Stories by Mary Brandel

The much-anticipated wave of Millennials is upon us, with their addiction to social media, their attachment to consumer devices and their merging of work and personal lives.

The CIO of Altria, a consumer packaged goods company, says innovation requires a new mind-set in the IT department.

When it comes to overall job prospects for IT professionals, 2014 will look a lot like this year, with 32% of companies expecting to increase head count in their IT shops, compared with 33% in 2013, according to Computerworld's annual Forecast survey.

A year and a half ago, David Collins was trying to move from contracting work to a full-time position in IT. With rampant downsizing and a flood of new graduates, the job market was looking bleak in central Ohio, where he lives. "I knew of candidates with 20 years of experience and master's degrees who were taking entry-level positions just to get back into the industry," he says.

Cloud computing and virtualization are redefining the role of the systems administrator. Here's how smart sysadmins are staying ahead out of the wave.

As vice president and CSO at Boeing, David Komendat needs to balance the security needs of the commercial and defense sides of the business, which includes over 160,000 employees in over 70 countries. Komendat's team is responsible for protecting people, property and information, as well as for making the business resilient. His team works to embed security and safety expertise within the business units, projects and sales teams of the largest aerospace company in the world.

In its 16 years of business, DataServ Solutions has relocated five times. That makes David Berndt, CIO at the document-digitisation and process-automation company in St. Louis, Missouri, in the US, something of an expert on the topic of securing corporate moves.
"By now, we've got a good process," he says. In the most recent move this past February, nothing was lost or damaged. "We shut down the office at about 2:30 on Friday, and we were up 100 percent on Monday, with no disruption for our clients and no service levels missed."

Cloud computing is one of the most-discussed topics among IT professionals today. And not too long into any conversation about the most highly touted cloud models - software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) - the talk often turns to cloud security.
According to Milind Govekar, an analyst at Gartner, cloud has rocketed up the list from number 16 to number two in Gartner's annual CIO survey of key technology investments. "Like with anything new, the primary concern is security," he says. In fact, the vast majority of clients who inquire about cloud, he says, would rather create a virtualised datacentre on their own premises - what some call a private cloud - because they're uncomfortable with the security issues raised by cloud computing and the industry's ability to address them.

At the most basic level, enterprise antispam systems protect organisations against email-related threats by identifying and removing junk mail and malicious messages. Some of the major threats, according to Radicati Group, include viruses, directory harvest attacks and denial of service attacks.
These systems have also broadened their approach to keep up with increased compliance needs and the evolution of email threats toward phishing and malware-distribution URLs, according to Chenxi Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research. For instance, many systems now support antivirus, content filtering for inbound and outbound email as well as Web and instant messaging traffic, encryption, archiving and e-discovery, or they integrate with systems that offer these functions, she says. Forrester calls this type of system "email filtering"; Radicati, "email security"; and Gartner, "email gateway."

Antivirus software has been around-well, nearly as long as viruses. But thanks to the ever-growing variety of threats to the PC environment, this is a fast-changing market that is undergoing two major trends: