"If your company is thinking of saving money by migrating to the cloud, don't forget to look to the long-term return, a Gartner study suggests ... That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise ... Finance and IT professionals, facing the need for greater computing power for everything from operational management to hedge accounting are understandably tempted by SaaS, given the cloud's relatively low startup costs and the fact they may lack the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions ..."
(Get More Information . .)

Deduplication as a for primary storage tool is discussed in Carol Sliwa's searchstorage.com interview with Dave Russell of Gartner Inc. In both backup and primary storage, Russell asserts, commonality of data is the chief consideration. If an embedded technology is available for dedup use in primary storage, Russell recommends its use; if not, then an attached appliance will serve the purpose. NetApp's ability to perform deduplication/compression on primary storage data makes it attractive technology, he says. When choosing vendors consider the possible need to reinflate compressed data when using one vendor for backup and another for primary storage.
(Get More Information . .)

"Gartner analyst Ken McGee has a radical assessment of IT and what CIOs need to do about. Read his principles of the 'new CIO manifesto.' ... "

IT is no longer a bastion of skills sets that supports the business, IT must become an enable of business strategies. To that end, one Gartner analyst has "15 IT Best Practices to Kill" in order to facilitate this change. Some of these have been around a long time and will meet resistance; never the less, changes are afoot.
(Get More Information . .)