Stories by Thor Olavsrud

The flexibility and scalability of the cloud can make migrating mission-critical applications a tempting proposition, but availability can become a serious issue.

Big data is slowly but surely changing the way companies do business. Here's a look at 10 trends shaping big data and the future of business.

Managing devices in a BYOD environment is no small feat, and the right mobile device management product is a key component in making it work. Here are 10 top MDM vendors in the market today.

When it comes to data breaches, hackers and organized crime garner most of the headlines, but most data breaches are caused by human errors and system glitches--application failures, inadvertent data dumps, logic errors in data transfer and more. As a result, educating your employees and making sure they're not cutting corners is a big component in preventing data breaches.

Your organisation will come under attack. It's not a matter of "if." It's a matter of "when." And security is no longer simply an operational concern. As technology has become the central component of nearly all business processes, security has become a business concern. As a result, information security should sit firmly on the boardroom agenda.
"If the worst were to happen, could we honestly tell our customers, partners or regulators that we've done everything that was expected of us, especially in the face of some fairly hefty fines that could be levied by regulators," asks Steve Durbin, global vice president of the Information Security Forum, a nonprofit association that researches and analyzes security and risk management issues on behalf of its members, many of whom are counted among the Fortune Global 500 and Fortune Global 1000.

"There aren't just skill gaps among technologists," Tom Clancy, vice president of EMC Education Services at EMC, says. "They also exist at the business leader and manager level." 

Few things can keep CIOs up at night these days like mobility, particularly bring your own device (BYOD). After all, mobile, consumerisation of IT and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) are turning enterprise security models on their heads.
Privacy implications--let alone the potential for data loss and data leakage--are enough to make a CIO break out in a cold sweat.

If you've been busy virtualizing your environment, or migrating to an internal cloud, chances are your software licensing and maintenance costs are spiraling out of control.
Every CIO wants to balance costs and maximize efficiency, but the shift to virtual and cloud hosting models has changed the game when it comes to software licensing, and many IT organizations are playing under old rules that no longer apply.

It's a rare CIO today who doesn't think about the impact of mobility and consumerization of IT. But mobile is more than just the latest step forward in tech innovation, say Mike Brinker and Shehryar Khan, principals with Deloitte Consulting. Mobile is fundamentally reshaping operating models, business models and marketplaces.

Working with and making business decisions based on data is good for your company's bottom line. Companies that have embraced a data-driven culture--rating themselves substantially ahead of their peers in their use of data--are three times more likely to rate themselves as substantially ahead of their peers in financial performance, according to findings by the Economist Intelligence Unit in a survey sponsored by Tableau Software.

For CIOs, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Five macro forces--analytics, mobile, social, cloud and cyber -- are disrupting the nature of IT and carrying businesses into the postdigital era.
The possibility is there for the CIO role to fade into irrelevance, with IT becoming a utility that's managed as a distributed function across the business. But the opportunity is also there for the CIO to become the catalyst for transforming the business, a trusted adviser that helps CEOs navigate the digital business environment.

Companies around the world are still wrestling with the concept of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and how or whether to implement it in their organisations.
Still the scales are tipping in favour of BYOD: A new global survey of IT decision-makers by Dell Quest Software reports that 70 percent of companies believe BYOD will or already has improved their work processes and 59 percent believe they would find themselves at a competitive disadvantage without BYOD.

A study by Juniper Networks and the Economist Business Unit finds that IT is succeeding at improving the efficiency of business processes, but most IT departments are failing to take the next step in becoming a strategic partner for business.

Microsoft, with the help of partner Hortonworks, brings Hadoop to Windows and stakes its claim as a vendor of big data technologies with new cloud-based and on-premises offerings.

For many CIOs, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and the consumerization of IT is the nightmare that keeps them up at night. Not only does consumerisation of IT create data-protection headaches, managing mobile devices is also a great deal more challenging than managing desktops and laptops. That may be just the in Microsoft requires to win back the enterprise on the mobile front with Windows 8, scheduled for release next month.