News
Disaster recovery and business continuity still a struggle for many CIOs
Organizations of all sizes are struggling with getting some of the basics of
disaster recovery and business continuity right. They still
need support in obtaining executive buy-in, managing resources and implementing
easy to use and reliable technology. To some extent, there is still a lack of
best practices being provided by vendors, and many SMBs rely heavily on their
channel partners to be their best
practices advisors to help them make the right choices.
What has made the world more complex is the fact that organizations are now
presented with three different platforms for their disaster recovery strategies:
physical, virtual and cloud. Each platform has its own unique challenges and
benefits. Some organizations will opt to keep purely physical, others will add
virtualization while many will embrace all three.
Ultimately the success of any company's backup and DR is based on the
availability of its systems and data and the impact that downtime has in terms
of lost revenue and lost customers, regardless of the environment data and
systems are held in. Using multiple different solutions to manage data across
physical, virtual and cloud environments makes this process unnecessarily
complicated and risks wasting valuable time and resources.
For most small to medium size businesses, a service's success is underpinned
by its ability to deliver ease of use, cost effectiveness and flexibility, and
by its ability to implement measures quickly enough to affect a near immediate
positive impact. Both cloud services and virtualization can do this, so the
future is bright. Managed in the right way, from one central, easy to use
solution, they can offer businesses the ultimate backup and disaster recovery
protection, ensuring that business continuity becomes easier to manage.
For IT managers, Janco
encourages them to compare their backup and DR practices
against their counterparts.
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Mobile devices are the bane of many CIOs concerns
As
more companies embrace the broad usage of individually-owned mobile devices for
access to corporate applications and data, CIO are asked for guidance on the
establishment of an associated device usage policy.
Every organization needs to identify and develop mobile security policies to
be deployed which will provide adequate protection. The level of protection has
to be aligned with the level of risk that your organization is willing to
accept. These policies should ensure that the many regulatory or compliance
concerns that might be applicable are addressed.
Only by a partnership of information technology (IT), human resource (HR),
finance, and legal teams - working closely with your executive team and business
unit managers - can determine the exact corporate liable and/or individual
liable policy that best fits your company, meets its financial goals and
objectives, and takes into account security, legal, regulatory, tax, or other
requirements and considerations that may uniquely apply to your company and its
operations.
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Will IT spending increase in 2012
IT spending is expected to increase in 2012. After years of budgets crimped
by the economy, there is significant pent-up demand at companies around the
globe to drop some extra cash for the products and services theyÂ’ve been waiting
for to drive business forward. But weÂ’ve heard this song before. One research
fiorm that was bullish on IT spending last year, said that it could rise
somewhat significantly in 2012, yet in its latest report the research firm
acknowledges that its estimates might have been too optimistic. Global spending
on IT spending will still be up, the company says, but donÂ’t expect it to rise
too quickly.
Janco has found that consultants and contractors are starting to be hired
again.
The salary survey is updated twice a year; once in January and then again in
July. You can get a free copy of the full survey if you provide 10 valid data
points and use a corporate email address. Free email accounts like gmail or
yahoo do not qualify as we have no way to verify the accuracy of the data
provided.
The report is updated twice a year, once in January and second time in July.
The unemployment data on this page is updated at least once a month and is based
on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
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New Facts of Life For the CIO and IT Management
The world has changed and the CIO and IT managers need to face the new
realities. They include:
- iPhone and Tablet are here to stay
- CIO and IT department no longer are in control of how technology is used
by you enterprise
- There will always be some downtime
- Systems will not be 100% compliant all of the time
- The cloud will not be the solution for all problems and will case new
ones
- There will never be enough capital and staff to get what needs to be
completed done
- The network has already been compromised
- Social networking use risks all of your company's secrets
- Users will always need your support even for technology that you have not
implemented
- IT will continue to be viewed as a service
organization
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Compliance Best Practices
Security compliance best practices include:
- Combine written content, usage, and retention policies with a Hosted
Managed Email Archiving Service to ensure an organization's ability to
preserve, locate, and produce legally valid email evidence. Unmanaged email
and other record management solutiond can trigger financial, productivity, and
legal issues for your organization when it a finds itself in a workplace
lawsuit. The cost and time required to produce subpoenaed email, retain legal
counsel, secure expert witnesses, mount a legal battle, and cover jury awards
and settlements is ver costly. Best practices call for a proactive approach to
email and business records management.
- Utilize a proven archiving technology to ensure forensic compliance. For
example, by encrypting and archiving a copy of every business record and
internal and external email sent or received and across the organization, a
Hosted Managed Email Archiving Service solution guarantees that your email is
secure and tamperproof. Nothing in your archive can be deleted or altered.
Everything in your archive is legally compliant.
- Ensure that financial data and related documents are effectively protected
from malware, viruses, and other malicious intruders - and are preserved in a
legally compliant manner in order to maximize SOX, GLBA, SEC, FINRA, and
PCI DSS compliance. This includes having solutions in place to manage
messaging threats and compling with regulatory requirements including Email
Anti-Virus, Email Archiving, Email Continuity, and Email Content Control.
- Meet HIPAA requirements by using formal policies, employee training,
and technology including email
Archiving, Anti-Virus, Continuity, and
Content Control Services to ensure compliant use of email to transmit and
store HIPAA-regulated patient information.
- Safeguard personal or sensitive data whose transmission falls under state
encryption laws or other privacy acts by deploying proven solutions that are
designed to effectively identify personal information in any electronic
transmission and, if necessary, block or encrypt the transmission.
- Reduce business and security risks associated with electronic
communication by implementing a formal electronic communication policy
that combines a written policy with employee training.
