Have you ever needed to access an important piece of information from an old document, and ended up spending hours rifling through filing cabinets and searching for the folder where you think you might have put that required piece of paper?

Or maybe you know what information you need, but can’t remember exactly which document it’s on. You’ve got shed loads of stored documents, and you know it could be a 'needle in a haystack' attempt to check multiple files and find the necessary document. It’s these time-consuming, frustrating and inefficient processes that document imaging addresses. When done correctly, it can change the way your business operates for the better, and save you both time and money.

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The importance of social media to businesses has long been recognized. According to a recent survey, time spent on social platforms represents 28 percent of all online activity, so if it’s important to customers, it naturally becomes important for companies too.

While some firms are content to carry out intermittent checks on Facebook and Twitter, many businesses are now demanding more nuanced ways of monitoring social media content. Social relationship management, or SRM, is a software solution that promises to strategically analyze social network interactions to give your business a competitive edge. With organizations from a broad spectrum of industries all realizing the importance of social media, gaining greater insights in this field could make the difference between success and failure.

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Organizations are rapidly migrating to the cloud. According to the 2016 Cloud Migration Survey, the top reasons for the cloud rush are the promise of high availability, reliability and potential cost savings. Companies, however, are not taking a one-size fits all approach. They are recognizing the pros and cons of private versus public cloud and tailoring their migration strategies to meet their needs.

The RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, which includes responses from over one thousand technical professionals, notes that private cloud adoption by organizations will rise from 63 percent in 2015 to 77 percent in 2016. Because more companies are adding private cloud to their environments, it opens up the possibilities for hybrid cloud. Seventy-one percent of them now operate in a hybrid cloud environment which enables them to combine the benefits of both public and private platforms.

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A new survey has revealed that IT professionals working in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) earn a substantially higher salary than their counterparts in the UK and Ireland.

Computer Weekly and TechTarget's Salary Survey 2016 APAC found that the average salary of ANZ IT pros was between £50,000 and £94,000 a year. In order to learn more about IT salaries in the region, 450 IT professionals from Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia were questioned regarding how much they earned annually.

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IT experts will be doing a lot of job switching with the start of next year, according to a new report by Spiceworks. Releasing the report during SpiceWorld 2016 Austin, the company says more than a third (37 percent) of IT professionals will start looking for a new job next year.

More than a quarter (26 percent) plan on accepting an offer next year, as well. A vast majority (69 percent) want to do it in order to advance their IT skills, but 64 percent say they want a higher salary. Four in ten say they want to work in an organization where IT takes more priority.

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Unified communications (UC) refers to a technology whereby a number of different communication media or platforms are connected and accessed as if they were a single entity. In practical terms, this enables businesses to employ a less fragmented approach to communication, allowing them to access and manage their internal and outward comms more easily.

The breadth of applications covered by unified communications is relatively wide and growing to accommodate new methods of interaction. UC may incorporate email, instant messaging, smartphones, landlines, fax and social media outlets. Unified communications tools are also capable of handling both audio and video content, which is why they are increasingly being adopted by businesses located across a broad spectrum of industries.

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If your organization ever gets infected by ransomware (and there are good chances it will) it is better not to pay up because you probably won’t get your data back, even if you do pay the ransom.

This is according to a new report by security firm Kaspersky Lab, which urges organizations to instead report the incident to the authorities. It bases its conclusions on a couple of research results -- more than a third (36 percent) of organizations pay the ransom, but around 20 percent still don’t get their files back.

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Imagine living somewhere where traffic jams were a thing of the past, where ambulance crews started on-route to an emergency before anyone had dialed 911 and where critical infrastructure operated at maximum efficiency. This utopian city may not currently be possible, but the Internet of things could change that in the not too distant future.

By connecting various aspects of the urban landscape to the Internet, local administrators will gain access to countless extra data sets that could help them provide better services for their citizens. These smart cities not only promise to improve the lives of their inhabitants, but also provide potentially lucrative commercial opportunities for a number of businesses.

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The concept of machine learning has been around for some time. Deep learning is an area of research aimed at taking things further still and getting closer to an artificial intelligence system by using neural networks in a way that imitates the human brain.

Sometimes also referred to as hierarchical learning or deep structured learning, it seeks to model data in order to solve problems like object and facial recognition, natural language processing and speech recognition.

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When businesses think of automation, they probably conjure up images of simplicity, efficiency, lower costs and increased productivity. Of course, this is something of an oversimplification and there are certainly challenges to adopting workplace automation.

However, it is not hard to see why more and more industries are automating their business processes. Whether it’s via robots or software, automation can eliminate the repetitive, manual tasks that, while essential, are a huge drain on employee time. Automation lets members of staff direct their energies into more productive areas, such as coming up with innovative new ideas.

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The first anniversary of the launch of Windows 10 was marked by Microsoft revealing that the operating system enjoyed one of the fastest adoption rates in the history of Windows. The software giant announced that over 300 million devices are now using Windows 10. Adoption rates for its latest operating system are 145 percent higher than for Windows 7 and 400 percent better than for Windows 8.

But however popular Windows 10 might be in terms of user adoption, it still brings a lot of the baggage of its predecessors for IT professionals to deal with, including painful migrations, time-consuming end-point management and patches. Even with improvements to minimize these issues, Windows 10 can still cause headaches as IT administrators attempt to migrate their endpoint devices without negatively affecting their users.

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When it comes to the exploding batteries on Galaxy Note7 models, Samsung has been lauded for its crisis management approach and how it’s accepted responsibility for the problem. Now setting up exchange booths at airports around the world so users can exchange their Galaxy Note7 phones is yet another example of its exceptional crisis management approach.

But while it’s commendable how swiftly Samsung is taking action to replace the faulty handsets, the company has left one crucial component out of this plan. That is, erasing the data from those Galaxy Note7 devices that are turned in at its exchange booths at airports around the world. There’s no mention of whether the data is being securely and permanently erased from the Galaxy Note7 phones that are taken back at the exchange booths -- and if it’s being done so before they’re handed off to Samsung’s chosen recyclers.

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We’ve already covered what businesses need to know about enterprise content management (ECM), so now it’s time to move on to another popular business tool: enterprise resource planning (ERP).

ERP is business process management software -- typically consisting of a suite of integrated applications -- that allows an organization to manage its entire business and automate many back-office functions.

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In an effort to demonstrate how AI could be used to boost encryption, researchers at Google taught two neural networks how to communicate with one another while keeping their conversation secret from a third.

Researchers at the company's deep learning initiative, Google Brain, have successfully taught two neural networks, given the nicknames "Alice" and "Bob", to secretly communicate with one another while keeping the details of their conversations hidden from one called "Eve". Last week, the team behind this endeavor published a paper detailing the process of the experiment and its results.

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Data centers, in the sense of a centralized space where business information is stored, have always been important, but as we move towards an increasingly digital economy, and indeed, way of life, they have taken on even greater significance. The importance of data centers to our everyday actions can be glimpsed simply by taking a look at the amount of energy that they consume.

According to the National Resource Defense Council, the Internet, which relies on data center infrastructure for its utility, represents 1.1 to 1.5 percent of all global electricity use -- with the associated annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to between 70 and 90 large coal-fired power plants.

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