Sales in the companyÂ’s Information Systems and Global Solutions (IS&GS) segment decreased $92 million, or 3 percent, during the forth quarter, which ended Dec. 31, compared to the last quarter of 2010. It also declined by $540 million, or 5 percent, for all of 2011, compared to the previous year, according to financial figures released Jan. 26.

Overall though, the business segment was hit by the fiscal pressures the government is under, which keep agencies from spending as much on IT products and services in 2011. Executives expect the segment's annual operating margins in 2012 to be similar to the annual 2011 figures.

IT Job Market Employment Trends

    

In a new report, Celent said the tumultuous state of the banking industry since 2009 continues to affect tech spending. For instance, when Celent published its report on worldwide banking last year, it appeared that a turnaround had begun. "This is no longer the case; there is still plenty of uncertainty," Celent stated.

Having an effective recovery strategy and a set of coherent disaster recovery plans is essential to helping avoid downtime during a crisis. The need for enhanced quality, efficiency, and predictability for disaster recovery and business continuity has increased significantly, highlighting the necessity of a well-defined set of recovery plans and regular testing. However, as the required scope of critical processes, production applications, and enterprise demands increases, sustaining the timeliness and effectiveness of a recovery plan can become increasingly difficult.

For most organizations, disaster recovery is extremely labor intensive, often requiring the manual coordination of hundreds of recovery tasks. So although the importance of having an effective disaster recovery plan is clear, organizations often find it difficult to achieve the level of protection they need.

In a survey of 500 IT pros, a staffing firm found the vast majority (89 percent) are currently happy with their jobs. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) said they intend to stay with their current employer, and 25 percent said they'd only leave if the right opportunity came along. Just 11 percent are unhappy with their current position, which includes 4 percent of respondents who are actively searching for a new job.

    

Part of the reason IT pros are staying put is caution. Employees are nervous about unemployment levels, an unstable economy, and the possibility of a double-dip recession. Marketplace paranoia is keeping people where they are.

In addition, companies are working hard to keep their current IT teams intact. A lot of employers are creating environments that are hard to leave. Perks such as the opportunity to telecommute, flexible schedules, and onsite daycare are helping with retention efforts. They've made it endearing so that people think twice about moving on to something else.

When the information security function adopts governance, it raises its game, engaging with senior management and other corporate governance functions. This not only minimises information risk and reputational damage, it also delivers continuing added value from information technology.

New technologies are constantly increasing the complexity of business information, while more sophisticated technology and processes are needed to manage it. Furthermore, that information is simultaneously more critical to the business and more susceptible to attack or abuse.

Information security governance enables the direction and oversight of information security-related activities across an enterprise, as an integrated part of corporate governance. It shows customers, business partners, shareholders and regulators that information is being protected according to industry best practice. It provides the agility to deal with incidents quickly and effectively, and enables better management of all of information security activities – decreasing the chances of headline-grabbing incidents.

Local disk-based data protection strategies improve backup efficiency and reliability over tape-based ones. Consolidation of edge data to the core data center may introduce further efficiencies. Data de-duplication can drive both backup-to-disk and consolidation adoption.

While security in the cloud services environment is clearly a concern for many IT security professionals, there is still a lack of assurance within the external supply chain as whole.

The message on security is getting through to businesses, there is no consistent language to determine whether the service provider will operate the controls to a level that assures the client that their risks are managed appropriately. This proves that the current security mindset is little more than managing risks to achieving compliance rather than empowering organizations to understand the controls required to manage the risks to their information.

All organizations on both sides of the public/private sector divide, have an explicit obligation under law to ensure that personal and corporate information is managed in a safe manner.

The current compliance overload over the past four or five years has led to an inordinate focus on managing risks to compliance rather than understanding the risks to information - and this focus has meant that we look to overuse of technical controls to show due diligence to ensure that when a breach occurs, that penalties will not be levied; it is not designed to reduce the likelihood of breaches themselves.

This approach is unsustainable, as it does not look to the implementation of the controls and fails to address the business risk management issue that exists in most organizations. This is turn has no more benefit to the business than placing money in the shredder.

The current lack of corporate information governance in today's businesses will soon result in increased penalties. This proves that the current focus on compliance risk management as we know it is nearing an end, and something else is required to assist organizations to understand and manage the risks to their information going forward.

Key business dynamics could alter this progress. Include the possibility of double-dip recession in the United States and European countries, continuous credit and derivative losses that threaten business expansion. These developments would cause many business to reduce their total IT spending budgets and make lower-cost, lower-automation system improvements. Business will, however, continue strategic cost reduction initiatives that drive ITO and BPO spending.

A number of technologies are generating interest but little spending or are early in their growth cycle. For example, research and development for mobile business infrastructure applications is accelerating although spending on mobile is still very low compared with spending on other distribution channels. The continued growth of the installed base of mobile devices will eventually create "network effects" that accelerate adoption beyond mobile status information into more customer relationship management applications.

Social media and peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and IT spending are in their infancy. The combination of social media with P2P transactions could spur P2P application development.

They can cause a loss of customer and partner confidence. Ultimately security breaches can damage a companyÂ’s brand and its ability to do business. As mobility becomes a more important part of routine operations, companies who are developing a mobility strategy must address the issue of mobile security. To do that, itÂ’s important to understand the vulnerabilities.

There are four areas of vulnerability in mobile business operations:

• Lost or stolen devices
• Unauthorized data access
• Risks arising from combining personal and work use in one device
• Gaps in device management and policy enforcement

IT projects on average are 27 percent over budget and take 55 percent longer to complete than originally planned, researchers from the University of Oxford's Said Business School. Researchers analyzed 1,471 global projects where the organization had revamped its information technology systems within the last 10 years. The projects were worth a total of $245 billion, and on average cost $170 million.

