December 18, 2015
As the onslaught of big data and demand of the Internet of Things (IOT) causes organizations to grow their reliance on data centers, business leaders are realizing the importance of data center technologies. But data centers are more than a sum of their electronic parts. In addition to the cooling, power and computing equipment, data centers require a host of personalities to keep business operations running smoothly – especially those that manage this critical infrastructure.
December 10, 2015
Planning what to do with a growing enterprise’s resources can be a burdensome and challenging task for even the most experienced businessmen, as the entire future of the company may depend on such decisions. In fact, many entrepreneurs will tell you that mastering enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one of the first steps that should be taken when transitioning from small business to a medium-sized enterprise or larger corporation.
December 9, 2015
Learn why the new category of NoSQL databases has become a popular option, the various databases available today, and why you should consider implementing a NoSQL solution.
December 7, 2015
Download this simple guide to protect your entire business when an outage occurs.
December 3, 2015
All components of an Internet of Things (IoT) solution — including sensor networks, wireless/wired communication networks, IoT platforms and gateways — are susceptible to threat. The high number of vendors building the IoT ecosystem aggravates the risk of network break-ins and hacking. No doubt, an IoT implementation opens up more endpoints to attack, and the complexity multiplies exponentially when tens of thousands of connected things have to be secured. Businesses need to ensure that adequate security measures are in place for IoT devices, endpoints and data traffic by including authentication and encryption and by limiting access to devices.
December 2, 2015
with Mike Martin, nfrastructureIn this interview, Mike Martin, CTO, nfrastructure, speaks with IT Briefcase about what he believes will be the top IoT trends and predictions for organizations of all sizes and their IT teams for the coming year. Read More >>>
December 2, 2015
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are dramatically changing modern information technology. The rapid adoption of SaaS and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) is among many other internet-based services that are challenging the traditional on-premises model – a model that is predicated on total ownership (and management) of infrastructure. IT teams are now well versed in cost models supporting the movement of once-on-premises managed infrastructure, and have more time to spend fixing deeper business problems rather than addressing management overhead. Still, many have yet to begin this seemingly imminent migration.
December 2, 2015
with Tejas Vashi, Learning@CiscoThe Internet of Everything (IoE) is bringing together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before. Understandably, this is accelerating the pace of digital transformation. Read More >>>
November 30, 2015
Power usage effectiveness, PUE, has been an important metric in the data centre world for some time now. Companies running data centre facilities typically strive for the lowest PUE they can achieve in order to reduce their operating costs and promote their green environmental credentials.
November 30, 2015
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are here and it is instrumental to keep your e-commerce platform in perfect health. Key areas to keep an eye on are usage and load characteristics – they are gauges for interpreting how much work an online platform performs, and how well it performs under stress.
November 30, 2015
People want to get going with DevOps or Continuous Delivery, but need a place to start. Others are already on their way, but need some validation of their choices. A few months ago, I published the first volume of DevOps and Continuous Delivery reference architectures which has now been viewed over 50,000 times on SlideShare (it’s free to download…no registration required). Three things helped people in the deck: (1) the reference architectures, (2) links to the sources for each architecture attached to each slide, and (3) no marketing fluff.
November 23, 2015
Choosing the optimal cloud solution for your organization—and the right cloud provider to help you secure your sensitive and mission-critical data and applications—is no easy task. Public cloud offerings can’t provide the levels of security and regulatory compliance needed to protect sensitive or mission-critical information. While private clouds managed on an individual company basis can provide the necessary security and compliance, they require significant expense, staffing with specialized skill sets, certifications and attestations that few organizations can afford. For most businesses, the most secure and cost-effective approach is a private hosted cloud.
November 23, 2015
Public discourse on “the cloud” may give the impression that it is some kind of ethereal vapor penetrating the far reaches and cyberspace. Reality is much less exotic, as former Royal Philips VP Alan Nance explained: “The first thing we need to understand about cloud is: there is no cloud. You’re really just using other people’s computers.” This more grounded definition reframes many cloud-related IT decisions. Nance continued, “The question you have to ask yourself is, how can I make the best use of other people’s computers?”
November 23, 2015
Over the last few years, many companies have started seeing the value in shifting their annual reports online from printed documents. For starters, electronic reports tend to save money, as there aren’t the associated printing and mailing costs that come with paper reports.
November 22, 2015
By Joe McKendrick, Author and Independent ResearcherFor the past two decades, there has been an informal segregation of duties seen in the BI and analytics world, with three primary classes of users. Read More >>>
November 19, 2015
by Antoine Mottier, BonitasoftUnderstanding customer need is more important today than ever as millennials enter the workforce. According to Goldman Sachs, millennials are one of the largest generations in history and are about to move into their prime spending years – poised to reshape the economy. Read More >>>
November 19, 2015
Developed by The Green Grid, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is a very useful metric for measuring the energy efficiency of a data centre. PUE is simply calculated by dividing the overall power entering the facility by the power consumed by the IT load within it – the target being to get as close as possible to a PUE of 1.0, as this would mean the data centre is 100 per cent efficient.
