We talked the other day about the cloud and compliance issues, and after writing that, we came across an item that drives that point home.

According to this article at the Bank Info Security website, the Federal Financial Information Examination Council is casting a wary eye at the cloud model, in light of past and potential data breaches. It has produced a four-page resource document designed to help financial institutions "better understand and address (the) unique risks posed by outsourced cloud-based services." More...

The rapidly-growing mobile payments industry is expected to more than double in just two years from $171.5 billion to $617 billion in transactions by 2016, according to Gartner. Simply, mobile payments is an “umbrella term that refers to a wide variety of approaches such as: a smartphone equipped with a special chip; a credit card number stored in a phone app; or a key-fob size device that turns a phone or tablet into a credit card processor,” says USA Today. Though still in the early adopter phase, startups, carriers, and big businesses are investing heavily in this innovative space. More...

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) is one of the few IT technologies with a "multifaceted" value proposition, in that it not only can lower costs, but can help streamline processes and form new ones. You may start out with cost reduction in mind, but along the way, you find ways to change and improve how you do business.

That was a key point made by analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Consulting, during a recent webinar on the subject of hosted UC&C. Also participating were Sprint's own Joseph Martin and Mike Velder of Cisco. If you missed it, you can replay it here. More...

It used to be that web videos were short. Many believed that was because of shorter attention spans. But we are finding that just isn't true. The truth is that short videos were just a technology and financial limitation. I personally no longer have a TV and my kids watch only web-based video content (a TV dial would be as foreign to them as a rotary dial telephone). All this has implications for the enterprise network. More...

Are CIOs and top IT executives hopping on the cloud bandwagon even more enthusiastically than their IT staffs? That appears to be what one of the latest surveys about cloud attitudes reveals.

In the survey, summarized in a CIO.com article, 92 percent of responding top IT decision makers (CIOs and other top IT execs) said they believe cloud technology is good for business. That's an impressive result, but even more so when you see that the same attitude was shared by just 81 percent of IT managers. In our experience, the CIOs usually require convincing by their managers and staffs when it comes to the newest technology approaches, so this is an interesting finding. More...

By now, most enterprises are dealing with implementing an evolving mobile strategy. Some are further than others in terms of penetration among employees. Much insight can be gleamed from these real-life  enterprise experiences. Here’s a look at some of the lessons: More...

I have written before about how gamification will become an incentive for convergence by tying  all the systems and processes together in the cloud and creating a game-like application environment. One example is a company that is trying to gamify getting out of bed. Actually, not a company so much as a hackathon team. More...

There’s change, and then there’s progress. One just means that something is new and different, but the other means that something has gotten better. It’s in that second category that Compass, our online portal for IP/MPLS VPN service, fits in the wake of a number of enhancements that will help you monitor your network. More...

Cisco recently announced its Open Network Environment, or Cisco ONE, strategy. The new architecture is the foundation by which Cisco networks will eventually be provisioned entirely through software APIs, otherwise known as cloudbursting, which I have discussed  before. More...

One of the ongoing concerns among certain enterprises is assuring that with their data and apps “out there” in the cloud that they will be fully compliant with regulatory requirements, whether those might be health-related (HIPPA), credit card-related (PCI DSS), or financially related, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Is there an element of control freak there? Probably. As one such freak in our own small way, we can certainly understand why there can be some legitimate concerns about the data an enterprise is handling and how safe it is, in this increasingly cyber-insecure age we’re living in.More...