<p>Support contracts are becoming crucial aspects of IT management as IT environments are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Examine the trends propelling the support services market, and discover the importance of continuing post-warranty support.</p> 

Outsourcing is the quest to offload either commodity or very specialized activities, so that staff can focus on work that truly adds value to the business. 

This 2012 benchmarking survey from ESI assesses the role of the Project/Programme Management Office (PMO), its development to full-blown maturity and value to the business.   

Read this paper to learn three ways your company can get the most out of its contracts by ensuring that the agreements you enter into are low in risk and that contractual terms are being observed and met. 

This edition of BI Trends and Strategies opens with a piece by Lou Agosta on the need for data warehouses to adapt to new data types, innovation and big data. Alan R. Earls also offers advice for incorporating spreadsheets into your BI programs without problems and Richard Herschel calls for universities to step up their BI and analytics programs. 

This week’s Computer Weekly examines the growing threat from smartphones being targeted by hackers and viruses as the devices are increasingly used for work. Hospitality giant Mitchells & Butlers talks about its migration to the cloud and the CIO of Airbus discusses his IT priorities and how he spends €500m a year on IT. 

This week’s Computer Weekly asks what chancellor George Osborne's Budget means for the UK IT community and if he can deliver his goal to make Britain "the technology centre of Europe". Also you'll find the final part of our private cloud Buyer's Guide and we examine the options for choosing the right WAN optimisation strategy. 

In the third issue of BI Trends and Strategies, learn from BeyeNETWORK experts William McKnight and David Loshin how to create a time-proof information management infrastructure, as well as five steps you can take to improve the quality of analytical data. Also learn about connectors for moving data between relational databases and Hadoop clusters. 

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. 

<p>Tune in to this podcast to hear Kevin Haley, one of Symantec's security experts from the Security Technology and Response organization, discuss key findings from the Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), the latest security research and the top trends for 2012. Find out how the security landscape will affect your organization.</p> 

This expert E-Guide from SearchServerVirtualization.com discusses some of the obstacles facing administrators managing virtual environments. Explore the "side effects" virtualization can bring to the data center and learn how implementing a few new tools can help alleviate some of these pain points. 

This expert e-guide offers an overview of SearchDataCenter.com's annual Data Center Purchasing Intentions Survey. Get insight into this year's trends around server hardware, operating systems and virtualization. Find out what your IT peers have made top priorities in their data centers this year and much more! 

Choosing sourcing and procurement software can be overwhelming. Should you go with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or best-of-breed vendor? Is the cloud or on-premise the best place to run your app? What functionality should the software provide? Read this expert e-guide to learn how to select a useful, cost-effective procurement system.