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This
Week's News
December
20, 2004 |
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Hardware
News
Hewlett-Packard just introduced new homegrown storage and management products and technologies from their partners. HP unveiled the Storage Works Modular Smart Array 1500 cs (starts at $9,000), a midrange storage system that allows the concurrent attachment of relatively fast and expensive SCSI and slower and less expensive Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) drives. They also rolled out the StorageWorks Ultrium 960 Tape Drive (starts at $5,540), which provides write once, read many capability for archival purposes. Also new is the StorageWorks Optical Jukebox (starts at $8,000) for archival storage of data that needs to be retained to adhere to government regulations.
In the December issue of Laptop magazine, there is a series of ratings of notebook computers. The Toshiba Qosmio G15 emerged with a perfect 5.0 score.
Desktop Replacements:
Toshiba Qosmio G15-AV501 (5.0)
Dell Inspiron XPS (4.5)
Hewlett-Packard Pavilion ZD8000 (4.0)
Thin and Light:
Gateway M320X PLUS (4.5)
Toshiba Satellite M35-S456 (3.5)
Sharp Actius AL27 (2.5)
Ultraportables:
Prostar PS1282 (3.5)
Systemax Pursuit 4110 (3.0)
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Software
Updates
Attempting to catch up to Microsoft and Intel, IBM is going full bore with Linux and Power Architecture, an open chip design initially developed by IBM, Apple and Motorola. IBM Power Architecture can allow a single server to act as if it were several. With Linux kernel 2.6, a four-way OpenPower 720 server can look like a virtual 40-way server. IBM currently sells about 50 percent of its solutions on Linux platforms, and they just teamed up with Sybase to offer its enterprise database software on these IBM Power Architecture servers using Linux.
Meanwhile, IBM's archrival Microsoft is not standing still. In fact, they just formed The Midrange Alliance Program, or MAP, whereby they will partner with Fujitsu, Electronic Data Systems and a half-dozen other companies to try to convince businesses to look at Windows-based alternatives to IBM's iSeries servers, the latest in the AS/400 family. One of the key messages from Microsoft and its partners is that there are tools that allow customers to take advantage of their investment in programs that run on IBM's AS/400 servers, moving them to Microsoft's .Net program environment without starting from scratch.
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ATMs/Kiosks
The Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) is an XML-based, financial messaging protocol that was developed to create a framework for the electronic business-to-business exchange of data among financial institutions around the world. At the recent BAI show, numerous customers of the IFX Forum demonstrated an ATM system utilizing the newest IFX message format. For the demo, ACI Worldwide's server software and IFX device handler were connected to the IFX clients of Phoenix Interactive, Diebold, NCR and Wincor Nixdorf. The group cited the benefits of IFX: reduced integration costs, reuse of development from one channel to another and lower training costs.
Sales of American Express travelers checks totaled $19.2 billion last year, but those old fashioned paper checks may become obsolete in the future. The paper to plastic conversion could involve cards that are prepaid, reloadable, and available in either dollars, pounds, or euros. They can be used virtually anywhere the card brand name is accepted, including ATMs. Find out more in the January issue of BANK
tech-trends - subscribe today.
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SiVault Systems, a provider of products and services for the secure authentication, processing, storage, and retrieval of signature- based electronic transactions and documents, has been named as a channel partner of Hewlett Packard's Forms Automation System line of business. The company claims to have the industry's first end-to-end solution for digitizing pen-and-paper forms input with services for authorization, authentication, storage, and data management of transacted content. SiVault Systems will combine HP's Digital Pen and Paper offering with their biometric signature and content authentication services.
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Wireless
World
CVS, a large drug store chain, has agreed to serve as the first national merchant to accept ExpressPay, an American Express system that relies on radio waves rather than card swipes to authorize transactions. CVS has already equipped 485 stores in seven states to accept ExpressPay, which AmEx has been testing in New York, Phoenix and Singapore. The chain plans to roll out the technology to all of its 5300 stores by the middle of next year, according to AmEx, which also says it will roll out ExpressPay nationally to its cardholders next year.
