In the crazy world of commerce, few businesses are as predictably unpredictable as retail apparel. In this industry, retailers need to understand their customers intimately and make available clothing that matches the fashion of the time every time. Failure to do so is not only a blow to the brand but might severely impact the [...]
Security is defined as the condition of being protected against danger or loss. In the Internet Age, information security has become just as valuable and important as is the physical aspects of safety.
Security remains top of mind among security business and technology executives. But how does this trickle down to users and their [...]
A few years ago I raised the hypothetical question: a terrorist enters your premises and threatens to blow up part of your IT infrastructure. He gives you a choice: save your servers or your storage. Which would you choose?
I wouldn
Top Business Concerns
A consistent challenge within the IT organization in 2007 is the need to keep cost down. Management is not asking IT not to spend money – but to spend it like nothing more is coming. In other words, spend where it will bring the most benefit in the shortest possible time.
So should [...]
The average Joe does not know that when he withdraws money from a local ATM machine, he is initiating a transaction that will update his profile at his bank’s main data center. Sometime later, that same transaction will be copied over to another data center to ensure that the bank adequately protects Joe’s information, which [...]
In a competitive environment, competing businesses try to outclass, outbid, outshine and outperform the each other. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the financial services sector where competition is fierce and product differentiation is virtually non-existence. Time-to-market advantage is all but useless as copycats can deliver better offerings in a matter of weeks. In [...]
Virtualization is arguably one of the most abused words in the tech industry in 2006. Virtualization is different things to different vendors depending on what is appended to it.
Server and operating system (OS) vendors like IBM, HP and VMware define it as the masking of server resources, including processor and OS, into multiple, [...]
We all have reasons for doing things in a certain way. Likewise, in business, decisions are made to achieve set targets. A check with several business managers at major enterprises in Asia reveals that containing costs remains a top priority.What is surprising is that analysts are telling business managers to get their heads out of [...]
Typical of any business in a booming environment, you expand operations, hire more people, open new offices (maybe even factories) in growth markets, and diversify product portfolio to capture a larger segment of the market. In the process, your IT infrastructure expands to cope with the expansion. All seems rosy at the time.
Then things turn [...]
