In Depth

In Depth

• Case study: Is e-health a cure for European healthcare?

  E-health – the use of technology in healthcare – has so far failed to fulfil its potential. But that could be about to change  Continue Reading

• Collaboration: Building Yammer into a SharePoint world

  With market penetration of well over 100 million seats, SharePoint is a strategic investment for many organisations. Where does Yammer fit?  Continue Reading

• Flash storage gains a foothold in Turkey

  Turkish businesses see the benefits of flash storage for high performance apps, but some think the big suppliers dominate  Continue Reading

• Cloudera v Hortonworks: Hadoop to complement or replace data warehouse?

  As the market for enterprise Hadoop heats up, the battle lines between two suppliers - Cloudera and Hortonworks - become more clearly defined  Continue Reading

• Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust secures government backing for £6m IT modernisation programme

  CIO interview: Joanna Smith, CIO. Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust  Continue Reading

• Erasure coding vs Raid as a data protection method

  Erasure coding is mooted as a potential successor to Raid and backup software  Continue Reading

• Write-through, write-around, write-back: cache explained

  Cache is vital for application deployment, but which one to choose – write-through, write-around or write-back cache? We examine the options  Continue Reading

• The pros and cons of WAN optimisation

  For many businesses, WAN optimisation can provide significant performance improvements, but projects can prove to be costly and complex.  Continue Reading

• Collaborative conversation in the post-email enterprise

  Email is no longer an effective means of collaboration and some companies have even banned it - but what is the alternative?  Continue Reading

• University of Huddersfield revamps Wi-Fi with Meru Networks

  University ditches Cisco and adopts a new Wi-Fi network to support more voice and video applications over mobile devices  Continue Reading

• Get datacentre cooling under control

  Reviewing existing datacentre cooling designs and exploring new ones for efficiency may not be as hard as you think. Here's how  Continue Reading

• Supplier profile: Workday

  Computer Weekly analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the rapidly growing cloud HR and finance software company, Workday  Continue Reading

• Businesses are beginning to adopt context-based security

  It is more than 10 years since context-aware security was proposed. We look at how the technology has evolved.  Continue Reading

• Nordics lead initiative to share European patient records data

  The Nordic countries have played a leading role in epSOS, an EU project to establish infrastructure for patient records data exchanges  Continue Reading

• Undercover economist Tim Harford decries data visualisation dazzle

  The Undercover Economist author says 200 years of statistical science should not be cast aside for the blandishments of ‘big data’ propagandists  Continue Reading

• Protect your business by encrypting the network

  Enabling encryption across different points of the network can provide significant protection from the most advanced of attackers  Continue Reading

• Can telcos tap into the datacentre business?

  Telcos have always run datacentres, but now many are hoping to give commercial providers a run for their money  Continue Reading

• VMware versus Hyper-V storage comparison

  VMware versus Hyper-V storage: How do the two leading hypervisors compare when it comes to deploying storage and in terms of their key storage features and functionality?  Continue Reading

• CW500: Bring your own IT department?

  Bring, your and own (BYO) are the first three words of an acronym being discussed in IT as the next phase of the consumerisation trend  Continue Reading

• Bywaters waste management uses BI to improve customers’ recycling

  Bywaters, a recycling and waste management company, has improved productivity by 4% using Pentaho data integration and business intelligence software  Continue Reading

• Would the real flash storage successor please stand up?

  Flash storage will hit a wall in development terms by around the end of the decade. But which successor is best placed to replace it: Memristor, MRAM or phase-change memory?  Continue Reading

• Messier-Bugatti-Dowty gears up BI with QlikView toolbox

  Messier-Bugatti-Dowty, an aviation industry specialist in aircraft landing and braking systems, is using QlikView to support business process improvement  Continue Reading

• Check the state of network security and stay safe

  Many organisations are planning to increase their investment in proactive security controls and threat intelligence measures.  Continue Reading

• BAFTA nominates cloud to boost web performance

  Arts organisation moves to Rackspace to handle awards-season peaks and help meet the ever-growing demand for rich media content  Continue Reading

• Essential tips for your first 100 days as an IT leader

  IT leadership coach and martial arts teacher James Knight offers six tips on the critical first 100 days in an IT leadership role  Continue Reading

