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Group Policy can be the most important parts of an IT groups tools to enforce IT standards and manage access, or it can be an indecipherable mess in which you do not want to touch. No matter where you fall in that mix, it is a good idea to take a look at the configuration with the Group Policy Diagnostic Best Practice Analyzer (GPDBPA) explained in this article to identify your risks and configuration.

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Five years ago, if Hewlett-Packard bought EDS, everyone would've thought it was pretty much like when IBM bought PwC -- a play to create a powerful data processing consulting business that could coexist with a computer hardware business. In fact, that's been a great model for IBM.

But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It's looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing -- a.k.a. hardware as a service.

If you're a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won't have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade -- making computer power something like electric power.

If you tack together some of HP's other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd -- as Om Malik did -- it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.

As part of the interview I did with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (the video is now on Portfolio.com), we discussed Amazon's push into cloud computing.

"We've been working on our Infrastructure Web Services for four years," Bezos said. "We launched our first one two years ago, the Simple Storage Service, and I am astonished -- I rarely meet a startup company these days who isn't using our web services and now we're starting to get, you know, deployment inside Enterprise level data centers as well. So it's a very exciting."

Asked about Google's plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: "Well ... we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products.... I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And ... important industries are rarely made by single companies."

So maybe there is room for HP, Amazon, IBM, Google and others to play in the cloud computing space. The HP deal is telling us that the concept is ready for prime time.

A new study points out the rather unsurprising fact that the number of "hyperconnected" individuals is growing. The definition of hyperconnected is anyone with seven or more connected devices and nine or more applications on those devices (though, it's not entirely clear how they define an "application" since it seems to include certain websites. Apparently 16% of people surveyed fell into that camp. Another 36% are in the "increasingly connected" group that counts those who connect via at least four devices and uses six or more applications. To be honest, this seems like an odd way of defining connectivity. If I had a really good "all-in-one" device meaning that I wouldn't need that many other devices but could use that one in more circumstances, why should that make me seem less connected? Of course, then there are the unconnected. A different study has found that approximately 18% of homes in the US have no internet access whatsoever.

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