not true," says Bruce Stockton, Con-way's VP of maintenance and asset management. ...

BIG BROTHER FEARS
Companies will face obstacles in using location-aware services. The vast majority of cell phones--and even smartphones, including Apple's iPhone--still don't have GPS, though there are other ways of getting location information (see story, "GPS Isn't The Only Tool For Location"). ...

Also, don't underestimate the suspicion that employees will feel with any GPS implementation. ...

Con-way worried that truckers would feel that way and oppose being tracked, though the concerns faded fast. "There are too many benefits to the system, like the driver not having to use their cell phone as much, or having to find a phone," Stockton says. It's also helped efficiency on the back end, with one fleet manager handling 80 drivers instead of 40. ... Cellular devices are probably next, says Stockton, though the company will probably still use in-dash systems, not GPS-enabled mobile phones. "We want to know where the truck and load is, not the driver," he says.

Even more difficult than employees' privacy concerns will be those of consumers, once companies start reaching people based on where they are. ... Targeted, real-time location-based advertising risks going beyond annoying to being downright creepy. "Cell phones are a personal experience," says Joe Walsh, head of business development and operations for SquareLoop. To give it the proper respect, companies should think about people wearing their cell phones on their hips. "Touching someone's hip is a personal thing," he says. SquareLoop offers different ring tones and vibrate modes to differentiate its alerts.

Yet, what's looking likely to emerge is consumers willingly trading their feeling of location anonymity for some value, such as better search, the chance to "bump into" someone nearby--or just maybe even that coupon. "Privacy in the end won't be a roadblock," says Jaap Groot, CEO of FindWhere, a location-based services vendor that recently acquired a platform called Livecontacts to let people share their their location and media content via mobile phone with their social network.

THE CONSUMER CONNECTION
... Google recently released a My Location feature for mobile Google Maps that works without GPS, an advantage since only about 15% of mobile phones sold last year had the feature. It uses data from mobile towers to help estimate where users are on a map, setting them up for potential new services, like location-based searches and social networking applications. And it's designed to work indoors, unlike GPS.

Microsoft Live Search has had a beta tool since October for use with BlackBerry devices, letting people with GPS-enabled phones use location as part of their searches. It's fairly basic functionality, allowing searches for things such as a restaurant or movie listing that consider location. ... "The mobile experience is still in its infancy," says Ziya Genceren, Microsoft group product manager for mobile, mapping, and local. The lack of precise location information from mobile devices that don't have GPS is one inhibitor, though companies will start offering more services even with less-than-perfect location data, he says.

How soon until we have widespread GPS on mobile phones? Jerry Panagrossi, VP of U.S. operations with Symbian, a mobile device operating system vendor, says a majority of consumer phones will feature location-based services within the three to five years. "This is mass market."

Think of how little time it took the camera to go from high-end accessory to standard on even entry-level phones. And then get your company ready for its location-aware future.

Illustration by Steve Gates

Continue to the sidebars:
GPS Isn't The Only Tool For Location
and
Questions To Ask When Considering A Location-Based Technology

Energy efficiency isn't just for the data center. Here's how to save some greenbacks by powering down out front.

Robert L. Mitchell

December 07, 2007 (Computerworld) -- ...Concerned about soaring energy costs, IT organizations have begun to make significant changes to the way their data centers are powered and cooled. But many IT departments haven't yet looked at saving energy by targeting the rest of the company's IT equipment. ...

"Office equipment has become more highly featured and powerful than ever before, but there's an energy cost to that," says Katherine Kaplan, who manages the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star consumer electronics and IT initiatives.

"If you look at overall power consumption, you're seeing almost double for computers and monitors than for data centers," says Jon Weisblatt, senior product manager, power and cooling initiative at Dell Inc.

Verizon Wireless is one company that is saving plenty of green by going green. Earlier this year, the wireless carrier deployed NightWatchman power management software from 1E Ltd. that puts desktop computers and monitors in offices, stores and call centers into power-saving mode after a period of inactivity, overriding any personal settings. Another 1E product, SMSWakeup, automatically "wakes up" those machines after hours to deliver patches and updates, shutting them down again when the process is complete. "It saved us [money] just turning computers on and off on demand," says CIO Ajay Waghray.

... He also replaced 7,000 PCs with power-sipping Sun Ray thin clients from Sun Microsystems Inc. in Verizon's call centers and migrated to LCD monitors companywide (a process that's still ongoing). Replacing nonmanaged PCs in 10 call centers with 7,000 managed thin clients cut energy use for that equipment by 30%, says Waghray. He estimates that the two initiatives combined have cut front-office power consumption by $900,000 a year...

There were an estimated 900 million desktops in use worldwide in 2006, according to IDC. Even if all of those units were Energy Star 2006 compliant, they would still consume 426 billion kWh of power annually.

If all of that equipment met the 2007 Energy Star 4.0 specification, it would cut power consumption by 27% over 2006 Energy Star levels, according to Marla Sanchez, principal research associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. That would save 115 billion kWh -- enough to power all of Switzerland for nearly two years -- and cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 178 billion lbs.

To do your part to reduce some of those emissions -- and save your own company some dough -- [try] following our five tips on saving resources and increasing the efficiency of front-office equipment.

1. Do an energy audit

It's hard to know where you stand if you don't first measure the efficiency of the equipment you have.

Fortunately, doing a power audit of ordinary office equipment is less complicated than auditing your data center. A simple, inexpensive meter that fits between the target device plug and the outlet can measure both current loads and cumulative power consumption over time.

...Meters range from the simple to the advanced. P3 International Corp.'s Kill A Watt or Sea Sonic Electronics Co.'s Power Angel are both simple to use and inexpensive.

More advanced units, such as the Watts Up Pro from Electronic Educational Devices Inc., store data and include software for downloading and graphing that data to show watts, volts and kilowatt-hour consumption over time, giving a more accurate picture of power use.

...After you've audited energy use, the next step is to audit your internal processes to ensure that equipment is being used in the most energy-efficient manner, says Robert Aldrich, a senior manager specializing in energy efficiency at Cisco Systems Inc. And once you have that process audit -- in other words, once you know how well you are doing human-behavior-wise -- the next step is to "kick the tires on technology" by taking a look at utilities such as power management tools, he says.

2. Adopt and enforce power management

"The biggest impact you're going to make in your overall computing environment is to get systems to go to sleep," says Dell's Weisblatt. ...

Network administrator Keith Brown deployed LANDesk Software's LANDesk to manage -- and lock down -- power settings on all laptops, desktops and attached monitors at Gwinnett Hospital System in Lawrenceville, Ga.

Like 1E's SMSWakeUp, LANDesk takes advantage of Intel Corp.'s vPro Active Management Technology (AMT), a feature built into its vPro series processors that supports remote management. ... "It allows you to do 'out-of-band' management on desktops," allowing control even when machines are turned off, explains Brown.

