By Raymond Goh

As the volume of data continues to grow, businesses today are facing challenges in managing and storing the data efficiently and cost effectively. Businesses are using and saving more data than ever before. And, by all accounts, data will continue to proliferate at unprecedented rates, pushing the total amount of information in existence today to 1.2 zettabytes—1,000 exabytes, that is—according to a special February 2010 report by The Economist.

At the same time, however, businesses are facing reduced budgets. They are pressured to manage, control and reduce cost, in addition, IT departments are being asked to do more, often much more, with lesser budgets.  Regardless of how much data their likely overburdened IT staff must manage today and tomorrow, businesses must find ways to save money by keeping a tight rein on both capital and operational expenditures.

The good news? Cost-efficient information management technologies such as deduplication and archiving, which were previously options for enterprise organizations only, are now available for the mid-sized business. Better yet, these technologies have been integrated into backup and recovery solutions that businesses can now use not only to reduce storage costs but to improve data protection and minimise the overall complexity of their IT environments.

While there is no single approach that is right for every organisation, businesses need to take an informed approach, looking at corporate culture, risk tolerance, size and reach. Technology can assist in managing data, cost and reduce risks in a systemised and protected manner that is in compliance with the various rules and regulations.

Eliminating Redundant Data

One of the most effective technologies for addressing the challenges of both rapid data growth and reduced budgets is deduplication. After all, during the typical backup process, approximately 70 percent of data that is backed up is actually duplicate data that has not been accessed in more than 90 days, according to a recent Gartner report.

By Koh Ee Laine

The surging cost of storage is a headache to many companies as they deal with issues in managing and storing data, and addressing question on what information should be retained, how the information should be available, and how long should it be kept?

The consequences of information management missteps are severe and far-reaching. It is now 1,500 times more expensive to review data than it is to store it, highlighting why proper deletion policies and efficient search capabilities are critical for enterprise organizations. Backup windows are soaring while recovery times have become prohibitive. In addition, with the massive amounts of information stored on difficult-to-access backup tapes, eDiscovery has become a lengthy, inefficient and costly exercise.

Symantec’s 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey, highlights that a majority of enterprises are not following their own advice when it comes to information management.  While a large majority of respondents believe in the value of a formal information retention plan, but only a small number actually have one.  The survey also found that too many enterprises save information indefinitely instead of implementing policies that allow them to confidently delete unimportant data or records, and therefore suffer from rampant storage growth, unsustainable backup windows, increased litigation risk and expensive and inefficient discovery processes. 
Infinite retention results in infinite waste

Enterprises see the value of a solid information management plan, but too many still follow the outdated practice of keeping everything forever. The sheer volume of data is growing exponentially, so trying to keep everything consumes large amounts of storage space and demands too much of IT's resources.  As a result, businesses spend far more time and money on the negative consequences of poor information management and discovery practices than they would by working to change them. 
Recommendations

Enterprises need to regain control of their information.  The costs of waiting for the perfect plan are far outweighed by the benefits of being proactive. The following are some recommendations from Symantec to address the issue:

Backup is not an archive, and it is not recommended to use backup for archiving and legal holds.  Enterprises should retain a few weeks of backup (30 - 60 days) and then delete or archive data in an automated way thereafter.

People normally don't pay much attention to advertisements in print media and generally avoid TV ads by changing channels, making a cup of coffee or taking a toilet break until the ad is over but there are some exceptions, according to local taxi advertising operator Futurelook.

In pilot trials of its iCab taxi advertising service in April, one of its clients which advertised its car rental, car service centre and handyman's services was so happy that it extended its campaign for a further four months.

“This client received between 30 and 40 enquires per month, with between 50% to 60% conversion rate compared to one or two calls per month when it advertised in the newspapers,” said Futurelook director, Valens Datuk Dr. Subra.

Another client, the Islamic International School in Subang Jaya received between five and six enquiries per day for the RM1,500 it spent per month on iCab advertising, compared to less than five calls in response to an ad costing RM8,000 per insertion in a newspaper.

Futurelook officially launched iCab in 100 taxis in early August and at the time, had four clients – namely MBF Card, Palm Gardens Resort, Pusat Zakat Selangor and Avis International Car Rental, though Futurelook also targets clients such as telephone companies, banks, hotels, insurance companies, food & beverage outlets, entertainment spots, government and others which typically address consumers.

iCab consists of iCab Digital, a digital media player with a 7 inch LCD display mounted in the back of the headrest of the taxi's front passenger seat or in front of the passenger sitting on the left side of its back seat. where studies found 95% of passengers normally sit.

