ITEC

CrossTech Forums is presenting an exclusive Executive Education program next week in Boston @ The Harvard Club:
 
December 6 - 8, 2010 - HealthIT Insight Summit brings together CIOs from healthcare providers (medical centers and hospitals) and healthcare payers (health insurance companies) for two-and-a-half days. Using the ever popular boardroom case study approach to education, the technology executives will learn from their peers and the editors of CIO Insight, Tech Target and MIT Technology Review. Join CIOs from leading hospitals and meet with solutions providers including IBM, VMware, Stratus, Accelare, Verizon, Hitachi Data Systems, McKesson, HCL, BlueSlate, ASG, Tata, Nuance and more. www.HealthITInsight.com

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Over Thanksgiving the Secunia.com site was defaced using a DNS hijacking technique that's simple and effective

When a security software vendor's site gets hijacked, you have to wonder who is safe -- and how it happened.

Here's the story. Last Thursday, people venturing to the main website of renowned security firm Secunia saw a strange defacement. Secunia.com sported a main page entitled "Hacked by TurkGuvenligi" with a graphic headed "Is?ms?z Kahramanlar Sunar..." (which is Turkish for "Anonymous Heroes Presents") and an image labeled "TurkGuvenligi Gel Babana" (Turkish for "TurkGuvenligi Come to Your Father"). TurkGuvenligi -- or someone using the name -- has been defacing sites for almost two years.

The defacement lasted about 70 minutes, according to the Secunia blog, before Secunia could get links to its main site back to normal, although the effects persisted for a couple of hours.

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Learn how to put together a Facebook Deals campaign to bring in customers and give them a reason to keep coming back.

It may not have been high on Mark Zuckerberg's list of reasons for creating Facebook, but the social networking platform is a tremendous marketing tool. Nothing sells like word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted friends and family, and Facebook provides a forum for users to post status updates expressing feedback on products and services.

Location-based check-in with Facebook Places takes the marketing a step further by letting users share their current location and activities with their network of pals. Services such as Foursquare and Gowalla made location-based check-in popular, but Facebook has the advantage of more than half a billion members, and of being the online destination that users already spend the most time on.

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Storage Consolidation Efforts Can Offer Many Benefits, But They Require Careful Planning To Be Successful

Key Points

• Know your current and target storage needs. Work with business partners to benchmark storage requirements and look beyond flashy new features.
• Smarten up your data management by investing in data deduplication and resource management to tighten control over the environment before implementation.
• Build the business case. Storage is the fastest-growing cost driver in the data center. Use underlying cost data to justify current and future consolidation investments.

Storage consolidation has emerged as a key opportunity for data center managers focused on boosting performance, reducing risk, and reining in costs.

A survey published in September by CompTIA confirms storage-related issues are increasingly top-of-mind for data center planners. According to the survey, the top key data storage-related issues they face are server consolidation and data security, each at 62%, and the growing use of virtualization, at 61%.

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Our manager ends his first year at his new company ahead of the strategic plan, but challenges always await

Going into my second year as my company's security manager, I've been spending some time planning my next steps. When I started this job, I defined a three-year road map for the fledgling security program, to give it focus and to make sure the approach to solving my company's security problems covers the right areas. I've made it through the first year of the plan pretty much on track, despite changing business conditions and unexpected emergencies. The next year will be spent shoring up other areas of the network. Year 3 will be all about optimizing and filling in gaps, if all goes as planned.

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ITEC is coming to the The Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle on next week December 9th - Register today!

Don’t miss the “Top 10 Challenges Facing CIOs and IT Management” from NetworkWorld Test Lab analyst Tom Henderson. 

Everything starts at 9:00 AM, free breakfast and lunch included. The venue is The Bell Harbor Conference Center – located minutes from downtown Seattle’s Pike Place Market and shopping corridor – a fitting home to get your thinking going about ways to improve productivity and solve those pesky tech issues quickly.

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Opera Software has released the beta version of its Opera 11 browser with new support for tab stacking.

In a Nov. 23 announcement, Opera introduced tab stacking, a better way to organize your open tabs. Traditionally, tabs were opened side-by-side, but now Opera users can stack their tabs, grouping them by site or by theme. Tab stacking reduces clutter and makes it easier to identify and work with sets of open tabs, Opera officials said.

"Tabs are the most popular feature in browsers today," said Jan Standal, vice president of desktop products at Opera, in a statement. "Because so many of us wrestle with tens or even hundreds of tabs, we wanted to find a better way to manage them. So, whether you are tracking positive reviews of your new album or researching the proper dimensions of Stonehenge, stacking your tabs is an intuitive way to organize and group your open web pages."

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Facebook-friendly RockMelt offers a browser blueprint for Google Apps and Docs

Marc Andreessen broke critical Web browser ground back in 1994, the Dark Dial-Up Ages, with Netscape Navigator, arguably the most influential Web browser (and, in some circles, best technology product) of all time. Navigator delivered previously unheard-of innovations, such as enabling Web pages to load on the fly, piece by piece, instead of making a user stare at a blank screen until every bit on the page had been received.

Fast-forward to November 2010. Andreessen has re-entered the Web browser fray with a new offering called RockMelt. Andreessen has once more started out with a solid open source code base foundation in Google Chrome (Netscape was built on Mosaic). But rather than providing a single pane for enhancing Web-page hopping, RockMelt joins Web browsing with instant sharing and collaboration, via tight integration with Facebook.

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As recently as a year and a half ago we both regarded cloud computing as more of a media event than anything that was real and that would impact mainstream IT organizations. That is no longer the case. As we head into 2011 we see the majority of IT organizations adopting one or more forms of cloud computing. Because of this broad interest in cloud computing, we are going to use the next few newsletters to discuss cloud networking.

We use the phrase cloud networking to refer to the functionality that has to be in the network and in the management of the network in order to support cloud computing. One thing that has always been true about networking is that LAN design is fundamentally different than WAN design. If anything, the requirement to support cloud computing increases the differences between LAN and WAN design.

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Deciding To Move Or Expand Your Data Center Requires More Than You Might Expect

Key Points

• A new data center facility should be in your sights a full 12 months prior to reaching 80% utilization of your current facility.
• Lack of floor space is an obvious indicator of a need to move or expand, but a shortage of power and cooling tends to appear before space runs out.
• Data center managers often recognize the best time to move or expand, but other executives and departments must be involved in the decision to move or stay put.

Even if the walls aren’t crumbling, the floor isn’t cracking, or the ceiling isn’t fractured, it still might be time to move to a new data center or expand your existing space. But because the reasons for a move might not be so outwardly evident, determining the right time for a move can require a hefty dose of introspection on the part of data center managers and other executives in your organization.

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