For times when laptops are turned on -- that is, when they're being used by employees -- Lenovo recommends configuring the disk drive to spin down after five minutes of inactivity, the monitor to go blank at 10 minutes, and the machine to go into standby, or suspend, mode after 20 minutes.

Others, such as Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist at the energy efficiency think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, recommend even more aggressive settings. He suggests turning off monitors and spinning down the disk drive after just two or three minutes of inactivity. ...

Every organization needs to find the right balance, managers say. "A few seconds of [wait] time for the average person is not going to be invasive," says Jorge Bandin, vice president of information systems and technology at hosted services provider Terremark Worldwide Inc. His company forces all PCs to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes of inactivity. ...

3. Dump those CRTs

... The place to start is with CRT displays.

"The biggest offenders are the monitors," says Brown. Most businesses have already begun phasing out CRTs in favor of more efficient LCDs, which use about one-third less power, but they still have plenty of CRTs waiting to go. ...

Energy savings can add up. Brown estimates that Gwinnett Hospital System is already saving between $30,000 and $60,000 a year in electricity costs by replacing about 70% of its CRTs with LCD monitors and using automated power management tools.

4. Slim down the client

As for the desktop, look for equipment that is Energy Star 4.0 compliant. ... Computers that meet the standard consume 20% to 50% less energy than those that meet previous Energy Star standards, says Kaplan.

Compact PC models, such as Lenovo's ThinkCentre A61e desktop or Dell's Inspiron 531, are more efficient than standard desktops and save space as well as power (the A61e is about the size of a 3-inch-thick notebook binder). ...

Many businesses, including Jenny Craig, are moving to a Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server setup, which enables them to use easily managed thin client PCs on the desktop. Thin clients use less power and space, since they have no disk drive or fan, and the Windows session and applications run on the server. ...

While replacing PCs with thin clients does require adding servers on the back end that boost power requirements, the savings on the desktop more than make up for that, says Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse. With the 64-bit edition of Presentation Server running on the back end, 1,000 PCs can be accommodated on three 800-watt servers. That amounts to about 3 watts per client, he says.

Jenny Craig's system uses 90% less energy than the PCs it replaced. "We see it on the bills [for the centers]," [Alessandra Nicoletti, director of IT operations] says....

For all their energy-saving benefits, thin clients won't work in every case, such as for some graphics or compute-intensive applications. ...

And other companies have encountered user resistance. Gwinnett Hospital System has dabbled in thin clients, but has stalled at around 100 terminals. "It hasn't always worked out as we had hoped," says Brown, noting that most employees pushed back, preferring to have a fully equipped desktop that runs their applications locally.

5. Print more efficiently

... With each generation of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s printers, for example, energy efficiency has increased by 7% to 15%, according to the vendor's statistics. ... Also, consumables packaging may be smaller with new machines, which means less waste to throw away.

...Printers are also getting smarter about when to go into low-power mode. Multifunction printers from Xerox, for example, monitor printer usage patterns over time to decide when to power down and bring the machines online.

Both Jenny Craig and Terremark Worldwide have configured printers to print double-sided by default. ... Duplex mode can cut paper consumption by up to 25%, says Dave Lombato, environmental lead for HP's LaserJet business.

While that won't cut the company's energy bill, it does cut down on paper costs as well as the energy and carbon emissions required to produce it. According to Forrester Research Inc., pulp and paper manufacturing is the third biggest consumer of energy in North America, behind steel and chemicals. ...

Consolidating and better managing printers, scanners and other peripherals also saves energy and money. According to Forrester, an individual copier, printer and fax machine can consume 1,400 kWh of power annually, while a multifunction printer (MFP) consumes half that.

Multifunction printer devices, which combin[e] copying, printing, scanning and fax, offer additional efficiencies, making consumables management easier and saving space as well as energy. Consolidating just two devices into a single machine, for example, cuts energy consumption by about 40%, according to HP. ...

While there's no one-size-fits-all solution for energy-efficient computing, the best options will be those that complement the business by simplifying processes, making staff more efficient and serving the customer better, says Verizon Wireless' Waghray....

By Jeff Zeigler, Network World, 12/13/07

With major OEMs arguing about who recycles the most electronics and with e-waste legislation on the rise across the world, green computing is a hot topic. However, many companies are still in the dark about how to properly get rid of old IT equipment in an environmentally friendly way that also ensures the secure destruction of sensitive data.

While recycling is often cited as the answer, refurbishment and resale are now being recognized as the ultimate solution. ...

... Recycling is certainly an important last resort, but the huge and largely untapped market for used devices makes refurbishment and resale a profitable – and more socially responsible – alternative. Recent UN University research by professors Rudiger Kuerh and Eric Williams reveals that passing on a PC for someone else to use is up to 20 times better for the environment than breaking it up and recycling it. ...

... Choosing a company to deal with retired technology should not be undertaken lightly, and ultimately will require due diligence regarding specific qualifications and other aspects of their business.

Asking the following questions can be a good way to start. Any IT asset recovery company that does not have satisfactory answers is probably not one worth pursuing:

1. What are your tracking and automation capabilities to manage assets?
2. Can you process all types and ages of IT equipment and recover value from systems, parts and raw commodities?
3. Have you developed a holistic data sanitization process that sanitizes all types of media -- such as IDE, SCSI and fiber -- and is verified by using forensic tools?
4. Do you have destruction capabilities such as degaussing, dismantling and refining for data that cannot be erased?
5. Can your operations scale to meet your partner’s needs and are they ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certified to meet standards of quality for process management?
6. Do you provide documentation and full reporting of your processes and perform internal and external audits?
7. Have you developed value-added operations such as repair, refurbishment, salvage or recycling capabilities to ensure that quality products are being resold and for the best price?
8. What sales channels have you developed to maximize recovery values for systems, parts and raw materials?
9 Can your reporting systems provide robust data and integrate with your partner's inventory or asset management system?
10. What risk protection do you offer to your clients – that is, indemnification, errors and omissions insurance, pollution insurance?

...As technology refresh cycles continue to shorten, it has become more critical than ever for companies to make end-of-life IT asset disposal a high priority by going through these steps and working with reputable refurbishing/recycling providers. By doing so, companies will not only ensure an environmentally sound and secure solution to ridding themselves of old equipment but also provide affordable options for those who can't afford new technology.

As the market for used technology continues to grow, companies will find that a good partner can recover enough value to pay for the services and return some additional value. This creates a win-win situation in the truest sense.

Zeigler is CEO of TechTurn. You can reach him at, jeff.zeigler@techturn.com.

Solar arrays and wind farms grab all the green technology attention, but the Internet is quietly providing ways to save energy.

By Richard Martin
InformationWeek
January 12, 2008 12:01 AM (From the January 14, 2008 issue)

... The pervasive use of broadband Internet connections and the tools and practices they enable could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by some 1 billion tons over the next decade, according to the American Consumer Institute. Widespread adoption of broadband in the United States alone would cut energy use by the equivalent of 11% of annual oil imports, the group says. ...

