applications - News, Features, and Slideshows

• New Kiwi tech start-up tackles SMB IT issues

  Origin IT spin-off aims to service IT needs of struggling small business owners.

• IBM partners to make mainframes more mainstream

  IBM is looking to boost its mainframe business with a Linux push that includes new hardware, software and the founding of the Open Mainframe Project. The company is also contributing mainframe code to the open source community.

• Former SAP exec pleads guilty to bribery charge

  A former SAP executive has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Panamanian officials in an effort to secure government contracts for the software vendor.

• Use SAP's mobile platform? Patch now to avoid these 'high risk' vulnerabilities

  Three “high risk” vulnerabilities in SAP Mobile could give attackers access to encrypted information stored in mobile devices, security firm Onapsis reported Wednesday.

• Dropbox adds U2F support for better security

  Two-factor authentication is often held up as a best practice for security in the online world, but Dropbox on Wednesday announced a new feature that's designed to make it even tougher.

• How to avoid 10 common business video mistakes

  With millions of videos on the Internet, how do you make your business video stand out? To find out, CIO.com asked dozens of video marketing professionals to identify the biggest, or most common, mistakes companies make when crafting and marketing business videos.

• How to Pick the Best Browser for Your Enterprise

  Knowing which browser to deploy in a large company is no easy task. The default option is Internet Explorer, but many users balk at this older, more cumbersome browser that seems to attract the most malware. Google Chrome gets most of the attention these days (as proven by a growing market share) and Mozilla Firefox offers good compatibility and speed. To determine which browser is the best for business, it's important to keep tabs of the latest improvements. Here's a look at the Big 3 with an eye on the enterprise.

• How to achieve better third-party security: Let us count the ways

  No enterprise is an island. In a connected world, a business cannot function without multiple relationships with third parties -- outside vendors, contractors, affiliates, partners and others.

• How to sort your Facebook feed by time on mobile

  Weddings. Job promotions. News articles. Facebook thinks it knows what the best stories are to drop in your news feed. But some users might want to see things their own way.

• How to Build a Customer Loyalty Program

  Boston-based restaurant chain b.good started its customer loyalty program with email 12 years ago because, well, it couldn't afford much else. As the chain has grown, so has its rewards program, which now has 53,000 'Family' members using keycards and smartphone apps to connect with b.good.

• Why SharePoint is the last great on-premises application

  At the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last month in Orlando, we heard many of the same grumblings we've been hearing about Microsoft for years now: They don't care about on-premises servers. They're leaving IT administrators in the dust and hanging them out to dry while forcing Azure and Office 365 content on everyone. They're ignoring the small and medium business.

• 5 things CIOs need to know about data lakes

  1.The concept is still quite new. The term data lake, credited to Pentaho CTO James Dixon, has been bandied about for several years. But the idea of data lakes as corporate resources is still in its infancy, according to IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni. A data lake is defined as a massive--and relatively cheap--storage repository, such as Hadoop, that can hold all types of data until it is needed for business analytics or data mining. A data lake holds data in its rawest form, unprocessed and ungoverned.

• How Big Data analytics helps hospitals stop a killer

  Big Data. Predictive analytics. Real-time. Actionable insight. There's a buzzword smorgasbord around the use of data to derive value. It doesn't help that sometimes the benefits can be esoteric, or at least hard to visualize. But sometimes the benefits are crystal clear, as in the fight against sepsis, one of the leading killers in the US.

• IT pros say Google slowly infiltrating enterprise, education

  Google's impact on the enterprise market may not have been obvious at its annual I/O developers conference in San Francisco last week, but the implications of the company's growing involvement and interest in business applications are strong. Google's suite of apps for work and education continue to help organizations cut costs while improving communication, productivity and collaboration across teams.

• Should you outsource your project management?

  There can be many benefits to outsourcing your company's project management functions, with equally as many pitfalls. There aren't any one-size-fits-all solutions based on your industry, type or size of business. Just as you would with different project management methodologies, consider the risks and rewards carefully and take the time to thoroughly evaluate why outsourcing project management may or may not be a good move for your organization.

Whitepapers about applications

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  Simplifying the Branch Network By Doyle Research

  A majority of IT organizations are experiencing significant changes that impact the requirements for their distributed branch networks. Mobility, cloud-based applications, and Internet of Things (IoT) are altering traffic flows and increasing bandwidth requirements. Employees and guests expect Internet connectivity, which means that employee-facing and IoT devices need reliable, low latency access to their data and applications, and must be securely on-boarded as they interact with centralized services. IT organizations do not have the level of control they once did with traditional architectures, and now face increasing pressure to support these new initiatives even as budget and resources remain lean.

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  The Ongoing IT Struggle: Delivering Availability 24x7x365

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  Cut Costs, Reduce Complexity, and Drive Availability for the Always-On Enterprise

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  Four ways APIs are changing your business