Category: Comments & opinions

CapGemini suggests financial services firms could be among the big beneficiaries of big data. If they learn to use it. Inside the Enterprise: It’s often said that financial services today are not about money, but about data. Instead of cash, most of the world’s transactions flow as bits and bytes. Vaults contain not gold, but hard drives with billions of virtual entries. Plastic cards have replaced cheques, and with Bitcoin, we’ve seen the arrival of a global, virtual currency. All this requires a vast amount of data to work. And the trail…

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Monitoring service company’s founders hail from Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, VMware Start-up Netskope comes out of stealth mode today in unveiling its security service intended to help enterprises monitor how employees are using cloud-based applications, such as Salesforce.com, while also giving IT managers the ability to block data transfers or receive alerts. The Los Altos, Calif., company says its offering enables customers that use cloud services to direct traffic originating on premises or from a remote worker’s device to Netskope’s cloud for monitoring before this traffic travels on to its…

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Mobile devices increase productivity and extend services beyond the office, but also add security concerns, particularly with BYOD. Mobile security management can help. Mobility is becoming one of the primary offerings for today’s enterprise IT departments. Simply put, untethered access to company resources is now a must have for most enterprises and their users. However, security concerns are rippling through the stacks of management, and have resulting in melding disparate technologies, such as BYOD (bring your own device) and MDM (mobile device management) into a singular concern commonly referred to…

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Digitalization of floor space in shopping centers and retail shops is progressing in leaps and bounds. Fascinating examples show what is possible today: nevertheless some retailers allow themselves to be lured into taking risky experiments because they are so enthralled with this technology. Times are tough for fashion retailers in pedestrian zones. Every third customer has fun trying on skirts, dresses and coats inside the store, then takes note of the product number and enters it into her smartphone only moments after leaving the shop to order these items online.…

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As the Heartbleed bug continues to wreak havoc across the internet, here’s our roundup of everything you need to know about it Since news of Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability broke at the start of April, web sites across the globe have taken steps to shore up their defences against it. Meanwhile, web users have found themselves on the receiving end of conflicting advice about whether they should take action and change their passwords or do nothing and wait for the internet service provider community to sort things out. In some cases,…

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Malware is everywhere. You can get infected by opening up a rigged attachment in your email, or by visiting a booby-trapped website that automatically downloads malware on to your computer. Once infected, your computer can turn into a zombie, being remotely controlled by criminals to attack other computers. Criminals may steal your personal data or use your computer for nefarious activity. While you need to take precautions to prevent getting infected in the first place, such as running an up-to-date security software, it’s also important to know how malware works and…

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Improving growth in disruptive times What does the digital economy mean to traditional companies? Digital economy for traditional enterprises mean the expansion or redesign of their existing business model and the introduction of new values, customer segments, products, services and channels to increase profit. These internal changes shall be based on the combination of a classic approach and internet capabilities. Threat and opportunity That is why the digital economy is at the same time an opportunity and a threat for traditional enterprises. The threat comes from not reacting and time and protecting the existing…

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ERP is moving to cloud: we all know this and the vendors certainly know. Hang on … no-one’s told the users Back in February I caused a bit of stir in the small pond of enterprise software industry analysts following a chin-wag with Kirill Tatarinov, Microsoft’s EVP of its Business Solutions Division. During the conversation, Tatarinov made the bold statement that: “No-one has done cloud ERP …Point me at a serious organisation that runs end-to-end ERP in the cloud.” As I wrote then, I believe Tatarinov misspoke and that much…

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The encryption code unlocked by the Heartbleed bug last week provided vital security for some of the most widely used websites on the Internet. Fortune 1000 companies rely on the open source code for their core business. But it turns out no one is paying for it. The software that got infected — and later fixed — is OpenSSL. It’s supposed to be the really safe, secure road on the Internet superhighway, where messages get encrypted and sent between users and servers. But the recent bug was like a gaping pothole. The volunteer team…

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What if Jerry Maguire had used a customer relationship management (CRM) system? Let’s hop in the time machine as we go back to that infamous Tom Cruise movie. Remember how Tom—I mean Jerry—gets fired by Bob Sugar, and then both men run to their offices to secure as many clients as possible? Jerry starts his own firm with the one and only client he could save. After many months of “help me, help you,” his business finally gets its legs. Would CRM have made a difference? As the late, great, Dicky Fox…

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