After comparing their budgets and estimated performance benefits with actual costs and results, researchers found that project managers were not taking into account unpredictable events when planning IT projects. Instead, they focused on the average performance of previous projects. When the projects spiraled out of control, both the careers of the managers and the future of the organization were at risk, the researchers found.

• Re-read you email before you send it.  You need to remember that when a person other than your self reads the email they will always put it in their context
• Do not use email to say no, argue, criticize or deliver bad news. Pick up the phone to deliver the information face to face.
• Be frugal and send only email that is necessary. If you do that it will be more likely your messages will be read. DonÂ’t copy others unless they really need to read it.
• Don't expect others to decipher what you mean by reviewing an entire email thread. Just because you are on the go doesnÂ’t mean you should expect others to piece together whatÂ’s being requested.
• Keep work-related email coming and going from your work account only. Having a single address makes it easy for people to find your messages. And it will prevent business messages from getting tangled with your personal email – and perhaps neglected as a result.
• Don't use your current work email to send resumes to prospective employers. Also, avoid using overly personal email handles when job hunting, such as wildman@------.com. Not everyone will appreciate your sense of humor and your email address will stay with you a long time.  What do you think your next employer will think about you when they see it?
• Try to respond to all messages within 24 hours, but don't say you'll reply with a more detailed response at a later date unless you really intend to follow through. If youÂ’re in consecutive meetings or away from the office, put an out-of-office message on so people arenÂ’t left wondering when youÂ’ll get back to them.
• In your subject line explain what you want - never leave it blank: Do you need someone to review or approve something, or is the message simply an FYI? In the message itself, get to the point and use bullets, which are easier to scan than large blocks of text.
• Avoid bright colors, odd fonts or extra-long signature lines. Some people find these distracting or just plain annoying. Include your personal or business links to social and professional networking sites when appropriate.
• Do not send out email with a mega-attachment. They might never reach its recipient, and if it does, it could overload the inbox. Consider zipping the file or utilizing a service that allows you to transmit large files over the Internet. (Be sure to check your companyÂ’s IT policy first.)
• Do not tag email as important unless absolutely necessary. Is it really urgent or are you simply feeling impatient? Resist the temptation to flag your messages with a big red exclamation point when theyÂ’re really not that time sensitive. The result of doing so constantly? People simply will stop paying attention.
• Do not automaticaly reply to all, and double-check your response before doing so. Bad "Reply to All" threads run rampant throughout organizations.
• Always review the distribution list when sending a sensitive message. Many a message has erroneously been sent to the wrong person with disastrous consequences.

A survey conducted by a vendor of identity management and security management solutions, found that senior business executives donÂ’t fully understand the true nature of IT's role in the workplace. They also appear to have no clue about how much power IT professionals have when it comes to data access.

It has been found that only 6 percent of mid-sized companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive – 43 percent never reopen, and 51 percent close within two years of the disaster. Implementation of a reliable DR strategy has traditionally been expensive and overly complex, largely because of equipment and networking requirements along with costly replication csoftware licenses As a result, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) were required to make difficult compromises, such as limiting disaster coverage only to critical applications, employing manual recovery processes on dissimilar equipment, or simply backing up to tape and hoping they will have access to working backups when needed.

Many companies are therefore forced into operating their businesses with insufficient protection in terms of application coverage, acceptable downtime and reliability of recovery.

Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, 40% of businesses that encounter a disaster close their doors within the following five years. For the 60% that do survive, the expenses that result from a loss of continuity can be significant.

According to Janco Associates, an International Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity consultancy the most common form of enterprise wide disaster is related to power outages.  Janco has found that in disaster recovery and business continuity cases it has reviewed the following is true:

• Over one third companies take more than a day to recover from a major power outage caused by events like hurricanes and extensive disasters.
• Over eleven percent of companies take more than a week to recover from these events.
• The typical time to reconfigure a network that has not been planned for can take up to 72 hours - if the resources are available.
• Data that is lost (not backup up electronically) can take weeks to re-enter if there is paper trail and if there is none the data can be lost forever.
• Over 85 percent of companies that experience a computer disaster and do not have a Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity Plan go out of business within 18 months.

This tension places unexpected demands on a IT organization. Besides the simple volume, there's the need to normalize the information that supports the various departments - marketing, customer service, sales, operations and design. There has to be a single version of the truth. And, sometimes, some variations of the truth. And that's hard to achieve.

• How many/much of the organization's resources could be lost?
• What are the total costs?
• What efforts are required to rebuild?
• How long will it take to recover?
• What is the impact on the overall organization?
• How are customers affected, what is the impact on them?
• How much will it affect the share price and market confidence?

Research that evaluates worldwide energy security, has identified the G7 economies of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and USA as being at ‘high risk’ in the short-term, while China and countries from the oil producing MENA region are highlighted as facing increasing challenges in the future.

Risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft has undertaken the study of short-term and long-term energy security to highlight the risks to countries as they strive to secure stable energy supplies in a time of geopolitical upheaval, dwindling traditional resources and a transition to a low carbon world.

The Energy Security (short-term) Index has been developed to identify the countries most vulnerable to shocks in energy supplies and price fluctuations in the international market on timescale of days to months. It assesses immediate risks to the availability, affordability and continuity of energy supplies in 196 countries by evaluating energy imports, diversity of supplies, import security and energy costs.

Only three countries, Sierra Leone (1), Gambia (2) and Guinea Bissau (3), are categorised as ‘extreme risk’ in the short-term index. However, a further 122 nations are rated ‘high risk,’ including the G7 economies of Italy (13), Japan (73), UK (90), Germany (104), France (107) and the USA (112).