Internet-enabled capabilities like telecommuting, e-commerce, teleconferencing, and distance learning that have been around for decades are expected to play an increasing role in cutting energy consumption--reducing air travel and the need for warehouses, trips to the mall, and even malls themselves. The American Consumer Institute projects that telecommuting alone will cut CO₂ emissions by more than a half million tons over the next decade (see table, above). Overall, the Internet economy could help reduce growth in greenhouse gas output by 67% over the next several years, the study says, citing data from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

"The future Internet represents an incredible business opportunity for researchers and corporations," says Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks at Canarie, a nonprofit group focused on advanced Internet development in Canada. "It will allow them to deploy new economic models and create marketing opportunities where they will make profits by reducing CO₂ emissions."

...Many of these more commonsensical plans revolve around the emerging demand-response industry, which matches electricity consumption to supply in real time. ...

In other words, while Google snags headlines for equipping its Mountain View, Calif., campus with a huge solar array, the real work of using the Web to slow global climate change is going on in less celebrated locales, like the Boston offices of demand-response and energy-management provider EnerNOC.

MARKET-DRIVEN
EnerNOC, which stands for "Energy Network Operations Center," was founded in 2001 by a pair of energy-business veterans and graduates of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. It's based on a simple principle: Companies should respond to market signals in the energy business just as they do in their own core industries. ...

A handful of utilities across the country in recent years have provided incentives for customers to cut power usage during times of peak demand. ... Now companies like EnerNOC are making this a viable option by tracking price fluctuations and grid events like power shortages, spikes in demand, and brownouts and helping customers respond to them in real time.

The technology is likewise simple: EnerNOC installs a gateway software device at the customer's premises (a data center, grocery store, warehouse, or manufacturing facility) that gives it 24-hour, real-time connectivity and control over the customer's energy assets. Based on preset rules, when peak demand hits, the price of electricity skyrockets, or a rolling brownout occurs, EnerNOC's automated program reduces power consumption, powering down lights and other nonessential power-consuming devices within minutes. In addition to saving money on the power they don't use during a peak-demand event, EnerNOC customers get a rebate from their utility for participating in the program, and they receive additional compensation based on how well they perform during a specific event....

SAAS APPROACH
What's striking about EnerNOC's service is that it's so sensible: Energy savings can be achieved in friction-free ways, just by paying attention. That's the business model behind the emissions management platform at Canadian software-as-a-service provider Carbonetworks. ...

"We provide an executive-level view of what a company's emissions footprint looks like in terms of both assets and liabilities," says co-founder and CEO Michael Meehan, who ...[is] the founder of online climate-change information source the Climate Resource...

The final step is using the Internet to match "emitters" with validated carbon-offset providers such as SGS, 3C, and Blue Source. They deal in tradable emission credits from sources engaged in activities that lower CO₂ production, like reforestation projects and solar energy providers. Emitters can buy credits to offset their emissions.

Going Down

Reductions in greenhouse gases from various online activities

	CURRENT ANNUAL SAVINGS (MILLIONS OF TONS)	FORECAST 10-YEAR INCREMENTAL SAVINGS(MILLIONS OF TONS)
Telecommuting	134.7	568.2
E-commerce	37.5	206.3
Teleconferencing	36.3	199.8
Replacement of mail, CDs, publications with online equivalents	9.8	67.2

Data: American Consumer Institute

Carbon offsets have gotten plenty of bad press over the last few years, with many experts calling them "greenwashing" or Band-Aids to cover up wasteful energy practices with clever marketing. But the value of offsets already makes Carbonetworks' service attractive, Meehan says, and the advent of mandatory carbon caps--now a virtual certainty with the United States' acquiescence to controls at the Bali global warming summit in December--will create an active carbon-trading market that CNX users can capitalize on....

Now the threat of regulation is being paired with incentives. "Companies see there's a huge carrot out there," Meehan says. By using CNX to attach a dollar figure to its emissions, he says, a forward-looking company could save 60% or more in energy costs per year without adding significantly to its bottom-line expenses...

BLACK ARTS
..."This is the inflection point," says Bob Gohn, VP of marketing at wireless-mesh silicon vendor Ember. ...

Spun out of an MIT research team in 2000, Ember operates in the online energy management space, making semiconductors and software ... used... in sensor networks for demand-response systems. ...

Silver Spring Networks, which makes wireless transceivers that are embedded in energy and water meters, is seeing that sort of demand. Such meters until recently were standalone devices waiting for a once-a-month reading. Now they supply hourly or even minute-by-minute energy-usage data to utilities and customers.

Utility grids, CEO Scott Lang says, "are some of the largest, most complex networks in the world"--yet they're still being read by guys with clipboards walking around in back yards. "To link them up we identified one standard: IP. The same kind of approach that makes the Internet work is going to make this work."...

Given the simplicity of many of these concepts... the question is, Why has it taken this long for them to edge into the mainstream?

One answer is security. The Hollywood scenario of an attacker gaining access to power-grid control systems is a real fear for public utilities. Then there's the era of cheap fossil fuel that we've just exited. ...

Another Internet revolution--and this one just might help save the planet.

Illustration by Peter Hoey

The real culprit when it comes to carbon emissions is the PC. Here's one way to turn off your employees' desktop machines when they're not in use.

By Richard Martin
InformationWeek
January 12, 2008 12:00 AM (From the January 14, 2008 issue)

...Measuring carbon emissions from a variety of IT devices, Gartner found that the top three are PCs/monitors, data centers, and fixed-line telecom systems. PCs and monitors alone contribute 40% of total emissions, data centers about 23%.

... As much as two-thirds of that is wasted, says Kevin Klustner, CEO of Verdiem, an IT energy monitoring and management company, translating to $5.4 billion of energy literally up in smoke each year.

Verdiem's approach: Use Web-based technology to turn off those PCs when they're not in use. ...

"We save the Baltimore school district $325,000 a year," says Klustner. "For a public school district, that's a lot of money."

...Radio giant Clear Channel Communications became a Verdiem client last year and projects savings of $11,000 over 12 months. That's after spending $6,300 on the software and getting a $2,925 rebate from its utility, Pacific Gas and Electric. ...

...Surveyor turns off or shifts to a low-power setting PCs that aren't in use. IT managers can choose a specific time (say, 6 p.m.) to power down machines, or base the transition on usage patterns--the software can tell when a keyboard has not been used for a certain period of time.

Verdiem's 150 customers run about 500,000 PCs. Powering them down when not in use will save about 100 million kilowatt-hours this year, preventing more than 61,000 metric tons of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere.

Computerworld January 7, 2008

Many say the new archiving guidelines fail to account for evolving technologies.

