Mike Vizard

They say it’s truly an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, that someone is likely to be a cloud service provider. With roughly five days of warning, the east coast is preparing for what is being described as “Frankenstorm,” a rare late season hurricane that is expected […]

Making Sense of Big Data in the Real Business World While most of the Big Data conversation these days focuses on new applications, such as mining machine data or data generated by social networks, it turns out that from a business perspective, most of the actual investment in Big Data is squarely focused on getting […]

Now that Microsoft has formally launched Windows 8, the fun begins from an enterprise IT perspective. While it’s unlikely there will be a wholesale migration to Windows 8, there is no doubt that systems running Windows 8 or its Windows RT sibling will find their way into the enterprise, and, like it or not, that’s […]

For all the talk about Big Data, one of the fundamental challenges facing IT organizations is actually making that data accessible to end users. What’s basically required is a new generation of analytics applications that are specifically designed to visualize trends hidden in massive amounts of data. At the Strata + Hadoop World conference this […]

While Big Data seems to be all the rage these days, in reality most organizations are a long way from making Big Data a mainstream part of their IT environment. A global survey of 1,115 business and IT executives conducted by The Said Business School at the University of Oxford on behalf of IBM finds […]

Managing data even before it got “Big” was never all that easy. Now that IT organizations are not only starting to realize how much data there really is, thanks to technologies such as Hadoop that make it affordable to store it all, data management is rapidly becoming a crisis. The challenge is going to be […]

In a perfect world, the cloud would be just another layer of enterprise computing that IT organizations could easily control. That’s the thinking behind a new offering from Novell that allows IT organizations to control where any given file is stored at any given time. According to Bill Calero, Novell product manager for data management […]

While a lot of progress has been made in making Big Data easier to manage, the fact remains that in order for Big Data projects to really transform the way a business operates, that business will need the services of a data scientist. The only real question is whether the business should, assuming it can […]

The real challenge with security is that as the IT environment becomes more complex, it becomes more difficult to secure it. Most organizations recognize that they need to take a more proactive approach to managing security, but the complexity of the IT environments makes developing a more sophisticated security strategy cost-prohibitive. In an ideal world, […]

When it comes to the allocation of hardware resources, one thing that usually gets the short shrift is the help desk. After all, it’s not like the help desk is tied to an application that a business unit invested in; it’s a general service that tends to get funded out of an IT budget that, […]

When it comes to the development of mobile computing applications, it really is about maximizing the productivity of the developer. With so many platforms to now support, developers need a framework that allows them to easily switch between environments without compromising the way that application runs in any particular environment. According to Telerik Executive Vice […]

Most of the conversation surrounding cloud computing has been dominated by the desire to cut costs. Instead of treating IT as a capital expense, IT is increasingly being managed as an operational expense in the cloud. Many organizations have discovered that it is a lot simpler to launch new applications in the cloud than it […]