Business and information technology are invading each other’s space these days — at least in companies keeping pace with change. Business is becoming more tech driven, and IT must demonstrate the business value of technologies. With many vendors selling point solutions, IT can quickly get crowded with business goals lost in the mix. “Imagine if ...

Does procurement bring exciting technological advances or business transformation to mind? If not, then look at the platform from Coupa Software Inc. The company is out to transform procurement procedures so that they support broader business objectives. Chief procurement officers are now being called to expand their duties to not just manage business spend, but ...

With most companies in hybrid limbo, it would help if software applications could talk. Do they want computing to live on-premises or in public cloud? Where would they be cheapest? Where would they perform the best or help further a particular business goal? A tool to answer these questions is the type of extra-mile service ...

Cloud security is growing up. No longer must public-cloud customers bring an armful of their own security tools. The plug-ins and add-ons are giving way to baked-in security that’s live as soon as instances are up. Cloud security proper — not just security in the cloud — is still pretty nascent, according to Jesse Rothstein (pictured), ...

Many companies are amassing big data to gain a competitive advantage with predictive analytics. What happens when the data sets get awkwardly huge and hard to manage? No problem — they just bring in special tools for processing and protecting it. Actually, this tool glut can become a big problem, according to Christian Beedgen (pictured), co-founder ...

There’s no “I” in security. OK, there is. But it’s the “US” now getting savvy companies through these tough cybersecurity times. Spreading security responsibilities across a company’s departments and beyond to third parties can perk up their defense posture. “There’s very little of what we do in security that’s just done by security practitioners,” said Katie Jenkins (pictured), chief information security ...

There’s little denying that cybersecurity is in fixer-upper condition these days. Threats are getting more sophisticated, while there aren’t enough skilled professionals to fight them. Companies keep piling on threat-detection software tools to unimpressive effect. The status quo will simply not be adequate to fend off new attacks, particularly those from nation states. Companies must ...

Cybersecurity is facing a gaping skills shortage. Businesses are piling on an obscene number of point solutions to compensate. The resulting heap of tools typically falls short — and they still require hands to wield them. Can cloud providers shovel businesses out of this deepening hole? We see security frameworks today with as many as 250 ...

It’s time to get real for executives hoping to make money from business data. After all the daydreaming, consulting with digital-transformation advisers and going on software shopping sprees, they have to get up and get to work. But data science — at least in its current, profit-driving iteration — is young. Companies can’t be blamed for ...

As information-technology environments disperse and hybridize, visibility is becoming a greater challenge. Monitoring different cloud environments across vast networks requires sophisticated data-analyzing tools. In the security space, the situation is even hairier; companies keep piling on point solutions to monitor diverse environments while gaining little or nothing in threat detection and prevention. The problem is ...