What's Next In IT

Cloud computing, mobility and big data analytics are the key pillars of the IT industry’s next dominant platform, expected to account for 80% of all IT spending growth through the end of the decade. The promise of these technologies is to bring insight, agility and responsiveness to businesses. However, to live up to this potential, the underlying technology infrastructure must also be capable of delivering unprecedented insight, agility and responsiveness. In this special sponsored section, we look at the ways in which the critical technologies of cloud computing, mobility and big data are coming together to transform business, exploring how IT decision makers can assess, understand and deploy the right solutions for their organizations.

Big Data

The potential of big data has certainly captured the attention of the masses. The New York Times has described the “Age of Big Data,” and McKinsey has called big data “the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.” IT professionals charged with bringing the benefits of big data to their organizations are less concerned with the hype and more concerned with the reality of how to put big data to use in their organizations. For IT, big data is about creating an infrastructure built for speed, high availability, dense virtualization, simple scalability, agility and other characteristics that are defining the next-generation data center. In this section, we leave the hype to others as we focus on the reality of building real-world big data solutions.  Continue Reading

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is growing rapidly, and by 2016 will represent the bulk of new IT spending, according to leading research firms. The availability of hybrid cloud models is giving IT decision makers many more options to drive down IT costs, increase agility, deliver elastic scalability and enable service-centric IT. These new models also present new challenges for the IT organization. For example: How does an organization deliver on the speed required for new cloud models? How does the IT team ensure data protection when data crosses between different cloud environments? How do you enable service-centric models and charge appropriately for usage? The list of questions can seem as endless as the cloud itself. We will answer many of them in this section. Continue Reading

Mobility in the Enterprise

Mobility is transforming our businesses, and our lives. For many individuals, the mobile device is becoming the primary – and, in some cases, only – form of communication. Businesses that embrace mobility hold a distinct competitive advantage. But what does embracing mobility actually mean? On the one hand, it means empowering your organization with mobile capabilities, from your management teams to workers, to the machines connected to other machines. On the other hand, it means ensuring that your applications and services and fully mobile enabled and designed to embrace the specific features and functions of mobile devices. In this section, we look at the challenges facing IT decision makers in enabling all aspects of the mobile enterprise. Continue Reading

SMB Tablets

With Intel-based Windows tablets, small and midsize businesses can be much more proactive in taking control of tablet usage among workers, driving cost savings, enhancing innovation, increasing productivity and improving security. <br><br> Intel-based Windows tablets not only make it easier for IT organizations to manage and deploy tablets, but they also provide powerful and cost-effective mobile solutions for every type of worker—including those who benefit from using tablets in conjunction with PCs, and those using tablets for purpose-specific functions. In this section, we examine how and why Windows tablets are changing the paradigm in how SMBs can support and deploy tablet computers for their workers. Continue Reading