UK insurers to focus on business continuity

As forecast by the Continuity Forum, pressure is mounting on companies to ensure business continuity plans are at the heart of an organisation's planning, writes Continuity Forum.

Much of this is driven by fears in the sector that still too few organisations are developing an effective response to the risks facing business, particularly with regard to major terror attacks and other events, such as the recent blackouts in South London and telecoms failure in Manchester.

Leading insurers, including AXA, have already held discussions with government to look at the possibility of introducing a legal requirement for BCM or other business interruption arrangements as a pro-active preventative step to control the scale of losses caused through events which would be covered through the normal insurance provision.

Middle East enterprises will adopt virtualisation in 2010, says Raqmiyat, a UAE-based systems integrator, reports Albawaba.

The IT trend is fast shaping up to be a major influencer in end-to-end infrastructure, including server, storage, network, application and desktop, for regional companies.

Virtualisation is expected to be a major driver of the UAE's increasing IT spend, which is forecast to hit $4.79 billion (12.4% more than 2009).

Seagate Technologies has released the first 3TB external desktop hard drive, which is capable of using USB 2.0, 3.0 or FireWire 800 connectivity, states Computerworld.

The 3.5-inch 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external hard drive is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X systems because it includes a New Technology File System (NTFS) driver for Mac. NTFS allows the drive to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without reformatting.

The drive comes with a standard USB 2.0 interface offering a 480Mbps data transfer speed, but with a separate GoFlex desktop adapter it can be upgraded to USB 3.0 or FireWire 800 to increase file transfer performance by up to 10 times.