Brian Fonseca

While bracing his IT systems to weather another hurricane season, Max Prather can't help but recall just how swiftly undetected weak points in his IT disaster recovery plan were cracked by Hurricane Katrina

An electronic revolution is taking place at the George Washington University , whose CIO last week called for technologies that can help satisfy increasing user demands for support of Web 2.0 technologies. But some users say management concerns about control, security and trade-secret exposure will deter organizations from ever embracing Web 2.0 tools.

King, who attended this week's Storage Networking World conference, co-sponsored by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association, is one example of what some attendees said could become a major problem for organizations -- the alarming number of women who are currently abandoning IT jobs like storage administration that require workers to be on-call at virtually all hours.

San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc. is expected this week to unveil partnerships with Microsoft Corp., BEA Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., and Borland Software Corp.

Battling a dwindling market and aggressive competition from traditional enterprise security products, MSSPs (managed security services providers) are relying more heavily on consultation and proactive protection measures to woo customers toward outsourcing security.

In an effort to bolster a stronger level of specificity for its SMB (small- to medium-sized business) clientele, SAP AG unveiled a quintet of new mySAP All-in-One products this week geared directly toward industry-centric areas.

McAfee this week will unveil VirusScan Enterprise 7.0, its first major update to VirusScan in years that introduces newly combined desktop and file server protection as well as clear lessons learned from the massively destructive Slammer and Code Red viruses.

Cognos Inc. is set to unveil its Cognos Series 7 V.2 software next week, giving end-users a sleeker version of the one-year-old BI (business intelligence) product featuring increased support volume functions highlighted by new projection analysis and zero-footprint capabilities.