• Accenture’s UK analytics head sees clients reorganising for digital

  Ray Eitel-Porter is managing director of analytics for Accenture UK & Ireland. He talks to Computer Weekly about how data management has assumed a more elevated strategic role as companies go digital  Continue Reading

• Spring cleaning your datacentre

  Although domestic spring cleaning seems to have faded somewhat, perhaps we should consider whether a datacentre spring clean is a good idea  Continue Reading

• IT security analytics: the before, during and after

  Effective IT security calls for intelligence ahead of, during and following an attack.  Continue Reading

• Flash hits the motherboard with memory channel storage

  Memory channel storage puts flash storage into the DIMM slots on servers, offering unprecedented speed of access to hot data. Who’s making it and what are the pros and cons?  Continue Reading

• The business case for next-generation hotspots

  Next-generation hotspot (NGH) is an emerging technology set to redefine how our devices interact with wireless networks  Continue Reading

• How to manage the tension between agility and discipline in IT

  Agility requires a new level of discipline that is redefining IT project management  Continue Reading

• Can the mainframe remain relevant in the cloud and mobile era?

  IBM mainframes run more than 1.1m transactions per second, yet the mainframe has remained largely unfashionable. We investigate  Continue Reading

• The CIO supplier relationship: How to get the best from your suppliers

  Professor Merlin Stone offers some insights to help CIOs manage their suppliers while avoiding potential pitfalls  Continue Reading

• Blackrock: measuring risk in a datacentre

  How the investment giant handles the risk of managing $13 trillion of other people’s money  Continue Reading

• Understanding the real value of IT and proving it to the business

  At a time when costs are being continually squeezed, there is more pressure than ever to demonstrate the business value of technology  Continue Reading

• Using NoSQL databases to gain competitive advantage

  NoSQL is attracting growing interest from businesses - we examine three case studies: Amadeus, i2O and Temetra  Continue Reading

• Target data breach: Why UK business needs to pay attention

  Late last year, US retailer Target was hit by one of the biggest data breaches in the industry's history. So what happened and why is it relevant to UK businesses?  Continue Reading

• Where next for the new EU data protection regulation?

  For many people in business, the proposed new EU data protection regulation has become obscured by a storm of controversy  Continue Reading

• Mölnlycke Health Care and Axfood demonstrate divergent ERP strategies

  Two Swedish firms, Mölnlycke Health Care and Axfood, demonstrate divergent ERP strategies - one standardised, one customised  Continue Reading

• Where is all the innovation in the PC industry?

  PC manufacturers need to innovate to reverse the continuing drop in hardware sales  Continue Reading

• Opportunities and threats to cloud storage adoption in Turkey

  Turkish organisations are taking up cloud storage and other services, but adoption is tempered by concerns over privacy, latency, lack of internet provision and regulatory issues  Continue Reading

• The private sector answer to exploiting public sector data

  The big IT suppliers emphasise the importance of transparent governance and maximising the benefits of open government data.  Continue Reading

• The digital CIO: How digital technology will change the way organisations work

  If you are an IT leader, digital technology is likely to be a pivotal factor in your career over the next five years  Continue Reading

• CW500 Security Club: The next threat landscape - what to expect

  The next threat landscape -- what to expect: IT security experts discuss the challenges facing organisations today  Continue Reading

• The digital CIO: How digital technology will change the role of IT leaders

  We have now reached the point where corporate IT as we know it will succeed or fail  Continue Reading

• Managing Wi-Fi and mobility

  Wi-Fi is a critical system, but it’s also the point where BYOD meets your network. New tools promise to simplify things, but can they?  Continue Reading

• Using public sector open data to benefit local communities

  Tech City’s Flood Hack shows how open data can help communities - an aspect attracting interest in Leeds council and other UK cities.  Continue Reading

• How to make the most of your annual appraisal

  Industry experts share their tips on how to make the dreaded annual appraisal successful and productive  Continue Reading

• Hacktivism: good or evil?

  IT lawyer Dai Davis looks at the rise of hacktivism and its impact on business and international politics  Continue Reading

• Mobile VPNs: Battered but not broken

  With weaknesses exposed in mobile VPNs in recent months, we examine if they are safe for companies to deploy  Continue Reading

• Big data storage in the Benelux

  Organisation in the Benelux countries are turning to big data analytics, but big data storage options can vary significantly between the lab and production environments  Continue Reading

• How open data can mitigate the floods of the future

  Live, open government data – collated on third-party platforms – can change peoples’ lives profoundly in a wide variety of ways.  Continue Reading

• Is privacy undermining trade in digital services?

