Never before has the role of the CIO been so imperative to the success of the enterprise. Turbulent market conditions over the past few years have undoubtedly transformed the scope of business, with detrimental effects on SMBs and global giants alike.
In one of the most difficult economic situations in 50 years, IT departments around the world are reevaluating their platform strategies and looking for innovative ways to create competitive advantages. IT projects have always been judged by three financial criteria: initial capital expense, ongoing operating costs, and time to value. In 2010, as we plan for a gradual recovery, IT projects will continue to be evaluated rigorously by these criteria. IT departments have already seen business expectations increase over the last 10 years as budgets decreased. Doing "more with less" is not new to CIOs or IT, which have been squeezing efficiencies from existing systems and teams since the last economic downturn. The difference is that, after years of optimizing existing resources, 2009 brings unprecedented financial limitations that demand new solutions. Cloud computing is transforming the way IT departments build and deploy custom applications during lean times. By offering a fundamentally faster, less risky, and more cost-effective alternative to on-premises application development, cloud computing will forever change the economics of information technology.
Co-sourcing leverages on the partnership model, in which a company sets out to engage a vendor to hire resources for its dedicated use. It ensures that the control on a company's key processes and knowledge assets is retained with the firm without relinquishing control of processes to an outside vendor.
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, focuses on improving corporate customer experience and expanding the range of support services to business customers. As a part of this strategy, Kaspersky Lab established Global Emergency Response Team (GERT), the new division to offer consulting services for current and future corporate users worldwide. The goal of GERT is to help business customers to identify and mitigate security policy mistakes and malware-related outbreaks, perform forensic analysis and provide security policy consulting.
In 2010 the total number of recorded IT security incidents exceeded 1.5 billion. Attacks of various kinds accounted for over 30% of those incidents. Today, malicious code spreads via websites, social networks, email as well as vulnerabilities in applications, and cybercriminals target companies of all sizes in order to steal money and confidential information (Kaspersky Security Bulletin. Malware Evolution 2010).
The larger a company becomes, the more difficult it is to keep track of what exactly each employee is doing during working hours. Without appropriate controls, you may find that people start uploading photos to Facebook, playing Farmville, or watching movies from a flash drive when they should be working. Of course, this impacts on employee performance and, as a result, business development. Moreover, this lack of discipline can also lead to IT security issues, e.g. targeted and zero-day attacks launched via vulnerable applications, infections from malicious websites, confidential data leaks from unknown USB flash drives etc.
During the course of three days in late 2009, cybercriminals acquired the banking credentials, username and password, for Hillary Machinery, Inc., located in Plano, Texas, and conducted more than 45 separate transactions to over 40 diff erent payees. The result was a loss of $801,495. While Hillary Machinery was able to recover some of their lost money, $250,000, plus attorney fees and court costs, was outstanding, along with an ongoing lawsuit between the company and its bank. According to Troy Owen, owner of the company, "While the loss didn't cause us to go out of business, it certainly put off the business growth plans that we had."
Business executives are challenging their IT staffs to convert data centers from cost centers into producers of business value. Data centers can make a significant impact to the bottom line by enabling the business to respond more quickly to market demands. This paper demonstrates, through a series of examples, how data center infrastructure management software tools can simplify operational processes, cut costs, and speed up information delivery.
Communications Then and Now – 2010 marks the dawn of a new era in communications. While the past decade has seen innovations that have opened up global communication and commerce, it was just a warm up for what will come in the next decade. Networks will evolve to support an insatiable appetite for constant communication, information, and entertainment. And, over the next 10 years, everyone and everything will be connected—everywhere.
In one of the most difficult economic situations in 50 years, IT departments around the world are reevaluating their platform strategies and looking for innovative ways to create competitive advantages. IT projects have always been judged by three financial criteria: initial capital expense, ongoing operating costs, and time to value. In 2010, as we plan for a gradual recovery, IT projects will continue to be evaluated rigorously by these criteria.
With each passing day IT, becomes a more integral element of operational efficiency, product innovation, customer service, and other avenues of competitive differentiation. Naturally it follows that unplanned application outages or even just slow performance have a direct effect on the business in terms of higher costs, lower revenues or lost customers. With the complexity of applications today, problems like these are bound to happen. Does the IT organization understand business priorities well enough to focus on the most important ones? Does it have the right support processes and effective tools to minimize the business impact of application-related incidents? There are many areas of IT to evaluate for changes to better support the needs of the business, but we need a good place to start. Improving the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) of incidents is a tangible way for the IT organization to increase its value to the business. What follows is a recommended set of practices covering people, processes, and tools that will enable an IT organization to prioritize incidents based on business impact and more quickly restore services to operation.
Source: www.ciosummit.asia
