5 top metrics for managing IT

5 Top Metrics for Managing IT CIOs frequently ask what IT should measure and report to business executives. The key to success is choosing a small number of metrics that are relevant to the business and have the most impact on business outcomes. The five metrics that meet the criteria for relevance and impact are investment alignment to business strategy, business value of IT investments, IT budget balance, service level excellence, and operational excellence. These five metrics should form the core of an IT performance scorecard.   4 Reasons to Install Exchange Server Security Today Should you install messaging security software on an Exchange Server, or is it better to use separate servers, appliances or services to provide these capabilities? Osterman Research believes that while these external solutions provide excellent performance, installing the right messaging security software directly on the Exchange Server also provides excellent performance without compromising Exchange Server stability, reliability, performance or maintainability.   Multi-Enterprise SOAs: 5 Ways to Drive Collaboration and Business Growth Multi-enterprise SOAs provide the framework through which to create integration and interoperability. Such integrated business platforms must provide for the seamless flows of information across organizational, departmental and geo-political domains, regardless of which technologies or standards are in place. It can quickly enable the processes that spell growth and profitability in today's economy.   11 Effective Green-Enabling Strategies for IT Effective green business information strategies span technology, people and processes and assume that an organization's information needs will be dynamic and continuously changing. Rather than relying on stove-piped tools to access information in support of one specific business process or compliance report, effective information architectures make use of enterprise-wide policies and automation to enable consistent, scalable information retention, search, retrieval, and analysis across multiple data types and infrastructure platforms.   Cut Deployment Costs in Half: How to Tame the PC Beast Large-scale deployments of personal computers are complicated and time-consuming. The costs associated with deploying and maintaining fleets of computers have become a large portion of many companies' overall information technology (IT) budget. Moreover, IT executives and managers are under constant pressure to reduce labor costs while maintaining or improving staff productivity. This paper offers IDC's quantitative and qualitative research and perspective for examining the challenges and costs of PC deployment, as well as the benefits of automating deployment processes.   5 Requirements for Better Web App Security Organizations are rapidly running out of options. The need to address a host of ongoing trends that are diminishing the usefulness of mission-critical applications by negatively impacting their performance and accessibility is making the deployment of application delivery solutions a necessity -- not a choice. At the same time, prevailing conditions in the threat and regulatory environments are essentially forcing investment in countermeasures such as Web application firewalls to establish greater degrees of application-layer security. One option that does remain, though, is how organizations choose to implement these much-needed solutions. eNewsletter Information: You are receiving this e-mail because you are a loyal subscriber to the Web Buyer's Guide Member Update with the e-mail address ignoble.experiment@arconati.us. If you no longer wish to receive Web Buyer's Guide Member Update, unsubscribe here. Copyright © 2009 Ziff Davis Enterprise. All Rights Reserved. Ziff Davis Enterprise, 28 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016 Privacy Policy