IT Leadership

OPINION

Why Is It So Hard to Think Different?

I've been having an interesting week -- first, with AMD, which has returned to profitability and stopped chasing Intel's butt to do some rather interesting different things, like merging x86 and ARM technologies. Then, with IBM, which also realized that chasing Intel wasn't doing it any good. It cho...

Intel Leaps Out of the Box

CEO Brian Krzanich laid out the road map for Intel's future in his first Consumer Electronics Show keynote as CEO. Krzanich, who took over the top job last May, focused on wearable technology -- including some products designed internally -- as well as dual operating system tech and Intel's McAfee ...

What you are going to see in a few days, when Dell stockholders get to vote on Michael Dell's plan to buy back his company, is a war of perceptions -- and perhaps a revelation on the state of the U.S. investor. Both ISS and the Chancery Court have clearly come down on Michael Dell's side, arguing th...

This past week, a lesson about enterprise information security found its way to me via a somewhat unorthodox channel: specifically, an episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. In this particular episode, the upshot was that Ramsay wasn't able to help. Why not? The owners weren't able to take c...

I've been focused on and off on turnarounds since I covered IBM's from the inside out in the 1990s, so I don't know how I missed this, but EMC2's turnaround was clearly a success, and its unique resulting organizational structure is incredibly subtle. The company is actually far more similar in brea...

The Obama administration appears to be sending a message to privacy advocates that it's taking their issue seriously by creating a new position devoted to it -- and choosing a high-profile tech lawyer to occupy it. The White House reportedly is tagging Nicole Wong, Twitter's legal director for produ...

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard is taking flak from the nation's tech industry for accusing IT firms of abusing the nation's skilled migration program. The "457 visas" program is designed to facilitate the immigration of skilled overseas workers to fill voids in the labor force. Gillard, how...

It is very difficult to pull off a turnaround. This is because you typically start with a company that is unprofitable and lacking the resources to compete. You have employees who are still on the job only because they haven't been able to find another one, and you're selling products that few want ...

A pair of new reports suggest that despite repeated attempts by the Obama administration to beef up U.S. cybersecurity, the nation is not ready to handle a major attack, and government agencies lag far behind deadlines for showing security improvements. Those conclusions are reached in the Office of...

EXPERT ADVICE

5 Warning Signs of Ineffective Security

Most cars nowadays come with driver and passenger airbags. It's a great safety feature that's helped save numerous lives since installing them routinely has become the norm. But sometimes, though it is rare, airbags fail to deploy even when circumstances arise where they should. Ask yourself: How ...

It may seem like Houdini is inside the network, because the perimeter as we have known it is disappearing. Conceptually, firewalls used to sit between the public Internet and the internal network with its servers, desktops and applications. There was a clear network perimeter separating internal res...

EXPERT ADVICE

Process Maturity and the Fine Art of Control

If you're in IT and your job involves securing your organizations' infrastructure, you've probably spent a good deal of time thinking through control selection -- in other words, picking the controls that most directly help you accomplish the goal of securing your environment. And you've probably a...

Microsoft put its updated cloud offerings and business tools in the spotlight Monday for the start of its annual TechEd Conference. In the keynote address kicking off the confab, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft server and tools business, discussed Microsoft's focus on helping consumers transit...

EXPERT ADVICE

Isolated Systems Need Love Too

Information security has changed a lot over the years. Way back in the dinosaur days, life was simple. Companies set up a firewall at the border and life was good. Bad guys stayed on one side of the fancy flashing box, and our personnel lived in the pristine, attacker-free paradise on the inside. W...

EXPERT ADVICE

The Lighter Side of IT Consumerization

You've probably heard the term "consumerization of IT." Some of the network and security pros reading this probably think this is yet another meaningless industry buzzword with little or no value. However, to dismiss it as such is to potentially miss out on what is both a very powerful concept ...

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