IT project failures make headlines, and the industry is working hard to improve the situation from the inside and outside. It's going to be a long road, but well worth the journey, says the author.

The high-end storage device market is now as replete with competition, innovation and competing standards as any other area of enterprise IT. The author examines the issues and the architectures vying for dominance.

Calibrating IT performance to business needs should be part of any effective tech no-strategy. The author outlines five key habits of IT/business alignment wizards: 1. Fine-tuning customer relationships; 2. Communication is your responsibility; 3. Focusing on metrics: a hard fact is worth a thousand soft benefits; 4. Proactive, informed proposals win the day; and 5. I can see clearly now: seeing the bigger picture.

Stuart Aitken runs the central information systems for the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC). He signed an outsouring deal two years ago that pays the supplier on the business benefits its efforts deliver. Has he finally found a way to solve the outsourcing conundrum?

Most enterprises deploy some software to protect against malware threats, yet companies are still overlooking key aspects of IT security. In truth, security strategies are often full of holes caused either by managerial oversight or individual error. There has been much published about the top IT security threats, but the biggest ostensible dangers are not necessarily the ones that end up posing the most prevalent problems. Quite often it is the less high-profile, more mundane vulnerabilities that persistently vex security specialists.

Second-generation blade servers are just starting to blossom, but as a core technology they still have some technological issues to resolve. Before following the trend to blade server adoption, there are several key operational issues that IT professionals should know about. Blades constitute by far the fastest growing server segment, gaining a big lift from second-generation systems that overcome some of the earlier functional limitations. Yet, the latest blades on the market are conquering almost all fields except large-scale server consolidation for which I/O capabilities are still inadequate. Perhaps the biggest problem for blades lies in removing the heat, stimulating a revival in water cooling as well as innovation air flow systems.