HostReview Editor's Desk

Strategy Lead Investments in the IT Industry Projected to Increase
by Milena Sotirova September 08, 2004

The recent Netcraft� report announced during August all of the hosters monitored experienced some failed requests, with iPowerWeb, Italian hoster SeeWeb and Rackspace the most reliable sites during the period.

According to the monitoring report for the first time, Linux is the dominant operating system, with five of the top ten running their sites on a Linux distribution.

The IDC last week report released that IT vendor marketing budgets are expected to increase by 6% across the IT industry in 2004. According to the source, this indicates a strong turn-around in marketing spending relative to the average 1.7% decrease in budgets during 2003.

The digits are based on the CMO Advisory's second annual Technology Marketing Benchmarks survey. IDC report adds that marketing leadership is acting more selectively and strategically in determining where and how to invest. According to the release there is a monitored tendency for investment strategy with respect to brand building.

IDC's presented a landmark research on marketing investment with established measurement of key performance indicators. These KPI's include the Marketing Budget Ratio - the percentage of revenue spent on marketing - which now stands at 3.2% of revenue across the industry, compared to 3.0% in 2003.

The security sphere report recently released by Secure Computing Corporation announced the results of an independent survey showing only 25 percent of US businesses recognised spyware as a major problem. The report documents the attitudes of enterprise IT managers about the dangers of emerging internet-based threats such as spyware and instant messaging (IM).

The study surveyed 111 US enterprise IT managers across a broad variety of industries in February 2004, and is available at www.securecomputing.com /pdf/hiddenhazards.pdf
A study by EarthLink showing that the average PC has 28 spyware programs, and a report by Dell found that spyware accounts for 12 percent of all PC desktop support calls. Still, 70 percent of the survey respondents saw spyware as either no problem or a minor problem and 90 percent of respondents saw IM as no problem or a minor problem.

On the security field this week, the recent threats were performed by W32.IRCBot.H which is a type of a Trojan horse program opening a backdoor on the infected computer by connecting to an IRC server. This classifies the virus as a remote attacker.

The second in danger, according to the virus report released yesterday is W32.Gaobot.BIE. The attacker is a worm that spreads to remote network shares. This virus uses backdoors opened by other common backdoor Trojan horse programs. After opening a backdoor, the virus allows a remote attacker to have unauthorized access via IRC channels.