Stories by Rachael Bolton

It's 7pm and the daily commute is finally over as you pull into your driveway. Maybe you're pondering what to have for dinner, looking forward to switching off in front of the TV or planning to crack open a beer and watch the football. Then again, maybe your phone just vibrated and you'll be responding to an urgent message from the Dublin office.
Work used to be a place you went to do your job. If there was more to do, it meant a late night at the office. If there was a problem in New York overnight, it would have to wait until you got in the next morning. But as technology continues to feed a mounting obsession with staying connected 24 hours a day, so the realms of home and office have begun to blur together.

With information technology budgets worldwide predicted to show some signs of life this year, albeit a gradual recovery, it's time for a reassessment of technology priorities - and local IT executives are better positioned than most.
But organisations are on the precipice of a fundamental cultural shift in the way their employees use information technology in the workplace - and corporate success will hinge on the ability to embrace and leverage that new engagement, at least one industry expert maintains.

Virtualising your servers saved you money. There was no question about that. Organisations that moved to virtualised environments reduced their footprint and shrank energy bills, while also enjoying a reduction in maintenance and management requirements.
But the players that took servers into the brave new world of virtualisation are finding it a lot harder to justify the same model for desktops on the same monetary basis.

The concept of an infinitely flexible, agile, mobile, enterprise-friendly, omnipotent provider of all IT needs is as elusive as it is attractive. In many ways it was fitting that it should end up with the moniker cloud computing - a joke that cannot be lost on vendor executives charged with selling the nascent concept to suspicious information chiefs during the past couple of years.
Elastic resource provisioning, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, pay-per-use servers and storage - cloud computing means different things to different people depending on the specific demands of their business.

Once upon a time, on a faraway local area network, a company's information technology systems were defended like a fortress. Employees toiled in safety behind the protection of great firewalls and the integrity of data was upheld.
But as virtualisation and cloud computing become more commonplace - and more fundamental business demands such as staffing and knowledge management create a demand for agile, task-based permission systems - the idea of the firewall as a company's main line of defence is fast becoming outdated.

Google has launched a new tool for users to control and administer their personal data.
The Google Dashboard was developed in Germany and Switzerland as a portal to provide a real-time analysis of all the information Google has recorded from a logged-in user.

Most businesses buy supplies manually because of problems with automated purchasing systems, according to research to be issued next month.
The Capgemini report says electronic systems intended to slash purchasers' paperwork are not widely used, despite being available since the 1980s.