Only 25% of companies have policies and procedures for retention and archiving

Source: TechRepublic E-Discovery Survey, August 2008

71% of companies don’t provide ESI/e-discovery training

Source: TechRepublic E-Discovery Survey, August 2008

59% of companies archive e-mail but not IM

Source: TechRepublic E-Discovery Survey, August 2008

All of the results from our e-discovery survey are available in a downloadable PDF.

I found these results in particular interesting because, in Tom Olzak’s post, “Five things IT can do to prepare for e-discovery,” he stresses how important it is for IT leaders to prepare for e-discovery requests through policies and procedures, archiving e-mail and IM, and employee training.

How is your company preparing for e-discovery requests? Let us know by posting to the discussion.

Here’s a look at the costs associated with telecommuting today:

It probably comes as no surprise that most organizations are prepared to foot the mobile phone-related bills, broadband connectivity, as well as a laptop or PC. What I thought was interesting is the relatively small percentage of employers who provide support for some form of PBX services. uisite IP-based PBX hardware to furnish off-site telephony services.

[Source: Loud and Clear]

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Quocirca is a research and analysis company that prides itself for being free from vendor bias. Its Web site notes that its reports are based purely on the analysis of the primary research it carries out by its team of analysts.

It seems clear from the results that the majority of TechRepublic members with a company-issued laptop do not consider it a necessity to get a spare battery. About 18 percent of those who took the poll get a spare battery on company funds while a mere 10 percent pay for it out of their own pocket.

What other security policies would you advocate where e-mail is concerned?

[Numbers published in Information Security , May 2008 Issue. Original Source: Webroot survey of 1,494 organizations]

I would like to highlight two conclusions that can be drawn from the survey results. It is clear that just over a third of those surveyed experienced little (if any) problems with spam. Another one third, on the other hand, experienced an average of more than 21 spam per day. Almost a fifth of overall respondents (18%) have what I would term major spam issues, receiving in excess of 41 spams per day.

While it can be argued that this is TechRepublic after all, I thought it the sign of the times that not a single participant opted for the “cover all” option of “I have no idea/I don’t care/I don’t use email”.

Much like how virus and malware have become part and parcel of computing, it is clear that spam is here to stay. What strategies do you use to deal with spam?

[Source: Survey conducted in TechRepublic Security blog]

Unsurprisingly, a Gartner analyst noted that mobile PCs “continued to lead unit growth across all regions.” More interestingly, he noted that “The industry could ultimately see a significant wave of consolidation if stronger vendors continue to press their pricing advantage.”

If you are wary of such “consolidations,” then you will probably be glad to know that HP continued to be the leading PC vendor at 18.1 percent of the worldwide market. It’s followed closely by Dell at 16 percent of the worldwide market.

The data in the above chart is in the thousands of units. It combines desk-based PCs, mobile PCs and X86 servers.

Why not share your favorite brands with us at TechRepublic.

[Source: Gartner Press Release]

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Gartner, Inc is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. It prides itself on delivering the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions.

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While you can hardly use the report without further on-the-ground research, it’s certainly a starting point.

According to its web site:

[The] ITIF Broadband Rankings are a composite measure of national broadband performance that represent the sum of standard deviation scores for three indicators: household broadband penetration, average speed weighted by percentage of subscribership… and lowest available price per Mbps.

Below is a snippet of the rankings. Note that the composite score is a standard derivation of the three indicators: Household penetration, speed, and price.

[Source: 2008 ITIF Broadband Rankings] (pdf)

What I found intriguing was the high proportion of votes cast under “PCs.” At the moment, desktop virtualization involves packaging an entire operating system into a virtual machine container, which is normally hosted in the data center. The result is streamlined desktop management that also happens to be a trivial matter to back up for business continuity and disaster recovery purpose.

Unlike server consolidation which has a pretty clear ROI, the case for desktop virtualization remains somewhat elusive. It remains to be seen whether it will take off.

Have you tried out PC or desktop virtualization yet?

The argument from Comcast’s perspective is that throttling bandwidth is necessary due to the presence of bandwidth hogs. My question is: Are there such hogs lurking in your corporate network, sapping precious bandwidth and lowering the perception of Internet connectivity of everyone else?

What can you do to protect against flagrant abuse of your company’s Internet resources?

The above diagram is from page 5 of the source report. It is derived from a survey of 345 organizations in the UK with between 10 to 250 employees.

[Source: Soaring not surfing]

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Quocirca is a research and analysis company that prides itself for being free from vendor bias. Its Web site notes that its reports are based purely on the analysis of the primary research it carries out by its team of analysts.

Well, if you ever had a personal site of your own, you know that not all web hosts are created equal. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes some trial and error before getting the right host for you needs. If reliability and uptime ranks among your requirements however, perhaps the below ranking of the “most reliable” web hosts will help you narrow your search a little.

The above table and measurements come courtesy of Netcraft. Performance measurements are made at 15 minute intervals from four separate locations around the Internet, with averages tabulated over a 24-hour period.

The results were based on the entire month of April 2008.

[Source: Netcraft News]

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Netcraft is an Internet services company based in England. According to the Netcraft Web site, it is funded through retained profit and derives its revenue — other than advertising on its Web site, from providing Internet security services and providing research data and analysis on various facets of the Internet.