"There are bad times just around the corner / There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky / And it's no good whining / About a silver lining / For we know from experience they won't roll by."
-- from the song "There are bad times just around the corner" by Noel Coward

According to Forrester Research there are indeed bad times just around the corner. The company, which had previously forecast IT spending to grow by 4.6% this year, has downgraded that forecast to 2.8%. That's another way of saying "recession".

It looks like belt tightening (or at least planning to do so) is in order, and that got me wondering what you're going to cut and what you're going to change.

Certainly new projects will suffer. I talked to a CIO recently who has an IT budget of around $15 million. He told me that every year he gets 15 or 20 requests from lines of business to develop new systems and he asked me how many projects I thought they took on.

"Five or six," I replied (aiming low, just in case).

"One" he replied. One! Just one project! And that was in good times!

Yes folks, if the big freeze materializes, we'll see capital expenditures, hiring and development freeze and the current IT skills shortage reverse into a glut no one can capitalize upon.

So, if saving money becomes a really big drive, what will your IT department do? I'm guessing part of the answer will be to maximize the use of existing resources.

I had a fascinating conversation with a company that offers a really cool take on using what you've got: RevStor with its SANware system.

SANware creates a distributed storage-area network (SAN) using the spare capacity of your company's PCs to back up data. It provides 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard encryption of all data, multiple copies of all files (with duplicate files removed in the process), versioning, distributed administration, and it does all of that without disrupting normal PC operation. It typically uses less than 1% processor utilization and 8MB of RAM.

Users can restore their own files or administrators can do it for them remotely. Administrators can also log on to any node and monitor and control system performance and configuration.

Given that the average modern (less than 4 years old) corporate PC has a disk capacity of around 60GB, of which no more than 20GB is being used (even with Vista and Office installed), an organization with 100 PCs will have roughly 4TB of storage going to waste. Consider the cost of adding 1TB of redundant backup to a network compared with what RevStor will charge you for the same capacity: $2,500.