The three Cs in today's business world are consolidation, centralization, and conservation. The focus is to create a harmoniously designed network that efficiently and economically meets all of a business' desired goals.

Businesses are seeking the three Cs in the areas of network storage, virtualization, and remote access:

1. Virtual NAS/SAN

The IT industry is about to go through a metamorphosis in the coming decade, and technicians and engineers need to be prepared. Research is showing a 75% reduction in the work force needed in the next decade, and a 50% reduction in the next five years for the traditional company IT staff. This will occur at all levels, and the numbers presented will bear this out.

Despite the recession, IT staffing added 40,000 jobs during the worst quarter of the recession in 2009. It is expected to continue to grow in the short term. So, how do we get from a growth industry to one where massive amounts of people will be out of work?

Pre-register now for this informative session!

Having inventory control issues? Looking for better efficiency in your warehouse operations?

With IT departments expected to do more with less resources, many companies are turning to the software as a service (SaaS) model as a means for purchasing enterprise software applications. Learn best practices for implementing warehouse management software on a cloud computing platform. Join this free webinar and learn about the 6 advantages a hosted WMS can provide for your warehouse or distribution center.

Key Points

Web 2.0 and social networking sites have changed the nature of Internet usage from mere information consumption to bidirectional information sharing by end users-a transformation that renders traditional enterprise Web-filtering solutions obsolete.

Social networks create new avenues for data loss from malware infections, targeted phishing attacks, or data leakage from employees posting sensitive information.

User awareness to new attack methods and security vulnerabilities posed by social networks is the first line of defense. However, IT should redouble efforts to ensure proper PC and Internet hygiene.

According to researchers at US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team), software that accompanies the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a Trojan horse that gives hackers total access to a Windows PC

The Energizer DUO, a USB-powered nickel-metal hydride battery recharger, has been discontinued, said Energizer Holdings, which late Friday confirmed that the software contains malicious code. The company has not said how the Trojan made its way into the software, however. "Energizer is currently working with both CERT and U.S. government officials to understand how the code was inserted in the software," Energizer said in a statement.

The blog calls the elimination of this package of integrated Microsoft back-office programs a move to "streamline [Microsoft's] server product portfolio."

"[M]idsize businesses are rapidly turning to technologies such as ... virtualization and cloud computing as a means to cut costs, improve efficiency, and increase competitiveness," the post stated. "Those capabilities are already available through other offerings, including Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite."

The pendulum is moving toward IT consolidation as CIOs try to save money and gain efficiencies. But it's possible to go too far.

Computerworld - When the economy plummeted at the end of 2008, the Western U.S. branch of The Salvation Army was ahead of the cost-cutting game. CIO Clarence White had centralized the IT organization a year or two earlier, and he had consolidated the database and storage servers from the business units into a single data center in Long Beach, Calif.

The move wasn't aimed at cutting costs, but "the timing was good," White says. It reduced the charitable organization's technology footprint, encouraged more virtualization and lowered maintenance and power costs. "It was an unanticipated benefit," he says. "We looked like geniuses."

Pre-register now for this informative session!

The rapid growth of social networks and electronic communications compel employers to understand, implement and update their Acceptable Internet Use Policies.

But maintaining a policy is not enough. Regulatory compliance and affirmative defense strategies require employers to monitor employee use of Internet services and electronic communications. Creating, Updating and Enforcing Your "Acceptable Use Policy" for a Social Networking World

The rapid growth of social networks and electronic communications compel employers to understand, implement and update their Acceptable Internet Use Policies.
But maintaining a policy is not enough. Regulatory compliance and affirmative defense strategies require employers to monitor employee use of Internet services and electronic communications. How much monitoring is appropriate? What are the available technologies? How can they legally and properly be used?

Key Points

Common data center setup mistakes can be grouped into three categories: power and cooling, design, and people and processes.

Today's cutting-edge technology is a double-edged sword, as it provides more functionality but has higher requirements. Proper power and cooling are essential to ensure good technology does not become a problem.

The importance of establishing key processes, and hiring the right personnel to implement them, is vital to success.

It is critical that IT administrators engaged in the task of setting up data centers pay heed to the lessons learned from mistakes made by previous businesses. Paying close attention to these lessons can provide a roadmap to successfully navigating the complex task of setting up a data center and avoiding extremely costly mistakes. After all, as George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

The rapid growth of social networks and electronic communications compel employers to understand, implement and update their Acceptable Internet Use Policies.