The media player plays a video and slide advertisements with voice-enabled full multimedia which repeats every 10 minutes, 60% of which are advertisements interspersed with four minutes of movie trailers and important announcements on health issues such as the H1N1 virus, cancer and other matters.

Advertisement length starts from 15 seconds minimum, 30 seconds or longer and they pay from RM1,500 per month for a 15 second ad displayed across the whole fleet of participating taxis, RM3,000 for a 30 second ad and more for ads of longer duration.

By Lalit Gupta

Over the last 5-10 years, governments around the world have implemented ‘e-Government’ in some form or fashion, with mixed results. Generally, such efforts have helped them provide enhanced access to information for government agencies, govt employees and citizens.

However, significant issues remain. Most government agencies today, still operate in silos, based on previously built ‘legacy systems’. Essentially, separate computing entities and environments were created to meet diverse needs, with different applications for different organizations. So, while access to services are good, the issues of legacy and IP creation based on business rules have tended to hamper growth and offering of more innovative and effective services for the citizenry. These systems are also generally inflexible and expensive to maintain.

But since they incorporate years of government policy and thousands of man hours of effort, it is understandably difficult to do away with them or move to a new, lower-cost and more agile computing environment.

This infrastructure situation is juxtaposed with an increasingly sophisticated and demanding citizenry. Citizens, both individuals and businesses, are looking for a high level of flexibility and agility by the public agencies to help them do things better and more efficiently. They are very used to particular levels of quality and convenience, drawing these expectations from the private sector. They are consequently growing more demanding in similar levels of convenience and service from their Government agencies. 

These are the two essential challenges that require a next level of evolution for the electronically-enabled government of the future. The call is for government agencies to be creative, do things differently, and quickly, across multiple agencies. Oracle defines this next step as ‘iGovernment’ – the next level of evolution for governments to address contemporary and future challenges.

iGovernment is not just about addressing inefficiencies in cost and flexibility. It is also about liberating a whole lot of energy that can be utilized to create more efficient and innovative citizen services. iGovernment will enable government services to essentially:

• be Innovative – with the flexibility and agility to do things differently and to do things better in being able to define, develop and launch innovative citizen services;
• be Integrated – to break down infrastructures and process silos to enable effective collaboration across agencies; and
• be Intelligent – to embed rich analytics capability and business intelligence into ones’ operations so that an organization is able to monitor the performance of agencies and public programs/ policies in a way not possible before.

Managing more with less – allocating your IT portfolio intelligently to remain resilient in the current business environment, was the theme of the IT Showcase Asia 2009 event organised by business performance enhancement company, the JFPS Group at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel & Convention Centre in Kuala Lumpur on 6 & 7 October.

The topics covered included issues such as virtualisation, cloud computing, security, information technology (IT) service management, outsourcing, open source software, shared services and so on, their benefits in terms of greater efficiency of IT and human resource use and the risks involved if not handled correctly.

“Given that many organisations have limited or reduced budgets, yet they still strive to achieve performance excellence but given the current state of the economy, companies are trying hard to curb unnecessary spending, while ensuring their objectives will still be met,” said Dato’ Dr. Sharifah Zarah Syed Ahmad, Deputy Secretary-General (Policy), Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI).

“With the amount of support that is expected from IT, businesses will continue to invest, be it in the area of network, storage, hardware, software, servers, operating systems, portals, data warehouses, etc. and as IT forms the operations framework of the business, it pays to manage the allocation of resources wisely, especially at this point of time.

THE inaugural SME Solutions Expo 2009 at the Mid Valley Exhibition Centre from 9 to 11 July was a both a showcase of information technology (IT) solutions for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and at the same time a showcase IT and non-IT related products and services by SMEs and for SMEs. It was held in conjunction with the fourth Entrepreneurship Expo 2009 which offered a wide range of ideas, opportunities, products and services for entrepreneurs, and the MIRC e-SME Week 2009.

Amongst the over 100 exhibitors of high-technology products, Asia Biofueltech based in the SIRIM Incubator in Shah Alam, showcased its biodiesel reactors used to produce biodiesel from raw oil from the jatropha plant which are one time was regarded as a weed. The choice of oil from the jatropha plant as raw the raw material is favoured by environmentalists because it's non-edible and is believed to not  impact upon the food chain.

Based on British and American technologies, the crude jatropha oil is mixed with chemicals, then moved to a settling tank where methyl ester (the biodiesel) floats to the top, whilst glycerine sinks to the bottom and is removed.

Glycerine, also known as glycerol is an organic chemical compound which has many uses as a raw material in the medical, pharmaceutical, plastics, food explosives and munitions industry. For example, nitroglycerin or glycerol-trinitrate is an explosive which forms the basis of smokeless gunpowder, dynamite, gelignite and cordite. Nitroglycerine is also used as a medicine to relieve heart conditions such as angina.

