Whether you describe Edward Snowden as a hero or a criminal, theres no denying the impact that this self-described computer wizard is having on IT leaders. After all, if even the NSA can fall victim to a tech-savvy millennial, how can they defend their data?
Employees want their go-to business apps available on their mobile devices. IT wants to deliver enterprise apps to help mobile workers become more productive. So what's keeping CIOs from bringing those critical apps to iPhones and Android phones?
It's time to get started on smartphone apps that will make employees more productive and customers more loyal, say Forrester Research analysts Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler.
The CIO of the future will need to develop a robust, professional organisation devoted to the user experience, according to an expert on usability.
The flexibility and scalability of the cloud can make migrating mission-critical applications a tempting proposition, but availability can become a serious issue.
Someone must harness the power of real-time data flows. Instead of focusing on their differences and fighting for the same budgets, the CIO and CMO can come together at this critical juncture.
Software as a service is here to stay. So CIOs need the tools to manage their sprawling portfolios of SaaS applications with the same rigor they use for on-premise software.
The old adage that "the soft stuff is the hard stuff" certainly applies to CIOs. Consider the many new ways we work together today as companies adopt global shared services, enterprisewide architectures and systems, and entirely new business models that arrive in mergers and acquisitions or outsourcing arrangements. All this requires finely honed skills in transformation and transition.
Year after year, the cost of disk space has plummeted. Since you can pick up a terabyte for $50, it's often seemed a false economy to be careful with storage.
A majority of enterprises have migrated to Windows 7 or are planning to do so. But for Windows XP holdouts ready to side-step Windows 7 for the upcoming Windows 8 OS, you are risking a gap in support, stresses research firm Gartner in a new "first take" analysis of Windows 8 migration in the enterprise.
The hype around cloud computing is hard to ignore and as each vendor is trying to put the word "cloud" in front of all its products, enterprises are finding it extremely difficult to sift through the noise and really find which products work best specifically for their data center.
After Microsoft acquired Skype earlier this month for $8.5 billion, most of the questions revolved around how Skype's IM, voice and video calling features will fit into Microsoft enterprise products such as Outlook and Lync.
There's no question that cloud computing will be the trend to alter organizations' infrastructure the most over the next few years, especially as firms transition from basic server virtualization to the private cloud. But today these environments are still relatively immature, acting as two distinct entities; applications are deployed in one or the other. But private cloud will not be the end of the road for cloud computing. Over the next three years, leading edge IT shops will start blurring the boundaries between public and private IaaS environments, so that applications can move between them based on immediate needs and economics-known as hybrid cloud. Enterprise architects can begin planning for this now by creating a road map that lays out the necessary capabilities for a hybrid cloud and using these to evaluate the capabilities provided by today's vendors and products.
As more sourcing executives consider incorporating SaaS solutions into their overall technology vendor landscape, the potential to significantly disrupt the current software market grows. And while SaaS adoption is expected to expand in the coming years, the challenge for sourcing professionals will be a lack of uniform adoption across the whole software market. In some software categories, SaaS will be a disruptive technology, in others the only option, and in many cases SaaS will have minimal impact.
The mounting pressure to move IT resources to the cloud has added a layer of complexity to the already complex job of a CIO.