Lisa Vaas

GSEC, CNSP, CISSP, Security+, CISA, CISM, GCWN, GCFW, GCUX and so forth: The list of security certifications is so long it could squash a router. As if proliferating certifications werent enough to confuse IT professionals, recent cat fights among cert providers have made it worse. Witness the recent charge by the International Information Systems Security […]

Oracle Corp. will provide customers with technical support for operating systems powered by UnitedLinux, the company announced at the CeBIT Conference in Hannover, Germany, on Thursday. Oracle officials said that the company is working closely with the founding members of UnitedLinux—Connectiva S.A., The SCO Group, SuSE Linux AG and Turbolinux—to form a joint team to […]

Users of some versions of Protegrity Inc.s datbabase encryption technology, Secure.Data for Microsoft SQL Server 2000, need to patch their systems. The Stamford, Conn., company late last month put out a patch to cover three buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in Secure.Datas XPs (extended stored procedures)—procedures that are used to do encryption and decryption on databases. XPs are […]

IT managers responsible for looking after the health and availability of their corporate data are getting access to tools from BMC Software Inc. and its partners Sybase Inc. and Veritas Software Corp. With the goal of getting crashed databases up and running quicker and more reliably, Houston-based BMC last week announced that it has integrated […]

Magic Software Enterprises Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. both have rolled out software that is designed to enable midsize companies to integrate enterprise applications. Magic last week introduced iBolt Integration Suite, a software package that works with the Irvine, Calif., companys eDeveloper application development tools to enable companies to connect and monitor transactions across heterogeneous environments […]

The New Jersey State Legislature has reportedly tabled a closely watched bill that would have prevented the overseas outsourcing of N.J. state government IT projects. Introduced into the N.J. legislature about four months ago, the bill was drafted by State Senator Shirley Turner to ensure that government funds be used to employ U.S. workers, rather […]

Even though IBMs and Microsoft Corp.s respective RDBMS software products are surging in popularity, Oracle Corp.s grip on the database market held strong in 2002, according to the most recent market numbers from International Data Corp. IDC, of Framingham, Mass., on Monday announced that the gap between Oracle and IBM is narrowing and that Microsoft […]

Forecasting is hard—especially when its about the future. IBM is proposing to change all that with three new autonomic software technologies that it planned to unveil today and demonstrate at next weeks CeBit trade show, in Hannover, Germany. The three technologies – Adaptive Forecasting, On-line Capacity Planning and Rapid Reconfiguration – are designed to predict […]

Microsoft Corp. has put out hot fixes for two known bugs in its SQL Server database software. The first bug is explained in a Microsoft online article entitled “FIX: Cannot Remove Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine After You Upgrade to MSDE 2000 SP2”. According to the article, users who originally used a particular build […]

Microsoft Corp. has consolidated the database security tools that shield SQL Server 2000 and MSDE 2000 installations from the Slammer worm. SQL Server 2000 SQL Scan, SQL Check and SQL Critical Update are now available in a single download, the SQL Critical Update Kit, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site. The kit […]