PWC’s 2013 Top Ten Technology Trends for Business

January 28, 2013

In today’s highly competitive global environment, companies are looking for opportunities to minimize costs, increase efficiencies and gain competitive advantage. Business leaders across all industries are focused on IT as a way to accomplish these goals. The use of emerging, disruptive technologies such as context-aware mobile apps and enterprise social networking along with the proliferation of public and private cloud is commanding organizations to assess and manage the impact these technologies may have on their business. Leaders are required to understand, prioritize and apply these new technologies within the context of their overall business goals.

PwC recently completed the 5th Annual Digital IQ Survey. The survey is designed to assess how well companies understand the value of technology and weave IT into the fabric of their organization. For the first time, the Digital IQ survey was conducted globally and included participation from more than 1,100 respondents. Detailed below are the Top 10 Technology Trends for Business that emerged from the survey. Click on any trend to get a brief point of view from PwC’s leaders in these areas.

Read about the 2013 Top 10 Technology Trends for Business please click the link.

Simulation & Scenario Modeling
Gamification
Digital Delivery of Products & Services
Private Cloud
Big Data Mining & Analysis

Leave a Comment » | Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

Ernst & Young’s IT Security Survey Highlights

October 31, 2012

Many CIOs and chief information security officers are struggling to adapt security practices to a changing environment that includes cloud computing, social media and tablets , according to a survey of 1,850 such IT pros.

The Ernst & Young 2012 Global Information Security Survey published today found cloud computing to be one of the main drivers of business model innovation and IT service delivery, with 59% of respondents saying they use or plan to use cloud services. But 38% admitted they have not taken any measures to mitigate risks.

Use of social media in business is prevalent, but 38% of the CIOs and CISOs surveyed say they don’t have a coordinated approach to address risks, such as defending the organization’s brand or determining how employees use work time to engage in social media.

The Ernst & Young survey indicated that 31% of respondents said they saw an increase in the number of security incidents compared to the previous year.

SECURITY: DDoS attacks against banks raise question: is this cyberwar?

Another technology game-changer, use of mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, is compelling “policy adjustments,” according to over half of these IT professionals who hail from the financial industry, insurance, high-tech, government, and various industrial, retail and utility sectors from all around the world.

More than one-third say that company-owned mobile devices have been adopted but use of personal devices is not allowed for business. The survey found that 36% have acquired mobile-device management software and 31% now have a “governance process to manage the use of mobile applications.” Encryption plays a central role for 40% of CIOs and CISOs surveyed.

In terms of budgets for the next 12 months, 30% said they expect information security funding increasing from 5% to 15%, while 9% of respondents anticipate a budget increase of 25% or more. Security budgets are expected to remain the same for 44%. About a third said they spend at least $1 million per year on information security.

Just over half said the area of highest priority for them is business continuity, including management and disaster recovery. But one surprise, the report states, is that the second-highest priority is “a fundamental redesign of their information security program.”

This appears to reflect on the security gaps that these CIOs and CISOs acknowledge exist in their organizations adopting cloud computing and tablet adoption. 55% said they plan to spend more to secure new technologies, while 63% acknowledged that they felt they had “no formal architecture framework in place, nor are they necessarily planning on using one.” The Ernst & Young study indicated these IT professionals may feel they have “a patchwork of non-integrated, complex and fragile defenses” that creates gaps in their security.

Those that did have a defined security architecture pointed to the Open Group Architecture Framework, the ANSI/IEEE 1471:ISO/IEC 42010 standards, and other references such as defense department frameworks defined in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

A major complaint from 43% of respondents is that they can’t find the right people with the right skills and training to handle information security jobs. And when asked what threats or vulnerabilities have most increased risk over the last 12 months, the answer at the top of the list was “careless or unaware employees,” followed by “cyber attacks to steal financial information.”

Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG publication and website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: MessmerE. E-mail: emessmer@nww.com.
Read more:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/network-wifi/3407599/ernst-youngs-it-security-survey-shows-struggle-control-cloud-computing-social-media-mobile-risks/#ixzz2Arf70Dov

Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

5 Step Guide to Reducing the #1 Data Security Risk

September 20, 2012

Last week I had the opportunity to attend an event on 3rd party data security and risk. Throughout the event, I talked with folks from many different industries and in many different roles. I spoke with auditors, general IT managers, storage administrators, CIOs, and of course, security professionals.

What is the Top Priority for Reducing Risk?

Everyone shared one common concern:

How can we reduce risk and protect our clients’ data?

One executive was asked, “Which area would you consider your number one priority for reducing risk?” His decisive answer was that, of all the areas of risk his massive enterprise faces, priority number one is unstructured data security.