November 17, 2015
The insurance industry has long been swimming in data. It has used data to come up with come up quotes and ratings. They’ve looked at local crime rates, age related accident details and even relationships between traffic tickets and claims. Before the era of big data, they were somewhat by what they could learn from the data they were using. Now insurance companies are harnessing the power of big data to provide personalized instant online insurance quotes that are a better match for customers than other companies in their area.
November 16, 2015
If you’re not using Workspace as a Service (WaaS) yet, it may be because you don’t fully grasp what it really is, how much it does, and how hot the global market is projected to become. As with many emerging technologies in a growth phase, WaaS is often underestimated and misunderstood. But if industry forecasts hold true, WaaS just may be the next big thing in the IT services space. To help shed light on why this is so, here are six busted myths about WaaS.
November 13, 2015
globeYour business depends on pushing accurate and dynamic content to its global audience–at the snap of a finger. In today’s world, it is possible to break through barriers, rapidly enter new markets, and transform your global aspirations. Traditional translation processes are hurting your business. If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely felt the pain of a manual translation process, which can slow and even derail brilliant marketing campaigns, global web content, and in-office productivity and creativity. Chances are you’ve felt that pain within the last week.
November 11, 2015
Nikhil Premanandan, ManageEngineIn this interview, Nikhil Premanandan from ManageEngine discusses the importance of notifying DBAs the moment any anomalous activity is detected and finding the root cause, enabling a faster threat mitigation response. Read More >>>
November 11, 2015
HighGround, the leader in employee engagement cloud solutions for building highly engaged cultures, today announced the company has seen exceptional revenue growth and has dramatically increased its workforce in 2015. HighGround executives attribute the company’s rapid growth to the need to improve workplace cultures in today’s complex business environment, as well as to the changing expectations of employees for more real-time and mobile experiences. Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report cites that 70 percent of U.S. workers are not engaged at work. Employee disengagement is costly, and companies that are looking to reduce its impact are turning to HighGround to implement employee engagement technology solutions.
November 11, 2015
In this program, we answer those questions and more with two leading experts – Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Ted Friedman and Experian Data Quality’s Head of Product Strategy Derek Munro.
November 9, 2015
With the recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor agreement, US multinational companies will have to revisit how they exchange personal data involving European citizens. Large-scale data access by US intelligence services, enabled by provisions of the US Patriot Act, prompted the European Court of Justice to conclude that US companies could not adequately protect European citizens’ personal data under the terms of Safe Harbor. This decision affects many multinational companies that previously relied on the agreement for transferring data out of Europe and storing it in the US. While this may be a win for privacy advocates, it has left roughly 5,000 companies with the need to quickly rethink how they transfer data between the Europe and the U.S. To make matters worse, companies have just three months to comply with the new ruling.
November 4, 2015
Thinking about a move away from traditional phone lines to a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution? You’re not alone: According to Business Wire, the market is on track to reach almost 350 million subscribers by 2020 and generate $136 billion in revenue. However, before ditching your plain old telephone service (POTS) for a VoIP, it’s important to ask a few critical questions.
November 3, 2015
Many small and midsized enterprises are struggling to get by without a proper business management solution (BMS). Instead, they stitch together a combination of systems that end up leading to inefficient processes and a series of information silos. However, an increasing number of CIOs are embracing cloud-computing options. Indeed, nearly 30 percent of companies plan to move their systems to the cloud by 2018. With that in mind, the following are some questions SMBs need to ask during their shift from a messy, disparate system, to a fluid business management solution that is up to the task of growing their company lean.
November 1, 2015
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchThe landscape for data backup and storage is shifting dramatically, thanks to some of the recent developments on the data and technology front. It used to be that most data was structured, or semi-structured, and easily stored in databases, or as the volume grew, data warehouses. Read More >>>
October 30, 2015
“Energy efficiency” is undoubtedly a watchword in the telecoms and data centre industry. Many ICT companies now have corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes focussed specifically on reducing their data centres’ carbon footprints and every data centre operator wants to be able to promote the fact that their data centre is green. Of course there are a number of ways of achieving this, including optimising the floor plan, the insulation and cooling technologies, the data centre infrastructure management systems and of course, using clean renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. And it is the solar element that I want to talk a little more about here.
October 29, 2015
Why is it that 75% of the business and IT executives anticipate their software projects will fail? Why is failure rate often a planned expense that is written off long before development ever begins? Below is a fun infographic to not only understand the major friction points in delivering successful enterprise applications, but also learn how to tackle these monsters and speed custom app creation. Do tell us about the monsters that scare you the most and any other ghouls we may have missed.
October 27, 2015
Technology is changing the way businesses function. New technologies are helping a hoard of businesses streamline their efficiency and run much smoother. A vast amount of tools have appeared on the market in the last few years that are helping customers in all areas, from human resources to marketing and sales. Not only have these sped up the process in ways that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago, but they have also given even smaller businesses the potential to think globally. The darker side is that we are now tied to our computers, reliant on digital technology to function on all levels.
Inside the Briefcase
