Stories by Thor Olavsrud

Hype continues to surround big data analytics. But hype or not, data-driven decision-making is becoming central to management decisions at most enterprises. They are taking inspiration from Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team that turned to data analytics (known as Sabermetrics in baseball and made popular in the movie, "Moneyball") to assemble a competitive baseball team despite the organization's limited financial resources.

Regardless of the security expertise and resources you apply to securing your assets, you are unlikely to achieve much unless you focus on the most vulnerable element of your organisation: your employees.

US consumers are know that their personal data is valuable to companies, and they're not afraid to share as long as they receive something in the exchange and the information isn't too personal, according to a new study by PwC.

If you lead an IT shop today, chances are at least some of the employees who report to you are millennials - young adults in their 20s. Millennials - also known as Generation Y - think about life and work differently than older boom and gen X employees, and hiring and retaining them requires management that understands their needs and a business environment to match, says Jim Finkelstein, president and CEO of FutureSense, a consulting firm the specializes in organisation and people.

IT organisations are justifiably concerned about the security risks inherent in bringing your own device (BYOD). Many are turning to mobile device management (MDM) products and services to address the problem.

According to a new report by Symantec, the total size of information stored by all businesses today is 2.2 zettabytes. Enterprises, on average, have 100,000 terabytes of information, while small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) on average have 563 terabytes of data. Moreover, that number is expected to grow 67 percent over the next year for enterprises and 178 percent for small and mid-sized businesses.

Open source has entered the mainstream, says Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, pointing to the billion dollars in revenue it reported in the last fiscal year—a feat only a few software companies (open source or proprietary) have managed. But while open source may have crossed the Rubicon, the battle for the future is just beginning, he says.
Speaking at the opening of Red Hat Summit 2012 to a gathering of more than 3000 people, Whitehurst began by looking backward, almost to the dawn of human history, to the invention of agriculture as the first industry as a collective endeavor by human beings to extract value from the land. From that time until the birth of the industrial revolution, he says, humans primarily generated value directly from a single physical asset: land. Around 1750 the industrial revolution began to alter that model as the machines humans created to extract value from the land became the primary source of value.

Many companies are pursuing Big Data with the ultimate aim of better understanding and selling to their customers.

Are we harbouring the last vestiges of Soviet-style communism at the heart of the enterprise? And is consumerisation of IT the new Glasnost?

Pay for an Analysis When Buying Data Mining, BI Software

Everyone is talking about Big Data analytics and associated business intelligence marvels these days, but before organizations will be able to leverage the data, they'll have to figure out how to store it. Managing larger data stores--at the petabyte scale and larger--is fundamentally different from managing traditional large-scale data sets. Just ask Shutterfly.

Technologies like virtualisation and cloud computing promise enormous leaps in efficiency and flexibility, but they can lead organizations into a quagmire if they don't plan properly for the transition, says Bill Hurley, CIO, CTO and executive vice president of Westcon Group. Without proper planning, organizations can stall in the midst of their transitions to virtualised environments or the cloud, finding themselves with a bundle of sunk costs and no path forward.

A large number of enterprises have not implemented automated server access controls, exposing themselves to risks ranging from insider fraud and corporate espionage to regulatory compliance issues and even nation-state sponsored attacks, according to a recent report by information security research firm Echelon One and enterprise access management specialist Fox Technologies.

That was the consensus of six panelists brought together by information exchange solutions specialist IntraLinks in a roundtable discussion Thursday morning at the Gabarron Foundation in New York City.

Big data gets a lot of buzz these days and organizations are increasingly concerned about the problem of managing it, but many don't really understand what big data is.