Cloud vs. on-premises: Finding the right balance

Greg Downer, senior IT director at Oshkosh Corp., a manufacturer of specialty heavy vehicles in Oshkosh, Wisc., wishes he could tip the balance of on-premises vs. cloud more in the direction of the cloud, which currently accounts for only about 20% of his application footprint. However, as a contractor for the Department of Defense, his company is beholden to strict data requirements, including where data is stored."Cloud offerings have helped us deploy faster and reduce our data center infrastructure, but the main reason we don't do more in the cloud is because of strict DoD contract requirements for specific types of data," he says.In Computerworld's Tech Forecast 2017 survey of 196 IT managers and leaders, 79% of respondents said they have a cloud project underway or planned, and 58% of those using some type of cloud-based system gave their efforts an A or B in terms of delivering business value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Strategy first: How to do mobile dev right

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a company that was finally doing business on the web. Its developers were exhausted after spending years learning about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery, and dealing with all the various browsers the company’s silly partners and customers wanted to use instead of the company’s Gold Standard, Internet Explorer 6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Believe your employer doesn’t know about your legal problems? Think again

An employee gets stopped over the weekend for a DUI. Unbeknownst to him once his name hits the police’s public database, his employer will know about it soon after – whether the conviction has any impact on the employee’s job performance or not.That is just one scenario in which enterprises are checking up on their employees to make sure their private lives don’t impact the companies bottom lines. It is not uncommon for companies to do background checks on prospective employees, but some businesses are carrying that through while employees still punch the clock.Security company Endera explained that employers want to know if an employee is on a criminal watchlist, is booked or arrested, loses a key certificate, is in financial distress or is involved in a lawsuit. An employee roster is loaded into the continuous monitoring system, and that system provides 24/7 scanning of thousands of external data sources. The employer receives real-time, secure alerts for further investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Career Watch: Be wary of IT employment contracts

Jeffrey Scolaro, an attorney at Daley Mohan Groble PC in Chicago and a member of Legal Services Link, answers questions about employment contracts.Are employment contracts for IT workers negotiable, or are they one-size-fits-all? The axiom that “everything is negotiable” should be where all IT professionals begin their assessment of proposed employment contracts. However, the IT industry in particular can be especially rigid in its collective enforcement of employment agreements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

17 tips and tricks to make your Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+ even better

With so many features, where do you start?Image by Ryan Whitwam/IDGSamsung has packed a crazy amount of features into the Galaxy S8 and S8+. It's nowhere near the insane level of software bloat we have seen in some past Samsung devices, but there are a great many options to explore here. You could tap through menus for hour after hour, hoping to stumble upon all the cool stuff the phone can do. Or you could read this guide to learn all about the best tips and settings to make the most of your new Galaxy S8.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How the insurance industry could change the game for security

The recent growth in the cyber insurance market is already improving cybersecurity in some industry segments, and has the potential to do more -- if the industry is able to address its data problem.One area where cyber insurance has already made an impact is in the retail space, said David White, founder and COO at Axio Global, a cyber risk company.After the 2013 Target breach, it became very difficult for retailers to get a decent price for cyber insurance unless they had completely switched over to end-to-end encryption, or had a definite plan in place for doing that.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How the insurance industry could change the game for security

The recent growth in the cyber insurance market is already improving cybersecurity in some industry segments, and has the potential to do more -- if the industry is able to address its data problem.One area where cyber insurance has already made an impact is in the retail space, said David White, founder and COO at Axio Global, a cyber risk company.After the 2013 Target breach, it became very difficult for retailers to get a decent price for cyber insurance unless they had completely switched over to end-to-end encryption, or had a definite plan in place for doing that.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network monitoring tools: Features users love and hate

Managing the health of the corporate network will directly affect the productivity of every user of that network. So network administrators need a robust network monitoring tool that helps them manage the network, identify problems before they cause downtime, and quickly resolve issues when something goes wrong.Five of the top network monitoring products on the market, according to users in the IT Central Station community, are CA Unified Infrastructure Management, SevOne, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), and CA Spectrum.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Network monitoring tools: Features users love and hate

