Breaking News

• IT Directors: What Does 2007 Have in Store?
• Real-Time Financial Information: Get Ready!
• Gartner's Advice to IT Directors

The Security Corner

• Becoming a Security Leader

In Brief...

• Two Years Ago Bill Gates Predicted that Spam Would Be Under Control by Now...
• Databases: Hackers' Favorite Target
• Vista: 9 Switches to Power Off a Laptop

Tango/04 News

• The New VISUAL Message Center 7 Helps Boost Service Levels
• Tango/04 Celebrates its 15th Anniversary with its Best Results Ever
• 100% On Time Delivery of Tango/04 Projects for Two Years Running

According to CIO Insight, IT Directors will be more focused on helping their companies reach business objectives. Their departments will play a leading role in achieving business results, not only focusing on cost reductions. In 2007 they will contribute to financial and strategic decision making and will be in urgent need of IT Professionals with business knowledge and leadership skills. Compliance maturity will demonstrate that regulations such as SOX bring improvements to administration, technology and attitude that positively influence business results and customer and investor confidence.

Read the article in CIO Insight

During the Global Public Policy Symposium, the big auditing firms (PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton and BDO) have proposed that business' financial reports should be available in real-time, at any time of the year, and on demand. With this measure they hope to improve transparency of markets and better protect shareholders' rights.

If this measure is put into action, companies will have to increase their real-time auditing, security and privacy controls of sensitive data.

Download the proposal by the big auditing firms from www.globalpublicpolicysymposium.com

Gartner's recommendations to CIO's for 2007 include: require the entire IT team to improve their frontline business experience, promote your most innovative professionals within the department, create a career plan to give your youngest employees room to grow, provide the HR department with tools to foster employee talent, get up to speed on technology like 3D printing, social networks and new high-level programming languages.

Read the press release by Gartner

Are the best Security Officers born or made? According to an article by CSO Magazine, Security Officers should initiate new strategies if they are to secure their leadership and obtain better results.

Establish objective metrics, calculate Return on Investment (ROI), gain credibility, share responsibility with other managers and departments, develop communication skills, understand the business of their companies, and consolidate security controls, are but a few of the key measures that Security Officers should take.

Read the article in CSO Magazine

In a forum organized by Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2004, Bill Gates assured, as published by the newspaper, that he expected to have spam under control in two years and that there was no doubt that the amount of spam was decreasing.

Unfortunately much more spam reaches our mailboxes today than two years ago…

Read Bill Gates' assertions in the article published on El Mundo's Web site (in Spanish).

2006 saw a worrying increase of hackers attacks on corporate databases. Some companies suffered up to 8.000 attacks in a single day and the phenomenon continues to spread. IT criminals aim to obtain confidential data such as credit card numbers.

To get the sensitive data hackers use SQL insert methods, inserting malicious code in Web forms (for example, a bank's mortgage calculator). As Web applications frequently do not validate the information they receive, the malicious code is inserted into the database and run, automatically sending the criminals the information they seek.

Therefore the best controls for corporate data monitor sensitive data at record level, with real-time auditing solutions that monitor each read access and every change carried out on the data. They provide the knowledge of who is looking at the data and why, and allow you to take action in time and prevent damage.

It may seem like a joke, but it isn't. As Business Week reports, to power off a laptop running Microsoft's new operating system the user must decide between 9 options. As if we had to chose between 9 switches to turn off a single light.

This curiosity aside, many critics of Vista use similar examples to underscore that the operating system is too complex for the average user and that even simple tasks like turning off the system can be a source of headaches. It is no surprise then that Gartner recommends companies wait until 2008 to start implementing Vista at corporate level.

Read the article in Business Week

VISUAL Message Center 7 introduces new and powerful BSM and Service Level Management functionality, which allow IT Managers to simplify infrastructure management, align IT with business priorities, meet increasingly demanding Service Level Agreements, and demonstrate to management that they have everything under control.

After 15 years of continuous growth, the launch of VISUAL Message Center 7 represents an important strategic step for Tango/04 in transforming itself into the leading IT monitoring solutions provider for companies running business applications on Windows, Linux, UNIX and IBM System i servers, as well as DB2, SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Read the press release

Tango/04 increased sales by 42 percent worldwide in the first half of 2006 in comparison to sales for the same period of the previous year, obtaining the best semi-annual results of its history.

In the United States, Tango/04's North American office reached revenues of over 162 percent in comparison to the 2005 results for the same period. The new Tango/04 Italy office tripled turnover over the past year, while sales in France, Switzerland and Luxemburg exceeded Tango/04 objectives for the French speaking markets by 47%.

Read the press release

Tango/04 successfully closes all its operations monitoring, IT security, and data protection projects on time and with full customer satisfaction.

Of the projects completed by Tango/04 in Spain between may 2004 and may 2006, 58% focused on IT Monitoring, Operations and BSM, while the remaining 42% consisted of IT Security and data protection projects.

Read the press release