Articles about Information Technology

Businesses around the world are failing to benefit enough from so-called "digital transformation" ideas due to a lack of effective leadership.

That's according to a new survey from Wipro Digital has found a major shortfall in terms of progress in embracing new technologies and business processes in the workforce, despite the promise of huge investment in these areas.

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Hadoop, for all its strengths, is not without its difficulties. Business needs specialized skills, data integration, and budget all need to factor into planning and implementation. Even when this happens, a large percentage of Hadoop implementations fail.

To help others avoid common mistakes with Hadoop, I asked our consulting services and enterprise support teams to share their experiences working with organizations to develop, design and implement complex big data, business analytics or embedded analytics initiatives. These are their top seven mistakes, and some advice on how to avoid them.

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UK companies were hit with fines totaling over £3.2m last year after falling foul of data protection laws, a new report reveals.

Analysis of figures from the ICO by PwC found that the 35 fines handed out in 2016 were almost double of  the previous year, despite repeated warning that the new GDPR regulations are just a year away.

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One of the greatest advantages of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is that it’s designed to be used throughout all departments of your company, from product planning and sales to inventory maintenance and accounting.

Combining your company’s processes into one cohesive system eliminates data silos, and reduces manual processes. ERP provides a unified platform that helps departments intercommunicate, allowing your business to run more efficiently.

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The adoption of cloud technologies in a company is becoming a key function of many company’s technology strategy.

Almost nine in ten (88 percent) of UK businesses have adopted cloud to some extent, the report says, adding that two thirds (67 percent) of users expect to increase the adoption of cloud services in the near future, according to a new report by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF)

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If you have previously worked with cloud platforms, you will be familiar with the distributed and decoupled nature of these systems. A decoupled distributed system relies on microservices to carry out specific tasks, each one exposing its own REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs. These microservices talk to each other through a lightweight messaging layer usually in the form of a message broker such as RabbitMQ or QPID.

This is precisely how OpenStack works. Each major OpenStack component (Keystone, Glance, Cinder, Neutron, Nova, etc.) exposes a REST endpoint and the components and sub-components communicate via a message broker layer, such as RabbitMQ. The benefits of this approach are first that it allows failures to be allocated to specific components, and second that cloud infrastructure operators can scale all services in a horizontal fashion and intelligently distribute the load.

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The arrival of the digital age is changing the way organizations work and how they interact with the outside world. Highly competitive and disruption-prone markets demand businesses to think fast and act fast -- and IT capabilities are widely recognized as the key to success. Yet, the role of Enterprise IT is often associated with cost and frustration, rather than that of enabler, or perhaps even driver of innovation. Can this image be repaired?

When people talk about Enterprise IT what they often refer to is the Operations side of the IT world. And, to be even more specific it is the Technical Operations (TechOps, sometimes also referred to as Operations Engineering) part of the team that is under significant pressure to meet the ever-increasing demands of their business while being itself disrupted by the advances of technology. Service Operations, the other part of the corporate IT team -- usually associated with the Service Desk, but at least in theory covering a lot more -- is battling its own maturity challenges in the service economy.

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IT professionals are becoming an increasingly common presence outside of the traditional IT departments, new research has found.

According to CompTIA, it seems executives are calling for specialized skills, faster reflexes and more teamwork in their workers.

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Job positions that require skills in so-called "microservices" have seen a huge boost to increase by 133 percent in the last year.

According to a new report by Rackspace, this has made such positions among the most popular IT jobs on the market today.

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There is no doubt that public clouds like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google constitute rapidly growing and attractive alternatives to traditional on premise IT operations leading many organizations to conclude that they are "not IT companies" and/or "do not want to be in the IT business."

But few companies can escape the mandate to be present online, to conduct business online, and to deal with partners, suppliers, customers, and employees online. This mandate is causing companies to embark upon initiatives to "digitize" their businesses, which means to implement these crucial business functions in software.

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Enterprise communications are set to see a major overhaul within the next five years, according to a new report. Research from Fuze found that almost six in ten (59 percent) of companies have prioritized adopting new communication technology.

Based on a survey of 900 IT leaders, the report says 64 percent are looking to cut the number of communications apps to remove complexity. Two thirds (64 percent) are also looking to move their communications completely into the cloud. Sixty-three percent will have adopted a unified communications system by 2022, and 62 percent think video will replace voice-based comms by 2022.

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The road to becoming an IT professional is often thought to be a lifelong process, however, new research claims that this is not the case.

A new report from Spiceworks, entitled "A Portrait of IT Workers," says 41 pe cent of IT pros in the UK consider themselves "accidental" and that they ended up in their career via a "non-traditional" route.

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The IT industry is booming and everyone, from small organizations to massive Fortune 500 companies, is hiring right now. For IT pros, this is good news.

However, the truth is that most don’t know how to get hired by the companies they want to work for.

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We don't have to wait any longer to see the effects of Brexit on the tech job market in the country -- Hired.co.uk already has some data for us. And it's exactly as you might have imagined it.

According to the hiring site's report, the number of foreign tech workers in the UK is now down 50 percent. The rate at which foreign workers are now accepting UK-based roles has also dropped by a fifth (20 percent). But it’s not just the employees that are declining offers, businesses are also sending out less.

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Automate or perish. That is essentially what a new study by BMC Software, an IT solutions for the digital enterprise company, is saying. It polled IT decision makers for its new report and came to the conclusion that almost three quarters (73 percent) agree with the above-mentioned statement.

ITDMs believe that those organizations which fail to adapt automation within the next five years will cease to exist in 10. More than nine in ten (92 percent) said that demands for new sources of revenue, unique competitive advantage, and operational excellence are creating "enormous pressure to compete digitally" to earn the trust of employees, partners and, finally, customers.

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