Wireless LANs will become more pervasive in enterprises, according to a recent survey released this week by In-Stat/MDR. The survey of IT managers found increasing budgets for wireless LAN equipment that will lead to adding more access points and giving more employees access. Respondents generally agreed that their budget for wireless LANs would be increasing but cited security concerns as the top reason for not expanding their WLANs faster.
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Security
Section
Enforcing desktop security often means simply checking to see whether the clients anti-virus software is up to date. However, more sophisticated packages are coming onto the market that can enforce security policies based on location or services running on the PC. They can even disable remote storage devices, wireless adapters, and even specific IP services on the client, based on whether it is connecting wired or wirelessly, or via a trusted or untrusted network. Find out about such a system that only runs $89.95 per seat in the January issue of BANK
tech-trends - subscribe now.
Unlike many security analysts, Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen believes that it is unreasonable to place the burden for computer security on users. He says that user education should not be the main approach to countering security problems for three reasons. First, and most importantly, he says it doesn't work - computer security is too complicated and the bad guys are too devious and inventive. Second, he is convinced that user education puts the burden on the wrong shoulders - when there is a mismatch between technology and people, the answer should be to change the computers. Third, as long as we keep the burden on users rather than fix the technology, he states that we will never realize the Internet's full benefits. His conclusion: the only real solution is to make security a built-in feature of all computing elements.
The Open Security Exchange, a consortium of private-sector technology companies developing vendor-neutral interoperability specifications and best practices guidelines, says that the lines between cyber and physical security are blurring. Physical and IT security traditionally have been stovepipe processes, with little communication between the products used on each side. OSE believes that companies, government agencies and other organizations must look holistically at their security management and practices. OSE's chairman says that "Our goal is to allow the systems to communicate so that security staff physical or IT security have the best tool in front of them to do incident response and remediation and maybe do some concerted response."
***
Security Section Sponsored by SecureWorks ***
--
How to Talk to Your Board About Information Security . . . Without Getting Fired
--
As an IT professional, you want your board to see the connection between your network's safety and your bank's profitability. To do that, you have to be part-salesman, part-educator, part-entertainer, and part legal expert.
1. Establish yourself as the resident compliance expert. What - you're not? No problem. Familiarize yourself with the rules of the regulatory bodies, and get to know the FFIEC Handbook inside and out. Board members know compliance is an issue, but most don't have the time to keep up with the endless regulations.
2. Skip the jargon. Directors aren't generally technical people. Don't drown them in an alphabet soup of regulatory acronyms--and save the conversations about phishing, patching, spamming, and spoofing for your staff.
3. Emphasize risk. Stick to their favorite subject: profitability. The more you quantify risk and connect it to quarterly numbers, market share, and growth plans, the better you will be able to sell your board on security.
Ultimately, what happens to your network is your responsibility - and your board's. It's up to you to make sure they get the message. Read the complete article at
http://www.secureworks.com.
Are you missing the boat? Sign up for our free e-newsletter and receive timely updates about Internet security every month. You can also receive webcast invitations, white papers, or email advisories. Sign up here:
http://www.secureworks.com/newsletter/profile.
Contact us today at: 877.905.6661 or www.secureworks.com
Are you missing the boat? Sign up for our free e-newsletter and receive timely updates about Internet security every month. You can also receive webcast invitations, white papers, or email advisories. Sign up here:
http://www.secureworks.com/newsletter/profile.
Contact us today at: 877.905.6661 or
www.secureworks.com
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Technology
and Marketing
Microsoft says more than 100,000 users have downloaded their Reporting Services (RS) tool since its introduction in January. Users say the price is right for the server-based reporting platform: It's free for SQL Server users who need to run only one instance of the business intelligence database. (If you need more instances, you must buy more server licenses.) Users are also attracted to RS's tight integration with the Visual Studio .Net development environment. Is RS right for your bank's management team to pull down reports? Find out more in the January issue of BANK
tech-trends.