Brian Fonseca   January 07, 2008 (Computerworld) -- Many IT shops have spent months working to refit corporate systems so they comply with year-old changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, even as some executives say the revisions aren’t clearly defined.

However, some IT executives who complained about the rules did acknowledge that the FRCP modifications have forced them to make positive changes to corporate data-retention policies.

The revisions, which took effect on Dec. 1, 2006, require that opposing sides in a federal lawsuit meet within 99 days of its filing to determine what electronic data must be produced and in what format. Failure to comply could lead to fines or a prison sentence.

The e-discovery rules have been created and are enforced by the U.S. Supreme Court and are often followed in state courts as well. ...

Gregg Davis, CIO at [Webcor Builders Inc.] the San Mateo, Calif.-based construction firm, contended that the rules fail to take into account evolving storage technologies. ...

“There are still a lot of questions around what is digital storage and e-discovery,” Davis added. “The [revised] rules have changed the game, and we are [being forced to] think and rethink where things are stored.”

For example, he noted that Webcor still isn’t sure whether images and documents on copy machine hard drives and print servers fall under the revised guidelines. ...

Davis recounted some questionable demands from opposing attorneys in some recent litigation in state court. One of them asked that Webcor buy his client software that could help it read the contractor’s Oracle database. Fulfilling such a request could prove “very costly,” said Davis, adding, “This is why [FRCP] is a new slippery slope.” ...

The updated FRCP rules have already placed a heavy burden on IT staffers, said Howard Nirken, a partner at Austin law firm DuBois, Bryant & Campbell LLP.
“[FRCP] has made their lives incredibly complicated,” Nirken said. IT is now responsible for immediately locating electronic files that “can exist just about anywhere — in networks, in people’s personal computers [or] on any electronic media you can imagine.” ...

Silver Lining
The rush to comply with the updated rules has provided some businesses with unexpected benefits by forcing action, IT managers say.

Bill Shaw, MIS director of The Village of Niles, Ill., said the revised rules led city officials to decree that all e-mails to and from city offices are official documents and subject to legal review.

That policy change quickly eased the city’s e-mail storage and management burden by reducing the number of nonbusiness e-mails that pass through its systems, Shaw said. “It’s had a reduction in our e-mail and an increase in productivity,” he noted. ...

The Brink’s Co., a Richmond, Va.-based firm whose holdings include Brink’s Inc. and Brink’s Home Security, hopes the revised FRCP guidelines clarify which data needs to be retained for long periods and which data can be deleted, said Suzanne Barasch, manager of corporate information systems and global messaging.
The company currently purchases 20 800GB backup tapes monthly to save all of its corporate data, she said.

“I’m not able to overwrite any of my tapes, and I haven’t been able to do that for three years. [Our lawyers] don’t want to overwrite any data,” Barasch said. “I think there comes a point where keeping everything is silly. There are files that haven’t been touched in years.” ...

If the Internet goes down, will you be ready?

ComputerWorld January 21, 2008

Gary Anthes  

January 21, 2008 (Computerworld) -- It’s likely that the Internet will soon experience a catastrophic failure, a multi­day outage that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars.

Or maybe it isn’t likely.

In any case, companies are not prepared for such a possibility.

But then again, some are.

These mixed messages come from credible sources. The confusion stems in part from the fact that the Internet has never seen anything much worse than local outages and brief slowdowns. But could it? And if it did, how ready would your company be?

Indeed, the threat is “urgent and real,” says The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of large U.S. companies. The Washington-based public policy advocacy group says there is a 10% to 20% chance of a “breakdown of the critical information infrastructure” in the next 10 years, brought on by “malicious code, coding error, natural disasters, [or] attacks by terrorists and other adversaries.”

An Internet meltdown would result in reduced productivity and profits, falling stock prices, erosion of consumer spending and potentially a liquidity crisis, according to a recent Business Roundtable report, “Growing Business Dependence on the Internet — New Risks Require CEO Action.” ...

Tom Lehner, director of public policy at The Business Roundtable, says business executives often fail to realize how dependent they have become on the public network — for e-mail, collaboration, e-commerce, public-facing and internal Web sites, and information retrieval by employees. He also notes that disaster recovery and business-continuity plans often fail to take into account the threat an Internet disruption poses to a company and its suppliers. ...

“What we wanted to do in this report is say to CEOs, ‘You may not realize that whole segments of your business are almost completely dependent on the Internet, and it’s not enough to have a few IT specialists to help you respond to problems as they come up,’” Lehner says.

Judging the Risk
Stephen Crocker, an Internet pioneer and chairman of the Security and Stability Advisory Council of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), says he tries to walk a line between “Chicken Little, things-are-terrible” scenarios and “Pollyanna, the-world-is-wonderful” views of the Internet. He says, for example, that he worries little about a physical attack on the Internet — against major hubs, lines and so on. “I don’t know of any physical attack that would have any widespread or long-lasting effect,” he says. “The Internet is pretty robust at the physical layer. ...”

But the Internet is not so robust at other layers, admits Crocker, the CEO of Shinkuro Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based developer of information-sharing technology. He points to the possibility of “systematic failure of operating systems like Windows, or penetration by worms that run rampant and cause massive amounts of chaos,” or floodlike denial-of-service attacks. Still, he says, these kinds of disruptions, although annoying and potentially quite costly, are typically resolved in a matter of hours and thus stop short of being the kind of catastrophe that the Business Roundtable report contemplates.

... Asked if he worries about an Internet meltdown, Michael Long, senior vice president of global services at Siemens Medical Solutions, says, “Anything is possible, certainly, with things today like the terrorism situation. But we are pretty confident that if we did have an Internet hiccup, we’d go with alternate communication paths.”

...Long does concede that certain functions would be a “challenge” without the Internet.

...There is a good chance that parts of the Internet will fail from time to time, says Neal Puff, CIO of Yuma County, Ariz. “But having been based on the Arpanet and designed to keep functioning when pieces are broken, it seems less likely that the entire Internet would stop working.”

... Puff acknowledges. “If the entire Internet goes down, everyone’s in a world of hurt, but I try to look at the probabilities.” ...

Inconvenient at Best

... “It would be encumbered tremendously if the Internet went down,” says Marc Probst, CIO at Intermountain.

Asked in a telephone interview if Internet alternatives are part of Intermountain’s disaster recovery and business-continuity plans, Probst says, “We haven’t sat down and gone through that kind of thinking. It’s probably a very good thing to do, and we will, right after this phone call.”

ICANN’s Crocker says that although the Internet has serious vulnerabilities, some of them could be patched relatively easily. ... “Today, the network operators, equipment vendors, government and business all seem to accept the idea the network is inherently dangerous and can’t be modified in any useful way. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

...Crocker says the Business Roundtable report and similar critiques carry an “implied assumption” that individual companies can protect themselves. There is some truth to that, he says, because companies can, for example, get multiple copies of critical systems running in different locations, albeit at considerable expense. ...

