Leon Erlanger

It's almost exactly a year ago that Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, touted the superiority of Google's brand-spanking-new disaster recovery infrastructure and the advantages its economies of scale would bring. Sheth boasted in the Official Google Enterprise Blog that Google was doing synchronous replication to multiple data centers, which would be too expensive for the typical enterprise but affordable for Google, thanks to the company's huge scale. See, that's why you're even safer with Google than hosting your own email.

If you were one of the users who logged on to Gmail this past weekend to find all your emails and Gmail settings gone, no doubt feelings of abject terror and helplessness ensued.

Welcome to the era of the cloud.

Motorola's Xoom is an impressive first shot at an iPad-style tablet based on the new Android 3.0 operating system. As InfoWorld's Galen Gruman notes in his first look, one Android 3.0 strong suit is its support for Exchange ActiveSync security policies -- an essential feature set for enterprise-class mobile devices.

As more businesses bring Apple Macintoshes into their regular operations, IT has to figure out how to ensure the Macs play well in the typical Windows-dominated environments. Several companies share the lessons -- good and bad -- that they have learned.

Among the main consideration: desktop management, security, and Apple's non-enterprise focus. But with some creativity and an increasing reliance on users to be more responsible for the systems they choose, the majority experience is positive.

Anyone who has worked in IT for more than five minutes knows that the field has been in a dramatic transformation for the past 10 years, invading and conquering other organizational domains such as communications and security, while also wrestling with the new issues that technology has wrought such as employee mobility. In most organizations, IT has had to transform itself from a bunch of techies installing and troubleshooting equipment to a key enabler of business strategy and competitiveness.

Throughout, outsourcing and offshoring have shaken the foundations of IT, making some wonder at times if they have a role in their organization at all. And those who work in outsourcing companies also have to figure out what their role is when they are supporting a variety of clients.