Technology

Principles of good key management

Too many businesses do not understand the importance of proper key management and they are not helped by vendors who make it very difficult to develop enterprise wide policies and systems. Nevertheless, best practice should be implemented.

Five ways to build a virtual office

When it comes to running a business, our feet are firmly on the ground but our data and software are increasingly in the cloud. My burgeoning media empire consists of two people (my lovely wife and me), but to the outside world we seem a lot bigger, thanks to online applications.

10 most important technologies you never think about

From Unicode to Lithion Ion batteries, XML and High-speed net access...we continue to use the technologies that changed the world, right under our noses.

Moving towards a smarter LAN

The network, the identity store, and policy - currently, these three elements are fairly separate, but integrate them tightly and watch them simplify the administration of controls in your LAN.

The future of anti-virus

On the eve of the Infosec security conference We look at the arms race between virus writers and AV companies and ask what it does for enterprise IT.

The WLAN wars are back - with a vengeance

The debates about wireless LAN architectures have got more complex, if anything. Craig Mathias explains why WLANs may never grow up and settle down.

Ubuntu Linux upgrade: Why you should try it

The final release of Ubuntu 8.04 next week should silence those who say Linux is too complex for the non-techie.

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away

The conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95 is that performance advances in hardware are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base.

Locking down the mainframe

Organisations are increasingly opening up their mainframe and sharing data, which means vulnerabilities and threats from both outside and inside are increasing, while the mainframe skill base is drying up.

Windows Server 2008: a great Vista killer

Some disaffected Vista users have discovered that Windows Server 2008, properly configured and tweaked to be more Vista-like, makes a killer workstation OS. Their discovery comes thanks to the musings of a (hopefully still employed) Microsoft engineer.

Why Vista is like sushi

According to an old industry joke, IBM was once so poor at marketing that if it had invented sushi, it would have called it "cold, dead, raw fish".

Is instant messaging an instant nightmare?

The dilemma of controlling instant messaging in the enterprise.

There but for the grace of God…

Few organisations hold the sheer volume of sensitive data that was compromised in the recent HMRC debacle, or even the mere 600,000 personal records lost in an MoD laptop.

Checklist for the economic green datacentre

How can you deliver economic benefits in an environmentally sound manner, while addressing power and cooling issues in the data centre?

Embedded software: Innovation, and commoditisation

Most IT professionals are involved in deploying and managing enterprise applications, but increasing numbers are involved in embedded applications. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the auto industry.