IT Services > Opinions

Although it may seem like your computing life is all e-mail and browsing, computer users still create files, documents, spreadsheets, boring presentations and all manner of other stored information. Which brings me to the question: Where do you store your data? And are you ready to store your data online in a service hosted by a third party provider?

For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.

Motivated to help the environment as well as their businesses, SMBs are increasingly embracing green practices. One of their primary approaches: employing green technology, according to recently released survey results from KRC Research.

While I applaud any company's attempt to be environmentally responsible and implement "green" projects, I remain skeptical of long-term commitments to green initiatives that don't decrease costs, fatten the bottom line, or polish the organization's image.

"Cloud" has a special place in my hit parade of despised neo-techno-vernacular. Unlike Web 2.0, my all-time favorite, at least "cloud" is somewhat self-descriptive: Formless, vaporous, and a semi-reliable indicator of climatic conditions. If you point at a round, puffy cloud and declare that it looks like a pitchfork, and someone with you nods and says, "Cool, I can see that," the forecast is mostly patronizing with zero vision and periodic sucking up. You're in trustworthy company if that person says, "Are you blind?" If someone in a meeting refers to a cloud, or worse still, the cloud, don't nod just to keep the conversation going. Consider it your duty to ask them to define the term.

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

At a conference for UK press this week, Red Hat added some detail to its plans for virtualization, cloud computing and application messaging.

Naked home workers may be the stuff of fantasy, but flexible working is now a corporate reality. Ready availability of broadband combined with the reliability and speed of wireless communications has transformed home and remote working.

IT productivity is under increasing focus as businesses look for ways to reduce the cost of their daily business operations and increase profitability.

Practically every company I talk with is consolidating data centers, constructing new ones, or both. These aren't the old "glass house" models of the 1980s and 1990s: They're next-generation designs with racks of blade servers, virtualized clusters and storage-area networks.