Employees use mobile devices and cloud apps in their personal lives because they are easy-to- use, anytime, anywhere. So naturally, they want to use these technologies in the workplace. In fact, enabling mobility offers huge productivity gains for businesses. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Internet & American Life Survey, smartphone adoption in the US crossed 50% of the ad…
Owning and operating a small business is a continuous uphill battle. You’re fighting the big guys to keep your business alive, tackling new obstacles each day, and staying busy trying to make your business successful. Knowing this, many people tend to focus on the percentage of small businesses that close shop each year, but it’s actually more valuable as a business owner to look at the oth…
Regulatory compliance has become an important corporate initiative as the complexity and scope of the regulatory environment continues to increase. Coupled with the rise in cyber attacks and insider threats, organizations are now searching for a more effective, sustainable, and scalable approach that will achieve their compliance objectives while improving the overall security posture of the or…
Forget about Farmville. Social media is becoming essential for IT organizations looking to improve support and boost productivity. Social media has made the world a smaller and more enlightened place, allowing friends, family members, business colleagues and often strangers to share information, play collaboratively, and lend each other support across counties, countries and time zones. As soc…
We are pleased to present the findings of the 2012 Payment Security Practices Survey: United States, sponsored by CyberSource and Trustwave. The study also was conducted in the United Kingdom and the findings from that research are available in a separate report. A secure payment process is essential to maintaining customer confidence and trust when making online purchases and sharing financ…
Many eDiscovery companies announced integration with Microsoft SharePoint last year. Frankly, our usual response was a resounding yawn. These announcements usually meant that the eDiscovery tool contained a data connector for SharePoint document libraries, which acted as repositories for stored files. Most companies were using SharePoint in this way, so this very basic eDiscovery capability see…
This paper provides an overview of the problems and risks associated with increasing amounts of data and the inability to quickly and efficiently identify sensitive data for business and legal reasons and the impact of data privacy requirements. It also provides an overview of challenges associated with Intellectual Property and how an organization can utilize eDiscovery solutions to address t…
No performance management strategy can be completely effective without support from underlying technology. When a company pursues performance management, it must find a single, unified solution that can meet all its requirements and deliver a holistic view of performance across the enterprise by easily accessing any metric from any source – without compromise. The solution should remain compl…
I’ve been focused on Business Intelligence for nearly a quarter of a century and I’ve never been more excited about the industry than today. However, opportunities come with new challenges and this research is designed to help navigate those challenges. Back in 1993, I first used the term information Democracy to envision a time when every user would have access to timely, relevant and ac…
Given its ubiquity, it’s hard to believe that the Apple iPad has only been on the market for 18 months. Consumers love these devices, but they are also sprouting like weeds in the commercial sector as they enable new types of business processes and applications. As tablet computers become more and more pervasive, will their presence increase IT risk? In other words, where does tablet secu…
Technology moves at breakneck speed. Technology upgrades typically do not. While there’s no doubt that having the latest technology increases productivity, remaining competitive requires a significant capital outlay to purchase new hardware and deploy it. For small and medium sized companies that have limited budgets and IT staff, keeping up with technology can be challenging, if not impossib…
The rise of the social consumer creates tremendous opportunities for organizations to develop deeper relationships with their customers in support of their business objectives. Whether your goals are to acquire new users, increase on-site engagement, or collect and leverage customer insights (or all of • What are your business objectives? • What are you trying to achieve on your site? • …
This is the first part in a series designed to help organizations develop their “BYOD” (bring-your-own-device) strategies for personally-owned smartphones and tablets. This chapter provides an overview of eight components that our customers have found to be the foundation of a secure and scalable BYOD program. Many organizations are considering personally-owned mobile devices for busin…
When you think about protecting virtual machines, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For many IT professionals, that first thought probably centers around high-availability, or HA, technologies. Each of the major virtual platform vendors has its own representation of HA, and although each vendor’s tactics in accomplishing the task might be very different, the result is effectively t…
The major IT initiatives of today – data center consolidation, cloud computing, unified communications, virtualization, and disaster recovery – share a common theme: they all presume a well performing Wide Area Network (WAN). The reality though is that most WANs are unable to compensate for the increased packet loss, latency, and bandwidth problems endemic to publicly shared infrastr…
