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Infrastructure strategies for 2006

Network Magazine's June 2006 issue make interesting reading for a CIO. You brought out what is on the mind of a CIO, and on his agenda, through various survey results.

Some additional areas which could have been covered have also come to my mind. The first is on internal security threats, and what CIOs are doing to protect the organisation's information assets from this. The second is on the deployment of network and infrastructure management tools. Thanks and regards.

— Vilas Pujari
General Manager, IT
Tata International

Thank you very much for your encouraging feedback and the highly relevant suggestions that you have made. We will surely incorporate these inputs in the next edition of Infrastructure Strategies as well as in other similar endeavours that Network Magazine will undertake in the future. Please do keep us updated on how we can make Network Magazine's content more relevant for the CIO.

First-hand account

Network Magazine’s February 2006 issue’s article by Parthasarathy Rangarajan titled Mentoring your team made for good reading. It was interesting to hear first-hand from a CIO the crucial aspect of team mentoring.

In today’s workplace the right skill-sets are difficult to find and even more difficult to retain. In this context it is high time that CIOs started mentoring their teams. I would like to suggest the importance of skill-set enhancement in connection with this. While monetary benefits are good for motivation and retention of personnel, they alone are not enough. Many a time IT personnel jump jobs because the learning opportunities are better at the new workplace. This is why CIOs have to ensure that their team members get the chance to constantly enhance their skill-sets.

This can be done by simple techniques such as periodic job rotation and giving advanced responsibilities to the right people. On an advanced scale it can be achieved by sponsoring relevant internal and external training. This will help retain the right talent for the organisation.

— Christopher Lewis, Bangalore

Your take on providing learning opportunities is very relevant in today’s organisational context. As you rightly mentioned, constant skill-set upgradation opportunities can go a long way in mentoring and thereby retaining IT talent which is the most difficult-to-come-by resource today. Please do stay in touch and keep the feedback coming.

Rootkit and botnet menace

I chanced to come across your Techscope 2006 issue at the Network Magazine India website. As you have mentioned, the latest security threats are rootkits and botnets. Things are only going to get worse.

It is very worrying that few security solutions can detect such malware. While a few forensic tools are available in the public domain, it is still not easy to sort out the rootkit issue. It is still highly cumbersome and time-consuming to even identify if a machine is infected or not.

The issue of botnets is even worse. It is very heart-rending to see innocent users and their computers being exploited for nefarious purposes such as DDoS and extortion. This is going to get worse if organisations and their users do not become aware of the dangerous security and legal implications involved. I would like you as a magazine to take up the criticality of issues such as these. The magazine should also act as a platform to ensure public awareness and thereby get application and security vendors to focus more on such issues.

— Arshad Mohammed, Kochi

Rootkits and botnets are indeed a great security risk today. With actual numbers of infected PCs very hard to come by, there needs to be a concerted effort from vendors, organisations and users to battle this menace. We intend to take up issues such as these using the magazine as a medium. For this we will also require your feedback.