SIDEBAR: The Little Things Count
Patrick Cain, chairman of a network security working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force, says he finds the possibility of a catastrophic Internet failure unlikely. ...

But, says Cain, co-founder of The Cooper Cain Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., it’s natural for people planning for disasters to concentrate on the big, dramatic events, like the crash of an airliner into a data center. Meanwhile, lesser but more likely events are ignored. For example, he says, if an organization has some local problem that prevents access by the public to its Web site, that can create a public relations disaster. ...

SIDEBAR: Best Practice Not Practiced
In May 2000, in response to a “resurgence in denial-of-service attacks” against Internet targets, the Network Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force issued a request for comments (RFC), titled “Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial-of-Service Attacks Which Employ IP Source Address Spoofing.”
... A lot of mischief on the Internet, including denial-of-service attacks that flood Web sites, rely on randomly changing forged source addresses. .... But through a simple process called network-ingress filtering, Internet service providers could check packets to ensure that they contain valid, legitimately reachable source addresses, says the RFC, which has since been named Best Current Practice 38 (www.armware.dk/RFC/bcp/bcp38.html).
“To what extent have the ISPs implemented that?” asks Steve Crocker, chairman of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Council. “The answer is, hardly at all...”

Network World 12/03/07

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World, 12/03/07

Photo voltaic arrays. Sod roofs. Reflective white membranes. These are some of the far-out techniques that architects are using to build the nation’s greenest data centers.

But the managers of these data centers say some of the most effective ways of cutting back electricity usage -- such as raising the computer room temperature a few degrees -- also are the simplest. ...

To build a green data center, you need "a team that works together and is incredibly creative," says Kath Williams, a Montana green building consultant and former vice chair of the U.S. Green Building Council. "It’s amazing where you can find the energy savings." ...

"It’s extremely difficult" to build a data center that meets the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, Williams says. "For data centers, the challenge is the energy load."...

Feds lead green movement

At the forefront of the green data center movement is the U.S. federal government, which has been required by law to measure and track energy usage in its buildings for more than 20 years.

"We can look at the energy consumption of all our facilities back to 1985," says Kevin Kampschroer, director of research and expert services in the Office of Applied Science at the Public Buildings Service, an arm of the General Services Administration that owns and leases office buildings for more than 1 million federal workers. "We know exactly what’s going on in our buildings, and we manage it at a national level. When we see significant increases, we send in a specialized team to see what we can do in this building." ...

Among the nation’s first data centers to be certified as silver or gold by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program are data centers operated by the EPA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Energy Department....

What works to cut usage

The newest green data centers share many features: They’re built using locally supplied and recycled materials; waste is minimized during construction; lots of windows provide extensive natural lighting; and fluorescent lighting with dimmers is used throughout. These buildings have occupancy sensors so that lights and temperature automatically adjust when no one is in the room. Another common feature is raised flooring with under-floor heating and cooling used throughout the buildings, not just in the computer rooms.

The EPA’s National Computer Center (NCC) at Research Triangle Park, N.C. -- a 95,322 square foot, 200-employee facility -- is a LEED Silver building. To get that certification, architects rotated the building so that the offices and lobby face south to allow the sun to help heat the building....

Architects also cut the size of the building by 20% from its original footprint, and designed in the capability to expand it later rather than building in extra capacity. ...

NCC’s most innovative feature is the special solar panels on its roof, which offset about 5% of the building’s electric usage. The building’s roof is one of the largest photovoltaic installations on the East Coast. The photovoltaic system converts the sun’s light into electric energy and feeds it directly to the building. Another benefit of the roof is that it provides extra thermal insulation. It not only generates electricity but it mitigates unwanted radiant heat gain.

NOAA’s Satellite Operations Facility (NSOF) in Suitland, Md., also has an innovative roof. The building has one of the largest so-called "green" roofs in the Washington D.C. area. It has soil and native plantings on the roof much like a sod shanty from pioneering days. ...

The Air Force Weather Agency is building a 182,000-square-foot building at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Neb., that is aiming for LEED certification. The building, which cost $29.7 million, houses supercomputers that process more than a terabyte of weather information each day and transmits it to pilots around the world ....

Some of the tricks the Air Force used include angling the building to face the west rather than the south to reduce summertime heat. The building also has a reflective white roof with extra insulation to keep the sun from warming up the building too much....

Lessons learned

Operators of these cutting-edge green data centers say one of the primary ways of reducing electricity usage is adjusting the air conditioning. By merely raising the computer room temperature a few degrees, they are able to reduce electricity usage by as much as 10% or 20% annually. ...

Adjusting the air conditioners water chillers by just a few degrees can reap huge energy savings. And that’s something that IT departments can do today to help make their existing data centers greener. ...

Why it all matters

Building green data centers -- or retrofitting existing data centers with green features -- is likely to be top-of-mind for CIOs in 2008. That’s because the amount of electricity that data centers use is on the rise.

The amount of energy used by data centers nationwide more than doubled between 2000 and 2006, EPA asserted in a report to Congress this summer. ...

EPA estimates that national energy consumption by data centers could nearly double again between 2006 and 2011, reaching more than 100 billion kilowatt hours and costing $7.4 billion annually.

In the future, the greenest data centers are going to be the ones with the most business, experts say....

Computerworld 11/28/2007

It's still an issue for some Gartner conference attendees, even as media turns away

Patrick Thibodeau November 28, 2007 (Computerworld) -- The avian flu has a plot line similar to a Stephen King novel. It's a menacing presence, mysterious and somewhat hidden, striking in out-of-way places and threatening broader havoc -- a global evil. And until this year, it was a best-seller in newsrooms, spurring headlines that raised public attention and spurred organizations to plan for it.

But media interest in the threat of a pandemic has fallen off. In a report this summer about pandemic planning, the White House said that attention to the pandemic has "waned in the media," while "the threat of avian influenza and the potential for an influenza pandemic has not."

The U.S. Government Accountability Office followed up in a report last month, and said the challenge for many organizations is "maintaining a focus on pandemic planning due to the uncertainty of when a pandemic may occur" and the need to address more immediate issues.

...In interviews of attendees at Gartner Inc.'s data center conference this week in Las Vegas, IT managers said they were nonetheless continuing to prepare for the potential.

Bob Kallas, director of computer support services at a company he didn't want named, says his firm conducted a test a few months ago to see how many workers it could support remotely. The company picked a day and then told several hundred employees to work from home. "We want to measure readiness to be able to support the company," he says....

The avian influenza has killed a little more than 200 people, about half in Indonesia. The fear is that the virus will change into something that's easily spread by people, touching off a global pandemic.

Earlier this fall, financial services groups along with the U.S. Department of Treasury conducted a three-week planning scenario, and planned for pandemic that would kill about 1.7 million people in the U.S. and hospitalize 9 million. ...

