Information Technology

It’s not easy to ignore the hype surrounding the cloud. Businesses all over the world are coming to realize that cloud computing offers numerous advantages, from more productivity and capabilities to lower costs. These benefits have lead to the growth of a wide variety of cloud providers, each offering its own unique take on services and products. The result has been a groundswell of support as organizations of all types look to the cloud for solutions to common and complex business problems.

Contrary to popular belief, the big data process isn’t a funnel. For whatever reason, we’ve come to think the more information we dump in from the top, the more actionable, quality insights will come out through the bottom. That just isn’t the case. We’re creating more data every day than any other point in history, but not all of this information is a golden opportunity. Most of it’s just noise. The real key to success is being able to navigate through the clutter and determine what pieces of information are pertinent.  

The psychological theory of the Paradox of Choice states that the presence of too many options causes cognitive distress and often results in less than optimal decisions being made. Given the pure number of tools, platforms, features and functionality that comprise today’s Digital Marketing landscape, the selection process can be overwhelming. So what should you really care about when assessing tools and making technology selections? Let’s look at why your search should start, and end, with tools that boast a decoupled architecture.

Experience Management

It sound simple, give your employees the opportunity to bring their own devices to work. The company can perhaps be less aggressive in their cyclical replacements of hardware and your employee is happy because they don't have to lug around two devices, theirs and yours. I absolutely like the concept of Bring Your Own Device. But implementing BYOD and benefiting from BYOD isn't so easy. As an IT manager, it scares me that the employee's device may have control over the company's software and device. As an employee, it scares me even more that company's software could control my device and have access to my personal data. At the end of the day, this only goes well if you have established a good BYOD policy for your business.

There are many pro’s and con’s when actioning a Bring Your Own Device to work policy and these effect both employee and employer. When counting the cost of BYOD it is important to recognize both financial and psychological factors:

Productivity vs Stress

When BYOD systems are put in place it has been clearly demonstrated that productivity is increased. According to Cisco, the simple implementation of using a smartphone or tablet that is familiar to the employee leads to better productivity, saving on average 81 minutes of time performing tasks each week.

Ian Kilpatrick, chairman Wick Hill Group, specialists in secure IP infrastructure solutions, looks at five key IT security trends and solutions for 2015:

1. Rise in security breaches

The current high level of security breaches, from the largest organization down to the smallest, will continue unabated. What will also grow in 2015 will be the acceptance that security breaches are pretty well unavoidable for the majority of organizations. Companies will need to change their approach to security in order to reflect this. Security spending will continue to increase, with spending growth higher on asset security over perimeter security.

The workplace can be hectic during the month of January, especially given the fact that employees arrive back at work with their fancy new devices. New laptops, mobile devices, and smartphones are among common gifts given and received over the holidays. For companies that use a “Bring Your Own Device” system, this surge in technology changes can present some difficult challenges.

When you think of all the major technical trends discussed lately (e.g. cloud computing or mobile,) you may have noticed another one beginning to throw itself into the conversation, virtualization. While virtualization has been around for more than a decade, we're only just beginning to unleash its true potential.

With news of security breaches happening at major corporations all over the world, it’s easy for business leaders to start focusing all of their attention on outside threats. Hackers seem to be everywhere these days, so a strategy that heightens network security against cyber attacks is usually a good idea. If your business has adopted bring your own device (BYOD) policies, however, all that preparation for avoiding outside risks may be misdirected.

London ranked 26 out of 33 in index of European capital cities broadband speeds

9 December 2014, London, UK: London’s digital economy is failing to be supported with fit-for-task broadband infrastructure, according to an index published today, ranking European capital cities by broadband speeds.

The index was developed to give insight into London’s historical and current broadband speeds and investigate how it compared to other European capital cities. Hyperoptic, the UK’s leading Fibre-to-the-Home provider, compiled the index, sourcing the data from Ookla’s speedtest.net, the global standard in Internet connection testing.