Assurance Management

Spending money on cyber security, we are told, has become the most important investment a company can make. It is said that companies large and small are not investing the right amount or, indeed, in the right things.

Today's technology systems must be built for resilience. They must be engineered to survive natural disasters such as storms, power outages, and water damage—as well as human error, hardware malfunctions, and software failures. In this year’s report, we examine the ability of businesses to maintain service even in the face of threats and challenges.

This paper from Atos describes the structural challenges enterprises are facing when establishing an outsourced SIaM function. Several Best Practices such as a functional blueprint, tooling considerations and partner alignment prerequisites (Commonly Shared KPIs, a SIaM Information model and the Service Catalogue) provide guidance for anyone on the SIaM journey. Finally the Outlook chapter explains the evolution of Service Integration towards Business Process Agility and links this capability to underlying technical capabilities such as Service Brokerage, Cloud Orchestration and Cloud Messaging. The Conclusions chapter lists a set of key take-away.

Are you heading for a Cloud thunderstorm? Having a QA and testing framework while selecting and implementing a cloud service can help you avoid a lightning strike

Slides from Cloud Expo 2015 keynote presentations. Richard Munro CTO – vCloud Air EMEA

Outsourcing elements of your IT infrastructure to an external hosting provider necessarily demands a different approach to governance than with traditional dedicated environments. This paper maps out some high-level recommendations to common governance standards to ease their successful implementation in cloud environments

Inside this paper you will find an introduction to what the Cloud is about – and why you need to take it seriously, along with my four most recent columns that seek to address how the Board, together with the CIO, should give practical substance to their paranoid optimism!

“Shadow IT” presents significant threats to your information security and availability that can impact your customers, and in turn affect your revenue. In some cases, customers may leave if you have a sustained outage or loss of client data.

The predictions that many industry pundits have been making about the rise of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) are coming to fruition. The surprise is that it is happening at a much-accelerated rate in businesses of all sizes, around the world.

The idea cloud can’t be used by regulated industries doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, there are many ways in which the technology can be deployed…

We discuss cloud security concerns and why businesses needn’t worry so much with Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks.

The Databarracks annual Data Health Check surveys hundreds of IT professionals across 19 different fields to capture a snapshot of the way businesses use and think about IT. Here are the highlights from 2014.

What should your first steps be when formulating a security policy for cloud use? Davey Winder has been talking to the experts about this very subject. Read on to find out more…

Set of slides from the Cloud Expo 2014 exhibitions keynote presentations. Antonio Piraino, CTO ScienceLogic. Member, Cloud Industry Forum

Businesses are beginning to make the most of their data, but they to need to ensure security issues are sorted out first...

Penetration testing is a customer-sanctioned intrusion of a network or computing infrastructure by a specialist 3rd party.

Is cloud the nirvana of IT deployment models? Will everything make the transition to the cloud? Are we facing the terminal demise of on-premise IT? This comprehensive e-book from CIF and CloudPro examines a broad section of topics related to the adoption of cloud in the enterprise. Advice, insight and guidance to help you make tomorrow’s tech decisions, today.

The results of this survey show that interest in the use of SaaS applications among organisations in Germany and the UK is increasing; with flexibility, access by mobile devices and always-on availability being the primary drivers. However, security is still seen as the greatest inhibitor, including the need to protect data from being accessed inappropriately. Identity and access management technologies play a key role in authenticating users according to the rights that they have been granted. Today, there are relatively new breeds of identity management services that extend identity and access management capabilities to externally provisioned applications as well as catering to the needs of both mobile and external users, such as customer and business partners. Such services provide an efficient means of assuaging some of the prime security concerns that organisations have in subscribing to SaaS services.

For law firms and corporate legal departments, the dynamics of a cloud delivery approach can be especially attractive—making it possible to increase staff productivity, deliver better client service, and improve business agility while reducing expense.

A survey by IDG Research Services reveals that organizations face confusion in researching cloud options, forcing them to adjust goals and search for more flexible and open cloud solutions that can help them prevent vendor lock-in.

Cloud-based applications and services, and software-as-a-service applications in particular, are coming into widespread use by organisations of all sizes. Such applications are used to process and store sensitive information making it imperative that user access rights are tightly controlled to ensure that information is secure from loss or theft and remains private. This paper discusses recent developments in identity and access management technologies that aim to extend such controls to services provided from external sources.

Practical solutions for the digital age of Global Communications and Mass data exchange.

Industry surveys consistently show that security is the number one concern when it comes to cloud adoption. In our related, previous report, "Secure your data - protect your business" we discussed best practice recommendations arising from interviews with a number of organisations and how they treat their data. In this follow up report, we answer key questions that people are asking us about cloud adoption and data management.

The research polled 450 senior IT and business decision makers in enterprises, small-to medium businesses (SMBs) and public sector organisations.