The avian flu remains a focal point of several diligent blogs. Among them is the H5N1 blog maintained by Crawford Kilian, a writer who teaches at a Canadian college. In response to some questions, he wrote in a note: "Business planning for a pandemic is like making your will -- because you have to contemplate something awful, you'd rather not contemplate it at all. So if the media aren't nagging us, we'll put it off. The catch-22 is that they won't nag us unless people are dying daily and in growing numbers."

10/30/07 Network World

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, 10/30/07

As employees struggle to read an increasing amount of work-related material, some companies have turned to RSS technology to improve productivity. ...

"The first problem we see addressed regularly with enterprise RSS systems is e-mail overload. Most knowledge workers these days are just about completely fed up with e-mail," said Oliver Young, a Forrester Research analyst.

An enterprise RSS system is ideal for delivering the type of information employees need to know about, but not necessarily act on right away, Young said.

RSS keeps need-to-know information out of the e-mail channel, which for most people is "a need-to-do task list sort of thing," Young said. ...

The Union Bank of California hopes that enterprise RSS can help it tame an internal communications overload.

About 80 bank groups, from areas like public relations, marketing, sales, product management and operations, hit employees with a steady stream of mass e-mails, all-hands voice mails, printed literature and intranet additions.

"We discovered that about half of the messages being delivered via these methods weren't appropriate to the people [receiving them] so we definitely needed to do something," said James Penn, the bank's vice president of interactive marketing and communications. ...

At the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) division in Orkney, Scotland, the IT department has significantly cut down on e-mail overload with a NewsGator enterprise RSS system, said David Rendall, a computer programmer involved in the project. ...

"The biggest challenge is helping people make the switch and get their heads around the new RSS paradigm," Rendall said. ...

In addition to reducing e-mail, enterprise RSS systems often boost organizations' use of intranets, blogs and wikis by alerting employees to changes and additions, Young said. ...

October 8, 2007 issue of InformationWeek

Gamers, YouTubers, and MySpace cadets are sitting in the next cubicles. Stop fighting them and, instead, welcome them into your corporate network.

By Aditya Kishore, Heavy Reading
InformationWeek
October 12, 2007 12:00 AM (From the October 8, 2007 issue)

The U.S. Department of Defense earlier this year banned access to 13 music, message, photo, and video-sharing Web sites on NIPRNet, the unclassified network used by soldiers stationed abroad to access the Internet and keep in touch with family and friends. It was a decisive move to get control of bandwidth usage on the department's network and rid it of "a significant operational security challenge," said Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, in announcing the ban.

Controlling access to content in the workplace isn't a new idea, and it isn't necessarily a bad one. But while site blocking solves immediate problems, ultimately it's a Band-Aid for a phenomenon that eventually will require radical surgery.

Businesses must take a longer-term view of these emerging applications and recognize that they're being driven by forces that are more likely to gain momentum than die out. Rather than fight the inevitable, business technology managers must start exploring ways to leverage the new digital content ecosystem to meet their companies' objectives.

WAG THE NET
In a recent study, InformationWeek sister organization Heavy Reading analyzed the video distribution value chain and identified disruptive forces created by the growth of Internet media and new video entertainment formats. Essentially, a generation of consumers is growing up with interactivity and connectivity as givens. As they enter the workforce, they're bringing new approaches to communication and entertainment, heavily oriented around the Internet. The consumer tail is now wagging the Internet dog. ...

Heavy Reading has identified five main drivers of this emerging media ecosystem:

Broadband penetration:

Online multimedia:

Social networking:

User-generated content:

Constant access:

BUSINESS PLAYS CATCH-UP
The experience of first-generation Internet users was shaped mainly by corporate networks. When consumer Internet service was limited by narrowband, dial-up access, corporate networks were the gold standard for Net connectivity, and IT departments were the bandwidth gatekeepers.

Those days are long gone, ... In many cases, businesses are following--not leading--when it comes to network-based service innovation. This is particularly true of high-bandwidth media applications....

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Businesses must develop an effective strategy to address these emerging challenges. The following steps will be important in ensuring business continuity:

State the rules. ...

Put Big Brother on guard. ...

Block where necessary. ...

Prepare for the multimedia onslaught. ...

Control bandwidth hogs. ...

Watch the little boxes. ...

No wires doesn't mean no problems. ...

Get interactive. ...

Look both ways. ...

Communicate. ...

Cluing in the troops--whether in the military or in the cubicles down the hall--about security and productivity concerns can help minimize the need to block access to offending Web sites. While following the Defense Department's lead and blocking access to a bunch of sites is quick and easy, there are other ways to deal with the onslaught of rich media applications--the very applications that could make your employees more connected and productive.

Aditya Kishore is a senior analyst at Heavy Reading.

Illustration by Yuan Lee

First in a series of articles assessing the future of the Internet. For more, check out internetevolution.com, with its ThinkerNet blog of more than 65 Internet contributors, including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, and General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda, as well as videos, Webinars, news, and more.

Computerworld 

Just down the road from Redmond, an enterprise Microsoft shop is switching to Apple.

Julia King   July 16, 2007 (Computerworld) -- It's little things like the small silver Apple logo on CIO Dale Frantz’s crisp white shirt that signal the sea change in the works at Auto Warehousing Co.Over the next 60 days, AWC will begin systematically pulling the plug on all Windows-based PCs in its cavernous auto processing shop and power up Macs to execute virtually all of its revenue-generating operations. The move comes on the heels of a quiet wholesale replacement of Windows-based servers for data storage and Web operations, which are now running on Apple Inc.’s Xserve RAID machines.

Dale Frantz

AWC’s new strategic enterprise technology plan is the direct result of proof-of-concept testing that indicates that the company can cut costs, increase system reliability and security, and provide expanded IT support services by porting a major portion of its IT infrastructure to Apple.

For Apple, which declined to comment for this story, the move represents a feather in its enterprise computing cap. It also gives the vendor a toe in the door of the Microsoft-heavy automotive industry. AWC is the largest full-service auto processing company in North America, with 23 sites across the U.S. and Canada.
“As a mainstream, big platform, we haven’t seen a lot [of Apple] in automotive,” says Gartner Inc. analyst Michael Silver. “Apple is still very niche-y. Its niches are in the media creation and the scientific communities.”

Auto Warehousing Co.

Business: Largest full-service auto processing company in North America, with 23 sites in the U.S. and Canada.

AWC’s plan, to be announced at a July 29 managers meeting, calls for the retention of some Microsoft technology. AWC’s main client/server software, VIPS (Vehicle Inventory Processing System), will continue to run on Microsoft SQL Server on the back end. “The SQL server runs well; it’s a solid product. There’s no business case to change that,” Frantz says.

But function by function, AWC will rewrite all VIPS client software in Java 6.0 or higher so it can run at the front end on Apple Macs.

