technology

Can IT education bring an end to the recession?

Well, by my title I don’t mean entirely end the recession, and especially not just through IT education alone. I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a snippet about an upcoming story. Unfortunately, I was unable to hear the entire story. However, the topic of the upcoming story raised an interesting question about the link between economic stimulus and education. I tried finding the story online but have been unable to find it to cite here. Maybe I just imagined it, but the story topic was about the GI Bill and how it helped a nation recover economically after the Great Depression and a costly war. The story preview continued to say that the nation grew economically and scientifically in the years following the war. It is as a result of those who were educated under the GI Bill that a new world of technology was shaped:

• Man in space and man landing on the moon
• Satellites
• Lasers
• Solar cells
• Transistors

Just think about all the marvels that have appeared in our world since the mid-1940’s. The relationship between those educated under the GI Bill and these technological advances is easy to see. Now, fast forward to today and the current economic conditions. What will happen in the next few years in the world of technology as a result of those who have lost jobs, being retrained in new skills and starting new careers? Maybe technological advances won’t be as rapid as those in the post WW2 era, but I expect some life-changing advances due to the education and skill changes resulting from the current education stimulus packages.

Electronic medical records, for example, will change both the patient’s and health care professional’s lives. The technology advance may not be sexy like lasers, but it may have a greater impact on the country we live in as a whole. Maybe we are living under the Chinese curse that goes “May you live in interesting times!“

Thanks for reading and let’s continue to be good network citizens!

FTP - is it old or is it still useful? Do you need “glamorous” file transfers?

We use FTP to provide a file transfer mechanism between users, customers & suppliers. I regularly get asked if FTP is the best and easiest mechanism for this purpose. My answer is: “it works”. The command line client is also available in most operating systems and there are a lot of GUI clients available out there to make the process easier for the user. So, what is driving this questioning of the “old” FTP method? What are users seeing out there that makes them think FTP is no longer useful or unable to meet the business needs?

Is it things like iTunes Store? Something like CNet’s Download.com? What do you think? Does FTP still have enough capabilities to make it in today’s technology market? What file transfer solutions do you use? What are the advantages and pitfalls of your chosen solution(s)?

My ears and eyes are open on this topic. Share your feedback with the ITKE community. Stand up and be heard!

Thanks for reading. Let’s continue to be good network citizens.

Did you see this? - Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool

Microsoft has a very large library of Solution Accelerators. These solution accelerators are meant to be detailed guides and toolkits to help organizations be successful in the planning, deployment and management of Microsoft products and technologies.

One accelerator that recently came to my attention is the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. According to the Microsoft website:

The increasing use of virtual machines—for purposes ranging from support of older operating system environments to power savings—has created new challenges for IT.

In particular, virtual machines may be left offline (stored in a non-operating state) for extended periods of time, which conserves resources when the server capacities of the virtual machines are not needed or frees up physical computing resources for other purposes.

However, offline machines do not automatically receive operating system, antivirus, or application updates that would keep them compliant with current IT policy. An out-of-date virtual machine may pose a risk to the IT environment. If deployed and started, the out-of-date virtual machine might be vulnerable to attack or could be capable of attacking other network resources.

Therefore, IT groups must take measures to ensure that offline virtual machines remain up-to-date and compliant. At present, these measures involve temporarily bringing the virtual machine online, applying the necessary updates, and then storing it again.

In the future, image updating solutions may be able to update virtual machines while they remain offline. Until such solutions become available, the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool, a Solution Accelerator from Microsoft, provides a way to automate the process of updating virtual machines. This tool is now available as a free download from the Microsoft Download Center.

Business Scenarios

You can use this Solution Accelerator to help you with business scenarios such as these:

• Your IT organization is converting physical servers to virtual machines to reduce costs, including administrative overhead. How can you regularly update offline virtual machines while minimizing administrative costs?
• Your IT organization has thousands of virtual machines stored for months at a time in a number of libraries. How do you keep the virtual machines reliably up to date?

This tool can be useful to those organizations already managing virtual machines or those considering deployment. Maybe it can make your life a little easier. Why not leave some feedback if you have used or are considering this tool?

Thanks for reading and let’s continue to be good network citizens!

Financial crisis due to poor risk understanding & management - IT security next?

I have written before about IT being an accelerator for the financial crisis. Another recent article, this time from Wired called Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street, seems to show how extremely complex risk measurement is and how someone tried to design a model to express that risk. It is the same for information security professionals. Take some time, read the Wired article and substitute the words “information security” where the word “finance” is used. See if it mirrors the current information security risk situation today. It may shed some light on how complex the situation has become and what the impact may be if something is not done by security professionals to head off an information security meltdown - but wait… are we already there with some of the botnets, conflicker, etc.? Let me know your thoughts on this.

Thanks for your time and let’s continue to be good network citizens!