By Lamont Wood

CIO, Meet CIA
CIOs who feel alone in treating computer security seriously have a new ally: the U.S. intelligence community. The Defense Security Service (DSS), has issued a new, unclassified report showing that the number of espionage attempts ballooned by 43 percent between 2004 and 2005, the most recent time period covered by the report. Information systems were the most popular target for the third year in a row. Spies were especially interested in communications, modeling and simulation technology, the DSS reports.

In all, 106 nations were spotted in the act. About 80 percent of the contacts came from the top 10 information-gathering countries; while the DSS didn't name these countries, it does say East Asia and the Pacific accounted for nearly a third of the contacts.

Some of the more James Bond-worthy attempts include a pen, brought to a briefing, that turned out to be a voice recorder. In another instance, blueprints of a satellite were photographed surreptitiously through a window. And one American man, in the report's words, was "seduced" by a foreigner into handing over his network password.

The Coming Energy Crisis In The Data Center
There's an energy crisis brewing right in the data center. If market watchers at Gartner Inc. are correct, data centers could start running out of electrical power as soon as next year. In fact, 2008 is when fully half of all existing data centers will have too little power to both run and cool their high-density servers, Gartner predicts.

What's behind the data-center energy crisis? Blade density, answers Michael Bell, a vice president of research at Gartner. Five years ago the average server rack required just 2 to 3 kilowatts per hour. But today's denser blade servers have driven the per-rack average to 15 kilowatts per hour. As server blades continue to add density, the power-demand figure could exceed a whopping 50 kilowatts per hour by 2011, Bell predicts.

Part of the solution, says Bell, could come froma convergence of innovations. These could include efficient processors, in-chassis cooling, in-rack and in row cooling. Combine these with highly integrated workload and power management systems, and data centers should be able to support higher-density servers.

Another part of the solution could come from new, highly efficient liquid cooling systems, plus virtualization, which lets one server run as if it were several, says Paul Froutan, vice president of product engineering at Rackspace Managed Hosting in San Antonio, Texas. Our advice in the meantime: Stay cool.

CIO Forecast: Cool Today, Warming Tomorrow
While CIOs don't love the current business environment, they do expect better times soon, finds the latest quarterly CIO Confidence Poll conducted by Forrester Research. What's more, CIOs say they expect to spend accordingly.

Forrester's survey finds that CIOs' confidence level in the business climate has dipped since the third quarter of last year. The share of CIOs who call the current climate "strong" fell from 93 percent to 91 percent in the third quarter. But, when asked whether they expected business conditions to improve within the next three quarters, the CIOs' confidence index rose by 7.7 points to 133.7 (to provide a point of comparison, the CIOs' confidence index was set at 100 points for the first quarter of 2004). "CIOs are feeling good about what is going on now and think things may begin to tick up," says G. Oliver Young, a Forrester analyst and lead author of a report on the survey. "They are spending more, and we think that spending will go up."

As for why the 115 responding CIOs appeared so upbeat, Young gave three reasons: CIOs have seen oil prices drop from their summer '06 high; the economy has meanwhile avoided a recession; and the housing market has defied predictions by refusing to crash.

Looking ahead at the rest of 2007, Forrester analysts say CIOs and their enterprises are still digesting recent IT acquisitions. For that reason, Young predicts the next big acquisition wave will begin in 2009.