But it will take 12 to 18 months to rewrite the VIPS client software to run on Macintosh machines, and Frantz doesn’t want to delay the cost savings and efficiency enhancements tied to the migration to Apple hardware. So in the interim, AWC will continue to run VIPS on Windows using software from Renton, Wash.-based Parallels Inc. that lets Macs run Windows applications in a virtual environment.

The Road to Here
AWC’s IT staff has been testing this configuration along with integrating Apple servers into its Windows-based network for the past four months.

Robert Mullen, senior programmer/analyst, also experimented with Linux as an operating system alternative to Windows. “I transitioned my full desktop from a Windows Vista enterprise desktop to a SUSE Linux desktop and was using the MacBook Pro as a laptop and SUSE Linux enterprise as my main desktop so we could see how well things worked,” he explains.

In the end, system stability and available support were the deciding factors.

On the storage front, “I got off the Microsoft file store we were using and moved everything to the Apple server, and it worked phenomenally,” says Mike Collison, AWC’s director of IS operations.

As for the VIPS application, Frantz says, “Windows on my Mac runs faster than any PC I’ve ever seen. It’s blazingly fast. One of the main things that stunned me is just how well the Mac hardware runs Windows.”

On the whole, “what we’re finding is this stuff just works,” says Frantz. “We’re at a point where we can deploy it” companywide.

No Staff Left Behind
AWC’s 16 IT employees have also been training on the Apple hardware and operating system. Frantz emphasizes that he has no plans to change people because AWC is changing technology.

“These folks have dealt with Windows-based PCs and servers for their entire careers,” notes Collison. “But now, all of our techs are using Mac PowerBook Pros to support the enterprise. It’s a fairly fast learning curve.”

“You run up against a series of go or no-go decisions when you’re doing a proof of concept,” adds Mullen. “But there seem to be no major barriers to stop the show.”

Ironically, “where it gets fuzzy” is over the issue of licensing, says Frantz, who is meticulous about licensing records and software compliance. The question, he says, is, “What do you need to be legal if you’re running Windows XP in a virtual environment on Mac hardware?

“We are running a copy of XP, so Microsoft deserves revenue for that,” Frantz acknowledges. “It’s just that it’s in a virtual workspace, so how do you handle the virtual workspace?”

A potential solution is to purchase and apply OEM licenses for Windows XP. This should allow AWC to legally run XP in a virtual environment on Mac hardware, according to the Microsoft OEM System Builder License that comes with Windows XP Professional software, Frantz says.

Microsoft declined to answer questions for this story about licensing Windows to run in a virtual environment. After several requests, the vendor, through its public relations firm, referred customers to a Web site: www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com.

Pressed for more, it offered this statement: “Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last fall.”

As Gartner’s Silver sees it, another potentially fuzzy area is the return on investment that AWC can expect by switching from PCs and Windows to Apple hardware and its Mac OS X operating system. “I’m skeptical about the ROI and how much it will cost in the end,” says Silver. “Running Windows on a Mac is the most expensive way to run Windows,” he notes. “You have to buy the Parallels software, buy more memory and buy a Windows XP license. It’s not an inexpensive way to do things.”

But Frantz is crystal clear on the issue: “This is more of a strategic choice for the future. If we look toward a return on investment to Windows Vista, there is no direct return other than we continue business the way we always have. By investing in the Apple platform, we pick up additional functionality that we don’t have today.”

InformationWeek

As e-mails multiply, so do the problems, from the unabated increases in spam to increasing scrutiny by regulators.

By J. Nicholas Hoover
Jan. 20, 2007

E-mail matters--ask Eric Govan. Last year Govan, a public relations manager with the Golden State Warriors basketball team, inadvertently sent a joke e-mail with the subject line "Ghetto Prom" to his list of sportswriters and other media contacts across the country. Shortly after, team president Robert Rowell sent out his own e-mail, according to The Associated Press, saying, "It came to my attention moments ago that one of our employees had inadvertently sent out an e-mail that was in extreme poor taste and completely unprofessional. ... The employee responsible for sending this e-mail has been dealt with in an appropriate manner." Translation: canned.

E-mail foibles can lead to firings, public embarrassments, and, in extreme cases, even criminal charges. In November, Deutsche Bank resigned as an underwriter to Hertz Global Holdings' initial public offering after a Deutsche Bank employee sent e-mail with inside information to some 175 accounts. Last month, the National Association of Securities Dealers cited--and may soon fine--Morgan Stanley for allegedly destroying millions of e-mails it had earlier claimed were lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In another case, former CTO of a wireless telemetry startup, William Dobson, faces up to 15 years in prison for allegedly intercepting e-mails of the CEO and VP of engineering.

STRANGE-BUT-TRUE DOWNTIME STORIES

E-mail downtime is as unpredictable as termites, goats, and the Grateful Dead. We'll explain in a bit, but suffice it to say you'd better have a backup plan.

A 5,000-employee health insurance company in the Midwest estimates it lost $3 million in productivity and business during an eight-hour outage, according to MessageOne, after the data center manager, giving a tour to his family, flipped what he thought was a light switch that turned out to be an ill-placed control for an entire bank of servers.

E-mail downtime also exposes companies, especially those subject to strict regulations, to legal ramifications. Say the company e-mail goes down and employees turn to their Hotmail or Gmail accounts--if that e-mail ever gets subpoenaed for discovery, it will be hard to find. And should e-mail go down during discovery, archives might not be recoverable quick enough to satisfy regulators.

The answer is simple, though the solution sure isn't. "E-mail has to be up all the time, everywhere," says John Bowden, CIO of plastics and wood products maker Lifetime Products.

The horror stories range from the typical--network failures, database corruptions, and power outages--to the downright bizarre. Morrison & Foerster, a prominent high-tech law firm, has wood frame office buildings on its Palo Alto, Calif., campus, one of which had to be shut down and fumigated because of a termite infestation. Nobody could get into the building, which just so happened to house the firm's regional data center and e-mail servers. "While we prepare for many outages, termites were never part of our disaster recovery plan," says CIO Jo Haraf. If not for its backup systems, the firm's e-mail would have been down for four days.

In another offbeat case, a senior partner at a national law firm based in Texas burned two DVDs of Grateful Dead concerts and sent the footage to people around the firm. The escapade clogged the firm's Exchange queues, taking out the e-mail.

A company in Texas had an agricultural tax exemption because goats lived on its property. One day, some hircine saboteurs ate through the fiber conduit into the building, bringing e-mail (and every other IT system) to a halt. "No goats were harmed, thank goodness, but connectivity was impacted," says MessageOne's Rosenfelt.

In a survey commissioned by MessageOne, 48% of companies said they'd had major e-mail outages within the last six months, and half of those surveyed said their last major outage lasted longer than three hours. Yet only 8% of them have e-mail continuity plans, only 29% use data replication or mirroring to protect e-mail servers, and just about half have tape backups for e-mail.

