Data retention value grows with storage needs

What's the goal of data retention? Depends on the data. Sometimes it's a second or two, so saving it is irrelevant. Other times, as with electronic health...
Hair-raising approaches to data backups

We are smack dab in the middle of hurricane season, but SMBs should be keeping an eye on well-intentioned employees in addition to the local forecast. Like the intern who was hired to perform daily data backups to tape drives and mail them to the SMB’s disaster recovery location -- an off-site...
Trade promotion management: A missing opportunity?

If you read Linda Tucci's recent story on the efforts of Tasty Baking Co. to find a workable solution for trade promotion management, you may have been struck, as I was, about why TPM can...
ITIL helps set IT service catalog expectations

I don't know about you, but to me, ITIL (or IT Infrastructure Library) is a little overwhelming. I'm only looking at using the ITIL framework as an IT service catalog tool, and I get a...
Midsized companies migrating to Windows 7 find the payback worthwhile

If the sagging economy has forced midsized companies to delay hiring more IT staff, maybe migrating to Windows 7 can move them off that dime.
In a recent
Top five free Microsoft downloads

Every once in a while I like to check out what Microsoft admins are downloading these days. I sometimes do a search on Google, but to get a feel for the work being done in Microsoft shops, I always return to the Microsoft...
The end of online anonymity, part 2

Google CEO Eric Schmidt's statement last week about the end of online anonymity recalls similar words by one of his former colleagues, Scott McNealy of Sun, more than a decade...
Agile best practices applied to business problems

In the past few years, Ross Pettit, client principal at Chicago-based ThoughtWorks Inc., has seen a shift in client requests. The agile software development consulting firm’s projects are still mainly...
Check your mobile security policies as smartphones, apps proliferate

For some firms that dole out smartphones to their employees, the mobile security policy might consist of remotely wiping the phone if it's lost or...