But maintaining a policy is not enough. Regulatory compliance and affirmative defense strategies require employers to monitor employee use of Internet services and electronic communications. Creating, Updating and Enforcing Your "Acceptable Use Policy" for a Social Networking World

The rapid growth of social networks and electronic communications compel employers to understand, implement and update their Acceptable Internet Use Policies.
But maintaining a policy is not enough. Regulatory compliance and affirmative defense strategies require employers to monitor employee use of Internet services and electronic communications. How much monitoring is appropriate? What are the available technologies? How can they legally and properly be used?

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K Dick

It seems that many businesses believe that when you've been around for long enough whatever it is you have been successful at can't possibly ever become obsolete. This is despite the fact that there are countless examples of how business models die off as our culture and technologies evolve.

Get Your Data Center Out Of The Hot Seat In 2010

Data centers aren't the only things chugging along into the new year, as heat is anticipated to have yet another successful year of delivering headaches to infrastructure managers around the globe. However, by undertaking a project in 2010 that can help to keep temperatures and power consumption under control, data centers can force heat to look elsewhere to continue its productive run.

Key Points

The recession delayed many programs and much infrastructure growth, but continuing a policy of "buy nothing" may start to seriously harm enterprises.

New methods of assessing value in the enterprise are likely to be based on TCO. This is why data centers are likely to increase their reliance on services.

Energy savings will continue to be a top priority in 2010 as enterprises adopt numerous methods for reducing consumption.

2010 AITP Member Summit
Bringing Together Your Community of IT Leaders
Friday, January 22 - Saturday, 23, 2010
InterContinental Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

Bringing value to the IT profession, the AITP Members Summit is an annual educational event hosted by aitp for all IT professionals, members and non-members.

Take the next step in your IT career - Register today!

Key Points

Data centers will continue to harness the performance benefits of storage virtualization, which has moved beyond its one-time role as a tool for SAN data migration.

Storage clouds will see more rollouts in 2010, but experts advise initial use within focused areas to best determine the use of clouds across the enterprise and to build skills.

Data deduplication could take a back seat to tiered archiving in some arenas, but the technology remains poised to have a significant impact on data centers in the coming year.

Unstructured data on underutilized storage devices create huge data center inefficiencies. Learn how to extend the capacity of your existing storage investment without buying new equipment.

This Hitachi Data Systems webinar will teach you five important concepts that will lower your storage costs by one-third or more. Learn about money-saving tactics like:

• NAS Head Consolidation
• File Tiering
• Capacity Efficiencies
• Archive Reduction
• Backup Efficiencies

You'll also learn where you can view a Video White Paper: Storage Economics: "Four Principles for Reducing TCO"

I see this a lot - if you like this story, please share it with friends.  You can email the link to your friends (with a neat customized message), or  share the link ondelicious,facebook, digg and other social networking sites.  Yes, you can do this within the registration process, but, as event planners, wouldn't you rather already have the data than rely on your attendees "friends" to fill it out??

I am workingwith a global financial services company that needs to overhaul itsportfolio of communications technology. These include  theirpublic/customer facing web sites to intranets and broadbandcommunication services serving their internal associates acrossfunctional areas. To add further complexity, this is a globalorganization across time zones embodying different cultural norms andstyles of communication along with different languages.

Typical of many organizations, the communications technologyportfolio has grown out of different business organizations that havechanged and been re-aligned over the years. While IT has been workinghard all along to deliver and manage a set of solutions that align withbusiness needs, the changes in business structure and focus hasincreased the "value gap" over time and resulted in a highly disparatesystems portfolio that can no longer support the business. Multipleemail systems, disparate intranet channels and internal web sites,experimental broadband video services, third party communicationplatforms, and multiple public facing or customer-specific web siteshave been deployed across the businesses have created a complexcommunication portfolio making it impossible to deliver a consistentand timely brand message to either the internal and external audiences.

What's the solution?  They need a rational communications technology portfolio and the governance structures to manage it well over time.

Are you a membership based organization struggling with managing your member data?

• Want an alternative to expensive AMS solutions?
• Would benefit from membership reports, as highly detailed or streamlined as you needed?
• Would like a more effective way of managing your organization?s chapters, officers, and rosters?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this is a must attend webinar for marketers, business leaders, content editors, and developers. Join TJ O'Connor, Principal Consultant, CrossTech Partners, along with Mark Boisvert Account Executive, CrossTech Partners, in part four of our four part series on Business Strategies for Content Management and learn strategies and technologies for managing your member database and provide a seamless user experience for your members.