  BSA report highlights dangers facing European Union (EU) nations as the European Commission (EC) revises its Data Protection Regulation  Continue Reading

• Converged stacks: What they are and the benefits they bring

  We survey the converged stacks market: Servers, storage and networking in pre-configured product bundles for specific virtualisation and application use cases.  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage options in Scandinavia

  It has never been faster or cheaper to store data in the cloud and Scandinavian businesses have taken up cloud storage with gusto  Continue Reading

• How to select the best hybrid cloud provider for your firm

  A successful shift towards a hybrid cloud corporate environment requires a new approach to trust throughout the organisation.  Continue Reading

• No more email? Why companies are turning to collaboration technology

  Collaboration technologies are helping companies improve their employees' work-life balance  Continue Reading

• Hadoop 2 opens new vistas beyond current UK data management practice

  Hadoop 2 enables a greater range of data-crunching tasks, beyond Hadoop’s previous scope of batch processing, directly within the stack itself  Continue Reading

• Let’s not forget the computing curriculum’s bigger picture: Computational thinking

  Computing curriculum is about computational thinking and problem solving, not just coding/programming say education experts  Continue Reading

• A guide to APM for the network manager

  Has application performance management become a much needed discipline for the network manager? We examine the issues for IT departments  Continue Reading

• Uppsala Ambulance, Dagens Nyheter favour Swedish-born QlikView for BI

  Sweden has played a big part in data visualisation tools. QlikTech, NComVA and Tibco Spotfire have roots there. Uppsala Ambulance and the Dagens Nyheter newspaper are QlikView users  Continue Reading

• Human factors in the datacentre

  Whether to ensure business continuity or maximise returns, everyone from the finance director to the facilities manager needs further datacentre education  Continue Reading

• No IPv6 explosion, but a ticking bomb

  IPv6 could be a ticking security time bomb in Belgium if businesses fail to respond to the fact that adoption is gaining momentum fast  Continue Reading

• Advanced data visualisation tools transcend traditional bean counting

  Advanced data visualisation tools take Muddy Boots and Volvo beyond conventional business intelligence  Continue Reading

• The UK’s problem with power

  Datacentre power buyers say Britain’s deregulated energy market is as complex as trading in derivatives  Continue Reading

• If the Year of Code has got it wrong, how should we teach kids to code?

  Experts share their views on the Year of Code campaign and the best way to teach children to code  Continue Reading

• How NSA spying disclosures influence security strategies

  How have whistleblower Edward Snowden’s exposés affected the ways organisations deal with internal and external security threats?  Continue Reading

• Future job of the senior infrastructure manager

  Hybrid cloud architectures will need IT departments to move from core server skills to managing the capacity to let developers code  Continue Reading

• Flash storage: What it is and where to deploy it

  A guide to the key decisions in flash storage: MLC vs SLC, all-flash vs hybrid, whether to add flash to an existing SAN, flash as a tier vs cache, and more  Continue Reading

• Troubleshooting datacentre management issues

  Gaining better control of the datacentre has to be a high priority to ensure high levels of performance and availability  Continue Reading

• What does 2014 hold for HR technology?

  A look at the key battlegrounds in HR technology in 2014  Continue Reading

• Create a mobile policy employees can trust

  With Gartner predicting a fifth of all enterprise BYOD projects would fail by 2016, we look at how businesses can embrace mobility successfully  Continue Reading

• The future of the tablet computer in the enterprise

  Tablets come in all manner of profiles and on a variety of platforms – but which will shape up as the workplace favourite of the future?  Continue Reading

• CW500: Is the CIO still as important in 2014?

  Computer Weekly's CW500 Club kicked off this year's meetings with a look at the challenges CIOs will face in 2014  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and cloud ubiquitous in midrange backup software

  Midrange backup software supports virtual environments and the cloud as a target, but like enterprise products support for mobile devices is largely absent  Continue Reading

• Digital reality: When IT meets the business

  The implications of companies going digital is that technology becomes a core competency to drive the business forward. How will IT adapt?  Continue Reading

• Do you need tablets in your workplace?

