Expert Advice

A colleague of mine recently remarked in frustration that IT often finds itself in the worst possible position: taking the blame for a host of problems -- including increasing costs, growing capacity needs and poor responsiveness -- while being limited by a lack of real influence and control over t...

Cloud computing represents a powerful shift in how your company deploys applications, stores data, implements security and adheres to industry regulations. Cloud architectures can give your company the flexibility to scale resources as the business requires. And you can do so without incurring unnec...

Traditionally, online advertising was viewed primarily as a direct-response vehicle. However, the growing use of data to define and deliver audience targeting means it now can have an impact on all levels of the purchasing funnel -- from fostering awareness to reaching consumers at the ideal interse...

With the evolution and proliferation of cloud computing, as more and more applications are being migrated to the cloud, many organizations are considering moving their database to the cloud as well. Two main concerns on users' minds are database scalability and availability. How scalable/elastic is ...

There's a new bit of conventional wisdom regarding the future of computing, and it's gathering momentum in some corners of the business world. Advocates of this particular piece of wisdom argue that the best way to reduce the cost and complexity of corporate computing for the data centers of the fut...

One of the most significant workplace changes of the past decade has been the steady increase in telework and flexible work arrangements. In the past, the ability to work remotely from time to time might have just shown up on a "corporate perks" sheet handed to new employees. Today, telework is no l...

The quick answer: It depends. The type of cloud services you select might be dictated by your IT budget, the core competencies of your IT staff, and your IT strategy and tactics -- meaning which applications you keep in-house, versus which ones you selectively outsource. To begin, let's look at the ...

Online retailers considering selling their goods overseas need to know the expectations of consumers in the countries in which they want to do business. This is particularly important at the checkout -- with payment methods becoming an increasingly sensitive issue, consumer trust will help determin...

The flash mob dance by the world's most powerful groups of agencies against ICANN's new gTLD domain name program must not be taken lightly. After all, these global bodies represent the real manipulaters of emotions. They influence our taste, habits and behavior -- like type of cereal, length of skir...

The existing model for daily deals is broken. The biggest issue: It's simply not making merchants money. In just a few quick years, daily deals have shifted the concept of local marketing from traditional advertising to blanket discounts aimed at driving first-time customers en masse. While the new...

For U.S.-based retailers, running a successful global e-commerce business takes the right balance of strong local marketing and effective operations. While it is essential that retailers cater to local customer experience expectations, it is also critically important to abide by local laws and regu...

The industry roils with definitions and explanations of cloud. These definitions come from product vendors cloud-washing their products, cloud providers positioning their cloud infrastructure, IT teams attempting to cloud-paint their efforts in virtualization, and even from consultants writing artic...

The countdown to Cyber Monday has begun. Is your online business ready for the holiday shopping spree? We're all too familiar with sluggish online shopping experiences that have left us frustrated or caused us to leave the site altogether before we've completed a transaction. As the holiday shopping...

One would think that after all of the publicity in recent years about insider trading and its illegality, that such a phenomenon would be a thing of the past. Not so. On Oct. 13, 2011, the hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, received the longest prison sentence to date for insider trading. A judg...

For most of the short history of computing, people have been forced to adapt to the way computers work, rather than the other way around; however, that trend is starting to change in a big way. The rise of cloud computing, social networking and mobile connectivity has put individuals and their needs...