Another law firm, Adams & Reese, has its headquarters in the largest building in New Orleans, where on Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane winds took out electricity and telecommunications. "I never thought in my career that communications in a city like New Orleans would be down for 22 days," CIO David Erwin says. The day after the storm, Erwin was able to send e-mail via a local listserv because, in anticipation of the hurricane, he had turned on a hosted e-mail continuity service from MessageOne. Erwin credits e-mail uptime, especially BlackBerry uptime, with helping the firm's New Orleans employees move to a temporary headquarters in Baton Rouge.

SPAM ISN'T JUST A VOLUME PROBLEM

The biggest problem with e-mail--literally and figuratively--is spam. However, one person's spam can be another person's business. A law firm doing work for pharmaceutical company Merck on the Vioxx case ran into e-mail problems. Vioxx happens to be one of the most prevalent words appearing in spam, so the law firm found its own spam filter was blocking critical business e-mails.

On the flip side, some companies are unwitting spammers and get cut off from potential business as a result. The Eastridge Group of Staffing Companies, a cross-industry staffing firm, analyzed outbound e-mail traffic and found that some employees were sending 5- to 10-Mbyte spreadsheets of client information to thousands of e-mail addresses several times a week. Yet many of the companies to which those e-mails were sent hadn't done business with the Eastridge Group for several years. Why? "We were blacklisted everywhere," says Brad Taylor, system architect for the group. "Not only that, but we started to lose business because we sent out so much that our system crawled to a halt and e-mails that we said would be delivered by 'this afternoon' or whatever weren't getting there until later."

When health drink company Naked Juice found that its outgoing e-mail was getting caught in the spam filters of its corporate customers simply because of its name, it had to call all those customers and request its e-mail be whitelisted. The company, which outsources operation of its e-mail servers, even had a problem a few years ago with internal e-mails being filtered out, but that was fixed with a call to the outsourcer.

Getting put on blacklists is one of the biggest spam problems companies face, says Gartner analyst Matt Cain. There's no central clearinghouse to get off the blacklists, he notes. Using HTML messages, sending e-mail to the same people too often, and lacing text with typical spam keywords are the major culprits. Often, companies must go to individual spam-filtering companies and ISPs to get their names removed, Cain says. Just goes to show that not all spam problems revolve around finding an advertisement for V1aggRa in your in-box.

THE TROUBLE WITH 'REVIEWERS'

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires that companies in certain industries review a percentage of their outgoing e-mails, from 1% to 3% for financial companies to 10% for retailers. Big companies often employ small armies of people who do nothing but sift through e-mails, looking for breaches in sales practices, excessive gifts and entertainment, leaks of intellectual property, and other regulatory breaches. It's not the most efficient of operations.

"It's a futile, burdensome activity, and most of what they're reviewing is pointless," says Paul Johns, VP of marketing for e-mail firm Orchestria. Applications from vendors such as MessageGate, Orchestria, and Proofpoint scan for account numbers, Social Security numbers, medical record numbers, and formats consistent with confidential documents, and they apply policies based on those scans: keep or quarantine the message, encrypt it, send it back to the sender, send copies to compliance officers, etc. Even Microsoft Exchange 2007 has some of those features.

Because automated processes carry their own risks, nothing replaces on-the-ball IT workers and educated employees, says Mike Rumen, enterprise messaging manager at international accounting firm Grant Thornton, which has 10 e-mail reviewers on staff. If companies try to filter all e-mail based on keywords and other content, they risk filtering out some important stuff that was misidentified. "It's a hard place to be in because you don't want employees abusing a system," Rumen says. "But you don't want to take away from something that's the soul of your business."

VICTIM OF ITS OWN UBIQUITY

E-mail's ubiquity has become a problem in its own right. "It's not just e-mail anymore," says Lifetime Products CIO Bowden. "It's meeting requests, tasks, mobility, and workflow--and e-mail's sort of wrapped around all that now."

Its seems that every employee has a favorite e-mail app or service he or she considers superior to the company's system. A client of LECG, a consulting firm, had a senior executive who just couldn't part with his AOL e-mail. The IT department didn't want to raise a stink, so it forwarded all of his e-mails to his AOL account. Recently, an investigation of the company turned up e-mails in the executive's in-box dating all the way back to 1999. "It's all great to accommodate executives who want AOL, but it's time to think about it and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't be that nice,'" says Kris Haworth, managing director of LECG's forensic investigation group.

The new model of unified voice mail and e-mail is compounding matters, as voice mail must also be retained and searchable for legal and regulatory compliance purposes. The legal department of accounting firm Grant Thornton doesn't let employees forward voice mails off-site for fear they could expose the company to litigation.

REGULATORS MEAN BUSINESS

Regulators, meantime, are pushing hard on e-mail discovery, which means companies need to have documented, and coordinated, policies for e-mail retention. Aaref Hilaly, CEO of Clearwell, an e-mail discovery software company, says his customers in the power industry complain about regulators breathing down their necks. "The [Federal Trade Commission] is always saying to them, 'Prove to us in this specific case that you're offering power through third-party vendors at the same rates as you would offer your own customers,'" says Hilaly.

When e-mail gets subpoenaed for discovery, it's crucial that nothing relevant has been deleted--even if it was unintentional or deleted for a different reason. A client of LECG's Haworth was under a fraud investigation at the same time the company was recycling its PCs. E-mail messages went out telling employees to delete their files, since the company would be replacing their computers. Such e-mails could easily be misinterpreted by outside investigators.

Another faux pas is reformatting documents. Bob Krantz, senior account executive for forensic discovery software company On-Site E-Discovery, says some of his clients save e-mail messages as rich text documents instead of in native form and that loses a lot of the characteristics of the original e-mail. Changing the characteristics of a file alters metadata, which changes the look and feel of an actual message, he says--for example, dropping the embedded spreadsheet that might be in a message. "I've had the Department of Justice ask for Lotus Notes natively now because they've seen that so many times on projects," he says.

On the other hand, e-mails don't always hold up in court. In the past, if a company handed over anything to the other side in a lawsuit, courts would say they'd lost any presumptive attorney-client privilege, says Andy Cohen, associate general counsel and global practice lead for storage vendor EMC. Now, Cohen says, the volume of e-mails that's subpoenaed has made courts think twice; the notion of inadvertent waiver of attorney-client privilege is no longer valid.

Don't count on those annoying disclaimers that legal departments append to the bottoms of e-mail to bail you out of hot water. They don't hold any legal weight, Gartner's Cain says. "I went through a couple of very common legal disclaimers line by line with an attorney, and we ended up rolling on the floor laughing at how toothless these disclaimers really are," he says.

Fortunately, only a few e-mail problems revolve around goats and termites. But many of the headaches caused by e-mail involve dealing with spam, finicky executives, and aggressive regulators. While it's heartening to know there are worse e-mail problems out there than yours, don't ignore your own slowly overloading e-mail server.