InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Tablets do work better than laptops for some people and tasks. Tailor the device to the workload.

Do you know everywhere business documents reside? Storage pros are often tasked with aiding discovery, yet as IT increasingly relies on cloud repositories while employees substitute mobile devices for PCs, that question is getting much harder to answer. Problem is, in the event of ­litigation, courts won’t accept ‘the cloud ate my homework’ as an ­excuse. Here’s how to cope.

It's almost impossible to avoid the wall-to-wall media blitz around Surface. So we'll spare you the marketing spin and focus on what IT pros need to know about how Windows 8 changes the end user and mobile experience. Hint: There's more to it than just a radically new, tablet-optimized UI.

The native vs. browser debate is still raging, with each strategy ­garnering 74% of respondents to our 2012 Mobile Application Development Survey who plan to deploy custom applications. What's not in dispute is RIM's decline: Just 22% will develop for the BlackBerry, compared with 71% focusing on iPhones.

New scale-out, solid-state, and cloud-integrated products may be a better fit for companies than monolithic systems.

A new generation of scale-out, solid-state and cloud-enabled storage products is emerging to meet changing information needs. Here's what you need to know and four steps you can take to get started with these innovative storage architectures.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks can do serious damage. Get ready before there's a flare-up.

DDoS attacks--often organized by criminal syndicates or tech-savvy activists like Anonymous--can cost your business serious money and are nearly impossible for most organizations to repel with standard defenses. Enter mitigation services designed to prevent or undo damage. Should you buy protection?

In one corner: the iPad and rival tablets, like the new Google Nexus 7. In the other corner: laptops and ­ultrabooks. These device camps--and the vendors behind them--are fighting to be the dominant enterprise productivity tool. In some situations, tablets do work better than laptops. Some--but not all. IT teams need to tailor the device to the workload; here's how.

It's time to tackle server virtualization vulnerabilities.