This shocked me a bit at first, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. According to Gartner, unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of all organizational data, and it’s growing approximately 50% every year.

Even data that is normally stored in databases or apps is regularly being dumped into spreadsheets for analysis, PowerPoint slides for presentations, PDFs for reading, and email for sharing between teams.

When you think about it this way, it becomes very easy to see why unstructured data is the highest risk area for many IT departments.

Compliance and Regulations

In addition to the intrinsic motivation for securing unstructured data, external regulations such as SOX, HIPPA, and PCI are forcing organizations to put processes in place to ensure the protection of 3rd party data. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have an efficient and affordable way to put these controls in place and prove that they’re being enforced.

An auditor I spoke with mentioned how difficult and time-consuming it is to perform attestations, and how, for most companies, entitlement reviews are manual and painful processes that don’t really accomplish the end goal of protecting data.

Where Do We Begin? A 5 Step Guide

If you are trying to start a risk management project in your organization, here are some actionable ideas on what to focus on:

1. Identify your most valuable assets

All 3rd Party data is valuable. Our clients trust us to manage and protect all of it. But it is critical to pick a starting point. To do this, talk with data owners and key stakeholders to find out which types of data are the most sensitive or most valuable.

2. Locate your most valuable assets

You can’t protect sensitive data if you don’t know where it resides. Is it in the CEO’s mailbox? Is it propagated across all your Windows file servers and NAS devices? In order to do this at scale, you’ll need a data classification framework that can scan files on your network for sensitive content indicators.

3. Identify where sensitive data is overexposed

 

You probably found a ton of high value data in step #2. Now you have to figure out who can access that data and prioritize data sets that are wide-open to everyone.

Many of us, when we move to a new home, we tend to change the locks. Why? Because we don’t know who has had a key in the past – the owners, realtors, past owners, builders? This represents a big risk for us and our families.

The same principle applies with 3rd party data. We need to identify who can access it, and what type of access they have. Then we can identify which data is overexposed, and where permissions need to be tightened up and assigned owners.

4. Monitor Data Access

As my good friend @rsobers says: Context is king. Part of reducing risk is monitoring who is actually accessing the data and what are they doing with it. If we’re constantly monitoring access, we can identify patterns in user behavior and alert when suspicious activity occurs. And if we store the audit data intelligently, we can use it for forensics, help desk, and stale data identification.

5. Use Automation

Are you ready to implement steps 1-4? Do you have an army of IT staff with nothing planned for the next 50 years? Luckily, that won’t be needed. You can use automation to identify the most critical data, understand who can access it, and monitor what they’re actually doing with.

By leveraging automation to provide your security intelligence dashboard, you can spot problems and then use automation (again) to simulate changes and automatically execute the remediation.

There you have it! Go forth and protect your customers’ data! Oh, and by the way, there’s a 6th step that doesn’t require IT involvement at all. Ask us about it.

Are you curious to see how your company measures up? Get a free data protection assessment. We’ll scan your infrastructure for holes and help you plug them with automated data protection and management software from Varonis.

1 Comment | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

In Search Of The Mobile Enterprise

September 20, 2012

The new mobile business model — with anytime, anywhere transactions and a blurring of lines between corporate and individual — can make your IT organization feel like it has lost control. For all the good that comes with mobilizing your workforce, there are challenges: maintaining security and compliance, managing multiple device platforms and addressing complex mobile requirements.

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting a new smartphone or tablet device.

Last week, it was the iPhone 5 and the new Kindle Fire HD. Tomorrow, HTC’s expected to introduce some new mobile products.

And Apple still has yet to introduce the Apple “mini” iPad, currently expected in October.

The move to mobile computing raises some intriguing questions about the nature of work. What is it? Where does it take place?

As someone who’s worked their entire career at IBM, I can certainly attest to the idea that here, increasingly, work is not a place you go but what you do.

I’ve spent nearly nine full years working from my home, and several of those years, spent at least a week a month living (and working) in airplanes.

As the IBM “Services for the Mobile Enterprise” team recently observed, the new workplace is now undeniably a mobile enterprise.

CIOs On Mobile: 66% Plan To Increase Mobile Investments in 2012

Which makes it no big surprise that 66 percent of CIOs plan to increase investments in mobile services in the next year.

And of course, there’s the “BYOD” movement to contend with (“Bring Your Own Device”), with employees expecting whatever device they have to fit into their corporate environment.

This new mobile business model, with anytime, anywhere transactions and a blurring of lines between corporations and individuals, can send IT folks into a conniption fit.

