Cloud computing is slowly becoming a mainstream technology. However, even before the hype cycle has died down, cloud providers are already starting to see downward price pressures. Every hosting provider under the sun is now repackaging itself as a cloud provider, and basic capacity and services are quickly becoming commodities.

Smartphone owners in China don't want to carry around a personal and a corporate phone. Instead, they're accessing work data from new-fangled phones under emerging corporate policies known as BYOD, or bring-your-own-device.

Making the business case for an accounting or HR system is clear-cut: Avoid unnecessary costs, manage cash better, reduce risk and you're done. If you were to invest twice as much in one of those systems, you might increase business payoff by 20 percent, so you can find the optimization point for ROI in a single spreadsheet. But what about the customer relationship management system?

All companies great and small will eventually work with a SaaS provider. In most cases, the standard contract should suffice, but CIOs will never know what they can add (or subtract) if they don't ask.

So-called Big Data can be defined as datasets so large and diverse, they break traditional IT infrastructures. What Big Data is, however, isn't as important as what you can do if you harness its potential and uncover new business opportunities through Big Data analytics.

Data is a powerful lure, promising to turn the massive and ever-increasing volumes of data inside an organization into a pool of intelligence that promises deep, actionable insight into every aspect of a business. However, that lure can lead you into an expensive trap if you don't plan carefully.

Bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, is a movement blurring the line between work and personal life. After all, BYOD is all about employees using personal smartphones and tablets for business purposes.

Disk storage is a lot like closet space-you can never have enough. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of big data.

One of the most common mistakes that companies make when they enter into cloud and SaaS contracts is failing to negotiate exits from the contract as fully as they negotiate entries.

At the end of any quarter, the last thing CFOs want to hear is that more than half of forecasted sales did not close. Unfortunately, this scenario is quite common. CFOs blame sales staffs for faulty forecasts, while sales teams try to shift the blame to IT for not giving them the right tools to turn fuzzy forecasts into actionable data.