Internet of things (IoT) is expected to make an enormous impact on pretty much every industry in the upcoming months and years, but it seems as organizations don’t really know how to secure their devices. This is according to a new report by ForeScout Technologies, which surveyed 201 senior IT decision makers in the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

First, the report says the threat surface is going to increase dramatically. An average business will operate 7,000 IoT devices in the next 18 months, which is "far more" than what the average company is used to securing and defending. Second, almost two thirds (65 percent) have "quite", "little", or "no" confidence in identifying and controlling their IoT devices. And third, the biggest challenge seems to be having IT functions working together.

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In terms of industry buzz and discussion, it is unlikely you’ll find a technological concept that’s more popular at the moment than cloud computing. Since it burst on to the scene a few years ago, cloud computing has proven its utility within a huge range of business and consumer markets.

With the flexibility, productivity and cost advantages being delivered by the cloud, it can truly claim to have had a profound impact on the way that we live our lives. However, although "cloud computing" is often spoken about in relatively generalized terminology, it is far from a homogeneous resource.

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Big data is another technology buzzword that can sometimes be difficult to pin down. Data, of course, has been around for a long time, long before computers invaded our homes, offices and pockets, so what exactly differentiates ordinary data from big data?

Broadly speaking, big data refers to datasets that can no longer be processed through traditional methods of analysis. This means that setting a minimum boundary for what constitutes big data is extremely difficult, as this value would likely change with each technological development. What is clear, however, is that big data is growing rapidly. The rise of digital technologies, particularly smartphones, has meant that the amount of information that we freely share, knowingly or not, is enormous.

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Businesses are looking to transform their IT services by moving to the cloud, but a new report reveals that they’re increasingly struggling to manage its complexity.

The study from cloud automation company Embotics and 451 Research surveyed 166 US-based enterprise IT organizations regarding their use of cloud infrastructure and the management and automation of the associated processes.

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The post-Brexit fallout continues. The UK has already seen price hikes from a number of countries across a range of sectors, and the latest announcement comes from Microsoft.

The technology giant warns that starting in January 2017, prices of enterprise software and cloud services will rise for anyone paying in pounds sterling. The UK's decision to leave the EU has seen the value of the pound plummet, and Microsoft is going to increase prices by up to 22 percent to make up for this.

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Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a new distribution model that is rapidly gaining popularity with businesses all over the world. A branch of cloud computing, SaaS lets businesses and consumers lease a particular piece of software from a third-party supplier, who delivers it over a network connection -- most commonly the Internet.

As with other examples of cloud computing, this provides a number of benefits in terms of flexibility, scalability and affordability, which is why it is hardly surprising that many businesses have been willing to embrace SaaS. In fact, global SaaS revenues are expected to grow 21 percent year over year to $106 billion in 2016.

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Microsoft has posted its earnings for Q1 FY2017 (Q3 CY2016), revealing revenue of $22.34 billion, operating income of $7.1 billion, net income of $5.98 billion, and earnings per share of $0.76 cents. The software giant beat analyst expectations of $21.71 billion in revenue and EPS of $0.68. The stock is up around 5.5 percent over yesterday, with shares trading at over $60 -- a record value for the company.

How do the latest numbers compare to Q1 FY2016? A year ago Microsoft reported revenue of $21.66 billion, operating income of $7.07 billion, net income of $5.66 billion and EPS of $0.70. So the revenue, operating income, net income, and EPS are up.

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The first question that businesses are likely to ask when considering virtualization is: what exactly is it? In IT terms, hardware virtualization refers to the act of using virtual, rather than physical computer resources. Practically speaking, this means that there is an abstraction layer between the physical hardware and the IT resources that the business consumes. For example, virtualization software will enable a single, physical machine to deliver multiple workloads simultaneously, with each workload only accessing the specific physical resources that are allocated to it.

In its most simple form, virtualization may refer to the partition of a hard drive, as this makes a single, physical storage device behave as if it is two hard drives. However, IT virtualization examples also come in much more complex forms. The core concept to remember is that to the end user, virtualization makes it appear as though they are accessing a single IT component or resource, regardless of the underlying hardware. Virtualization enables businesses to consolidate IT resources, such as network, CPUs, memory and storage and provision them as they see fit, usually via a network connection.

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The term DevOps is being thrown around a lot in the IT industry at the moment, but what exactly does it mean and, more importantly, how can it help an enterprise?

As a combination of developer and operations, DevOps looks to bring these two different areas of digital business together to provide the perfect combination of innovation and user-focused processes during software development. Continuous deployment and continuous delivery are both important aspects of this and, when adopting DevOps, it is vitally important that businesses assess which one is right for them. It also looks towards the automation of delivering changes to infrastructure and software.

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Automated software delivery specialist Puppet is launching a new Docker Image Build tool, which automates the container build process to help organizations as they define, build, and deploy containers into production environments.

It adds to existing Puppet functionality for installing and managing container infrastructure, providing a standard, consistent way to install Docker operating environments as well as building and deploying containers.

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If you only have a few websites and mobile apps to handle looking after them is a fairly straightforward task.

But businesses that need to handle multiple digital properties with proper governance and security -- at the same time delivering a consistent, personalized customer experience -- face a major challenge.

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Bringing information technology into line with the needs of the business is frequently a problem. ITIL -- originally known as Information Technology Infrastructure Library -- is aimed at resolving this by establishing a set of rules for IT service management (ITSM).

The ITIL framework is geared to standardizing the choosing, planning, delivery and support of business IT services. The intention is to deliver greater efficiency and predictable service levels.

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In the early days of business computing, the technology was seen as a supporting tool to help speed up processes like preparing accounts or controlling stock. But as information technology has found its way into more and more areas of business, it’s become increasingly important that IT should be aligned with the needs of the business and be able to deliver added value.

For this to be effective businesses need to have policies and procedures in place to plan, deliver, control and operate the IT services they offer either internally or to outside customers. All of these activities can be drawn together under the umbrella title of IT service management.

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For the vast majority of organizations, customers should be the number one priority. Without their support, revenue streams dry up and businesses quickly fail. For small businesses that have a face-to-face relationship with their clients keeping them happy is straightforward, but in larger organizations ensuring that the relationship between business and customer is as positive as it can be is not always easy.

Imagine being in charge of a global, multi-national company with thousands of customers in disparate locations. Each of these customers has their own specific needs and businesses can’t afford to treat them all as a single homogeneous entity. At the other end of the scale, even growing businesses can struggle to manage their customer relationships because of limited resources. Fortunately, customer relationship management software is on hand to help businesses of all sizes and across a wide range of industries.

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Storage architectures from the early days of computing typically used block storage and managed data as hierarchy of files. While this was fine when the amount of data involved was relatively small, as storage requirements grew it meant that the management of data became a major task. What was needed was a way of making handling data simpler whilst allowing scalability and ease of access to the information.

Object storage treats data as objects, each being made up of the data itself, metadata that defines it and a unique identifier. The advantage of this is that it makes it possible to store large amounts of unstructured data in a way that’s affordable, scalable and capable of a degree of self-management. In recent years its use has been driven by online sharing and streaming services, allowing a diverse range of digital content to be easily and quickly accessed from anywhere without the need for complex, specialist software.

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