People tend to trust their computers for some reason, and when the disk drives fail they feel betrayed, who preaches the gospel of frequent backups as the best way to avoid having to spend $500 or more recovering lost data. When looking for the best data recovery provider there are literally thousands of options. Doing …

Green IT is all about moving forward, right? Well, not quite. Most companies need to take a step backward first, and perhaps a step sideways, too. Let me explain. We’re seeing rapid growth of computing resources within companies worldwide: server growth at 28% per year, storage growth at 45% per year, MIPS growth at 17% per year, and desktop growth at 1.3 times the rate of labor pool growth. What impact does this growth have on the climate? And what can IT managers do right now to reverse a negative trend? Take a step backward With technology continually expanding, most organizations follow conventional wisdom adding capacity to do more business. The word “adding” is key here. Few IT managers are looking for the “right” capacity.

Having been a non-employee for about 14 years now, I’ve made my share of stupid business mistakes. I’ve also coached a number of people to start their own businesses, and I’ve seen many of them make similar mistakes. This advice is geared towards small business owners, particularly people who are just starting (or about to start) their own business. Selling to the wrong people While sales are important to the survival of any business, you don’t need to push your business on everyone you meet, including friends and family. Furthermore, it’s a waste of time to try selling to people who simply don’t need what you’re offering. Selling to the wrong people includes trying to sell to everyone. Some customers are much easier to sell to than others. For example, my wife does web consulting for small businesses, and she’s learned that some clients are much harder to work with …

When it comes to information security, your biggest vulnerability is not necessarily your computers. It’s your users. Every day, employees make glaring errors such as posting their passwords where others can see them, downloading and opening e-mail attachments that contain viruses, and failing to shut down their computers at night. Human error, not system weaknesses, is the leading cause of serious security violations, according to the “Committing to Security Benchmark Study” sponsored by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). Because human actions greatly affect computer security, you must educate your employees, IT staff, and management to make security a priority and develop good security habits. If you don’t feel confident supplying that information, hire an outside consultant. Organizations such as the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute, the Computer Security Institute, and the MIS Training Institute specialize in such training and can help companies worldwide. General user training: Focus on …

Microsoft works to continually improve the performance, security, and stability of the Windows operating system. As part of this effort, Microsoft develops updates, fixes, and other improvements that address issues reported by the company’s customers and partners. To make it easier for customers to get these updates and enhancements, Microsoft periodically combines them into a single package, and makes that package available for all Windows customers. These packages are called service packs. Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates and hotfixes. It also includes select out-of-band releases, and a small number of new enhancements, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system. Windows XP SP3 provides a new baseline for customers still deploying Windows XP. For customers with existing Windows XP installations, Windows XP SP3 fills gaps in the updates they might have missed—for example, by declining individual …

Looking for a career challenge? Here are new job titles cropping up in IT departments across corporate America, as well as a brief job description for each one.  Information steward Reporting to the CIO, the information steward is responsible for how information is handled and stored across the company. The information steward determines who has read, write and copy access to information. This person is also in charge of how information is secured, backed up and archived. The position involves compliance with industry-specific regulations, as well as the new e-discovery rules for litigation. In an era of stolen laptops and exposed credit card numbers, the information steward is responsible for keeping the CIO out of the headlines.

Many recruiters say there are more open positions than they can fill, Suffice it to say, the market for IT talent is hot, but only if you have the right skills. If you want to be part of the wave, take a look at what eight experts,  including recruiters, curriculum developers, computer science professors and other industry observers — say are the hottest skills of the near future. Machine learning As companies work to build software such as collaborative filtering, spam filtering and fraud-detection applications that seek patterns in jumbo-size data sets, some observers are seeing a rapid increase in the need for people with machine-learning knowledge, or the ability to design and develop algorithms and techniques to improve computers’ performance. It’s not just the case for Google, There are lots of applications that have big, big, big data sizes, which creates a fundamental problem of how you organize the data …

Being able to reliably mine the Internet for meaningful information has so far been an elusive skill. While whole galaxies of data float in cyberspace, finding exactly what your business requires, quickly and reliably, has until very recently been difficult to achieve due to the incompatibility of many data formats. Improved access to the Internet’s fertile data fields promises exciting benefits for businesses. A small travel agent, for example, could draw upon a wider pool of online holiday prices, flight offers and hotels to offer customers better service. In finance – where a millisecond’s difference can win or lose you millions – fast, easy electronic access to wider information channels would give businesses a lucrative trading edge.