Managing the health of the corporate network will directly affect the productivity of every user of that network. So network administrators need a robust network monitoring tool that helps them manage the network, identify problems before they cause downtime, and quickly resolve issues when something goes wrong.Five of the top network monitoring products on the market, according to users in the IT Central Station community, are CA Unified Infrastructure Management, SevOne, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), and CA Spectrum.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Network monitoring tools: Features users love and hate

Managing the health of the corporate network will directly affect the productivity of every user of that network. So network administrators need a robust network monitoring tool that helps them manage the network, identify problems before they cause downtime, and quickly resolve issues when something goes wrong.Five of the top network monitoring products on the market, according to users in the IT Central Station community, are CA Unified Infrastructure Management, SevOne, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), and CA Spectrum.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Network monitoring tools: Features users love and hate

Managing the health of the corporate network will directly affect the productivity of every user of that network. So network administrators need a robust network monitoring tool that helps them manage the network, identify problems before they cause downtime, and quickly resolve issues when something goes wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Cloudflare wins managed DNS shootout

An effective DNS (Domain Name System) infrastructure is a critical component of system uptime, which is essential to the viability and continuity of web services. For complex websites, a third of page load time can be attributed to DNS lookups. Inadequate or improperly configured DNS can have a potentially catastrophic impact on a company’s online presence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Cloudflare wins managed DNS shootout

An effective DNS (Domain Name System) infrastructure is a critical component of system uptime, which is essential to the viability and continuity of web services. For complex websites, a third of page load time can be attributed to DNS lookups. Inadequate or improperly configured DNS can have a potentially catastrophic impact on a company’s online presence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Public clouds are calling to IT engineers — and their wallets

Less than one-fifth of enterprise IT assets are in the cloud, but it looks like more are on the way.One-third of data-center professionals and IT practitioners plan to deploy workloads in the cloud in the next year, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, an advisory group focused on improving critical infrastructure.Companies still rely mostly on their own infrastructure and multi-tenant data centers, including collocation facilities, the survey found. Sixty-five percent of IT assets are in-house, and only 13 percent in the cloud.But the move to the cloud continues. The survey found 67 percent of respondents had seen at least some workloads that would have run internally in the past move to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Public clouds are calling to IT engineers — and their wallets

Less than one-fifth of enterprise IT assets are in the cloud, but it looks like more are on the way.One-third of data-center professionals and IT practitioners plan to deploy workloads in the cloud in the next year, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, an advisory group focused on improving critical infrastructure.Companies still rely mostly on their own infrastructure and multi-tenant data centers, including collocation facilities, the survey found. Sixty-five percent of IT assets are in-house, and only 13 percent in the cloud.But the move to the cloud continues. The survey found 67 percent of respondents had seen at least some workloads that would have run internally in the past move to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

65% of enterprise workloads still in on-premises data centers, study finds

There’s a cloud option out there for almost every IT workload, but a survey from the Uptime Institute indicates that about two-thirds of enterprise computing is still done in company-owned data centers.The study, which polled more than 1,000 IT professionals and data center workers via email earlier this year, found that 65% of enterprise workloads were running in data centers owned or operated by those enterprises, and that that number is just about the same as it was in 2014.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft to slash cloud-connection rights for stand-alone Office + Old Windows Server machines can still fend off hacks. Here's howTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

65% of enterprise workloads still in on-premises data centers, study finds

There’s a cloud option out there for almost every IT workload, but a survey from the Uptime Institute indicates that about two-thirds of enterprise computing is still done in company-owned data centers.The study, which polled more than 1,000 IT professionals and data center workers via email earlier this year, found that 65% of enterprise workloads were running in data centers owned or operated by those enterprises, and that that number is just about the same as it was in 2014.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft to slash cloud-connection rights for stand-alone Office + Old Windows Server machines can still fend off hacks. Here's howTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here