Stories by: Sandra Gittlen

It takes a lot to shock Chris Goggans; he's been a pen (penetration) tester since 1991, getting paid to break into a wide variety of networks. But he says nothing was as egregious as security lapses in both infrastructure design and patch management at a civilian government agency -- holes that let him hack his way through to a major FBI crime database within a mere six hours.

Whether you hire outside consultants or do the testing yourself, here are some tips for making sure your time and money are well spent.

First will come virtualization, then utility storage. That's long been the vision of how enterprise storage will evolve as IT grows increasingly dynamic and on-demand becomes business as usual.

Consider this: In the week following September 11, 2001, your users were glued to their television sets tracking breaking news. If an event of similar proportions happened today, they would expect the enterprise network to be able to handle not only real-time video feeds but also high-definition videoconferences and surveillance, as well as instant access to social-networking tools.

Here are 10 tips network managers should follow for a successful video deployment.

With the rise in adoption and availability of enterprise videoconferencing systems comes a warning from IT pioneers: Thinking this technology is simply plug-and-play will lead to disaster.

Not wild about wikis? Not big on blogs? Not sold on Second Life? IT execs who ignore Web 2.0 collaboration technologies could be hurting their company's bottom line.

While rapid-fire cost-savings and consolidation efforts typically dominate an IT executive's annual to-do list, what's getting the green light this year are multiphase projects that protect organizations from regulatory fallout and data leakage.

For Scott McCollum, IT services director at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, network security can't mean one thing for the wired LAN and another for wireless connections.

For the past few years, organizations have gone full-force in deploying a combination of wired and wireless enterprise networks. But now, as wireless technology matures, they are left asking: Where are the tools to unify management of these disparate networks?

Some IT executives might have been alarmed when Gartner predicted that by next year 10 percent of companies will require employees to purchase and maintain their own notebooks and other devices. But for Bill Leo, CIO of Oliver Wyman Delta Organization & Leadership, it was confirmation of what he already knew: He is already taking the first steps toward allowing employees to purchase and use their own PCs.