Despite all the goodness — for employees, management, and most importantly, the bottom line — there are challenges that accompany this mobilization of the workforce.

Issues such as maintaining security and compliance.  Managing multiple device platforms.  Addressing complex mobile requirements.

IBM recently released this interactive infographic that has some interesting statistics I thought worthwhile sharing here.

To start, 35 percent of the world’s total workforce is expected to be mobile by 2013.

Here in the U.S., up to 72.2 percent of workers are already plugged in remotely.

This year, some 43 billion mobile applications are expected to be downloaded.

And yet on average, mobile workers spend only a total of 28 minutes a day on technology distractions…there’s too much work to do, otherwise!

The Mobile Upside: 240 Extra Hours Worked Per Worker Per Year

And here’s the upside bonus for you managers: Such mobile workers work an average of 240 extra hours per year.

But as the infographic observes, with those benefits come expectations.

This new mobile generation of workers demands flexibility. Today’s employees expect to use their own devices and applications at work to access information and social networks at will. They even value this flexibility more than a higher-paying salary (Can you say “Mobile enables work/life balance?”).

Cisco’s Connected World Technology Report in 2011 found that 66 percent of workers said they would take a job with less pay and more flexibility in device usage, access to social media, and mobility than a higher-paying job without such flexibility.

Mobile Presents New Challenges

So, as businesses work to embrace these new productive mobile work habits, they must also face the requisite challenges asscoated with the growing number of devices, networks, and applications. Enterprises need a solution that intertwines cross-platform compatibility, security, cost management, compliance, and the inevitable complexity.

By way of example, 21 percent of mobile workers say they have experienced a security issue related to their smartphone (lost, stolen, hacked, virus) in the last year alone.

Fifty-four percent of enterprises rate security and authentication as one of the two top concerns for their mobile environments.

Seventeen percent say they need to meet compliance/regulatory requirements in mobile environments.

And yet 45 percent of IT departments say they aren’t prepared policy- and technology-wise to handle this more borderless, mobile workforce.

Bridging Your Mobile Gap

To overcome those challenges, enterprises need an experienced partner with a strategy capable of spanning the distance between mobile advances and existing infrastructures.

Those early adopters are leaping ahead: They’re already experiencing 20 percent cost savings and productivity improvements.

And 75 percent of CIOs say mobility solutions are a top priority of theirs for 2012.

On the mobile front, IBM workers are walking their own mobile talk, connecting to 10 different networks located around the world, and with 100K+ of them connecting using their own handheld devices (using at least five supported device platforms).

IBM’s own app store, Whirlwind, offers over 500 applications and was recognized by CIO Magazine with the “CIO 100 Top Innovation Award.”

All of that experience IBM has had with its own mobile enablement has informed and shaped the company’s customer-facing mobile initiatives, both through product development and through the introduction of its mobile services offerings.

IBM can help your staff develop the right strategy and governance and deliver a wide range of mobile enterprise services to create a more productive, connected workplace.

1 Comment | Application Hosting, Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

CIOs Need to Make Information Management a Real Priority

August 9, 2012

 

Fantastic article from Ventana Reseacrh

Our recent benchmark research on information management uncovered some startling facts about the level of technology adoption necessary for efficient information-centric organizations. Chief information officers (CIO) are responsible for the availability of information to their businesses in a consistent and timely basis, but in most organizations, information management is seen as just a delegated set of tasks and is not the CIO’s top priority. This unfortunate outlook can have a lasting impact on the efficiency and profitability of a business.

Our business analytics benchmark of more than 2,800 organizations found that two-thirds spend the majority of their time on data-related tasks rather than analytic ones. Analysts spend too much time using tools such as Microsoft Excel to copy and paste the data they need to communicate to meet information requests. Lack of availability and lack of consistency in a company’s information has a severe negative impact on its business analytics.

Our benchmark research on information management found some opportunities for businesses to gain ground. Almost two-thirds (63%) have confidence in their organizations, saying they have the right team to improve information availability, but at the same time they admit that data spread across too many applications and systems (67%) and multiple versions of the truth (64%) are barriers to information management. Getting the right accurate information still plagues most organizations, and most do not have a plan to improve this situation. While organizations have complained for decades about lack of access or accuracy of the data, today the impact of these issues is better known. Only 19 percent of organizations indicate business and IT work well together, while 56 percent say they work fairly well together and are focused on improving. Most organizations still operate in silos and talk about working together more than they actually do.

