InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Big iron is under relentless pressure to prove its value in an x86 world. We look at five ways to bring it into the distributed data center.

IBM has long touted big iron as the platform of choice for massive transactions, batch processing and critical financial services, and with good reason. But can the mainframe hold its ground in the face of cloud, distributed computing and relentless budget pressure? Yes, if IT can leverage killer apps and hold the line on costs.

Don't let data, WAN and integration challenges knock automated failover off course.

Automation and orchestration are all the rage among IT architects these days. One of the best places to apply the technology is to disaster recovery. Most organizations still want a "go" button, but after that, timely recovery requires automation. Here's what you need to know to make it happen.

Our InformationWeek 2013 Virtualization Management Survey shows automated service delivery is the future -- unless you want to find yourself managing cloud providers.

The next steps in going virtual up and down the stack, from network to desktop: Automation and finally taking hypervisor security ­seriously. The two go together, because if you’re going to trust ­production systems to run without human intervention — a must for delivering IT services on demand — you’d better be darn sure ­attackers can’t gain control. 

Most IT teams have synthetic monitoring of their sites down. Now it's time to extend that vigilance to client-server applications.

Most IT teams have synthetic monitoring of their websites down. Now it’s time to extend that vigilance to client-server applications.

When you build an app for Android, BlackBerry, iOS or Windows, it reflects your company. Yet few IT shops have the in-house skills to make this a smooth process. There are five main strategies to get custom apps from the drawing board into the hands of customers and employees; we’ll discuss what development skill sets to look for, questions to ask and pitfalls to avoid, and how to compare costs.

Automation isn't easy, but without it, you'll never get self-service or self-healing, or realize full cost benefits.