The way people do business will drastically change in the next three to five years, and Europeans are leading the way. This is according to a new report by Samsung, which investigates key trends impacting the workplace culture.

This new business model we’re all about to embrace Samsung dubs the Open Economy. Basically, it revolves around high levels of collaboration between companies, contractors and partners, while retaining industry-standard security levels. The report calls upon WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, which claims European countries occupy eight out of the top ten slots.

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Cyber security is an increasingly essential skill set, but it can be hard for businesses to verify that they're employing people with the right abilities.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is launching a new, vendor-neutral certification. CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst (CSA+) is the first of its kind to bring behavioral analytics to the forefront of assessing cyber threats.

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Just half of IT departments managed to complete all of the projects that they were assigned during last year, a new report by MuleSoft claims.

Based on a survey of 951 IT decision makers, MuleSoft’s Connectivity Benchmark Report 2017 says there is a widening IT delivery gap that is to blame for these results.

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When the Great Recession hit in 2007, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) began to catch the attention of enterprise CIOs as a favorable way to reduce the CAPEX necessary to provide their businesses with world-class IT services, and deliver more predictable OPEX. Fiscal reasoning may have been the carrot-on-the-stick, but CIOs were just as smitten by the promise of a simplified IT environment. It took several years for SaaS to firmly establish itself in the enterprise -- gaining a true foothold in 2012 -- and the delivery model is now considered mission critical by most enterprises. The "hands off" environment, rapid deployment potential and lower upfront costs all contributed to SaaS’s disruptive shift.

Notably, however, when SaaS was first being considered as an enterprise option, many cautioned that its use should be rooted in "vanilla" business applications that would not require complicated integration with enterprise data. Remember, SaaS burst onto the scene as a way to provide the SMB market with quick and affordable access to robust, single-purpose capabilities such as CRM or human resource management, but the applications were not particularly good at exchanging data in real-time, across transactional environments. "The convenience of using SaaS applications can mask a significant IT challenge of integration, both with other enterprise applications and with data sources," warned CIO Magazine.

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While Microsoft's Azure cloud service is gaining popularity with businesses, many of them are relying on a managed services provider (MSP) to implement it successfully.

According to a new survey by cloud and IT services company NetEnrich, 67 percent are 'very likely' to engage an MSP in the next year to migrate to Azure or to manage their cloud and/or on-premises environment.

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Telephones used to have a dial. Television viewers used to have to get up to change the channel. Internet connections used to run at 56 kbit/s. And, not so long ago, organizations could run their service from a single data center. Their DNS servers were placed inside it with no contingency plan. After all, if the data center went down, the DNS server was useless.

But time and technology march on, and a single data center is now the exception rather than the norm. Enterprises run multiple data centers, sometimes in multiple countries, not to mention cloud regions and highly distributed networks. Consequently, your DNS needs to be just as highly distributed as your content. What good is a disaster recovery site if you have no way to direct your users to it?

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The speed of business today affects every part of the organization, and IT is no exception. That’s why traditional methods of developing and deploying software that split up the process into multiple teams and departments are being replaced by newer, more agile techniques such as DevOps. This removes silos to get people, process and tools working together to make the product delivery lifecycle faster and more predictive.

DevOps is fundamentally changing the IT landscape -- and that includes areas such as the database, which has often not been part of the traditional development model. New research that we recently carried out shows exactly how much of an impact it is having. Our global study of 1,000 organizations surveyed database professionals using SQL Server, ranging from C-level executives and IT directors/managers to database developers and administrators (DBAs). Half of them employed 500 people or more. The overall message was clear -- DevOps is becoming mainstream, and more and more people see the database as central to the process.

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The benefits of data science are widely recognised according to a new survey, but 22 percent of users are failing to take full advantage of the data available.

The study by Continuum Analytics, the company behind the Anaconda open source data platform, surveyed 200 data science and analytics decision makers at US organizations of all sizes and industries, as well as more than 500 data scientists to uncover similarities and disparities between the two groups.

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We've been talking about the cloud for some years now and, while we may look back at 2016 as a year of growing enterprise cloud adoption, 2017 will be the year when hybrid clouds really enter the mainstream. Cloud is no longer "optional" for enterprises looking to remain competitive: with businesses demanding ever-greater agility from their IT functions and with data growth continuing to explode at an alarming rate, more and more IT departments are looking to move critical IT services to a combination of private and public cloud.

Research by Veritas in 2016 found that 38 percent of workloads today exist in a private cloud, with 28 percent in a public cloud. And these numbers are expected to grow at rates of seven percent and 18 percent respectively this year. Here are a few of my thoughts and on how businesses are going to transform the way they use hybrid cloud in 2017.

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Microsoft may have a "mobile first, cloud first" mantra, but we shouldn't forget that the software giant is also highly invested in the enterprise market as well. It's incredibly lucrative, as business clients spend billions upon billions of dollars on its products, a list of which includes the likes of Windows and Office.

So, naturally, when Microsoft is working on a product it has to take that into account as well. With Windows 10 things have been going rather well, if you compare it to Windows 8, when it comes to enterprise adoption, but the software giant is looking to improve things with a new Windows Insider program aimed at businesses, referred to as WIP4Biz.

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Cloud management company RightScale has released the results of its sixth annual State of the Cloud Survey, the largest survey of corporate cloud users.

Among the findings are that optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative across all cloud users (53 percent) and especially among mature cloud users (64 percent). Respondents estimate 30 percent of cloud spend is wasted, while RightScale has measured actual waste at between 30 and 45 percent.

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Businesses and IT executives are frustrated by their current software and more than 80 percent of executives have had to change a part of their daily operations to match the way their software works according to a new report.

The survey of over 500 executives carried out by development platform provider TrackVia finds that integration or compatibility with other software and applications is cited as the top priority by 32 percent, yet also the biggest challenge (31 percent) for executives.

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More than half of companies in the UK, US and Germany (53 percent) are not prepared to face a cyber-attack. This is according to a new report by specialist insurer Hiscox, which has polled more than 3,000 companies for the report.

The Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2017 looks at four areas -- strategy, resourcing, technology and process -- and ranks companies based on such criteria. Most companies score fairly well for technology, but less than a third (30 percent) reach the "expert" score in their overall cyber-readiness.

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There’s a severe disconnect between IT decision makers and C-suite executives when it comes to handling cyber attacks. Namely, both believe the other one is responsible for keeping a company safe.

This is according to a new and extensive research by BAE Systems. A total of 221 C-suite executives, and 984 IT decision makers were polled or the report.

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Privacy regulations like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mean that enterprises can face substantial fines for non-compliance.

As 2016 saw a record number of personal record data breaches this is something all businesses need to take seriously.

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