A new report from 451 Research applies their Cloud Price Index methodology to private clouds, in an attempt to understand how much different private cloud options really cost. The headline figures suggest that running a private cloud powered by an OpenStack distribution will cost around $0.08 per virtual machine hour, but running your own VMware, Microsoft or […]

Companies are moving applications to the cloud because they want a more flexible and dynamic computing infrastructure. Still, many organizations hesitate to migrate their most important applications to a public cloud for various reasons. First and foremost is security. Because the public cloud’s infrastructure isn’t under the enterprise’s control, some organizations can’t use it. For […]

Arms flailing in an ocean of customer data, panicky marketers need the CIO to throw them a life line. That is, they need to know what to do with the data. Before this can happen, though, the CIO must partner with the CMO to create an “insights team” and architect an “insights fabric” technology stack […]

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Schmidt, founder and CEO of JAS Global Advisors, which provides a number of business and technical consulting services pertaining to information technology. Among the services offered are incident response and forensic investigations. Schmidt has […]

IBM scientists say they have made two critical advances in an industrywide effort to build a practical quantum computer, shaving years off the time expected to have a working system. “This is critical,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s manager of theory of quantum computing. “The field has got a lot more competitive. You could say the […]

The tools available to finance departments have improved dramatically in recent years. New and old vendors alike offer more efficient delivery models, better control of risk and governance, more intuitive user interfaces, and more functionality. Cloud ERP vendors like NetSuite, Workday, Epicor, Infor, and new cloud solutions from Oracle and SAP (among others) have fundamentally […]

Ah, the nice open Internet. Sunny days, eh? Not so fast. A big theme at the RSA 2015 Conference in San Francisco last week was protection by reputation. Malware sources, known hacking domain intelligence. Evil spammers with botnet payloads. Protect yourself! If we’re to believe these organizations, civilians don’t have a chance in the first […]