35 THE NEXT... LIBRARIES
ORBIT

THE CLOUD is here to stay. The next step is using services such as Amazon EC2, Mozy Pro, and Rackspace Cloud to store business documents, application data, and email on the web.

“The trend of content explosion and the need for content storage thanks to multimedia videos and images, as well as record keeping for various regulations, has turned IT storage management into a nightmare,” says Emil Sayegh, the general manager at The Rackspace Cloud. “Businesses are realising that an alternative to proprietary and dedicated storage exists, and that fast access to massively cheaper storage data can be a differentiator for them.”

Frank Gillett, a Forrester Research analyst, adds: “In Forrester’s survey of enterprises, almost one-third are using an on-premise backup application that archives to a storage-as-a-service disk target, and 17% are using backup-as-a-service or online backup services for PC and/or servers.

36 THE NEXT... TABOO
RETIREMENT

 THE UK’s Conservative party recently announced plans to raise the national retirement age from 65 to 66 over a six-year period, the Labour government immediately denounced them as “deeply unfair”.

The right to retire is still sacred in Europe and it takes a bold politician to suggest that workers stay at their desks for longer, despite overwhelming evidence that rapidly ageing populations will soon place an intolerable strain on public finances.

Yet reducing the pensions burden needn’t mean forcing octogenarians out to work. In countries such as France, Italy and Austria as many as 45% of healthy citizens aged between 50 and 64 are registered as retired, thanks to government incentives intended to benefit younger jobseekers.

What’s more, not all workers want to retire promptly at 65. In most major European countries 45%–60% of employees say they would be happy to work longer for a better pension. And despite a decade-old EU directive banning discrimination on the grounds of age, NGOs across the continent are still campaigning against compulsory retirement on behalf of workers who have been forced out of their jobs.

So why is the political will still lacking to raise retirement ages? Employers are partly to blame – businesses don’t want to be lumbered with large workforces of doddering geriatrics – and lavish pension provisions for politically powerful public sector workers make it hard for governments to recommend austerity to the private sector.

Yet, with life expectancy in the Western world expected to reach the mid-nineties by 2050 and birth rates at record lows, politicians will soon have no alternative but to tell their senior citizens to keep at it.

37 THE NEXT... WORLD PARTY
SOUTH AFRICA

ON 11 JUNE 2010, the FIFA World Cup – the planet’s largest sporting event – will kick off with an African host for the first time. The month-long, 32-team football tournament will be held in 10 stadia around South Africa and, just 15 years after the end of apartheid, will be a huge coming-out party for the country. With six months to go, organisers say they are on target in dealing with the significant challenges regarding security and transportation of the expected 500,000 international visitors, but there’s still the small matter of where they will stay. In June, 15,000 hotel rooms were still needed to accommodate ticket-holders, as evidenced by the flurry of construction by developers and hospitality giants. Not that people will be doing much sleeping – especially should the host nation win.