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Where not to hide your password and user ids
With
dozens of logins and passwords spread out across an equal number of sites and
apps, it's no wonder the average user tends to forget them. Even with a tried
and true system for generating memorable but complex passwords, the formula
could easily fall apart if you just can't remember it.
So rather than continually clicking the "Forget Your Password?" help link,
folks are readily hiding login information around their computer station.
And given that there's little variety in those secret locations, "hiding"
might be a stretch. The most common locations where folks hide their login info
are:
- Under the keyboard
- Under the phone
- Under the mouse pad
- On the monitor
- In the top drawer
- Under the desk
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The CIO's mission is to find innovative ways to leverage the technology in
place - or will be in place - to help grow the business and execute better.
That is a fundamental shift because it requires the CIO to be much more of
a business partner. At the same time with tight corporate budgets, the CIO is
expected by the enterprise to make the right calls around acceptable risk and
smart investment while still reducing overall IT costs.
The CIO is expected not only to provide the internal strategic focus in terms
of the needs that exist within the business to support the mission of the
company, but in many cases the CIO is asked to step up and be part of revenue
generation for the company. It is more about understanding the business
and the strategic goals of the business - how technology can be applied in
a cost-effective way that helps move the business forward.
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IT sector lost 3,900 jobs, including 2,900 telecom positions
The struggling U.S. economy had something to cheer about Friday as the U.S.
Labor Department reported a drop in the unemployment rate, but the IT sector
isn't benefitting.
Unemployment in November fell from 9 percent to 8.6 percent, the Labor
Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced, and nonfarm payroll
employment rose by 120,000. That's the lowest unemployment rate in 2 1/2 years
since March 2009, according to The Washington Post.
The government noted improvements in such industries as retail trade, leisure
and hospitality, professional and business services, and health care.
The IT sector wasn't so fortunate: It lost 3,900 jobs, including
2,900 telecom positions, Janco Associates announced, citing BLS statistics. The
IT sector lost 5,100 jobs in October, according to Janco Associates.
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Cost of data based fraud increases
Fraud cost organizations 2.1 percent of earnings in the past 12 months, which
is equivalent to a week of revenues over the course of a year in a recent survey
that polled more than 1,200 senior executives worldwide.
The study
found a decline in the frequency of fraud over last year. Of the executives
polled, 75 percent suffered some kind of fraud-related loss in the last 12
months, which is down from 88 percent the year prior.
However, fraud remains predominantly an inside job and insider jobs increased
this year. The 2011 figures show that 60 percent of frauds are committed by
insiders, up from 55 percent last year.
Keep in mind these are only the cases in which the perpetrator is known. And
that translates into more concern among executives. Overall, fraud concerns
among executives around the globe rose approximately 15 percent led by
information theft and corruption and bribery. Half of all companies surveyed
said they are moderately to highly vulnerable to information theft, up from 38
percent in 2010. IT complexity is the leading cause of increasing fraud
exposure, cited by 36 percent of respondents compared with 28 percent last
year.
Compared to just 10 years ago, more and more the value of a
company is not contained in tangible things, it's contained in the company's
ideas, and those ideas tend to live on information systems in the form of
digital data. "
Indeed, information-based industries reported the highest incidence of theft
of information and electronic data; including financial services (29 percent),
technology, media and telecoms (29 percent), health care, pharmaceuticals and
biotechnology (26 percent), and professional services (23 percent).
Roughly one in four companies were hit by physical theft of cash,
assets and inventory or information theft, both down from 2010. Management
conflict of interest (21 percent), vendor, supplier or procurement fraud (20
percent), and internal financial fraud (19 percent) all saw notable increases.
The incidence of corruption and bribery nearly doubled over the past year from
10 to 19 percent.
The policies that Janco has created are a must have that every enterprise
needs. They can all be accessed by going to the Policy Master
Page or the individual policies can accessed directly by clicking
on the links below.
The policies have just been updated to comply with all mandated requirements
and include electronic forms that can be Emailed, filled out completely on the
computer, routed and stored electronically. A totally solution that uses
technology at its best.
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more information
CIOs are losing the contol battle with SmartPhones
Smartphones are now
finally on the CIO agenda and, in fact, one of the most difficult topics: there
are a variety of different platforms; employees are bringing their own phones to
work; applications can compromise security; and the monthly costs are
unpredictable.
With an increasing number of individually acquired smartphones, IT
departments need to be defining their strategy for dealing with these devices. A
process needs to be defined that is cost effective and helps CIOs manage the
challenges of security, cost and IT control while balancing the needs of
employees.
IT is losing control of smartphones and yet retaining all the
accountability.
Other Individual Policies
All of the policies that are provided here are contained within one or more
of the templates that are on this site. These policies have been added as
individual documents in WORD format (WORD 2003 and WORD 2007) for those clients
who just need this particular policy. All policies are Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA,
PCI-DSS, and ISO compliant.
The policies have just been updated to comply with all mandated requirements
and include electronic forms that can be Emailed, filled out completely on the
computer, routed and stored electronically. A totally solution that uses
technology at its best.
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more information
www.e-janco.com has several direct feeds. The focus of
the feed is the management of technology in enterprises of all
sizes. The primary feed is shown on the top of each page on
the right hand corner. All of the feeds, including that one
are subset of the Janco Historical feed. The feeds are:
www.itproductivity.org has several direct feeds. The focus of
the feed is the productivity of technology in enterprises of all
sizes. The primary feed is shown on the top of each page on
the right hand corner. All of the feeds, including that one
are subset of the IT Productivity Center Historical feed. The feeds are:
www.it-toolkits.com has several direct feeds. The
focus of the feed is the management of information
technology in enterprises of all sizes. The primary feed is
shown on the top of each page on the right hand corner. All
of the feeds, including that one are subset of the IT
Toolkits Historical feed. The feeds are:
