IT Focus Staff

In 2004, retailers will aggressively use technology to sharpen their consumer value propositions and improve their net margins, predicts a Forrester Research document by analyst Kate Delhagen with Joshua Walker, Carrie A. Johnson and Esther H. Yuen.

March 7-13, 2004 is Global Business Continuity Awareness Week, an international initiative to promote the awareness of and need for business continuity in the business community and beyond.

Although relatively new, IT operational risk management will assist IT decision makers to deliver better and more consistent service for the business, according to Jim Hurley, vice-president and managing director, Information Security, at Aberdeen Group.

Of the top 1000 global financial services institutions, 80 per cent have no automated operational risk solution, 16 per cent use vendors and four per cent have it in-house, according to a report released last October by IDC's Financial Insights.

EMC announces ILM portfolio of servicesInformation storage and management vendor EMC Corporation in January unveiled a set of storage services aimed to help customers...

The financial services sector in North America this year will spend US$22 billion on outsourcing, growing at 12 per cent compounded annually through 2007, predicts Forrester Research, Inc.

A survey from research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc. of Stamford, Conn., reveals that companies expect to halve process cycles over the next five years but IT managers are pessimistic about ability to move systems to real-time this decade.

Business continuity is important for all industries but the cost of downtime affects the financial industry significantly more than all other vertical markets, costing as much as US$4.5 million per hour of outage in the U.S. alone, according to The Yankee Group.