Be secure. Use technology to transform our business (aka Digital Transformation). No downtime. Be able to work anywhere, anytime and on any device. Leverage the Internet of Things. These sound like a New Year’s Resolution list for the CIO of a large enterprise right? But what about small businesses where resources are scarce and the luxury of a full service IT team is just a dream.

Understanding DFARS Compliance: What It Is and What You Need to Know
To say that cyber security is an important issue in the modern era is definitely something of an understatement. According to a recent study conducted by Ponemon Institute in association with IBM Security, the average cost of just a single data breach incident reached $3.62 million in 2017. That's just the consolidated worldwide cost, however - the average cost of a data breach in only the United States reached an all-time high of $7.35 million during the same period of time.

Every year, the AWS re:Invent conference is the place enterprise IT professionals flock to learn the latest and greatest capabilities coming out of Amazon Web Services. This year was certainly no exception. In this post, we’ll look at few of the most noteworthy announcements from the event.

Is IT Eating Your Lunch or Feeding Your Company?
As we continue to grow our “CIO for Hire” program, we continue to find the same issues hindering our clients growth. Here’s our “Top 10” list of ways that IT can eat your lunch:

Focus on machines: on the technology, rather than your strategy, your users, your people
Hindered collaboration: files sent as attachments, no version or access control, tasks sent in emails, no follow up etc.

Disaster recovery 101: What you need to know about disaster recovery (and how the cloud changes things)
(This article was written by Wayne Rash and originally appeared on hpe.com)

The term "disaster recovery" has been bandied around the world of IT for decades.

As the amount of data coming in to business systems continues to grow at an exponential pace, businesses must be prepared to capitalize on the value that data has to offer if they wish to be successful in the modern business era. That being said, these businesses can't expect to deploy the big data projects of tomorrow on the IT systems to today.

From a theoretical perspective, the potential benefits of a business moving some or all of their IT systems to a cloud environment are impossible to deny. However, in order to really get the bottom of what makes cloud so useful in today's business environment, it can be helpful to focus on something a little less abstract, and instead take a look at some actual use cases where cloud is changing business equations and giving some organizations a competitive advantage.

Interviews are now a thing of the past. Let CimaCare introduce you to the future of Staff Augmentation and Virtual CIOs.

You need a CIO to provide your business with critical insights and strategy. But you don't have weeks to invest in identifying, recruiting, and training one.

An area that has been causing business leaders headaches for years is customer support. Of course, customers are the lifeblood of your business, so keeping them satisfied and informed should be one of your highest priorities. At the same time, dealing with the volume of customer calls and emails you receive may make it difficult for your employees to find any time in their day for the productive work that they were actually hired to do.

When we think of catastrophe’s like car accidents or fatal illnesses we tend to think “that’s what always happens to other people”. Because of this, we are shocked when these things happen to us but the important thing to remember is that to someone else, you and I are the other people that these happen to.