InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Used to be, IT installed a modem bank, maybe an extra login layer for employees to dial in on weekends, and called it telecommuter support. My, how times change. Today, millions of workers never set foot in traditional offices, and the ability to work from anywhere is a powerful recruiting tool. Fortunately, supporting remote employees is easier than ever given advances in networking, security and communications technology. In this Best Practices report, we'll outline 10 steps to turning the home office into a branch office.

We explore the technical issues exposed by virtualized infrastructure and look at standards, technologies and best practices that can make your network ready to support virtualization.

Deduplication at the disk and the network level can make it easier to move and store critical information in your DR environment.

SharePoint 2010 offers myriad deployment options, but if you want it on premises you'll need 64-bit hardware, OSes and databases. We look at the impact of SharePoint 2010 on IT.

Companies are reining in far-flung IT platforms and local applications, pulling servers and storage back from branch offices and small computer rooms to central data centers. Benefits abound, but centralization isn’t a panacea. We explore its most significant challenges.

The word for 2011 is “consolidation.” It’s happening now in the industry writ large, through acquisitions by all the major storage vendors. Meanwhile, IT teams areas are packing more information on fewer devices, delivering faster throughput  while using less space and power, and managing the needs of more applications with fewer people. In the coming months, smart CIOs will accelerate this trend by adopting new multipurpose arrays and converged networks.

As enterprises adopt more SaaS apps and other cloud services, users fall back on bad habits (Post-it Notes, anyone?) to keep track of a growing number of IDs and passwords. We provide guidance for managing this looming security risk. Options include do-it-yourself SSO, password vaults and cloud services built to address the problem.

Information stored in SaaS apps is subject to e-discovery requirements. We help you prepare now—before a lawsuit hits—to ensure you can meet your legal obligations for data that lives off-premises.   

Networks are the lifeblood of any data center, but effective updates aren’t just about pushing more bits around. IT must also form a symbiotic ecosystem with virtual servers and shared storage—the three legs of the virtualized, cloud-like Data Center 2.0 infrastructure. In this report we’ll also explore the latest tactics for maximizing I/O and taming cable and port sprawl.