IT Services: Opinions

I'm a qualified accountant. I even sometimes read the Accountants Journal - there, I've said it!

Looking through the holidays into 2010 there are four clear priorities for risk management that cut across all tiers with financial institutions. Over the last year the pendulum has swung from the exotic to the pragmatic, from chaos to order within financial services. The four priorities for risk in 2010 can be derived from the word D.A.T.A.(data, analysis, transparency, accuracy).

It looks like an old friend of mine, Sun Microsystems, may be going the way of the dinosaur. Sort of, anyway. Or maybe just transformed. We all have to wait and see.

No two IT shops conduct business in the same way: CIOs report to various executives, project approval processes are all over the board, and personnel policies are vastly different. Unlike other professions, IT doesn't seem to have a common set of basic principles across companies.

The term "cloudbursting" was coined by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr to describe the use of cloud computing to deal with overflow requests, such as those that occur during seasonal rushes to online retail sites.

Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.

Although it may seem like your computing life is all e-mail and browsing, computer users still create files, documents, spreadsheets, boring presentations and all manner of other stored information. Which brings me to the question: Where do you store your data? And are you ready to store your data online in a service hosted by a third party provider?

The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.

Motivated to help the environment as well as their businesses, SMBs are increasingly embracing green practices. One of their primary approaches: employing green technology, according to recently released survey results from KRC Research.

While I applaud any company's attempt to be environmentally responsible and implement "green" projects, I remain skeptical of long-term commitments to green initiatives that don't decrease costs, fatten the bottom line, or polish the organization's image.