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CIO Profile: DWP and UK Government CIO Joe Harley brings a boardroom ethos to public-sector IT

Government CIO Joe Harley has had an illustrious career within the public and private sector. As well as taking on the mammoth task of transforming ICT within the public sector in January 2011, he remains CIO and director general for Corporate IT at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)....read more here.

Published by CIO.co.uk on 23rd June 2011.

All together now: how to benefit from cloud-based unified communications

Unified comms is the promise of bringing different forms of communications together - is it a good fit for the cloud?

Unified communications is about bringing your mobile and fixed line telephony, email, instant messaging, collaboration and other communications together in such a way that you can manage them as one.

It's a great option for organisations that have a dispersed workforce, or those that want to adopt flexible working practices, as there are clearly some advantages in terms of permitting a your staff to work from home, which in effect helps to reduce carbon emissions and office space. As a practice it is argued that flexible working can also boost employee performance, and experience shows that it can facilitate and encourage a higher level of collaboration...

Read more on CloudPro.

A call to action

Could government departments really save £800m through smarter provision?

In October 2010 Sir Philip Green delivered a report that described government waste of public money and resources as being both staggering and shocking.

The government, he said, was not sufficiently using its huge scale and buying power to gain better deals in all operational and departmental areas. Different government departments and public sector bodies, for example, have often worked with a diverse range of communications suppliers...

Read more of Graham Jarvis' article on CIO.co.uk.

Getting to grips with workloads in the cloud

Clouds are nothing without workloads but how can a company optimise its deployment?

Without workloads the cloud is just idle. This perhaps seems very obvious to all of us because wherever data is being processed workload is created by the servers used to manage and handle it. David Chalmers, Technology Director for Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Business Group agrees...read more on CloudPro.

Cloud market: future mass market, oligopoly or monopoly?

How many cloud providers will there be in future? One? Ten? 100? How does this debate help our decisions today?

The outstanding opinion about whether there will be an oligopoly or monopoly of cloud providers in the future is a resounding, “No”. However, life is not so simple and it emerges that the definition of what a cloud provider is can literally make the whole question much foggier than one would immediately think. This is because there are a number of different players within the cloud computing market, and each of them contributes in some way.

Read more on CloudPro.