Organizations’ emerging transformation to digital business models is driving the need for greater IT agility to meet changing business strategies and requirements in a highly digitalized world. Traditional sourcing strategies that are either too centralized or not centralized enough, too customized or too industrialized, actually reduce, rather than enhance, agility.  In today’s blog post, Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner, explains how service providers need different core competencies to succeed in a digital world. Ms. Tan said: Businesses are embracing adaptive sourcing, which addresses shortcomings in existing traditional sourcing…

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Almost one in five small and medium businesses worldwide are exposed to major security risks as they are still using Windows XP after Microsoft ended support for the operating system, according to a three-month study by antivirus software provider Bitdefender. The research, conducted in countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Spain and Brazil, proved that businesses still rely on the legacy Microsoft OS despite security concerns. Millions of malware attacks target companies every month and hackers try to steal confidential data by taking advantage of the system’s…

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Here are 11 security considerations that IT administrators should weigh as they approach that decision. When planning a cloud deployment, choosing a public-cloud or private-cloud model is one of the most important decisions to be made, especially from a security perspective. IT administrators should weigh 11 considerations as they approach making that decision. How significant are cost savings among the motivations for moving to the cloud? Generally speaking, greater cost savings can be achieved by moving to a public cloud; lesser savings are achieved in a private cloud. IT decision-makers should…

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Big Data is often associated with big vendors—the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAP. But the industry is also full of up and comers and niche specialists that could make an impact on a market said to be worth more than $32 billion by 2017. Gartner has released a list of five Big Data vendors to watch, as enterprises search for technology to draw intelligence from the vast amounts of information collected daily. Analyst Svetlana Sicular posted the list June 17 with the caveat that there are “many more companies…

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Oracle reported that new license sales were flat in the last quarter, evidence that CIOs are increasingly looking to the cloud for software. Oracle also reported June 19 that profits fell 4.2 percent on higher expenses in the fiscal fourth quarter, to $3.65 billion. Lack of growth in new license sales, a key metric for software makers, is what sparked a more than 6 percent drop in share price in after hours trading. “New licenses was a major culprit for the shortfall and will be a focal point of investors…

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