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The mixed messages kept on coming this month. At one point the imminent downturn "won't disturb IT contractors," and then a few days later, "Downturn unsettles IT contracts." Fiona Czerniawska, the director of the Management Consultancies Association’s think-tank, said, “IT expenditure will be comparatively resilient if there is a downturn this time around”. She puts this down to a pent-up demand for greater expenditure because so much money has gone, particularly in financial services, on compliance and regulatory-related work. If you're old enough to remember the turn of the century bubble-bursting fiasco then she assures you things will be different this time since in 2002, "there was a significant backlash against IT from the dotcom bubble and Y2K." Back then some analysts suggested the cost of fixing the Millennium Bug and building rubbish websites had delayed expenditure on essential infrastructure, and that this would keep IT contractors afloat when the companies played catch up. It did for some, but many others sank. So while Ms Czerniawska's upbeat missive was still shooting off the presses, CUK also reported a survey by Interquest, polling 120 contractors, showing more than 50% are now nervous about their jobs, up from the 12% who felt the same six months ago. Executive chairman of Interquest, Gary Ashworth hinted that the findings were a sure sign that "economic gloom and doom" was taking its toll on workers on the supply side of IT. It seems that the economy sits on a knife edge just as the pundits do. Will it or will it not tip into recession? No wonder the monetary policy committee (MPC) sat on their hands; neither voting for nor against an interest rate movement, but not really voting for it to stay the same either. So much for the experts in the "science" of economics! But then soliciting opinion from any group is always likely to throw up strange results. And there was none stranger than Microsoft's survey of 140 computer users this month that seemed to conclude that dislike of the Vista operating system (OS) was more about negative impressions than it was about the way the OS worked. In the experiment, users who had never seen Vista previously were told they were watching a demo of a brand new operating system codenamed Mojave. Mojave was given an average rating of 8.4 out of 10 while Vista rated only 4.4. Yet nobody should be surprised that techies get excited by being shown a demo. That's why they're techies. Everybody was excited by Vista's launch, but sustaining that fervour during product role out and support is the trick. Luckily the experiment did not include a "trial" phase, otherwise I suspect this transparent PR exercise would never have seen the light of day. Nevertheless, neither Microsoft's publicity machine nor the economy was the top story for 2008's last summer month. No, the wettest August for some 100 years (if rainfall continues as expected) was over flowing with stories about data leaks. First off, the Ministry of Justice, the government department tasked with creating data protection policies, admitted it mislaid the personal details of 45,000 people. The data vanished in nine separate incidents over the past financial year. In one incident in January, 14,000 "inadequately protected" details were lost from a "secured" building. Then, a second hand PC purchased on Ebay for £35 was found to hold customers' details from American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland. Names, addresses, sort codes, account numbers, credit card numbers, mobile phone numbers, mothers' maiden names and even scans of signatures were included. Next, an unencrypted memory stick containing the details of 84,000 HM prisoners went missing due to and error (or errors) by PA consulting. But even this flood of data leaks is just a tiny stream into a mighty reservoir. Business flyers from the US and Europe lose 15,648 laptops each week according to the Ponemon Institute. "There are potentially millions of files containing sensitive or confidential data that may be accessible to a large number of airport employees and contractors." The UK government itself admits it no longer knows the whereabouts of 3,200 mobile phones and laptops potentially loaded with sensitive or private information. Official figures reportedly released to parliament show that a staggering 468 devices a year – more than one a day – have gone missing from central departments since 2001. So while some of these lost items hit the headlines when they turn up on Ebay or in the back of a taxi, most are quietly lost to their owners and end up... who knows where. So the month ends with a very clear path for those contractors nervous about the downturn: switch to information security and particularly data encryption or code cracking. You can sell your services to the highest bidder and ride out the coming storms on a wave of leaky corporations. William Knight Aug 29, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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