Spotlight Features

When it comes to enterprise e-mail, Microsoft Exchange on the back end and Microsoft Outlook on the front end are among the most frequent vectors for viruses and worms. The cost of downtime as a result of this malware plague is measured in dollars, lost productivity, disrupted communications, and ma...

The U.S. economy was not kind to offline retailers during the 2002 holiday season: They saw the smallest revenue gains in more than 30 years. But e-commerce, which tended to overpromise and underperform during the Internet bubble as many Web-only outfits stumbled over fulfillment and customer servic...

On one hand, enterprise storage needs are increasing exponentially year after year. On the other hand, IT costs are controlled more fiercely than ever, often by non-IT executives. In this stingy environment, vendors are attempting to convince corporations to buy entirely new networks dedicated to da...

After announcing its .NET initiative in mid-2000, then backing it up with a slew of releases and hype, Microsoft clearly was hoping 2002 would be the year Web services took off. But the calendar has flipped to 2003, .NET is not as far along as anticipated, and some observers are wondering if the sof...

Total security for a corporate network may be a goal of many IT executives, but no matter how much a company invests in security systems, breaches -- originating either outside or inside a network -- are a fact of life in the information age. By budgeting for the extra resources needed to respond to...

Increasingly, Fortune 500 enterprises are turning to e-business software to enable real-time transactions and data exchange. This hot sector is crowded with software firms, each vying to peddle integrated suites for supply chain management, CRM, e-procurement, fulfillment and logistics. How can an e...

As tenures at companies go, Steve Case's trajectory at AOL was similar to that of a bullet fired straight up -- it ascends at a fast rate but eventually plummets. Last week, Case resigned his AOL chairmanship under pressure from stockholders who have lost tens of billions of dollars since the AOL Ti...

E-commerce, once the domain of "geek types" or consumers with high disposable incomes, has hit the mainstream. The U.S. Census Bureau says e-commerce spending increased by more than 34 percent year over year to $11.1 billion from the third quarter of 2001 to the same period in 2002. But the Census B...

In the wake of the dot-com collapse and subsequent recession, it is easy to shun e-commerce hype -- but to do so altogether would be short-sighted. The ideas that drove the initial boom are still valid and in fact have flourished. Customers and businesses really have forged direct connections over ...

On paper, Symantec appears to be one of the hottest tech companies around. Propelled in part by users' need to defend against a rash of destructive and well-publicized computer worms like Code Red, Nimda and SirCam, its stock price has jumped 70 percent in the past year. Nonetheless, leading industr...

As recently as a few years ago, IT personnel were trained to harden their network perimeter, barring outsiders entirely. In contrast, today's security environment is far less clear-cut -- and the role of firewalls is expanding. "A lot of new developments are going on at once," Richard Stiennon, Inte...

As 2003 dawns, several signs indicate that the U.S. economy is starting to improve. With those welcome tidings in mind, some workers in the e-commerce sector may be hoping for a reprise of the late 1990s, when jobs were plentiful, stock options were actually worth something, and the general high-tec...

The bad news is no secret, but it bears repeating: If you have bought anything online in the past several years, your personal information, including your home address and credit card number, is probably accessible via the Internet -- and available to people with less-than-noble intentions. Fortunat...

As corporate data accumulates at an exponential rate, the work of millions of employees, produced on computers keystroke by keystroke, has produced a virtual monster of a problem. The growing heap of computer files, which includes companies' most sensitive data, can no longer be ignored, leading to ...

The speed of information delivery is continually increasing. Most people who work in office environments have had access to broadband Internet connections for years, and more home users than ever before can surf the Web at speeds that eclipse those of the fastest dial-up modems. But how many custome...