IT Toolkits Newsletter

The IT Employee Confidence Index increased 6.1 points to 45.8 in the second quarter of 2009, according to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive®, indicates that overall confidence levels among IT workers surveyed rebounded in the second quarter as a result of fewer workers believing the economy is getting weaker, and more workers reporting confidence in their personal employment situation.

Despite having to cope with massive budget cuts, salary freezes and demoralized staffs, most employed IT executives are more satisfied with their jobs this year than they have been in previous years, according to the results of a job satisfaction survey.Part of the reason is that normally during a recession those who have jobs are very thankful and will "put up" with a lot because they know there are fewer options for them.

Read on.....

It is estimated by some that corporate data has grown by 25% in 2009 after several years of increases at two to three times that rate. When you combine this with flat to decreasing IT budgets, something eventually has to give. Companies are now forced to make a choice. They will have to either keep buying more storage - which means other budgeted items go unfunded -and deal with the increased operating costs associated with managing more devices, such as power, cooling, and data center space or reduce the amount of data retained, which could impact compliance, recovery service level agreements, and business intelligence initiatives. Data deduplication approaches offer IT a hybrid alternative, which is to remove redundant content before it is ultimately stored - eliminating most of the downstream negative effects, which capacity would cause. The gains in capacity savings provide customers with much more optimistic outcomes such as the ability to retain more "virtual" and true information online for longer periods, dramatically lowering the operating impact of supporting that data and enhancing data protection operations with disk. These outcomes can lead to huge downstream financial benefits, such as moving corporate archives from tape to disk to assist corporate counsels in responding to electronic discovery requests. For example, in a 2008 survey, approximately 60% of U.S.-based trial attorneys reported having cases that raise electronic discovery issues. Of that group, over 86% have issued or received a discovery request for electronically stored information since the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure went into effect in December 2006. Corporate counsels need to quickly be able to run searches against centralized online archives in order to facilitate early case preparation and potentially avoid legal expenses because of reaching a settlement prior to trial.

Cost Control is the Focus of Many CIOs and CEOs

The economic forecasts for the remainder of 2009 may be brighter -- but we are still in a recession. Many economists are calling for the economic downturn to last well into 2009 and some even say mid 2010. Because of these tough economic times, enterprises continue to focus on cost reduction and other forms of productivity improvement. To support the efforts Janco has identified several areas IT department can place their efforts.
They are:

• IT Service Management - Change Control - Help Desk - Service Desks Over the past several years, there have been significant improvements in the tools available to IT support organizations. These tools can help in the automation of support and the remediation of problems. By deploying these tools, enterprise can optimize the size and the responsibilities of help desk personnel. This is the area where there are opportunities for significant cost savings and service level improvements.
  
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• Enterprise Architecture Optimizing the enterprise architecture to focus on operation's  support can provide enterprises with immediate cost savings. By rationalizing the operation's portfolio, enterprises can reduce the costs associated with having redundant support contracts, over supporting, or under supporting IT systems.  Enterprise Architecture has become a common practice for large IT organizations. For the first time there is a methodology to encompass all of the various IT aspects and processes into a single practice. However, realizing the full potential of enterprise architecture can be challenging. Read on...            Order Now...
             

IT Infrastructure Management Infrastructure Management