Stories about: Critical Systems

Top EMC storage executive David Donatelli has abruptly left the company to join rival Hewlett-Packard Co. as executive vice president for enterprise servers, storage and networking, HP announced yesterday.

A continuing lack of corporate mandates to quickly install Oracle's security patches may be leaving many Oracle database installations exposed to vulnerabilities for extended periods of time, according to survey results released on Wednesday.

With market observers further slashing forecasts this week, Nortel Networks declaring bankruptcy and a range of vendors including Intel, Nvidia, and Motorola issuing dour financial reports or cutting staff, it appears all but certain that the IT sector faces a global decline this year.

Whom can you trust? In security, many of us nurture a healthy sense of paranoia and tend to be distrustful. But as human beings, as social beings, we form bonds of trust with those around us.

As Hurricane Gustav approaches the US Gulf Coast, the IT lessons learned from the devastating Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that smashed New Orleans and other areas in 2005 are on the minds of many worried IT managers.

Think your security staffers are trustworthy? Competent? Knowledgeable? Ask a security professional for horror stories and you might think again.

Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center caused scores of companies to reconsider their disaster recovery and business continuity plans, whether they were affected by those catastrophic events or not.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash. We have also spoken to Charles H. Moore about Forth. In this interview, we chat to Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame about the design and development of C++, garbage collection and the role of facial hair in successful programming languages.

Tresys Technology has released a desktop virtualization platform with a difference - it is designed from the ground up for organizations needing tight security, including military bodies.

Joseph Powell first suspected that there were problems with his IT contractor when the admin refused to cede his administrative rights on an accounting software package. Powell, who was the business administrator for a private school, began noticing more issues. When the school's board ordered the IT admin to cede control of the software, he began introducing deliberate errors into the school's database. "We also began to experience costly downtime on the network coinciding with any time [he] was unhappy with how he was treated by the administration," Powell says.