1. CIO

    A Microsoft Teams vs. Slack Update: Three Weeks In

    A lot of people commented on my original article detailing why my company, ActualTech Media, made the jump away from Slack to Microsoft Teams. Now that we’re at the three-week point, it’s becoming clear where we’re seeing benefits and where there are challenges that we hope Microsoft addresses… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  2. CIO

    Putting Things in Context: Why We’re Ditching Slack for Microsoft Teams

    I don’t often write about the inner workings of ActualTech Media. It’s not because I don’t want to, but is due primarily to having a whole lot to stay on top of. But we’re doing something that many may think crazy, so I thought I’d tell the world! We’ve ditched Slack and adopted Micro… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  3. CIO

    Clouds Are a Key Enabler for Digital Transformation

    Clouds fundamentally change who has control over IT. Traditional infrastructures rely on IT teams to provision resources, workloads, applications and services. Clouds don’t – they let the individuals responsible for doing something useful with IT be the ones to provision that IT. At the risk… Read More

    By ActualTech Media
  4. CIO

    Ease of Use is the Goal for Private Cloud

    The decision has been made to move to private cloud. All reasons for or against have been heard, and now it’s time to implement. With this in mind, what options are available for doing so, and how do they affect the design of an organization’s IT? Private clouds come in flavors, and while eac… Read More

    By ActualTech Media
  5. CIO

    IT Support May Be the Crucial Cloud Question

    Once IT teams are no longer having to hand-hold IT infrastructure every day, they won’t know the intricacies of its operation. This makes the support experience – both the ease of access to support, and the overall quality of the support – absolutely critical. What do other customers of that v… Read More

    By ActualTech Media
  6. CIO

    How Digital Transformation Is Like a Diet

    I don’t like to bring too much personal baggage to my writing and this may be a little corny, but one of my current undertakings has some real-world parallels to a modern technology-centric business trend, so here I go… Big Change Requires Big Commitment As so many know, losing weight is reall… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  7. CIO

    Top 5 Tips for VDI Success

    Last week, ActualTech Media hosted the VDI and End-User Computing EcoCast (which you can still watch On Demand here). The purpose of the event was to discuss the latest innovations in End User Computing and hear from some manufacturers of products that can make deploying VDI solutions more straightf… Read More

    By James D. Green
  8. CIO

    Cloudtenna Aims to Tame the Chaos of File Search Across Silos

    Answer: Dropbox. Slack. Gmail. File servers. Google Drive. JIRA. Salesforce. And way too many more. If your question was, “What are all of the possible locations for the single file I’m looking for and need this very minute?” then you win! Or, lose, as the case may be.  As companies contin… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  9. CIO

    Opportunity: 2019 FASB/IASB Updates to Lease Accounting Rules Could Upend IT Purchasing Models

    A major change to leasing rules – coming in 2019 – has the potential to upend traditional data center hardware acquisition models. It also presents a major opportunity for enterprise IT vendors in a financial position to capitalize on the changes. Disclaimer: I am not an accountant or an expe… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  10. CIO

    What If Domino’s Stopped Making Pizzas: Jettison the Technology Hyperbole to Achieve Better Alignment

    What if Domino’s stopped making pizzas this very minute?  What would happen?  If you answered, “well, they’d go out of business” then you already have a grasp on why one of today’s favorite phrases should be jettisoned from your business phrasebook. Every so often in the technology wo… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  11. CIO

    Countdown to the GDPR Deadline: Preparing for Compliance

    It’s nearly May 25: Do you know where your data is? If you don’t, the consequences could be severe. On that date, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect, a regulation that was designed to protect an individual’s personal data. With the compliance deadline upo… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  12. CIO

    Technology Experts Share Their Top Tips and Advice for 'World Backup Day'

    Backing up data should be one of the most fundamental of all IT activities. Yet, time and again, companies that should know better fail to properly create, secure and validate their backups. This Saturday, March 31, is World Backup Day, a day created to raise awareness for data backup and protect… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  13. CIO

    Data In The Context of Digital Transformation

    In case you weren’t aware, we are on the cusp of a full-on data tsunami. Thanks to the digital transformation movement, there are a growing number of systems and devices in use in any given business, and they’re throwing off data which needs to be stored, protected, and often analyzed. Businesse… Read More

    By James D. Green
  14. CIO

    The State of Cybersecurity in 2018

    We’re still at the front end of 2018, and there’s already been a major security threat exposed. It affects most computers built in the last 20 years, and it’s very scary. That makes it an appropriate time to broaden the discussion to the larger issue of cybersecurity threats facing us in th… Read More

    By Keith Ward
  15. CIO

    Accelerate Time to Value of Your Data with DataOps

    Over the last several years innovative companies have been adopting a DevOps paradigm that reduces the barriers between developers and operations teams in delivering high quality software faster. This has allowed leaders like Uber, Amazon, and Lyft to experiment with a better customer experience and… Read More

    By George Lawton
  16. CIO

    Tech Industry Professionals Share Their Views and Tips on Data Privacy Day

    This Sunday marks the 11th anniversary of Data Privacy Day, which was created to raise awareness and promote the protection of personal privacy and data. The occasion first started in 2008 as an extension of European Data Protection day, which started in 1981 with the signing of Convention 108, the… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  17. CIO

    Moving Beyond Backups to Enterprise-Data-as-a-Service

    What do you do when your disaster recovery turns into a plain old disaster? Well, if you’re the large media corporation News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG), you turn to Actifio for help. And you get even more than you expected. Our friends at Actifio recently shared a handful of interesting case st… Read More

    By James D. Green
  18. CIO

    A State Department of Transportation Department Moves from Traditional to Hybrid IT

    You may believe that digital transformation is an overused term, but the potential impact from such initiatives can be profound.  It is changing all aspects of our lives. Every day we rely on digital technology to give us more and more information. It is increasingly pervasive, from the cars we dr… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  19. CIO

    Digital Transformation: Organizational Change Management Should be on Your Short List of Priorities

    Change is good.  Change is bad.  Change is healthy.  Change is disruptive. All of these statements are true, depending on the time and your perspective and on what you’re actually doing.  In an increasingly technology-driven business environment, it can be reasonably expected that the pace… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  20. CIO

    4 Steps to a True Digital Transformation

    The new era of hybrid IT is improving the way business run and helping deliver new and differentiated services. By embracing the additional values hybrid IT provides, businesses can create their right mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises solutions, while deploying services where they… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe
  21. CIO

    How Hyperconverged Infrastructure Ensures Peak Performance in a Cost-Effective Manner

    Data growth is a huge issue today, and as the amount of data increases, businesses are struggling to find a way to make sure their infrastructure can handle the load. The key is making sure that performance can to keep up to make the new volume of data truly efficient. But, how? One way is through h… Read More

    By Scott D. Lowe