The trend of employees bringing their own devices into the workplace will grow rapidly in 2012. This will create even larger stockpiles of data for IT to sift through and manage. Clive Gold*, EMC, reports on the impact of ‘the consumerisation of IT’ on big data - what he calls “the biggest opportunity of this decade” - and how organisations can best tackle it.

The company call centre was once the primary (and a private) port of call for irate or frustrated customers. Now, many are turning to social media, airing their complaints on Twitter or Facebook for the world to see. Robert Allman, of Dimension Data Australia, looks at how to build a competent CRM architecture in this age of social media, and public complaint.

Voice+Data last month earned the award of Cover of the Year for B2B magazines, at the Publishers Australia Excellence Awards. The magazine won the award for the ‘My Dog is a Cloud’ illustration, featured on the cover of the May 2011 issue. [ + ]

With the government finally putting a price on carbon, IT managers around Australia will now have to pay close attention to the efficiency of their storage arrays. Clive Gold, Vice-Chair of SNIA ANZ, explains the rationale behind the association’s new Emerald program, and how you can use it to assess the impact of the carbon price on your own equipment. [ + ]

Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr recently launched OzHub, a cloud initiative with the aim of building “Australian consumer and business confidence in cloud computing”. Merri Mack takes a closer look at OzHub and its potential impact on cloud computing in Australia. [ + ]

In his eleven years at TechnologyOne, IT Manager Andrew Bauer has seen the IT team grow from just two members to a team that supports the company’s current staff of 850 people. Merri Mack talks to Bauer about the challenges of getting a hold of something relatively intangible - such as the cloud - and using it to create real-world benefits for the business.

Unified communications offers a tantalising mix of productivity benefits, but the cost of a full-blown enterprise-grade deployment is prohibitive to many organisations. However, with the emergence of cloud-based unified communications services, these benefits are becoming available to more and more Australian businesses, as Stephen Withers found out.

Server virtualisation is growing ever more popular thanks to its potential to drive down costs and increase flexibility. But pre-virtualisation server performance metrics no longer apply, making any application performance problems hard to diagnose, leaving users wondering where their app went and IT with no answer. Rafi Katanasho, Compuware, explains what you can do about it.

Aggregating reams of data on your users and customers, then mining that data for business intelligence, is powerful indeed. But combining these otherwise disparate stockpiles of personal data has grave ethical implications, particularly if these datasets should ever fall into the wrong hands. Conrad Bates, from C3 Business Solutions, discusses these considerations and the need for ethics standards for information management.

IT departments are being urged to make use of new technologies like social media, mobility, virtualisation and the cloud. Each of these carries new security risks and IT departments must learn new tactics to successfully secure them, as Merri Mack explains.

Cloud computing is often treated as something of a black box: you put data into it, some magic goes on, and processed data comes out. But even though someone else is taking care of the heavy lifting, securing your data as it goes into the cloud is still your responsibility. So says Vince Lee, Regional Manager, Australia & New Zealand, SafeNet.

Demand for data centres continues unabated, driven by factors like cloud computing and increasing use of multiapplication phones. These data centres must be efficient if they are to be successful. Jim Smith, CTO of Digital Realty Trust, discusses how power-usage planning can help build better data centres.

Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of consumer technology giant Apple, has died. [ + ]

Data centre operators continue to be hounded by perennial problems like rising energy costs and increasing compute demands. Many are seeking to virtualise the entire data centre in order to get a leg-up. But this pursuit carries many dangers, as Merri Mack found out.

Once a ‘digital dinosaur’, whose most complex piece of technology was a typewriter, Greg Flint has evolved into a digital immigrant. As Acting Superintendent, Manager Policelink Branch for the Queensland Police Service (QPS), Flint has successfully led the state’s Policelink project. Flint explains to Merri Mack how he went from operational policing to heading up a major information technology project.