The crude methyl ester (biodiesel) is then heated to remove the methanol (methyl alcohol), after which it's passed through Eco2Pur dry wash system which uses the Magnesol branded artificial magnesium silicate to remove impurities such as soaps, catalyst traces, residual methanol, moisture and other production residues from the biodiesel to assist them to attain EN14214 & ASTM-D6751 quality standards.

Malaysian company Smart Surface Sdn Bhd announced its SmartWall multi-touch surface computing platform on on 25 August.

We got glimpse of the first SmartWall under construction but still under wraps, when we dropped by its modest office in the Taipan area of USJ Subang Jaya on 13 August to see its award-winning SmartSurface multi-touch surface computing table.

SmartSurface made its debut at ITEX 2009, where it won managing director Faysal Abdulaziz and executive director Homam Alghorani the ITEX 2009 Best Inventions Winner in the Corporate category and the ITEX Gold Medal awards at the 20th International Invention, Innovation & Technology Exhibition (ITEX) at the KL Convention Centre from 15 to 17 May.

Smart Surface had about five corporate customers for SmartSurface when we visited, including a major tobacco company which  which  uses it to promote their products and services in an enjoyable and interactive ways through relavant multi-player games.

Held annually and organised by MINDS (Malaysian Invention & Design Society), ITEX is the region's leading exhibition of new inventions, new technologies and products by individuals, universities and companies from across ASEAN, the rest of Asia, Europe and elsewhere, with the aim to secure investment, manufacturing and commercialisation prospects and partners.

Another Malaysian company, Kreateevee Sdn Bhd launched its own version of a multi-touch table interactive kiosk on 29 July, also at the KL Convention Centre in conjunction with the MSC Malaysia Great ICT Sale 2009.

A long time in gestation

“Surface computing has been around as a concept since the 1980s but the unavailability of sufficient computing power was its main hindrance, whilst the the number of LCD displays available then was insufficient and very expensive,” said Faysal.

The concept basically holds that instead of humans adapting their natural ways to enter data in ways which fit in with the limited constraints of a keyboard and a mouse, with multi-touch surface computing, the computer adapts itself to the natural ways of humans, such as their gestures, hand sweeps, handling of objects and so on for its input.

For example, medical doctors can use it to explain their patient's medical contition by showing them their X'Ray and MRI scan images on SmartSurface, show them third-party results of a search engine search on their condition, type out a prescription on a virtual keyboard and post it electronically to the dispensary for the patient to collect his medicine, all with the sweep of their hands.

Doctors can also use it in online consultations with colleagues and fellow professionals elsewhere.

In education, studens can use SmartSurface to interact with their own research within simulated windows. Both SmartSurface and SmartWall can also be used in advertising and at exhibitions; in airports, malls and shops; in banking, businesses and by telcommunications operators; cafes; in teleconferencing; by the military; by manufacturers and so on.

Raising children and keeping them out of trouble has been a challenge for parents since time immemorial,

The challenges were less in the days before the population explosion and urban sprawl, where people lived in villages and small towns where there were few distractions and most people knew each other and could be parents’ eyes and ears on what their children were up to. This was so too in the larger cities where lower mobility back then kept children and parents within the same community.

For example, parenting challenges in a town like Ipoh back in the mid-1960s were mostly to ensure that their children did not get into bad company, did not get involved in gangsterism, smoke cigarettes, loaf around with friends, watch too much TV or spend too much time in the cinemas – about the only distraction back then -- when they should be studying.

The popularisation of the drug culture and of a more permissive lifestyle due to the youth rebellion, the sexual revolution, the availability of discos and greater mobility since the mid-60s presented newer more serious challenges to parents but at least they could still keep tabs on the company their children kept, since they could still see them and their companions.

Today the wide and growing availability of the Internet, which children know more about than their parents, with easy access to pornography, hundreds of their invisible online acquaintances scattered round the globe and faceless online stalkers hiding behind the anonymity the Net provides presents even bigger challenges for parents today, so how should parents cope?

 Just be a good parent

Parents should cope by continue to be good parents, according to Effendy Ibrahim, Symantec Asia Pacific consumer business lead, Asia South Region.

“Talk to you children and stay connected with them through regular conversation,” said Effendy, himself a parent, who presented findings of the Norton Online Living Report 09 to the media in Kuala Lumpur on 26 March.

The inaugural MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2009 was a real eye opener to the advances which Open Source software has made, especially on end-user desktop PCs in the past few years.