<p>Businesses need to keep a close eye on the evolution of cloud based services to avoid wasting money and missing out on business opportunities.</p> <p><strong> </strong></p> 

This report from Deloitte argues businesses are again investing in IT to provide the differentiation and innovation critical from their competitors despite the downturn. 

Over the past 18 months we have seen the irresistible rise of a new phenomenon, cloud computing. This term is given by the IT industry to a new business model for computing, one where capacity for computer, storage and networking can be dynamically acquired, on demand,and paid for according to usage. 

In the cover story of the April 2012 issue of Storage magazine, Lauren Whitehouse outlines best practices for cloud backup integration and the various methods for doing so. Also included in this issue are articles regarding virtual server management, storage for big data, the rising cost of disk drives and more. 

This article shows how an application grid built on Oracle Fusion Middleware can not only prevent unplanned outages, but it can improve the overall performance of mission critical business applications. 

This article provides a high-level overview of the manageability aspects of the VMware ESXi solution on Dell PowerEdge Servers. It discusses the various facets of manageability and the management tools that an IT Administrator can use to deploy, monitor, inventory, configure, and update an ESXi system. 

Your next software implementation doesn’t have to be a nightmare. It can be done faster and with less training and without the need for upgrades or continued training. Read this paper to learn about the Plex Online implementation and training process, a process perfected over hundreds of successes. 

In this article, Kaplan, of Harvard Business School, and Norton, founder and director of the Palladium Group, explain how to effectively manage both strategy and operations by linking them tightly in a closed-loop management system, which comprises five stages. 

Discover the impact desktop virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructure have on your network. 

With a potential economic crisis looming in the Eurozone, Gartner offers a checklist of questions that CIOs and CEOs should ask each other. 

Master data management (MDM) tools are on the rise as more companies look toward ways to solve all their data needs through one system. This expert e-guide from our editorial team features two articles with exceptional insight on what vendors and trends are prevailing in the current MDM market. 

The inaugural issue of BI Trends & Strategies offers sound advice to help you in ensuring your organization is on track to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of BI and analytics. In this issue, readers will learn about a big data definition and the impact it will have on BI and data warehousing, agile development methodology and more. 

This article from Gartner offers advice to public sector organisations thinking of deploying cloud computing and assess the progress made by governments in their use of the cloud.