Our research found a lack of adoption of key initiatives to help manage information assets more effectively. Even key initiatives that are completed, from master data management (MDM) (10%) to data virtualization, data quality, data integration and data governance (16%) are employed by just a fraction of organizations that should be mastering the science of information management. We saw some potential for improvement; initiatives in data integration and data quality are in effect at 28 percent of organizations, but in other areas the number was smaller. The majority of initiatives focus on customer-centric data: The number ranges from almost three-quarters of some organizations to much less in financial, employee, product and supplier data. These data-related initiatives are critical for organizations that need to deliver information management. An organization that does not have them completed and working together is taking significant business and financial risk by running at an unacceptably low level of efficiency and accuracy.

Information management in a distributed enterprise environment is no easy task when you need a common information warehouse. We found that too many incompatible tools (57%) and many unsynchronized metadata stores (42%) were the top two obstacles to having a common information warehouse.

IT management puts itself in a difficult situation when it fails to invest in resources and technology to improve information asset management. While projects are being initiated and planned, in many cases data availability is not being improved fast enough to meet business needs. We found the largest obstacles were insufficient staffing (68%), inadequate budget (63%) and insufficient training and skills (59%), which means that many organizations are ignoring this issue or operating with less than skilled resources that are already overstretched.

This has to change, and our benchmark found a lot of potential places for improvement. CIOs need to create a strategic plan for information management to ensure they are focused on the factors necessary to equip their information architecture to meet business needs. Unfortunately, even as organizations begin to see the importance of information management, we have the current fixation on handling big data, which takes away resources that could be devoted to getting information management efforts in order. The reality is that big data does not operate efficiently without an efficient information management environment. Just adding another data source that is not well-integrated inevitably increases costs and uses more resources.

Your next step should be to make information management a strategic top agenda item for your CIO. Other priorities, including business analytics, business applications and big data, will not reach their full potential without top-notch information management that integrates business and IT efforts.

 

Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

Gartner predicts that by 2017 the Chief Marketing Officer will control the technology spend

July 18, 2012

The Wall Street Journal just posted this article in advance of IBM’s 2Q earnings announcement tomorrow, leading with this sentence: “Technology companies have found a new customer—the marketing department.”

The story goes on to highlight the fact that marketing organizations are increasingly taking the lead in technology acquisition, and that “Companies are de-emphasising traditional productivity tools like PCs and standard business software in favor of advanced programs that help them boost revenue, for example by tracking customers across channels and better targeting offers and advertising.”

In the Journal article, author Spencer Ante points out that Gartner recently predicted by 2017, the chief marketing officer will control more technology spending than the company CIO. Gartner estimates that around a third of marketing department expense budgets is devoted to purchases such as systems to manage customer relationships, predict customer behavior, and run online storefronts, and that the global spend on marketing software already rose from $20 billion to $25 billion over the past year.

Anyway interesting video below:

Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

The Jury Is In – CEO Choose Big Data Over Social Media

June 1, 2012

A new studyby McKinsey & Company reveals that less risky and potentially more beneficial realm of Big Data software is a higher priority today than social media integration. The study consisted of 1,500 surveyed CEOs, CFOs and CIOs between April 3 and April 12, 2012.

Almost 50% of respondents stated that they are currently using Big Data to “understand their customers better”, whereas 32% stated they are using social media for “interaction and promotion purposes.” The survey also found:

– 13% did not consider Big Data a priority, so far as stating it was “not on the agenda”

– Over 50% state that flexible delivery platforms are a priority for the next 1-2 business years

– 19% of respondents have deployed digital marketing practices across the enterprise

– 4% used location-based software to target customer promotions

The study also found:

– 52% believe that organizational structures not designed to take advantage of either Big Data or social media priorities

– 51% say that lack of technology infrastructure and IT systems are a significant challenge

– 43% and 31% are having difficulty in finding functional and IT talent, respectively

Big Data and social media do not have to be mutually exclusive. A number of businesses are beginning to integrate the two, using Big Data solutions to analyze business content based on their social media activity.

Thanks to
http://blog.drjerryasmith.com/2012/05/31/the-jury-is-in-ceo-choose-big-data-over-social-media/

Related articles

Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

TEDTalk Video: Information is Food

May 15, 2012

In March 2012, JP Rangaswami gave a short TEDTalk in Austin, TX, Information Is Food, about treating information similar to how we treat food.

How do we consume data? At TED@SXSWi, technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information, and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food.

With a background in economics and journalism, JP Rangaswami has been a technology innovator and chief information officer for many leading financial firms. As an advocate for open source and disruptive technologies, Rangaswami has been a leading force in the success of multiple startups, including School of Everything, Salesforce.com and Ribbit. He blogs (unmissably) at http://confusedofcalcutta.com/.

Related articles

Leave a Comment » | Managed Service Hosting, Marketing, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 753 other followers