PC World Business

Just because you don't have a large enterprise doesn't mean you can't run your IT operation like the big guys. Here are seven ways to help your SMB--a small or medium-size business--implement some of the lessons big IT operations have learned over the years. Using these tips, you should be able to improve productivity, cut costs, and keep your business running smoothly.

Visa is looking for a few good people to run its next-generation data centers.

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

As server virtualization projects gain scale and strategic value, enterprise IT managers must move quickly beyond tactical approaches to achieve best results.

Many IT professionals measure the success of a technology deployment by all the things they did (see "7 tips for succeeding with virtualization"), but some say a successful virtualization implementation often can be the result of things IT didn't do.

When it came time for Washington, D.C., to create a new intranet for city employees, spending US$4 million on a site based on proprietary portal software just didn't seem like a good idea to CTO Vivek Kundra. But using Google Apps did, he said in an interview Tuesday.

Companies are slowly starting to more closely evaluate solid-state storage technologies, though most are still waiting for the cost to come down before implementing it.

Interest in modular data centers is growing, fueled by high-profile endorsements from Microsoft and Google. But the model raises new management concerns, and efficiency claims may be exaggerated.

Faced with a massive PC refresh at a price tag of US$1.8 million, Jack Wilson instead rolled the dice on virtual desktops three years ago. The enterprise architect at Amerisure Insurance didn't just dabble in the nascent technology, he enacted a sweeping change, replacing all 800 PCs with Wyse thin clients and a server infrastructure that hosts 800 Windows workspaces -- a feat that took eight months and, critically, struck at the heart of worker productivity in a services-dependent industry.

You've heard about data centers in shipping containers. But how about a data center in a tent? And in rainy Seattle?

Trying to boost the IT capabilities at his digital forensics company, Brian Dykstra invested in a quad-core processor-based server. After all, he figured, more cores means a more powerful machine that can do far more work than single-core systems.