Oaksys Tech Update

The attack on Google Mail for some Chinese dissidents was based on a security weakness in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.  It demonstrates the need for keeping your software up to date. One (free) tool that is highly useful in achieving this can be found at Secunia. It examines your software version level, of most common software, and advises you if the current version is out of date. Usually it offers a location where updates can be found. As a consequence you are likely to maintain the essential security patches.

Anti Virus and anti-malware  software can only go so far in protecting your machine. If your PC accesses the Internet or receives email you need to make sure that all of your software is kept up to date with the secuirty patches.

Ofgem, the Energy Regulator, reports that the UK needs a £200 Billion investment in its energy infrastructure if we are to avoid power shortages. What steps has your business taken to protect the security of its energy? Does it have a UPS and load shedding policy that is routinely exercised? Has it considered local generation of power, possibly under a CHEAP scheme? If you do not preplan it is inevitable that at some time in the future your organisation will lose productivity due to regional power outages or brownouts.

Guru

BT just love sneaking out price increase details. This happened at the foot of an email from BT discussing other services.

The cost of an “out of plan” call rises from 5.4 pence per minute to 5.9 pence per minute (that’s 9% folks) with effect from the appropriate date of  1st April 2010. The call set-up charge for each call increases from 9.3 pence to 9.9 pence. The call set-up charge is particularly iniquitous; if you reach an answerphone you will be charged a minimum of 15.8 pence even if you hang up immediately.

Compare this with Skype which is 1.2 pence per minute and 2.9 pence call set-up, i.e. 4.1 pence minimum for a call (outside of plan).

Those are the domestic tariffs, I’ve yet to track down the business tariff’s, but I have little doubt that the increase will be 3x the rate of inflation there.  If your business is paying the full BT tariff for calls you should be firing the person responsible for negotiating telephone costs. With a little bit of work it is usually a simple job to cut those costs by 30% from the BATEOTM, I can usually get 50% reduction with no loss of service quality.

Guru

BATEOTM - bill at the end of the month

I attended a seminar where Microsoft’s latest tools for managing Hyper-V were demonstrated. Virtualisation is creating an increase in the complexity of the Server environment. Businesses will need increasingly skilled personnel to manage the environment. They will need good software tools to be able to perform effective management of the environment.

The other thought which struck me is the need for operations management to have good tools to measure/track the operational cost (and cost recovery) of running applications in a multi-server data centre. It takes considerable capital expenditure to set up a full loaded Microsoft/VMWare environment. The servers have to be powerful as does the storage environment. Recovery of the capital cost during the financial depreciation period will be an additional loading on the operational costs. Fortunately such software tools do exist to help track the costs and to bill the user business. More on this later.

Guru

A few year’s ago I bought a Polycom Communicator C100S as a portable speakerphone for my Laptop and my travels. It was great under the Microsoft XP environment, but when I upgraded to Vista I soon found that the device did not work properly. Polycom support promised new driver software by mid-2007 but it never materialised. It was not a cheap microphone, it cost over $100, so you’d expect a reasonable service level from Polycom. However, no  joy, Polycom ignored the complaints from the people who purchased the device. I understand that there is now a new device CX100 that works with Windows 7, but I’m not going to give Polycom the opportunity to screw me again! Their name easily mutates to Polycon.

Guru

Femtocell technology used to extend Cell/Mobile phone reception to dead spots is being put forward as the next great solution for communications. Vodafone already have a system called Vodafone Sure Signal and O2 are trialling their solution. This is however little different from voice over IP, such as the SIP protocol, using local WiFi base stations. Both solutions need a broadband Internet connection, but the solutions by the mobile phone companies is likely to be proprietory to their own networks. Unless standards are introduced it will just promote vendor lock in. All that this provides is the opportunity for the owner of the Femtocell device to pay for rectifying the shortfall of the Mobile Phone Company coverage.

If you need information on deployment of Femocells there is a guide here. Here is an example of the equipment from Airvana.

Guru

“Five fire engines in South Yorkshire and the Humber region have been sitting unused since they were bought in 2007″ in a BBC report. At 26 tonnes they are too heavy to be used on the UK roads. Excluding the purchase expenses such as specification and manufacturer visits these vehicles each cost over £500,000.  The fire service bosses blame the manufacturer, calling it a supplier error.

I know that if I had ever  specified/ordered computer equipment that was too heavy for the containing building, I would be fired and/or sued for negligence. With the mind set of the Fire Chiefs I’m not surprised that no-one has been fired for this negligent purchase. I’d love to buy a Chieftain Tank to park outside of my home, but I know that road regulations would make life very difficult for me and I’d have the councils chasing me for the cost of road repair. The people raising the Fire Engine order were presumed competent to buy such equipment, but they got it wrong. I bet they will still get their full pensions when they retire.

Further waste of Tax Payer’s money and no penalty.

Guru

It is fascinating to see that BP is of the opinion that in concentrating its supply chain for IT to one supplier – Computacentre, that it will reduce costs.  I have no axe to grind on Computacentre. I have used them before and they are a thoroughly professional outfit, but they were not always the lowest cost supplier. As an IT Manager I usually found that I could reduce costs by multi-sourcing, but it did take some management time to monitor the arrangements and performance.  An upside of the management involvement was that I was fully aware of the service level provided by the various vendors. It gave the opportunity to reward/punish service levels accordingly.

When I moved to a larger organisation (from 1500 employees to 75,000), that had streamlined vendors, I found that the support charges to users were five time higher than my previous employers. The service level monitoring by the client company of the single service organisation was significantly poorer and the goods supplied were more expensive.

In effected the client company had tried to outsource a management responsibility to one of its suppliers. Eventually this poor service level was mitigated, but not resolved, by employing additional Relationship Managers within the employing organisation.

BP need to be very sure of what problem they are trying to solve by removing 540 suppliers and replacing them with one. They may not get the result that they expect. Their financial processing may be simplified a little, but they may find that account management is much more difficult.

Guru

Many business managers assume that the physical security of their Data Centre and other IT facilities will be the responsibility (and budget) of the Facilities or Building Services Manager. This is not the case. The CTO must take responsibility for this issue even if that simply means that he/she ensures that the Building Services Manager does a proper job.

There are now substantial financial penalties, not just loss of IT assets or loss of business services, if you get this wrong. In the UK the Information Commissioners Office can fine your company up to £500,000 for failure to provide adequate security for your ICT systems if that action then breaches the Data Protection Act.

Your ICT installation should have a good Physical Security Policy and Plan in place. Managers should be made responsible and accountable for the physical security and the proper implementation of the security policy. The effective implementation of physical security should mesh with network and server/PC security. It should be tested and reviewed on a regular basis.

Simple business insurance is not good enough.

Oaksys

The UK Inland Revenue misses 43% of the 103 million calls that it receives each year. With 10500 personnel employed to answer calls there are approximately 4 incoming calls per employee per day. Yet the Inland Revenue misses about half of those calls. To be honest the figures for incoming calls in the BBC report seem low to me. Personally I get rather more than 4 business calls a day and I rarely miss any using my standard plain old telephone. No doubt the the HMRC has call centre systems to queue calls and offer advice to waiting members of the public, but somehow the call queue management is not as good as it could be.
Here’s a piece of advice to help them fix it. The senior managers at the Revenue should spend two hours a week sitting in a call centre taking routine calls from the public. If that happened I think we’d  suddenly see procedural changes that fixed the problems. When the statistics on call centre performance are boring figures on a spreadsheet they are easily ignored by senior management and do not lead to Root Cause analysis.

Guru