Data breaches can be hard to detect and are often missed by traditional cyber security approaches, allowing attackers to spend a long time inside a network.

One way of combating this is to catch attackers out by deploying decoys that mimic desktops, servers, printers and other technology present in a network. But until recently this approach was only available to large organizations.

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Unless you’ve been hiding away from the world of computing for the last few years, you’ll have come across Hadoop.

Apache Hadoop, to give it its full name, is an open source framework designed to handle the storage and processing of large amounts of data using low-cost commodity hardware. Since its initial release in 2011, it has become one of the most popular platforms for handling big data.

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It's been a while since remote working became a reality, but this latest survey into the matter showed that it is now becoming the norm. As a matter of fact, employees would rather have flexible hours and the possibility of mobile working than a company car, according to BT.

A total of 1,500 workers in the UK, Germany, France and Spain were polled for the report, and 67 percent confirm the claim regarding the car. For 76 percent, flexible working is one of the top three priorities in their company. But mobile working is far from perfect -- current technology sometimes makes it hard to get a hold of people, which delays crucial decisions. Also, sometimes it's hard to access documents and files.

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Organizations waste millions of dollars trying to keep hackers away from sensitive information using outdated perimeter-based security technologies. The result is obvious: it isn’t working.

Percipient Networks’ CTO Todd O’Boyle has counterintuitive advice for businesses when discussing what to do about hackers: let them in your corporate network. I spoke to Todd, and he explained why that advice is more sound that you might think.

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Today, the majority of enterprises rely on employee authorization by means of keycards or passcodes. While this form of security is convenient, these methods don’t truly authenticate nor verify the identity of the person at the time and place of an access request. We’ve all seen how usernames and passwords can be easily stolen. When this inevitably occurs within an organization, that factor becomes useless and will allow an attacker to gain access to everything the employee was authorized for.

Employee authorization based on a single paradigm is highly flawed because it could easily be lost, stolen or duplicated. If you are relying on only one vector for authentication, then there will only need to be one point of failure. Outside of the increased risk of becoming victimized by a data breach, enterprises that rely on these single paradigm authorizations are opening themselves up to the potential of fraud, lawsuits and damaged reputation and relationships with both internal and external stakeholders.

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However much technology you throw at protecting your organization's systems the weakest link is still the person sitting in front of the endpoint.

No surprise then that social engineering is increasingly the attacker's weapon of choice for gaining access to sensitive systems. Security rating and risk monitoring company SecurityScorecard has put together an infographic showing the five most common attacks and their impact on enterprises.

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The bring your own access (BYOA) movement has presented a number of challenges and opportunities to IT leaders in recent years. Since the dawn of the smartphone, the consumerization of IT has left CIOs fighting to keep up with the latest trends in productivity, communication and creativity apps.

Driven by simple user interfaces and the promise of fast synchronization across devices, business users have flocked away from the typical corporate IT stacks and begun to pick and choose their own tools, often without the consent of IT.

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Automation means many different things, in the context of business it usually involves streamlining processes in order to reduce costs. Applied across the whole organization it means restructuring resources and integrating the applications used across the enterprise to save time and money.

Business process automation (BPA) automation is aimed at those tasks that involve a series of processes which follow a predictable pattern with a series of repeated operations. As research specialist Gartner puts it, "It focuses on 'run the business' as opposed to 'count the business' types of automation efforts and often deals with event-driven, mission-critical, core processes. BPA usually supports an enterprise’s knowledge workers in satisfying the needs of its many constituencies".

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Employees are often a company’s largest expense, but they can also be their most important asset. After all, without talented and dedicated staff at every level of the business, organizations will fall behind in terms of productivity, leadership and creativity. Although human resources has traditionally been tasked with handling all matters people-related, as this facet of business management has become increasingly complex and dynamic it has largely gone by another name.

Human capital management (HCM) is often broken down into three categories (workforce acquisition, workforce management and workforce optimisation) and incorporates a vast array of business processes, ranging from the administrative to the strategic. Increasingly, businesses are looking to human capital management to ensure they get the most from their employees,

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As companies move more of their data to the cloud it's not surprising that they’re turning to encryption in order to keep their data safe.

But if you're using a third-party cloud provider, who owns and controls the keys to your encrypted data? Rui Biscaia, director of product management at data classification specialist Watchful Software believes it's vital for companies to know.

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Information technology infrastructure is made up of many components, servers, storage, networking hardware, systems management software, and more. This can lead to a complex system being built up of components from several different suppliers.

What converged infrastructure does is to bring together all of these things into a single, integrated package. For businesses this means that they can centralize the management of all their IT resources with a view to increasing use and cutting costs. Converged infrastructure is often associated with the cloud and outsourcing, but it can work just as well applied internally within large organizations too.

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Connectivity is vital for all businesses. Whether you need to communicate with customers, clients or employees, or simply rely on it to deliver your service, the importance of connectivity cannot be overstated.

What’s more, this importance is clearly growing. In the always-on, cloud-based, mobile-first digital world that we inhabit, enterprise connectivity is not merely desirable -- it is expected at all times.

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Providing an open source platform for cloud computing, OpenStack allows the use of multi-vendor commodity hardware in a data center to process and store data, and deliver networking resources. It’s managed through a dashboard or an API and is used by many major companies around the world to manage their IT infrastructure.

OpenStack grew out of a joint project between NASA and Rackspace Hosting and launched in 2010. It’s currently managed by the not-for-profit OpenStack Foundation created in 2012. More than 500 companies are now members of the OpenStack project. OpenStack has a six-month release cycle with each release planned at a design summit. The software is modular with components focusing on different services.

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Businesses are moving faster towards a cashless society because it's cheaper than handling "real" money. This is according to a new report by Sage, integrated accounting, payroll and payment software provider. The company’s latest report says small and medium-sized businesses are losing £9.4bn each year through cash payments.

A quarter (24 percent) say that staff members stole some cash, a third (34 percent) believe human error had them losing money, and more than half (56 percent) claim they spend at least an hour every week counting and sending money to the bank.

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Many companies are realizing that traditional integration approaches no longer satisfy business requirements and are not designed for the digital age, according to a new report.

The State of Salesforce Connectivity survey from cloud integration company Jitterbit looks at integration trends and needs from 300 companies from 33 different industries running Salesforce.

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