Vendor View / Opinions

CIO spoke to Don Williams, VP Asia Pacific & Japan at Veeam about calculating the cost of downtime, automating backup and recovery, and moving disaster recovery services into the cloud.

Over the last couple of years, CIOs and their corporate IT organisations have been faced with three key challenges.

At Gilbert + Tobin, we have a problem with our email: We have far too much email, as lawyers generally need to keep almost every document that relates to the work they do, having no limit on the size of their mailboxes.

A recent series of cloud briefings sought to address the technology, legal and change management aspects of cloud. They prompted some thought-provoking discussions around the longevity and value of cloud computing.

Today’s IT departments no longer deal with just standard-issued company desktops running on the same operating systems. They deal with a slew of devices from desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets – all with different operating systems, apps and security risks.

In today’s inter-connected world of transactions and interactions, data has become a key factor in the production process. The ability to take advantage of this factor is what makes a smart organisation different from one that is not so smart.

When looking to make a strategic cloud decision, organisations can generally follow one of two ideologies: closed or open.

Reaching the state where mobile technology covers any application, any device, anywhere for every user is no mean feat.

Governments and enterprises can use business intelligence (BI) and data analytics to achieve real competitive advantage in uncertain economic times when budgets are being squeezed, according to attendees at CIO’s roundtable “Creating an intelligent information business.”

Rolling out efficient and secure mobility infrastructure across an organisation is a challenging but ultimately worthwhile exercise, particularly as users are demanding access to information anywhere and at any time from a plethora of mobile devices.

Despite an increase in natural disasters in the last few years in Australia, disaster recovery (DR)
planning is still not ranked highly on the agenda of most organisations.

Though social CRM’s a field in its infancy, it has the capacity to dramatically transform the way we engage customers, do business and understand markets. But how do you separate the substance from the hype and develop a social CRM system that’ll grow your company?

The anticipated slowdown in the resources sector is making many Australian businesses nervous about their spending. As a result, CIOs are being asked to focus on pragmatic things like reducing costs, helping to improve existing business processes, and finding the right people to run their current infrastructure. By contrast, in the US, cost cutting has already run its course and priorities of CIOs has shifted back to increasing the top line competitiveness and agility of the businesses they drive.

DDoS attacks have remained on the front page again in 2012 for a very simple reason; they continue to attack the largest and most secure networks in the world, from governments’ web properties to Wall Street.

What happens if you can’t see that your company’s data has been stolen until it turns up in someone else’s portfolio? It’s not always the highly visible events that are the catastrophe.

The national carbon price was introduced at the start of this financial year. It’s a reality, so what does a carbon price mean for your ICT infrastructure?

The Industrial Revolution transformed four key aspects of society—innovation, transportation, communication and financial markets—changing the world forever. Although it began more than 200 years ago, there are surprising some parallels between this historically transformative period and IT security. The dynamics of the threat landscape and the increasing complexity of IT environments have given rise to a new era: The ‘Industrialisation of Hacking’.

A major provider of IT solutions to large corporations recently found it was losing contracts to smaller IT companies, despite its greater range of products and services. A client survey and internal analysis revealed that its customer relations were patchy, and they were often even hostile to the needs of clients through the company’s inability to adapt its product portfolio, and provide proactive sales and service facilities.

Regardless of the uncertain global economy, the amount of data being captured and stored shows no sign of abating. In fact, it has increased exponentially since the onset of the global financial crisis. Even as business growth slackened and budgets were cut, organisations continued to capture data.

Thanks in part to encouragement from the national government, more Australians are learning about the benefits of telework — conducting business across the organisation without requiring employees to be in the same physical location by leveraging technologies old and new.