Cloud computing offers massive scalability -  in virtual computing power, storage, and applications resources - all at almost immediate availability and low cost, and business managers are demanding their IT operations assess the benefits this new computing model can represent. 

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

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. 

Read these articles to create a framework for stating your company's case for implementing a data governance strategy. 

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. 

Tim Zimmerman, Gartner research director offers some practical advice to organisations wanted to use iPads on their corporate wireless networks. 

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. 

Programming is a journey between the real world and a computer. This article explains why object orientation is currently the best way we have of making the journey. 

<p>Read this expert article to find best practices for keeping your iteration and release cycles in sync even as your Agile development projects becoming increasingly complex.</p> 

With Microsoft SQL Server 2008, small and mid-sized businesses have a variety of options for creating state-ofthe art strategies for ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for their databases. This article explains why upgrading to SQL Server 2008 may help IT sleep better at night. 

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.