If 1-800-Flowers.com CIO <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/343802/Stephen_Bozzo_senior_vice_president_and_CIO_1800Flowers.com">Steve Bozzo</a> had his druthers, even the online retailer's mailroom clerks would have access to business intelligence.
Among the 84,000 open tech positions currently listed on Dice.com, there are roughly 1,400 job listings that say a master's of business administration is preferred, and they come from a variety of industries, says Tom Silver, senior vice president, North America, at the tech jobs site.
If you ask IT execs why they're hesitant about moving to the public cloud, security comes up at the top of the list. But security vendors are responding to these concerns with a raft of new products. Here are four interesting cloud security tools that we tested.
How's this for a challenge? The CEO dies suddenly and you're tabbed to take his place -- on the heels of your network infrastructure company entering into a major new strategic partnership and in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Oh, did I mention your competition includes some companies named <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/cisco/">Cisco</a> Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks, among others? That's life for Chris Crowell, CEO of Enterasys Networks, who took over in 2009 shortly after predecessor <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/092408-fabiaschi-dies.html">Mike Fabiaschi's untimely death</a>. Since then, Crowell has refreshed Enterasys' product line, pushed for the development of innovative new <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/060811-enterasys-isaac.html">social media-based</a> <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/network-management.html">network management</a> capabilities that promise to make life easier for network admins, and achieved record sales in the last financial quarter. In this latest installment of the <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/keywords/ceo-interviews.html">IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series</a>, Crowell spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how Enterasys is competing against networking's big dogs, explored an upcoming fabric launch expected in October and talked about the company's <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072908-siemens-enterasys.html?hpg1=bn%25252520">partnership with Siemens Enterprise Communications</a>. He also explained why "Isaac" is so important and where Enterasys plans to take the technology.
Feeling like your business intelligence effort is a bit sluggish and out of touch with what the business needs? Maybe it's time to try agile BI, a rapid development methodology that solicits end-user input early and often, and delivers BI systems fast.
Cloud storage seems like such a no-brainer for backups and disaster recovery, it's a wonder that more businesses aren't taking advantage of it. If you're concerned about cloud outages, cloud storage costs, data loss, data security, or the ability to push your nightly backup sets up the Internet straw, Riverbed Technology's Whitewater appliance may make cloud storage easier to embrace.
The Netgear ReadyNAS series of network attached storage units serve as a prime example of how the industry has changed over the years. They were originally a product of Infrant Technologies, a veteran of mainframe disk subsystems that poured decades of serious storage experience into the small drive system for SMBs. Nearly four years into Infrant's acquisition by Netgear in May 2007, the ReadyNAS line now stretches from SOHO to enterprise NAS.
Many small businesses have relied on Microsoft's Small Business Server (SBS) family of servers to get their feet wet with their first server and network. Introduced back in 1997 as BackOffice Small Business Server 4.0, SBS has matured into a tightly integrated platform of the most important services a small company needs: file and printer functions, email, calendar and contact sharing, and document collaboration. While it is limited in the maximum number of concurrent user connections, SBS doesn't shirk core services, providing enterprise-grade features at a price point almost every small business can afford.
There's an area of the NAS landscape where the lines between consumer and corporate use are blurred. While high-end NAS arrays cost plenty of money, they also provide essential features like redundant power supplies and superior performance. At the lower end are the truly consumer-grade devices that might seem like they'll work in a corporate environment but fall short of meeting the essentials critical to infrastructures. They are, however, very cheap.
The business benefits of a cloud computing model have been well stated. You cut costs by switching to more flexible on-demand IT resources that can better handle the ebb and flow technology needs at a company.
Microsoft's flagship backup and archiving software, Data Protection Manager, has come a long way since we first tested it in 2005.
After over 10 years of active participation in the honeypot community, I was surprised not to have heard of MicroSolved's HoneyPoint Security Server before I started planning this roundup. HoneyPoint runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and offers some useful features -- such as "defensive fuzzing" and the ability to track alert status -- that KFSensor and Honeyd don't. But HoneyPoint is neither as easy and complete as KFSensor, nor as flexible and scalable as Honeyd.
If you've recently begun to update your résumé, you've probably encountered conflicting opinions on how to write a résumé for a CIO position so as to attract an executive recruiter's attention. For example, you may have heard or read that your résumé needs to tell a story about your work experience, and thus needs to include specific details about your professional accomplishments. Yet you've probably also read that a résumé, by nature, should be brief, and that the goal of your résumé is to give the executive recruiter just enough information to make him want to call you to find out more. Such contradictory advice can curse even the most effective communicators with writer's block when they have to re-write their résumés.
So you've created an iPhone enterprise app, and your sales folks and executives are thrilled. They want more functionality, say, tapping into location-based services or-gulp!-using the camera to capture product images. A few people are requesting the app run on their brand new Droids. Now the CEO wants the app on his soon-to-be-available BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
Perhaps your wireless carrier released a new software update for your BlackBerry smartphone, but your favorite applications just won't work on the new build. Or maybe you were feeling daring and decided to install a leaked "beta" BlackBerry OS to check out some new features, but it drastically degraded your handheld's performance.