Beware the New Ides of March

Washington lawmakers correctly calculated that moving daylight savings back a month would reduce energy consumption for winter heating and light systems, potentially saving consumers and corporations billions of dollars and the country hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil. What they didn't take into account was all the IT processes controlled by clocks that have automated daylight savings adjustments preprogrammed for the former April cycle.

Vendors, solution providers and end users have been racing to update their systems to prevent problems caused by the time change. While the potential problems aren't as dramatic as the millennium's Y2K crisis, unpatched systems could leave systems open to security vulnerabilities, unsynchronized processes and poor performance.

Software vendors, including IBM, Microsoft and Novell, have released tools to identify affected systems and patches to correct the time change problem. Solution providers are advised to either check with their customers to ensure they've either addressed the daylight savings problem or have a plan in place to update systems to avoid performance and security issues.