Stories by Jonathan Hassell

Organizations that are adopting DevOps methodologies are realizing actual benefits to disaster recovering planning from taking that approach.

Organizations that are adopting DevOps methodologies are realizing actual benefits from taking that approach.

When their data has been stolen, and is being held hostage, companies are increasingly caving in to cybercriminal demands for payment. Short of paying up, the best defense is a good offense.

Bitcoin exploded on to the world’s stage in 2012 as a currency backed by everyone and controlled by no one. But what exactly makes it work from a technology standpoint?

The Internet of Things brings with it the promise gee-whiz applications and life-changing innovation. But one thing’s for sure – there are as many questions as there will be gigabytes of data being poured into your data centers.

Picture this. An executive at your organization gets an idea for a big project, one that adds a new product line to your company and could result in millions of additional dollars in revenue per year. The whole company is gung ho about this. The new mantra each workday is "what are we doing to advance Project X?" Cheers are sung each morning. And, of course, the IT team gets involved and spins up a number of servers, both physical and virtual, to help out the development team and put the new product or service into production.

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.

Reviewer Jonathan Hassell highlights some of the good features and things to watch out for in Microsoft's Skype for Business software/service.

Some of the biggest news to come out of Microsoft Ignite last month was the introduction and the first public demonstration of SharePoint Server 2016 -- a demo that quelled a lot of speculation and uneasiness in the SharePoint administrator community.

Microsoft kicked off the Ignite conference yesterday. The event is the combination of its IT pro-oriented TechEd conference along with the smaller Exchange, SharePoint and Lync conferences it had run at various points over the past decade. Here some initial thoughts and impressions of the keynotes and product announcements.

While SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud ) concept crystalized only in the past couple of years, buy this new area in data warehousing and data analytics has been growing -- and improving -- every day.

As I wrote for Computerworld, Windows 10 has a lot to answer for – and it sets itself up for answering these questions in a big way by skipping a version number and jumping straight to 10 from 8.

It's past time for all major companies – certainly in the Fortune 500, but the advice carries on down into even medium-sized organizations – to carve out a C-level role focusing solely on security.

"The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them." -- Zig Ziglar

Net neutrality is about more than individual consumers' rights to stream video over the Web without paying extra for it. Partitioning the Internet into haves and have-nots will give big companies yet another advantage over smaller, more disruptive firms.