In this week's Computer Weekly, we hear from Visa Europe CIO Steve Chambers on the technology behind the credit card transactions that retailers rely on. We examine the challenges facing the government's G-Cloud project; and we ask how Microsoft will cope when customers no longer want to purchase software licences. Download the new issue now. 

Yesterday's virus is today's custom malware, while denial of service attacks has been replaced with botnets. This paper examines the history of attacks of malware and the defenses needed to counter these attacks. 

This research from Freeform Dynamics, based on a survey of end users,  identifies the challenges faced by IT departments and suppliers on software licensing, and offers advice to organisations on dealing with software licensing. 

At Metro Health, doctors use an electronic medical record (EMR) application to look at a patient’s medical history, enter examination notes and diagnoses, write prescriptions and view test results. Learn how Metro Health improved availability and lowered energy bills with a server approach. 

Depending on the size of an enterprise, a job scheduler may manage thousands of individual mission-critical business processes every day. Access this resource for a brief history of the job scheduling marketplace and to learn what to look for in job scheduling software, including a checklist with which to evaluate your options. 

VMware offers market leading solutions that help businesses address their virtualization needs. Dell and VMware have a long history of collaboration. Read this white paper to learn more. 

While the technology that supports VoIP has been present since the mid-1990s, the ability to quickly alternate between VoIP and circuit-switched networks has come into prominence in the last few years. Access this white paper for a full history and overview of the current mobile communications landscape. 

Read this white paper for a discussion of the business case for data archiving as the first step in an SAP ILM strategy; strategies for Data Archiving, Retention Management and the Retention Warehouse strategy for legacy decommissioning in SAP; and Dolphin’s best‐practices approach to an effective, long-term ILM strategy. 

This paper demonstrates that RAID 6 is less capable to prevent data loss with today's large capacity SATA and SAS HDDs. It will also share Oracle's designs to mitigate this risk. The integrity of customers' data is in jeopardy if these large capacity SATA/SAS HDDs are simply packaged into a RAID 6 group without additional mitigation. 

IT managers everywhere feel overwhelmed with the rising tide of security threats they have to deal with in the face of an increasing regulatory burden. It is not surprising then that they tend to overlook one particular area of IT security, which is the privileged access that they grant themselves and/or their colleagues in order to do their jobs. 

This paper offers a high-level discussion of the benefits of Oracle Solaris running on Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series and T-Series, and drill-down information on specific optimisations and advantages for increased reliability, security and virtualisation. 

In this week’s issue of Computer Weekly, we look at the key trends and technologies that will be on IT leaders’ agenda in 2012. Our first Buyer’s Guide of the year examines how IT consumerisation will affect business technology; and Home Office IT director Denise McDonagh tells us why government IT isn’t working. Download the new issue now. 

In this videocast, senior enterprise IT architect Nelson Ruest breaks down some of these scenarios, with details on how Hyper-V can provide benefits in test and development situations and business continuity.