Data growth remains one of the most common topics of conversation I have with organisations. Pick any research study, and it will show you that data growth is relentless—more than 40 percent per annum most argue—and that pace of growth shows no sign of stopping. The largest growth area is in unstructured data: the data that resides outside structured databases.

The rapid adoption of mobile and cloud service’s extends where information resides beyond the traditional data centre boundaries. This creates new challenges around the management and protection of an organisation’s information.

From my conversation organisations are no longer solely focused on how to tame this growth. Techniques like de-duplication, space-optimised snapshots, compression and archiving are all essential tools and commonly used to better manage this growth. Now, the conversation is turning to other related matters, such as how to get better control and leverage of...

In my previous blog I outlined the topic of IT service assurance and the five key things to consider if you are looking to transform your IT department or simply operate it more efficiently with existing assets.

In this blog I will focus on the topic of IT continuity.

With hurricane Sandy recently tearing through the North East of the United States, businesses have been reaching once again for their business continuity plans (BCP). The broad topic of business continuity management (BCM) covers all facets of how to minimise risks and ensure continual delivery of business services, IT being one of the key elements.

Given the devastation a hurricane and other natural disaster can cause shouldn’t all businesses build BCM plans to accommodate these situations? Well yes, in the ideal world businesses would minimise or remove all risks - if money was no object. However, in reality budgets are limited and there’s often a reticence to sure up defences for...

A trip of firsts - that's what it was for me. First time for Gartner Symposium, first time to Orlando, first show where I led the mobile discussions and first Gartner show at which I presented - even if it was just a 20min theater presentation on the show floor. What a memorable and exciting learning experience for me! As I headed home, I took the learning, introductions, musings and experiences with me.

Most of my conversations at the Symposium were with our customers who swung by the Symantec booth to say hello or with those who have heard about/been told to go to Symantec to hear and see our mobile products in action.

"I have all these users that want to bring their iPads/iPhones and ask me to give them corporate access on those devices. Sometimes it is just email, but sometimes it is more than that. How can I do that and still know my corporate information is secure?"

"I don't want to manage all those mobile devices...

As I meet with customers and partners and keep abreast of IT related news in the media, I see a number of commonly repeated business and IT related challenges - cost containment (reduce CAPEX or move it to OPEX), improved IT agility and better alignment with the business, enhanced information security and governance requirements, and how to meet increased resilience objectives.

Many of these are fairly well known challenges and no single solution appears to exist that address them all. The cloud conversation tends to come up pretty quickly as one of the “ways forward”. In this short l blog I will share with you my thoughts on other ways I see businesses reviewing and implementing strategies to transform their IT delivery platform.

Commoditisation: as components and services become less easy to distinguish between they become commoditised. To an extent we’ve seen with ERP/CRM systems, where previously huge expense in hardware and...