How do you manage your print content? The latest print publishing tools allow you to quickly and easily populate a print document with database-driven content using XML.

• Do you need a centralized, fully managed repository of data; allowing greater control and end to end assignment management?
• Would you like to reduce document production lead times?
• Reduce costs in editing and proofing?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this is a must attend webinar for marketers, business leaders, content editors, and developers. Join TJ O'Connor, Principal Consultant, CrossTech Partners, along with Mark Boisvert Account Executive, CrossTech Partners, in part three of our four part series on Business Strategies for Content Management and learn strategies and technologies that will help you automate the publishing of content from a digital repository into your print publications.

I wrote a few weeks ago about strategic outsourcing and technology rationalization (link).Today, I am sharing some further views on successful technologyportfolio assessment and a transformation strategy to Second CircleTechnology ™.

As the economic downturn continues we are seeing and increasingnumber of companies looking at cost reduction through applicationportfolio transformation. Application transformation with Second CircleTechnology drives more flexible and lower cost while legacy systemsconstrain IT's ability to meet business needs. We have seen reductionsin cost that range from 15% to 30% of IT spend.  At the same time,legacy application portfolios constrain the ability to meet businessneeds. Some of the typical constraints are:

• applying systems and processes consistently throughout the company
• adapting quickly enough to address changing business needs
• ensuring the skills needed to make critical changes to systems

Business Strategies for Content Management
Part 2 of 4: Syndicating and Repurposing content with RSS Feeds
February 4, 2009 2:00 PM EDT Register Now!

Many users now prefer to subscribe to content via feeds, instead of traditional email newsletters. RSS is a technology that allows organizations to deliver regularly updated content to users. This relevant, personal content is then aggregated into a single, easily accessible location.

• Do you want to reduce information overload to your audience by moving information away from the e-mail inbox?
• Do you want to increase portal and intranet usage by incorporating updated, personalized information?
• Would you like to improve employee collaboration and knowledge sharing

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this is a must attend webinar for marketers, business leaders, content editors, and developers. Join TJ O'Connor, Principal Consultant, CrossTech Partners, along with Mark Boisvert Account Executive, CrossTech Partners, in part two of a four part series on Business Strategies for Content Management, and learn how create syndicated content, allow users to subscribe, and reuse content across multiple areas of your website.

IT executives have a challenging mission in 2009 when it comes to the data center. Cut energy and operating costs, go green, make architectures more flexible, evaluate blade and other server platforms, and stay on top of the ever-evolving world of virtualization and cloud computing - just to name a few key concerns. CrossTech Forums can help with two major IT executive summits.

BladeSystems Insight, taking place April 19-21, 2009 at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix, is focused on blade servers, virtualization, power and cooling and other core data center technologies. It is an annual national event that provides a travel participation package for IT decision-makers. The Next Data Center is a series of regional one-day summits that will host an audience of IT executives starting in June 2009 in Dallas, October 2009 in Chicago, and March 2010 in Atlanta. To launch the "Next Data Center," there will be a special program at BladeSystems Insight in Phoenix this April.

It's a great way to kick off a year of data center education, networking and business for IT executives everywhere. Solution providers interested in sponsorship opportunities should contact Paul Samargedlis at 781-821-6740 or psamargedlis@crosstechforums.com. For information on applying for an executive invitation to attend any of the summits, visit http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com/ or http://www.gondc.com/.

Business Strategies for Content Management
Part 1 of 4: Evaluating Web Content Management Solutions
January 21, 2009 2:00 PM EDT Register Now!

Web Content Management (Web CMS) means many things to many people. This begs the question of how/where to maximize efforts when building a content management strategy.

• Do you need an easier way to manage your web sites?
• Would you like to manage all web content from a single online platform?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this is a must attend webinar targeted at marketers, business leaders, content editors, and developers. Join TJ O'Connor, Principal Consultant, CrossTech Partners, along with Mark Boisvert Account Executive, CrossTech Partners, in part one of a four part series on Business Strategies for Content Management, and learn how to successfully evaluate and deploy a Web CMS platform.

CrossTechMedia today announced the formation of a strategic alliance with CMP Technology's Channel, powered by XChange, and Pulvermedia Inc. to produce the IT-eco World Conference and Expo taking place December 5-6, 2007 at the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta.

Atlanta will be the first city to preview the conference and expo, which showcases the full eco-system of ever-changing technology and solutions available today. IT-eco World is an outgrowth of the long-running ITEC conference series, now in its fourth year in Atlanta.