Saturday, 11 February 2012
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RESOURCE CENTRE
Tax and Revenue Management: A government’s lifeblood
IT has provided the opportunities for governments to remodel the entire process of tax collection over the last decade. It is, however, a continuously evolving process and governments the world over need to constantly upgrade their tax systems to optimise their revenue workflows.
Unlocking Public Value
A recent SAP study confirmed that those organisations which adopt best practices in the areas of scope and adoption, process standardisation, technology and customer governance, do perform better, and do so as their best practice maturity increases.
Governments and Socialising
The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.
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Government Security, Technology
How to weather the storm: Symantec
No matter what industry you’re in, this recession could be the opportunity of your career.
“It’s during difficult times that you make your reputation,” says Jay Shankavaram, managing director of the Corporate Executive Board, a global, cross-industry research association focused on executive decision support.
“This recession is a golden opportunity for IT leaders to shift the perception of the IT function, because the business partners may be more willing to actually think outside the box.” But thinking outside the box doesn’t mean they want to spend money on IT, unless you can show them in no uncertain terms that they’ll see that money back—and quickly.
Making IT pay for itself
Indeed, most organisations are now requiring IT solutions to deliver much faster return on investment (ROI) than in the past, and IT leaders are tasked with conducting and communicating credible ROI analyses.
To Greg Topf, director of IT at NewBay Media, a New York City based publisher of consumer magazines and Websites, this is a familiar challenge.
Topf identified NewBay Media’s file shares as a prime opportunity for storage tiering. He recently implemented Symantec Enterprise Vault with File System Archiving, which has already paid for itself in tape cost avoidance alone. “I realised that 85 percent of the data on our file servers hadn’t been touched in a year and a half,” he recalls. “By archiving that data onto second-tier storage using Enterprise Vault, I was able to free up a lot of primary storage and eliminate most of our tape backups.”
Channel your inner insurance salesman
Sometimes, however, ROI isn’t the point. Especially with data protection and security, bulletproof solutions simply have to be in place—during good times and bad—or businesses face unacceptable exposure to risks.
“Sell those investments to the business as you’d sell insurance,” advises Kam Golpariani, vice president, security operations, security risk management at First Advantage Corporation. “Often it’s not possible or appropriate to build an ROI case—you have to explain the need in terms of risk avoidance.”
As a provider of risk management services, First Advantage understands that organisations must continue to manage risk very carefully during a recession. To mitigate the risk of sensitive internal or customer data leaks, the company recently deployed Symantec Data Loss Prevention. “We do a lot of executive reporting, and we were able to show business managers what the solution could accomplish using non-technical terms,” says Golpariani.
Getting time on your side Ask a business manager to name a few frustrations with IT, and the time it takes to complete projects will likely come up. So might the number of employees dedicated to keeping the systems running. Both have recently come under more intense scrutiny.
“With our previous antivirus solution, we had to maintain a separate master server to host the software for each of our seven domains,” explains Mandar Marulkar, chief information security officer at KPIT Cummins, a business and technology services provider based in Pune, India. “We moved to Symantec Endpoint Protection, which requires only one central server, and reclaimed 80 percent of one system administrator’s time.”
Rethinking the future
The current economic climate won’t last forever. But the way IT leaders respond to it will leave a lasting impression on their colleagues and business partners. “The challenge for IT is to position itself as a strategic asset that can help drive business outcomes and prepare companies for new directions,” says Shankavaram. “Because a lot of organizations are rethinking the way they’re planning to grow. They’re going back to their drawing boards. And IT leaders have the opportunity to help lead this transformation.”
Visit https://scm.symantec.com/es/en/ to find out how you can Protect Today, Secure Your Future
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