Sponsor: IBM Corporation

By addressing key considerations, providing clear and actionable items, and offering real-world examples, these five steps provide an adaptable strategy to help your organization get started and maintain an effective, ongoing application-security strategy.

Are you outsourcing application development or considering outsourcing your new IT initiative? This interactive video discusses key considerations to help you keep your outsourcing projects on track and ensure you get what you paid for.

Today's fast-moving world makes DevOps essential for any business aspiring to be agile and lean in order to respond rapidly to changing customer and marketplace demands. This book helps you understand DevOps and how your organization can gain real business benefits from it. You'll also discover how a holistic view of DevOps that encompasses the entire software delivery life cycle - from ideation and the conception of new business capabilities to implementation in production - can bring competitive advantage in a continuous delivery world.

There's no such thing as "the cloud", says this Frost & Sullivan executive brief. It's more useful to think of the cloud as shorthand for a range of service and deployment models. This practical guide offers steps for moving your company into the cloud, at whatever pace you prefer, with a focus on the SmartCloud Services portfolio offered by IBM and its partners. Read the executive brief for usable advice on selecting the right cloud computing vendor to maximize your chance for success–one that allows you to build on your cloud strategy as your company grows.

This white paper discusses the ongoing challenges of cloud, the issues to consider before migrating to it, and the benefits that a migration can bring. The white paper also describes what to look for in a managed third-party cloud: Automation/standardization capabilities Configuration options Security levels Client control features Management features Ability to fulfill client organization's business needs

"Businesses that depend on web applications are constantly looking for ways to increase the efficiency of developing new applications and reduce the complexity of administering the environment. But many of the tasks required for application development, configuration and deployment are time consuming and expensive. IT is under pressure to control these costs while ensuring that applications will run smoothly and web-based interactions will be fast, responsive and secure. The complementary capabilities of IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and IBM PureApplication™ System can help address these challenges. This paper describes how organizations can save time and money through consolidation and acceleration of applications onto a flexible IBM PureApplication System environment with built-in expertise."

The skills needed to quickly design, test, configure and integrate solutions into today’s complex IT environments can be costly and scarce. IT managers may find themselves unable to develop and deploy applications and supporting systems as quickly and efficiently as they would like, even in virtual and cloud environments. As a result, businesses may lack the agility needed to be successful in a fast-paced, competitive environment. To address these challenges, IBM® PureSystems™ offerings provide patterns of expertise designed to deliver: Faster time-to-value; reduced costs and resources; lower risk and reduced errors; Essentially, a pattern is a recurring solution to a standard problem. This paper is intended to give business decision makers and IT executives an understanding of IBM PureSystems patterns—what they are, how they work and why they can provide exceptional value to an organization.

Data workloads are rapidly evolving and changing. Today's enterprises have many different types of applications, with different usage patterns, all constantly accessing data. As a result, data services need to be more robust and scalable. IBM PureApplication System and IBM PureData ™ System for Transactions are designed to meet these needs. This paper shows how the latest technology and expertise built into these systems gives businesses an innovative approach to rapidly create and manage highly scalable data services, without the complexity of traditional approaches.

Data growth continues to be a major problem in the business world, and many small and medium businesses have just as hard a time responding to the challenge as large enterprises do. Although smaller organizations generally have less data to store, they also have fewer IT resources to work with. As a result, smaller companies are often the ones that are most harmed by rapid data growth. In order to get the data protection and recovery functionalities they need while staying within their budgets, small and medium businesses need a solution that takes a creative approach to data protection. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery gives small and medium businesses the opportunity to start out with only the individual solutions they need, and add new functionalities as they grow. In addition, TSM SUR only requires businesses to pay for the amount of data they store after compression and deduplication.

The continuous growth of information means data protection is not only more important than ever before, it is also more expensive, time consuming and complex. And the historical tendency to use specific point solutions for backup and restore only makes matters worse. To meet these challenges organizations will need to modernize their backup and restore operations with a complete view of their backup environment and a comprehensive plan for migrating to optimized operations. They need to consolidate backup systems to address more complex recovery scenarios. Read the following analysis to better understand data and storage issues and demonstrate the value of deploying a modern data protection solution.

There are many great things to come out of open source initiatives, not the least of which is innovation. But relying on an open source application server for your most critical customer-facing apps may not be the smartest strategy. Consider the security, integrity, scalability, and ultimately lower TCO of the proven IBM WebSphere Application Server for your enterprise.

This analyst paper by Edison Group addresses the strategic reasons why organizations need to refresh their servers, and how a server refresh with IBM System x® servers, powered by the latest Intel® Xeon® processors, delivers and supports solutions and capabilities needed by SMBs.

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

The IBM Business Continuity Index rates the performance and maturity of business continuity programs. Organizations all over the world completed the survey. In this white paper, learn statistics about the global state of business continuity and where your business may sit on a scale from exposed to mature.

As a small or medium-sized business, knowing which infrastructure investments you need to make to improve your business is easy. The struggle is being able to apply your finite resources for long-term benefits when the day-to-day demands of your business keep your IT assets more than busy. A private cloud is one of those solutions that deliver immediate and impactful benefits with minimal pain. Read this brief e-guide to see how a private cloud on IBM® System x® servers, powered by the latest Intel® Xeon® processors, can accelerate the journey to smarter computing for your enterprise.

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.