  Consumers have shown a massive appetite for tablets, but IT departments have not presented the same level of eagerness  Continue Reading

• The hidden threats facing your unsupported XP devices

  Exorbitant custom support deal fees may not be the highest costs organisations running Windows XP will face after support ends in April.  Continue Reading

• Enterprise backup embraces VMs and cloud, but lags on mobile

  We survey enterprise backup products and find the top five tightly meshed with hypervisors and integrated with cloud, but lacking mobile device support  Continue Reading

• Storage startup survey: Funding tops $1.2bn in 2013

  IPOs are in the air and storage startups are magnets for investors, with $1.2bn of funding flung at flash arrays, hybrid flash, converged storage, cloud and object storage  Continue Reading

• Why computing curriculum fails to light academics’ flame of inspiration

  Roundtable reveals disappointment over computing curriculum and calls for more focus on importance of informal learning  Continue Reading

• How to navigate the IT supplier jungle

  Being a CIO is interesting and satisfying, but there is a relentless pressure on them to improve  Continue Reading

• Big banks' legacy IT systems could kill them

  A banking T-Rex is dying and nimble competitors will pick at its carcass. Is it too late for the retail bank giants to overhaul their IT and survive?  Continue Reading

• Cloudera CTO: enterprise ‘data hub’ is smartphone to data warehouse SLR

  Amr Awadallah is the chief technology officer and a co-founder at Hadoop distributor Cloudera. Here he briefs Computer Weekly on how the supplier is advocating the concept of an ‘enterprise data hub’  Continue Reading

• Failure to migrate from Windows XP could torpedo your business

  As the end of Windows XP support looms, what are the options available to CIOs using applications that run on nothing else?  Continue Reading

• VDI storage basics and persistent versus non-persistent desktops

  A look at the fundamentals of VDI storage and how to specify storage for likely workloads and persistent versus non-persistent desktops.  Continue Reading

• Get ready for the datacentre storm

  With a wave of innovations rolling ever faster towards the datacentre, analysts say 2014 is the year organisations must plot their course through choppy waters  Continue Reading

• SAP execs predict more innovation as economic outlook improves in 2014

  SAP executives are looking to 2014 as a year to establish the supplier’s innovation agenda of in-memory database technology, cloud and mobile  Continue Reading

• Windows XP support will end this year – are you prepared?

  April 2014 marks the point when Microsoft will finally end technical support for Windows XP. What should you do if you can't migrate by then?  Continue Reading

• Minerals firm Imerys upgrades IFS ERP as economy lifts

  Imerys has 30 different ERP systems around the globe. A plan to move to a single instance of ERP, thrown off course by recession, was achieved in 2012; other business benefits have accrued  Continue Reading

• Top 10 information management stories of 2013

  Top 10 information management stories of 2013. Putting analytics to work emerged as the most popular theme, with Tesco, McLaren, and Telefonica Ireland among those leading the data analytics pack  Continue Reading

• Putting software security in the hands of the buyer

  For far too long, businesses have been at the mercy of software suppliers for ensuring that critical applications are secure  Continue Reading

• Next generation hotspots: The future of Wi-Fi?

  A new solution for connecting to wireless hotspots could change the user experience forever. But as Steve Evans points out, there will need to be more collaboration in the telecoms and networking industries before we start to reap the benefits.  Continue Reading

• Internet of things set to unleash deluge of disruption

  Universal connectivity will yield insights in fields as diverse as aviation and hospitality, but will challenge conventional practices.  Continue Reading

• Realising the benefits of a totally connected world

  The internet of things will transform everyday life, from managing airports’ passenger flow to heating buildings and caring for the elderly.  Continue Reading

• BlackBerry Enterprise Server – Should you stay or should you go?

  John Chen’s recent open letter to BlackBerry customers holds many promises for the future  Continue Reading

• Internet of things will drive forward lifestyle innovations

  Internet-connected devices have been predicted to become popular for many years, but have been held back by many issues  Continue Reading

• The pros and cons of putting Wi-Fi into high street stores

  As the high street fights the tide of online shopping, retailers have adopted the ‘digital store’ model – but there are drawbacks for some  Continue Reading

• SMB 3.0 brings enterprise-class storage to Hyper-V deployments

  SMB 3.0 is Microsoft’s replacement for the “chatty” CIFS file access storage protocol that offers enterprise-class storage to Hyper-V deployments  Continue Reading

• SME cloud - blanket security or security blanket?

  Cloud network and security systems could be the answer for SMEs looking for enterprise-level services on a small-business budget  Continue Reading