Enterprise video streaming, simplified in the cloud

By Gail Balfour, Unleashing IT

Increasing demand, growing complexity, numerous formats, multiple networks, and disparate devices: why moving your video delivery to the cloud just makes sense for service providers and the enterprise.

Do you have a Netflix subscription? Do you download movies to your tablet, or access YouTube clips on your smartphone? At first glance, these consumer video diversions may not seem very relevant to the world you work in. But the technology behind such innovations is being rapidly adopted by the enterprise, while becoming increasingly complex for service providers. As a result, it is causing disruption across the whole value chain—from media companies to advertisers—and is changing the global landscape for content distribution models, in living rooms, boardrooms, and enterprise IT shops. 

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Make sure your ERP is a business-led project, not an IT-led one

(From an interview with Shoshana Jamieson, Director of Consulting at Illumiti)

It’s no secret that many organizations struggle with ERP. Gartner’s recent whitepaper, entitled “Working Smarter, Not Harder Is the Key to Business Success With ERP” identifies the principal reasons why some organizations are so successful with their implementations, while others continue to experience challenges.

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Big Data’s big promise

By Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Almost every company, large or small, has more data than it knows how to handle. And it can be downright overwhelming. Think of how many e-mails you read, answer and store in a day. Throw in your financial reporting, your corporate data, daily transactions and other core business information, and the list goes on, year after year. On the surface, these massive stores of data may seem like a burden, or even a liability. But what if you could use that information to make wiser business decisions, or predict problems before they happen? Does your data have a lot more value than you realize?

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Canadians are steadily developing digital telepathology networks

By Gail Balfour
Canadian Healthcare Technology

According to Dr. Andrew Evans, the benefits we will see from telepathology projects taking place throughout the country will go far beyond the ability to quickly share biopsy images with remote pathologists for consultation and diagnosis. This emerging technology will also have a profound impact on clinical education and research, quality assurance, accuracy and speed of diagnosis, as well as storage of data and integration with electronic health records.

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Here’s why your website doesn’t rank higher

By Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Have you ever Googled your own company? How about searched for terms that are related to your products or services? If you have, you may have noticed how difficult it can be to get your Web site to appear at the top of the search engine’s results page, or even on the first few pages. Yes, you are competing with countless other businesses worldwide, and a lot of other noise online, but is that why you appear so far down the list? Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at what you could be doing differently.

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Cybercrime: A global epidemic nobody’s really talking about

By Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Your credit card information is likely sitting on a hard drive somewhere in eastern Europe, and criminals may choose to use it at any time. At least, that is what Joseph Menn’s research suggests. Menn, a Los Angeles-based journalist and author of the non-fiction book Fatal System Error, gave a sobering keynote at the mesh conference held in Toronto earlier this year. His message: cybercrime is a global epidemic and it’s a war we probably will not win.

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Tweet risk

Twitter’s potential potholes and 3 ways to avoid them
By: Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Using Twitter as a business tool may be all the rage right now, but before your company jumps headfirst, it pays to take a step back and assess the potential risks. One large financial services firm did just that, and discovered that the main danger lay in the fact that they were thinking about Twitter differently than other Web content. This may be due to its potential for immediacy.

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Cloud computing for your company?

By: Gail Balfour
Backbone Magazine

Consider clouds, just for a moment. They are light and intangible. They can come out of nowhere, and can bend and morph their shape in the blink of an eye.

A lot of what makes up the description of a traditional cloud also applies to cloud computing. And that’s largely its appeal.

For the last few years, individuals have completed a lot of their work in a browser window, while accessing and storing their data online. But until fairly recently, cloud computing was not considered a viable large-scale business solution. This is changing, even though challenges still exist.

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