Articles about Information Technology

As the role of Information Technology continues to grow and evolve within business, the potential risks associated with accessing, storing, sharing and protecting information are similarly increasing. In order to better equip themselves to adjust to these kind of threats, businesses need to consider the various risks they might be vulnerable to and implement a reliable strategy to deal with these effectively and efficiently.

Firstly, let’s consider a few threats. In each of the scenarios below, a vulnerability can result in a serious risk to your business:

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Instead of just adding value to the insurance sector, technology underpins its very growth and evolution. In the last few years alone, the use of mobile devices, GPS, social media and CCTV footage have all impacted hugely upon the way claims are processed and policies assessed.

The analysis and value of "big data" gleaned through customer interactions has become more important than ever, as insurers look to maximize efficiencies and profits whilst keeping customers happy.

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In today’s fast-paced business world, driving efficiency is often at the heart of growth plans. When thoroughly planned, outsourcing plays a vital role in ensuring productivity is high, enabling managers to focus on business development and disruptive innovation.

However, some organizations cause irreparable damage to their business by outsourcing too early, while others risk falling behind to more innovative competitors by ignoring the opportunities available; and some companies outsource the wrong mix of activities. It’s unclear whether this balancing act is why the outsourcing market in the UK declined in Q1 compared to the same period last year, although it could also imply a wariness to trust third parties with internal business processes.

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IT teams need to evolve in order to meet new challenges -- make sure you have got the right in-house and outsourced resource with this analysis.

IT teams are evolving. The old model of a Finance/IT director supported by Infrastructure and Application managers, with a host of network engineers and developers, is changing to meet new challenges.

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For those of you who are not in the know (and you really should be) Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire and bring together like minded entrepreneurs and provide a space to network in. Last night, the inspiring President and CFO of Mind Candy, Divinia Knowles, took to the stage at Google Campus, London for a fireside chat with Zomato UK CEO, Kimberly Hurd.

Divinia is one of the driving forces behind Mind Candy and along with Michael Acton Smith, guided the company from a small startup to one of the most successful tech companies, responsible for the behemoth that is Moshi Monsters. Moshi Monsters is a phenomenally successful website for 6-14 year olds with over 80 million users registered in over 150 territories worldwide. The website was so successful that a movie and mobile games have all since been released. Interestingly, Divinia hinted at the potential to move the brand onto new platforms such as Smart TV and, once they have matured, both VR and the Apple Watch Platform, so watch this space!

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Being a manager at a company is a difficult task. You need to help people, motivate them to work, plan their projects, and make decisions. Even though a lot of people dream of becoming a manager, or any sort of boss at a company, not everyone is fit for that kind of pressure and expectation.

But when it comes to Google, being a manager is a completely different experience. The reason? It’s kinda hard to manage people that are most likely a lot smarter than you.

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New trends such as machine-to-machine communications and cloud computing are opening great new opportunities, and Europe is in serious danger of missing out if it doesn’t produce enough experts in the field.

During a speech in Belgium, European Commission (EC) Digital Single Market chief Andrus Ansip said Europe might face a huge deficit in skilled ICT workers, V3 reports.

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I’m an older guy with younger kids so to some extent I live vicariously through my friends, many of whom have children who are now entering the work force and some of those children can’t find jobs. We’re not in a recession, the economy is expanding, new positions are supposedly being added every day, but the sons and daughters of my friends aren’t generally getting those jobs so they are staying in school or going back to school, joining the Peace Corps., whatever. Everyone is rattled by this. Kids don’t want to move home and parents don’t want to have them move home. Student debt continues to increase. Everyone wants to get on with the lives they thought they were promised -- the lives they’d signed up for and earned.

What changed?

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Data center teams face one crisis after another, but at least one has remained constant over recent years. The tidal wave of data, especially related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data, continues to grow at phenomenal rates, threatening to overwhelm operations for many enterprises. IT teams are struggling to keep their heads above this deluge of digital information, scale storage and processing resources to handle the data, and simultaneously provide the ubiquitous connectivity required for today's Internet of Things.

Fortunately, data center equipment providers have been evolving the data center foundations. IT and facilities teams have the life vests and rafts that they need, if they know how to use them.

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The recent breaches of large corporation internal systems has lead some security analysts to believe indifference from employees is a key factor, rather than rogue nations attacking the private sector.

Identity management firm SailPoint claims employees would be willing to sell corporate information like passwords for as little as £100 and routinely use the same passwords for almost all applications.

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A poll by Microsoft shows that there are vastly differing views to the technological lives we now lead. While most people believe that technology has made life better in a number of ways, there are key differences in opinion between developing and developed nations.

Countries in which advanced technology is more commonplace -- so-called developed countries -- there is an element of fear and concern that is not found in developing countries. Despite this difference in views, the overall consensus between internet users is that personal technology has had a positive impact.

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One of the current challenges for a business IT team is supporting a variety of desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile end user devices for employees. This task can be a considerable overhead in terms of time, resource and cost. Physical desktops are not only expensive, insecure, and maintenance heavy, they are also not necessarily a good fit for an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce. The groundswell of Windows 7 migration plans, an expanding virtual workforce, the growing popularity of mobile devices, and tighter IT budgets each point to the need to re-evaluate desktop strategies.

While virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) seems like a promising alternative to managing physical desktops and mobiles, in reality, it’s too costly and complex for most companies to implement successfully. Cloud services, however, are helping to mitigate many of the challenges of traditional VDI implementations. Cloud based virtual desktops deliver benefits around centralized management and simplified deployment without the high costs, limitations, or difficulties of VDI.

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The new internet protocol known as Multipath Transmission Control Protocol enables easy privacy invasion, but also secures today’s networks.

On the internet, your traffic is not your own -- no matter how you roam. New multipath technologies, including one found hidden dormant in the internals of the newest Mac operating system, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, may provide consumers with more tools to gain control of their online communications. However, this freedom comes at a price, which network operators may not be willing to pay.

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Most of us have hopefully managed to get off the sinking ship that was Windows XP. As much of a recent memory as that has become, a new end of life is rearing its head, and it's approaching fervently for those who haven't started planning for it. Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, a solid server operating system that's now about eleven and a half years old, is heading for complete extinction in just under 300 days. Microsoft has a fashionable countdown timer already ticking.

Seeing as we just finished our second server migration in a single week (a personal record so far), sharing some of the finer aspects of how we are streamlining these transitions seems like a timely fit. This braindump of sorts is a collection of best practices that we are routinely following for our own customers, and they seem to be serving us well so far.

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Right now, depending who you speak with, there is either a shortage or a glut of IT professionals in the USA. Those who maintain there is a shortage tend to say it can only be eliminated by immigration reform allowing more H1-B visas and green cards. Those who see a glut point to high IT unemployment figures and what looks like pervasive age discrimination. If both views are possible -- and I am beginning to see how they could be -- we can start by blaming the Human Resources (HR) departments at big and even medium-sized companies.

HR does the hiring and firing or at least handles the paperwork for hiring and firing. HR hires headhunters to find IT talent or advertises and finds that talent itself. If you are an IT professional in a company of almost any size that has an HR department, go down there sometime and ask about their professional qualifications. What made them qualified to hire you?

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