Delivering an IT service to a business is difficult. It needs to support and enable the success of the business. In my experience, every IT department wants to provide the best service it possibly can. Let’s face it, we all do – if the business is a success everyone wins.

There are a huge number of moving parts to the IT infrastructure of a company, with a great many complex interactions. These typically happen between teams that manage specific sections of this infrastructure. Unfortunately,...

Are you open to new ideas, and given a compelling choice are you really prepared to change? That’s what informed CEOs are asking their C-suite leadership team.

The context of those questions is about determining who is most qualified to guide the organisation’s digital transformation journey. It’s also about setting expectations for C-level executives to partner.

IT and business leaders must acknowledge that they’ve likely reached a significant turning point. Business technology...

Lurking in the background of any IT manager’s nightmares is the spectre of shadow IT. Shadow IT can be described as hardware or software used in an enterprise that is not supported by the enterprise. The negativity of the term is justified because it implies that employees are using technology without the knowledge or approval of the IT department – a recipe for disaster.

The risks of shadow IT are well-known and have the potential to damage a business’s ability to function effectively. Even...

Box and Microsoft lead the way on vision and execution in Gartner’s recently released Magic Quadrant for content collaboration platforms – but it doesn’t quite tell the full story.

If you are unfamiliar with the name of the report, there is a good reason. The Quadrant was previously known as EFSS (enterprise file sync and share), with the analyst firm changing the definitions this year to reflect a shift in the market.

As Box puts it, content collaboration platforms ‘go beyond EFSS to...

Today’s fast-paced work environment finds employees striving to improve efficiency, productivity and communication. In an attempt to excel at work, they often use applications, services, data storage and sharing beyond IT’s approval. This practice — known as shadow IT — is having an obvious impact on technical support teams by undercutting sound governance and reducing operational efficiencies. According to

Cloud robotics is set to generate new value chains, technologies, architectures and business models, according to a new paper.

The report, put together by GTI, a body focusing on the TD-LTE (time division long term evolution) ecosystem alongside SoftBank, CloudMinds, China Mobile, Huawei and Skymind, argues the advantages of cloud robots, with the same common network, are threefold; information sharing, offloaded computation, and collaboration.

One of the examples the report looks at – or gives an image of...

IT workers face a serious challenge when it comes to file sharing. In one corner is corporate governance which seeks to protect businesses and prevent cyber-attacks. In the opposite corner are end users who want to work more efficiently – collaboratively – by sharing or saving files.

The best way of ending this conflict is to find middle ground. In attempting this resolution, enterprises need to find the right balance between IT security and governance on one side and the needs of employees on the other. To...

Cloud storage provider Box has announced the launch of Box Drive, a desktop application which aims to match the power of the cloud with the more familiar feel of traditional network drives.

The goal of the product is to ‘make it easier to adopt the cloud without changing the way people work’. “The future of work is working in the cloud,” the company notes. “Box Drive makes moving to the cloud incredibly easy. Users are freed from the constraints of their local hard drives because...

‘Unified communications’. A simple phrase to describe an aspirational outcome. But for most businesses today, the idea of a single solution for communications throughout the organisation is exactly that: an aspiration.

That’s not to criticise, of course, but it’s an understandable result of the way that different communications technologies have evolved and been introduced to organisations: from strategically planned solutions aligned to a company’s overall IT infrastructure, to...

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We constantly hear about programs such as Race for the Cure, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, The Ice Bucket Challenge, and other fundraising or awareness initiatives for diseases.  However, hearing a disease has been cured almost never happens. With billions of dollars being used to research diseases around the world, many people started looking for reasons as to why more progress hasn’t been made. Researchers re-examined their processes and realised two things. First,...

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Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced two new products focusing on cross-platform storage and collaboration, as well as revealing it has become the fastest software as a service (SaaS) vendor to hit the $1 billion revenue run rate threshold.

According to various reports, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the financial milestone at an event in San Francisco earlier this week. Fastest of course does not mean first; the company has a way to go before it catches up with the likes...

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The way in which DevOps is being tackled by different organisations can be defined in one of two ways. You’ve either got the ‘teenage sex’ approach – everyone’s talking about it but hardly anybody’s doing it – or you’ve got the Eric Morecambe method; ‘all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order.’

In other words, there is no one unified guide; companies and departments are...

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Even though the majority of respondents in a survey released by Oracle say collaboration between business and IT is key for an enterprise cloud model to succeed, a plethora of barriers remain.

The research, which polled 1,200 technology decision makers in midsize and large companies across three continents, found more than a quarter (27%) of respondents said managing shadow IT is a ‘significant’ barrier to adopting an integrated approach to the cloud, while almost half (43%)...

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Slack has been ranked as the number one private company leading cloud computing in 2016, according to research conducted by Forbes.

The messaging app provider, which was noted by Netskope in recent research to be among the top 20 cloud apps used by businesses for the first time, finished ahead of cloud storage firm Dropbox (#2) and electronic signature provider DocuSign (#3)....

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Collab9, a Cisco-powered unified communications provider based in Gardena, California, has announced it has become the first unified comms as a service (UCaaS) provider to be authorised by FedRAMP, the government security standard.

The move is aimed at federal, state, and local agencies for their unified collaboration needs, with Collab9 offering messaging, both for voicemail and email, mobility, and integration with Microsoft Office 365, Skype for Business and...

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Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced a new customer win in the form of sports brand The Adidas Group.

The announcement, which appeared on the firm’s official blog this morning, explains how Adidas is utilising Dropbox Enterprise, which was launched in November last year, to have ‘fast, reliable access to…data’ and ‘seamless collaboration’ for its employees.

“At...

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Enterprise cloud software provider Box is working with cloud communications provider RingCentral to unify its global enterprise communications in order to save up to $900,000 per year.

Box will deploy RingCentral Office, the comms vendor’s flagship UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platform, as well as planning to utilise RingCentral products which integrate with both Google for Work and Salesforce. RingCentral notes that the openness of its platform, as well as its...

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You’ve put a lot of effort into building your cloud business and you want to make sure you stay ahead of the competition. You’ve kept a close eye on market trends and you’ve seen there are many ways to measure business performance. But, how much do you really know about Key Performance Indicators and how they affect your business? Did you know that the right KPIs can make the difference between continued success and a slow decline?

You’re probably...

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More research has arrived detailing the importance of embracing shadow IT as opposed to cordoning it off, this time from NTT Communications, which has found almost four in five (78%) of organisations have employees using cloud services without the knowledge of IT.

The research, which polled 500 IT and business decision makers across the EU, found that more than half (57%) believe shadow IT practices are happening across at least half of the departments in their organisation, while...

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Office 365 continues to be the most popular cloud app used by enterprises ahead of Salesforce and Box, while Slack has jumped in workplace popularity, according to the latest figures from identity management provider Okta.

Increasingly, enterprises are using both Office 365 and Google Apps, the fourth most popular service overall. Traditionally, Okta argues, industries such as finance, biotech and construction are more likely to be Microsoft houses compared to more digital businesses which prefer...