IT Services

With unemployment, hiring freezes and redundancy dominating the headlines, its not surprising that many business professionals will happily say goodbye to a recession-dominated 2009 and look forward to a more positive 2010. The IT sector, like many others, was unable to sidestep the impact of a global recession, experiencing a significant ... read more..

Information Technology has planted itself firmly at the heart of all modern businesses and has become inseparable. From the moment you wake up, until the moment you go to sleep billions of transistors, sensors, control systems, software applications and business rules shape your day. Gone are the days where a mechanic ... read more..

So long as business applications are user-friendly and do the job, users shouldnt need to care about the bits and bytes. Whether youre at the helm of your company or are a time-pressed employee trying to get your job done, the last thing you want is to be slowed down by ... read more..

As the CTO of a data protection and encryption company I hear many a tale of woe as other CTOs and CEOs confess to me the stories of how various laptops within their companies have gone astray and the destruction these lost laptops have caused in their wake. With this ... read more..

Choosing the Right Reader With a wide variety of reader technologies to choose from, its important to ensure that the technology selected properly balances risk, cost, and convenience factors. Prox technology is a viable choice, especially for sites where there are existing Prox cards in use, but contactless smart cards represent ... read more..

As the age of austerity descends upon the UK public sector, attention is turning to shared services as a means of generating efficiency savings. Many organisations in the sector are considering joining forces to deliver services in order to reduce costs and benefit from economies of scale. Major change could ... read more..

(Article taken from Management Guidelines 331 Future of the Desktop)The desktop computing marketplace is fast-paced, with an increasing variety of options for the delivery of information both within an organisation and the wider connected community. In facilitating this information, the way in which applications are installed and accessed has become ... read more..

(Article taken from Legal Guidelines 11 Shoosmiths)There is no universally accepted definition of Cloud Computing. This is perhaps what underlies so many of the misconceptions and gaps in understanding, and what causes difficulties when it comes to communicating the benefits and risks to the various tiers of a business.Regardless ... read more..

Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) to set the standardTop technology leaders have come together to develop a Code of Conduct to help provide understanding and manage users expectations of cloud suppliers.A newly formed self-regulatory body called the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), a sub-group of FAST and Investors in Software (FAST IiS), ... read more..

Ian Kilpatrick of Wick Hill Group discusses how the latest botnet threats are evolving and offers some suggestions as to how you can protect against them.Over the last year, the incidence of botnet (or zombie) attacks has been growing rapidly. Some service providers around the world have already begun to ... read more..

A new Standard and an Accreditation scheme from the National Computing CentreFirst successful IT Departments receive their ITDA awards at the NCC Annual Conference 2009.IT departments are never short of challenges: delivering upon ever-evolving business requirements; deciding when and how to adopt new technologies; managing internal and outsourced relationships; ensuring ... read more..

AccreditUKMichael Dean looks at how the Accredit UK ICT Supplier Standard underpins NCCs IT Department Accreditation.Michael Dean looks at how the Accredit UK ICT Supplier Standard underpins NCCs IT Department Accreditation.Elsewhere in this edition of ITadviser we celebrate the first organisations to be accredited to the National Computing Centres new ... read more..

There is an urgent clash of priorities facing the UK when it comes to IT infrastructure We all understand the importance of ICT in a knowledge-based economy. The need for better, bigger, more sophisticated ICT will only continue to increase as Britain strives to compete as a world leader. ICT ... read more..

Businesses today face more data security threats than ever before.The threat landscape is constantly evolving to the point that as soon as a new security measure is put in place, that measure will likely be breached or become redundant in the face of a new threat. Security aims to stay ... read more..

As technology trends advance and reliance upon IT infrastructures increases, what effect will this have on the creative industry? With information moving towards the digital domain, Jonathan Morgan, co-founder of software developer Object Matrix, looks at the demise of tape-based archiving and the natural succession of the digital workflow.There seems ... read more..

Research conducted by the National Computing Centre and Atos Consulting, the consulting arm of Atos Origin, has revealed that businesses are re-establishing growth agendas and are becoming ever more dependent on IT solutions to differentiate and remain competitive. This survey highlights that in all companies, large and small, legacy IT ... read more..

Within IT, code maintenance is an often overlooked area of misery and costs. Code maintenance is generally overlooked as the costs and potential problems associated with cleaning up old code can be huge. The industry sees their options are to leave the code as is and accept the massive code ... read more..

This is the second part of a series of white papers by Erudine that examines the issues and problems of Legacy Systems. First, this paper takes a look how legacy problems are usually confined to the components of a project that handle behaviour. Second, this paper introduces the Erudine Behaviour ... read more..

One of the most difficult challenges facing IT directors today is maintaining and upgrading legacy systems. Legacy is becoming a hot topic: research by the Gartner group show that the main concern amongst IT managers in mid-sized IT companies is integration with legacy systems.The Burden of Legacy ... read more..

The Erudine Behaviour Engine is an innovative technology for the generation and management of complex business rules. This paper examines how the unique benefits the engine can bring to projects requiring business data workflow management, and specifically Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Automation (BPA) systems.Unique Improvements to Business ... read more..

The problems and issues around requirements capture and management are well documented within the IT industry. It is the defects in the requirements definition process that very often lead to failure in the successful implementation of major IT projects. We would all contend that truly successful development can only take ... read more..

Programmes and projects are significant investments and key mechanisms by which business change is achieved. Yet many otherwise successful organisations fail to reap full value from this investment by not learning the lessons from this experience.Profiting from Experience ... read more..

Information lies at the heart of effective management. Not only are business executives accountable for the information published to the market, but effective strategic and operational decisions rely on intelligence derived from available data. Organisations need to have access to the 'right' data to improve competitiveness, grow market share, meet ... read more..

Given the significant costs and strategic value of IT, measuring its performance is at least as important as measuring the performance of any other key business function. Yet many organisations find IT performance measurement challenging, so they settle for measuring what they can - rather than what they want or ... read more..

Achieving successful alignment of IT with the business starts with reaching an understanding and agreement between business and IT about IT's role and business contribution. This will get senior management in both IT and the business, involved and accountable for IT governance, and support the board in setting direction. True ... read more..

Organisations recognise the need for risk management, and many purport to have it in place. Further investigation often reveals inconsistent and superficial processes for risk identification and management, and even inconsistent approaches to risk categorisation. Management is reassured by the belief that risk management is in place, as evidenced by ... read more..

For some companies, IT budgeting can seem like a mystical art fit only for specialist accountants; for others, it's a money pit that yields few measurable benefits. The complex issues at play include visible and invisible spend, varying views on approaches such as total cost of ownership (TCO), expected lifespan ... read more..

Increasingly, organisations are handing responsibility for significant parts of their business, including IT, to third parties, often offshore. Attracted by the potential for a known cost base and greater efficiencies, working with third party vendors also carries substantial risks. The appetite for outsourcing to third parties has not decreased, despite ... read more..

Standards for many aspects of business - IT included - have been available for many years. Fully embraced by some, ignored by others on the grounds that attaining and maintaining compliance is too onerous, while others choose a middle path of following the principles without certification or independent verification. Standards ... read more..

IT governance as a critical enabler to Transformational GovernmentThere is no doubt that the pace of business change has increased and will continue to do so. It is also true that opportunities for significant incremental business benefit are diminishing and that, increasingly, organisations are depending on technology to achieve the ... read more..