According to separate studies done by the Carnegie Mellon University and Google, you can expect between 2% and 13% of all hard drives to fail in any given year.  This failure rate is much higher than what hard drive manufacturers’ data would lead you to believe.

This PC World article explores some of the reasons for this discrepancy in the expected reliability of hard drives.

Regardless of the actual scale of the problem, the bottom line for your business remains simple – back-up all your critical data regularly so that any hard drive crash is merely an inconvenience rather than a disaster.

“Cyberloafing” – the act of accessing the Internet for personal purposes on company time – is set to increase in Singapore.  So claims a report in today’s Business Times quoting a conference paper by a local academic.

Such activity could well be a drain on productivity, but the paper does point out that not all types of cyberloafing is bad for business.  In fact, browsing the web has been shown by several studies to have a positive effect on cubicle life in general.  It allows people to cope with life and work stresses and may even contribute to increasing a worker’s “business intelligence”, thus boosting productivity.

The effect of checking and responding to email, however, is not quite so clear-cut.  As it requires time and effort to manage emails, it can generally be a drain on productivity.  However, companies concerned about cyberloafing should avoid knee-jerk reactions such as a blanket ban on all personal web usage. The net result of such a response would almost certainly be negative in terms of general morale.

The only sustainable response to this challenge is to start managing by objectives – not tracking input.  In other words, set clear goals and objectives for you team and measure productivity by how well these goals are met, not by much much time is seemingly put into achieving them.

The Internet genie has long escaped the bottle – don’t waste your time trying to stuff him back in. Instead, focus your effort in leveraging the technology to boost your business’ competitiveness.

Nothing signals that a technology has arrived better than a fight over standards.  The slug-fest that recently broke out over the “Open Cloud Manifesto” shows that the cloud computing concept is no longer simply hazy vapour-ware.

Cloud computing refers to the trend where computing power is becoming a utility that is generated remotely in the in the Internet’s vast backbone infrastructure (”the cloud”) and delivered as a service through the web.  The so-called Open Cloud Manifesto essentially calls on the major IT vendors to avoid erecting proprietary fences for the cloud platforms they are developing.  The hope is that with open standards, customers can easily port data, applications and services between different cloud platforms.

While few would argue against the benefits of such open standards, there is certainly going to be a bitter fight over exactly whose standards and conventions to adopt before the dust settles.  This a par for the course for any emerging technology.

Currently, IBM, SAP and Cisco appear to be driving forces behind the manifesto – these are services and commodity hardware providers who stand to benefit greatly when cloud computing really does take off.  At this stage however, the real pioneers behind cloud technology are absent from the list.  The likes of Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft are, not surprisingly, more cautious about potentially giving up any competitive advantage they have built up for the sake of altruistic openness.

The current flap is just a minor skirmish.  As cloud computing grows at its current pace, a full-scale standards war could well be on the horizon.

Download the Open Cloud Manifesto Draft 1.0.9 as pdf here.