Business Technology Roundtable

Senior executives at progressive companies have been on a mission -- they're raising the bar of expectations for leaders of their significant investment in business technologies. Providing reliable access to IT resources and reporting on system up-time objectives are unlikely to gain recognition or rewards from the savvy CEO. They now require a direct impact on business-related goals and anticipated outcomes -- with no excuses. Granted, many CIOs and IT managers have made progress in their efforts to better align their IT operations with their Line of Business leader's ongoing demands. But despite this progress, according to the results of a survey announced by Red Hat, obstacles remain before the vision of true IT and business integration can be fully realized. The survey results provide insight into the progress IT leaders have made in assuming more strategic roles -- as well as into the challenges they continue to face -- but also raises fundamental questions about how C...

According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, their research results demonstrated that the potential for managing servers and other IT resources remotely is essentially underutilized. However, changes in the current business environment will increase the adoption of this approach. Plato, a wise Greek philosopher, wrote about how "necessity is the mother of invention." Certainly, that perspective is equally valid today. The motivation for utilizing the resources of a service provider can be considerable. A case in point: Fortune 50 companies, with budgets of $2 billion, can save as much as $500 million of their IT infrastructure budgets. How, you may ask? Apparently, it's mostly from reducing fully-loaded labor costs. Evaluation of IT Assets and Liabilities McKinsey surveyed 141 CIOs at multinational corporations, and 34 percent of them said that they anticipate utilizing some infrastructure management services over the next three years -- which is an increase from...

Because of the expanding growth and complexity of communication networking, and the risks presented by a new breed of skillful hackers, serious security threats are an unfortunate certainty within the highly interconnected office environment of today. These threats are very real and the results are costly to those businesses that have been affected. Apparently, the victims aren't entirely at random, which is often assumed to be the case. According to the 2007 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey , almost one-fifth (18 percent) of those respondents who suffered one or more kinds of security incident further said they had suffered a "targeted attack" -- defined as a malware attack aimed exclusively at their organization or at organizations within a small subset of the general population. Beyond the Virus Threat Moreover, financial fraud overtook virus attacks as the source of the greatest financial losses. Virus losses, which had been the leading cause of loss for seven s...