Discovery is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing, analyzing and producing information during civil legal actions. The goal of discovery is to obtain information that will be useful in developing relevant information for pre-trial motions and for the trial itself. Information sought during discovery can include documents, testimony and other information deemed necessa…
Business documents are vital strategic, financial, operational and intellectual assets that are essential to daily business processes. They constitute the lifeblood of an organization. Yet half of organizations rate their document management practices as less than effective. This is why document process management is becoming an outsourcing strategy that enables organizations to reduce cost…
The expression “better, faster, cheaper” is commonly associated with supply chain initiatives, where companies have developed an edge by getting products to market faster and more efficiently than their competitors. However, in the new world of cloud computing, more companies are looking at their IT department as a competitive differentiator by enabling them to quickly deploy hosted appli…
IT organizations are under increasing pressure to meet the business goals of their companies. This challenge can be particularly daunting because it involves complying with regulations, such as the Sarbanes- Oxley Act (Sarbox) and Basel II. Compliance requires strong corporate governance capabilities that are demonstrable to outside auditors. Because IT plays such a major role in business proce…
In today’s competitive business environment, small and midsized businesses that want to grow and sustain an edge in the market must continually streamline and improve core business practices. In many instances, technology-based solutions are integral to achieving operational efficiencies and to furthering key business objectives. As businesses progress from small to midsize organizations,…
Software is of tremendous importance to today’s IT-intensive organizations. In fact, the appetite of organizations for software is growing at a faster pace than software budgets—especially in light of current economic conditions. It is therefore more critical than ever for software buyers to get maximum value out of every dollar they spend on software.
Today’s rising overhead expenses drive organizations to find practical ways to reduce costs. Profit-conscious executives face the challenge of either reducing headcount or reducing overhead expenses. Much of the time, either of these strategies can have a negative impact on productivity and morale. Every so often a strategy appears that can provide significant expense control and enhance prod…
The AS/400 and RS/6000 platforms have evolved greatly over 20 years, and now IBM has brought them together to create the Power Systems server line. The technologies and methods for data protection and system optimization for both platforms have seen great changes as well. Even as transaction and data storage volumes have increased, ensuring that the right data protection and management practice…
System i is at the heart of the IT infrastructure for many organizations. Companies around the globe depend on the platform to provide reliable performance for their sales, operations, human resources, accounting, shipping and other critical applications. While it is true that System i is one of the easiest to manage business systems in the world, it is still far from entirely self-managing or …
For today’s small and mid-sized businesses, the risk and effects from any unplanned outage (downtime) grow with each additional critical application, network enhancement or system upgrade. We don’t have to look back very far to see the consequences of sudden or unexpected disasters affecting the IT infrastructure of major cities and businesses of every description. Consequently, IT man…
IT equipment accounts for nine percent of all energy consumed by businesses—the third-largest source of power for the commercial sector. With the right power management policies in place, you’ll have better control over your entire network–not only over how much power is consumed, but also how–and when- computers are powered down. This new control allows you to more successfully exe…
Enterprise software changed the face of business over the last decade. However, afters of aggressive enterprise software buying, corporations are now saddled with a large portfolio of solutions that are expensive to upgrade and have become equally expensive to maintain and support.
Organizations need to protect their data and restrict access to enterprise resources to authorized users. Many companies attempt to address their security concerns by simply implementing stronger password policies, requiring employees to remember more and stronger passwords for all applications. However, most employees can not remember more than one or two strong passwords, so they won’t f…
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”) puts a new emphasis on timeliness and transparency in financial reporting, and the importance of internal controls in managing a public company. As of November 2004, SOX became a requirement for larger companies traded on a U.S. stock exchange; smaller public companies have until July 2007 to comply. This whitepaper provides an overview of, and s…
Over the years a variety of file transfer tools and techniques have been utilized to support the file transfer needs of internal systems as well as file transfers with external partners. The file transfer process has become complex, involving differing platforms, technologies, processing methods and support. Each process has been developed separately to meet differing requirements resulting in …