Stories by Thor Olavsrud

The holidays are nearly here and 2012 is on the way out. It's time to reflect on some of the most popular security stories and tips of the year as we prepare for 2013.

'Tis the season for prognostications. Staring into the big data crystal ball one thing seems clear: We can expect to see the continuing growth of the Internet; wireless networks; social media; and the number of mobile devices, sensors and other digital technology that is flooding us with new data every minute of every day.

Sales of mobile devices are expected to surge this holiday season. Whether your firm has embraced bring-your-own-device (BYOD) or elected to look the other way that means many of your employees can be expected to upgrade their tablets and smartphones. But what about their old devices? Will they be decommissioned properly?

A study by Juniper Networks and the Economist Business Unit finds that IT is succeeding at improving the efficiency of business processes, but most IT departments are failing to take the next step in becoming a strategic partner for business.

'Tis the season for online scams. Here are 12 of the most dangerous scams you're likely to see this holiday season.

Aiming to help IT administrators manage security for physical and virtual desktops from a single pane of glass, Symantec joins the ranks of enterprise security providers optimizing their endpoint security offerings for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

This past Cyber Monday was the biggest online spending day in history. In the aftermath, two trends are clear: mobile shopping is a growing trend and retailers are doing a good job prepping for traffic spikes but third-party service providers are not.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner in the U.S., and so are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two of the busiest shopping days of the year. It's also a peak period for malware, phishing and spam. Since employees are increasingly using their own devices to access corporate resources (or simply using a work PC to sneak in a little shopping on Cyber Monday), it's a good idea to share some best practices with your users to help protect them and your network from threats.

IT organizations continue to struggle with the details when it comes to enabling BYOD for applications beyond email, and a new study finds that while employees are eager to access corporate resources from their mobile devices, they have little tolerance for controls IT wants to impose.

On election night, as the rest of us again wondered what was going wrong in Florida, the CIO of Florida's Department of State had a different perspective: He was bearing witness to the successful culmination of 17 months of hard work.

Studies show that employees are engaging in rogue use of the cloud, even when IT organizations say they have clear formal cloud policies and penalties for violation of the policies.

The promise of big data is enormous, but it can also become an albatross around your neck if you don't make security of both your data and your infrastructure a key part of your big data project from the beginning. Here are some steps you can take to avoid big data pitfalls.

Hurricane Sandy left devastation in its wake, first pounding the Caribbean and then pummeling the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the U.S. People and businesses are now struggling to get back on their feet. As a CIO or IT leader, you need to ask yourself: Will your organization be prepared for the next disaster?

The amount of data in the world doubles every 18 months. Here's a look at eight real-world big data deployments in a variety of industries.

Enterprises are beginning to leverage mobility to transform their business processes rather than simply providing always-on access to email and calendaring. Healthcare, financial services and retail are at the forefront of using mobile to transform their businesses, and Windows 8 may accelerate the process.