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Online
Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
Account hijacking is one of the fastest growing forms of electronic fraud and the FDIC wants banks to do something about it. "Financial institutions' wider adoption of electronic payment systems, as well as the increasing number of customers using these services, have produced greater opportunities for electronic fraud," the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a study, "Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft." They believe that a single password is not adequate to properly identify on-line bankers: "The main problem with single-factor identification is that passwords, the most commonly used factor, are often easy to steal, guess, or crack and, once a password is compromised, the thief has the same access rights as the legitimate user."
America Online (AOL) is obviously in tune with the FDIC since they are issuing their customers PassCode secure token devices from RSA Security that generate a unique six-digit code every 60 seconds. Authentication requires the use of that code, along with a customer's user ID and password. The optional service costs $9.95 for the device plus a monthly fee that starts at $1.95. AOL has a partnership with Yodlee for its bill payment capabilities, which can be accessed with or without the PassCode device. The default level of security uses an "account security question" for accessing secure content such as financial information.
According to the annual "Credit Card Survey" conducted by Myvesta, Americans are now carrying an average of 2.9 credit cards, up from 2.3 in 2003. The average American female carries about $200 less in credit card debt than their counterpart: American males have an average of $2,742 of credit card debt spread out over 2.5 cards, and females average $2,522 of credit card debt on 3.3 cards.
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Internet
Access
HyperSpace Communications has released HyperTunnel 3.6, the first version of HyperTunnel to incorporate the company's HyperTCP technology. The firm claims that HyperTCP increases throughput over high-speed networks and should have broad appeal among users of high bandwidth networks including DSL, T1 and above. HyperTunnel places a small piece of software on remote clients (HyperTunnel Client) or on a gateway (HyperTunnel Gateway) in front of a collection of clients and on dedicated servers on LANs where corporate asset servers are located.
There are over 400 VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service providers in North America, but only a small percentage of them deliver services that can be considered business-grade, such as IP PBX (Private Branch eXchange) support, business broadband VoIP or VoIP over IP-VPN. banks looking for cost reductions by running voice and data traffic over one network need to carefully weigh the growing number of hosted or managed VoIP service offerings. Learn about what some of the top telecom players are offering in regards to hosted VoIP in the January issue of BANK
tech-trends - subscribe today.
The small northwest Washington city of Mount Vernon is the first central office in Verizon's network to be converted from old-fashioned circuit switching to cutting-edge packet telephony. The central piece of new equipment, a Nortel softswitch outfitted with add-ons to support legacy TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) interconnections, takes up about as much space as the 7-foot-high, 19-inch-wide Class 5 circuit switch it replaced. But the most significant difference is that the new platform promises to generate increased revenue through support of new converged services while slashing capital and operational costs by up to 50%. Of all the Baby Bells, Verizon appears to be the furthest along in the circuit-to-packet transition. BellSouth is conducting trials of Siemens softswitches in South Carolina and Florida; Qwest has announced intentions to use the Lucent softswitch in its VoIP infrastructure; and SBC is using Siemens' softswitches in its hosted VoIP service.
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Call
Centers
An IBM expert in speech thinks that speech technology can offer organizations not only an opportunity to enhance the service they provide to their customers but also greater operational efficiencies. Brian Garr, Program Director and Segment Manager for the Conversational Access Segment in IBM's Pervasive Software Division, believes that speech technology delivers good ROI and differentiation, and that you should implement speech as a mainstream part of your infrastructure - not as a separate technology unit. He has these recommendations for organizations looking to add speech recognition to their call center front end:
Plan to scale your business make sure the system can grow with you.
Use open standards - don't lock into a proprietary system.
Unify your customer experience across all horizontal touch points.
Recognize the value of conversational access and Natural Language Understanding technologies.
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