Brought to you by SolarWinds

Allowing employees to use personal devices for work often creates chaos for IT departments.

Apart from enforcing security and compliance standards, IT managers also need to grapple with increased use of IT resources through personal devices.

Yet, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is here to stay. According to a VMware survey, over 50 per cent of workers in Singapore already use their personal devices for work, whether their employers have a BYOD policy or not. …

A weakening U.S. dollar and growing demand for enterprise software will bolster IT spending this year.

Gartner noted on Thursday that global IT spending will grow 4.2 percent from last year to reach US$3.7 trillion in 2013. When measured in constant U.S. dollars, IT spending will grow by  just 3.9 percent, the analyst company said. …

While you were partaking in the year-end festivities, cybercriminals had a field day exploiting a loophole in older versions of Internet Explorer.

Last Friday, the website of the U.S. Council of Foreign Relations was allegedly compromised by Chinese hackers who exploited the zero-day bug that was only discovered that same day. …

When Internet giant Google threatened to pull out of China in 2010, few were aware of the paradox that the Internet brings to China’s leaders beyond the political fodder.

In How China’s Leaders Think, Robert Kuhn, an international investment banker who has advised the Chinese government for over two decades, notes that Chinese leaders recognise that free access to information is critical for technological advancement and competitive success in world markets.

“On the other hand, they worry about potentially disruptive consequences of such free access which can deliver malicious, salacious and seditious information,” Kuhn says. …

Solid-state drives (SSDs) may boost the performance of servers and PCs, but it can be difficult to recover lost data from those speedy drives when things turn awry.

According to Kroll Ontrack, a data recovery specialist, the complexity of how data is stored on SSDs makes recovering data from damaged drives difficult and time consuming. …

Photo credit: RocketTheme

Christmas is just round the corner, and if you are still fretting over the right tech gift to get for yourself and your loved ones, we’re here to help! So, here’s a list of gifts mooted by us: …

Businesses have typically been slow to adopt any new version of Windows, and the newly-minted Windows 8 is no exception.

To boost demand for Windows 8 tablets among corporations, Microsoft has put together a quick guide to help businesses decide on the kind of Windows 8 tablet to buy. …

SolarWinds has updated its Virtualisation Manager tool to help enterprises better manage their virtual desktops.

Virtual desktops are software tools that allow employees to use the same operating system and apps across devices. They also make it easier for IT staff to install and update programs.

According to SolarWinds, Virtualisation Manager can be used to monitor and manage virtual desktops and server virtual machines from VMware and Microsoft through a single dashboard. It also includes a charge-back mechanism that allows IT departments to charge business units for the use of virtual desktops. …

HP is setting its sights on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with HP Cloud Compute, an enterprise public cloud offering based on the open source OpenStack cloud computing system.

While AWS is leading the pack in public cloud services, its offerings are largely pitched at developers. With HP Cloud Compute, HP is targeting IT head honchos who demand high levels of support and reliability from cloud services to power critical business operations. …

HP is upping its ante in the red-hot big data market with new additions to its AppSystems portfolio that helps enterprises glean useful business insights from truckloads of data.

For starters, AppManager for Hadoop is a new dashboard application that helps companies analyse corporate data using Apache Hadoop, an open source software that breaks down complex data into smaller chunks for analysis by clusters of computers. …