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Do you know everywhere business documents reside? Storage pros are often tasked with aiding discovery, yet as IT increasingly relies on cloud repositories while employees substitute mobile devices for PCs, that question is getting much harder to answer. Problem is, in the event of litigation, courts won't accept "the cloud ate my homework" as an excuse. Here's how to cope.

The rules for IT are changing: While 29% of participants in our annual ranking of business technology innovators say lowering business or IT costs is a priority, that’s down sharply from 47% just three years ago. Today's focus is on the customer, with 37% citing widespread deployment of customer-facing mobile apps. Add cloud computing and big data analytics to the mix, and you can see it's a whole new game. Find out how the very best companies are changing to play by the new rules.

357 IT pros weighed in to rank 10 data center management products. EMC's Unified Infrastructure Manager earned the highest score for both overall performance and data center management features. VMware and Cisco both tied for the second spot in overall performance. On the features front, Cisco, VMware and IBM all earned scores of 77%, just two points behind EMC. Other vendors evaluated include HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec.

It's almost impossible to avoid the wall-to-wall media blitz around Surface. So we'll spare you the marketing spin and focus on what IT pros need to know about how Windows 8 changes the end user and mobile experience. Hint: There's more to it than just a radically new, tablet-optimized UI.

Collaboration. Efficiency. Speedier customer service. The same factors that have long been cornerstones of unified communications projects are prompting companies to support a range of mobile devices. However, closed operating systems like Apple's iOS present a formidable obstacle for UC vendors.

This report highlights some top applications being developed and used to increase the effectiveness of instruction and the level of student engagement and higher-order thinking from elementary school through postgraduate studies.

Mobile-enabled sales and service tools are improving workforce metrics across industries. Here are seven case studies to show how mobility can transform financial services firms in retail and business banking, capital markets, insurance and wealth management.

In most industries, compliance mandates can feel like more of an annoyance than a necessity. In the energy business, strict compliance mandates could be all that stands between business as usual and a catastrophic, long-term power outage. Standards regulating the smart grid, are rightly stringent and often difficult to meet, but they can be modified and leveraged by organizations in all industries to lock down corporate and customer assets.

Is the U.S. rising or falling as a global IT innovation leader? An update of the exclusive research we conducted two years ago shows that business technology pros think the country is making modest progress in some areas.

A growing number of IT organizations are pursuing IT service management deployments to improve customer relationships and better align with the business, and ITIL is emerging as the framework of choice. To get the most out of ITIL, organizations should focus on the practical elements and avoid the impractical theoretical components. We'll walk you through the process with 10 recommended steps.

With just 8% of respondents expecting to build new facilities and constrained budgets the No. 1 impactful trend, it's clear enterprise IT's transformation to service provider is in full swing. Today it's far more important to focus on the hardware and software in your data center than on the glass house itself. Maybe that's why 67% are on board with private clouds. We'll examine how IT can quickly and efficiently meet new business requests without breaking the bank.

When it comes to justifying new projects, the 453 business technology pros responding to our spending survey are an upbeat lot. We asked about 16 possible initiatives; in every case, the outlook was “spend money to save money.” One typical scenario: 59% say a private cloud will cost more short-term, a valid assumption. But fully 86% say it’ll yield long-term savings. Maybe, maybe not, but mind your credibility.

Salaries for most of the 1,097 IT executives we surveyed are lower than they were in the previous two years: Median total compensation for CTOs fell to $129,000 from $140,000 in 2011. The exception? Those holding the chief information officer title got a $4,000 bump.

While staff and managers are satisfied with their jobs overall, more than 50% of staff and management got raises of less than 5% or had their pay frozen, and about a quarter saw benefit cuts.

The market for IT talent in the sector is strengthening and shifting in focus, with data analysis skills in high demand. However, total compensation for IT staff and managers has been relatively flat.

New business requirements make developers more secure in their jobs and more valuable to their employers than the general IT population--by 11%, when it comes to compensation packages. However, while annual compensation continues to grow, male app dev staffers earn almost 15% more than females.

Insulated for the most part from the financial crisis, insurance IT has not seen wild swings up or down. Compensation is trending upward for staff and downward for managers.

IT needs to make innovation a priority and execute new projects faster. Just 32% of the business technology leaders we surveyed are driving new products or services, only 30% say their teams are creating a new revenue stream or business model, while 57% worry that they can't implement new technologies fast enough. It's time to rewrite the rules for how IT gets done.

While a technology that warns of problems before they arise may sound too good to be true, predictive systems have been in use for years by financial, retail, healthcare and other sectors. Now it's IT's turn.

We outline plans to help you move beyond server virtualization to build a more flexible and efficient data center. From network and storage virtualization to automation and orchestration to promoting your private cloud services, our guide takes you through the essentials needed to build a private cloud.

To find out, we surveyed 536 IT pros. While BlackBerry represents a median of 70% of company-purchased devices in use now, that number plummets to 25% when respondents look ahead 24 months. And, a mere 7% say they plan to increase their use of RIM products. While the future looks pretty grim, there are some moves the company can make--but they need to be bold, and fast.

Data center storage shows all the signs of a maturing discipline: IT professionals are more concerned about data reliability, security and performance vs. just keeping up with capacity demands. Although centralization has been the mantra for several years, distributed, scale-out systems are challenging the hegemony of big storage iron. And with solid state reaching new levels of affordability, it's rapidly displacing mechanical disk for many Tier 1 applications. In short, it's an interesting time to be in the storage business.

Employee ignorance or indifference can bring down even the most carefully constructed security architecture. Don't just trowel on more controls--CIOs have to change user attitudes and behaviors to ensure better security. In this report, we show you how to appeal to employees' self-interest to get buy-in for your security program.

Fact is, today 'proactive' translates to 'real-time reactive' via auto remote wipe, sharply defined mobile policies and enforcement, and segregation of personal and corporate data. We know malware is going to happen. Here's how IT can limit damage.

Are you maintaining extra in-house capacity to handle demand spikes that rarely materialize? Cloud services can help meet scale-out computing and storage needs, but the rent-vs.-buy decision is about more than just elasticity. It's about using the money you have in the most efficient manner to provide the services the business needs in an agile fashion.