Telecommuting, Indian Outsourcers, Portable Karaoke and More

This issue of Trendlines from the 7/15/08 issue of CIO magazine covers recent news impacting the IT community including Wi-Fi issue in Philadelphia, IT costs at Dow Chemical and Online fraud tools

By Steff Gelston
Thu, July 10, 2008

CIO

Even With $4 Gas, Demand for Telework Unmet

Even as gas prices hit historic highs in the U.S., most Americans can't telecommute, according to a recent survey released by advocacy group Telework Exchange.

Of those surveyed, 92 percent said they believed their jobs could be done from home. But only 39 percent of the respondents say they were able to telework at least part-time. Nearly all the survey respondents were culled from the 377 registrants of the Telework Exchange website.

"Telework Exchange registrants—both government and private-sector employees—do have a clear interest in telework," says Cindy Auten, Telework Exchange's general manager, in an e-mail. "We find that this is an accurate sample of the full population." Even with people in much of the U.S. paying $4 a gallon or more for gas, telecommuting seems to be facing an uphill battle. Telework Exchange has pushed for more telework options for U.S. government workers, but a survey released in March by CDW-G found only 17 percent of federal employees telecommuting.

Surveys have shown that management resistance to telework remains a barrier, Auten says. "What we found was that as managers become exposed to/involved in telework, their approval of the operating practice improves significantly," she adds. "Encouraging managers to telework is a critical step to achieving overall agency telework adoption. Further, agencies must educate and train management on telework drivers and benefits."

Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed said they're willing to pay any amount for gas. More than eight in 10 respondents said they rely on their vehicles to get to work, with only 13 percent using carpooling and 10 percent using public transportation. However, 78 percent said they were making lifestyle changes—such as limiting car trips—because of high gas prices. Another 62 percent said they were spending less in general and 53 percent said they were eating out less often.

An average, a U.S. resident spends $2,052 a year for gas to commute and spends 264 hours on the road, according to the survey.

"I think that we are seeing a tipping point for people to start looking for other alternatives to commuting," Auten says. However, employees may have to prove to managers that they can remain productive. "It is also important that employees focus on measurable outcomes to demonstrate continued or increased productivity," she says. "It is helpful to use project schedules, key milestones, regular status reports and team reviews."

-Grant Gross

Indian Outsourcers Gaining Global Share

India's top outsourcers are growing their share of the global IT services market as customers break large, multibillion orders into smaller chunks, and customer confidence in Indian providers grows, according to research firm Gartner.

Continue Reading

With 1.5 billion instructions in one second (BIPS), while consuming less energy than ever before, Wintergreen Research says IT departments need to sit up and take notice of this hybrid system that combines the System z with servers.
Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.
With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security.  The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough.  Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs. 
This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.
The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.
This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.
As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.
Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.
A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.
Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Sponsored Links
Resource Center