IT Risk: Your Audit Checklist

The broad and rapid adoption of cloud computing by all sorts of businesses and organizations is quickly reshaping the way many key internal functions are expected to operate in — and adapt to — the new paradigm. That includes procurement, IT, risk management, governance, compliance, and audit, to...

By Rob Livingstone • June 19, 2012

BYOD: Bring Your Own Danger?

Now that a bit of the luster has worn off that shiny buzzword — BYOD — and the policy of allowing employees to work with their personal cell phones and tablets has had some time to settle in, some CFOs are discovering that actually deploying a “Bring Your Own Device” strategy might not be the sma...

By Taylor Provost • June 14, 2012

The Increasing Inevitability of Cyber Insurance

Back in the days when I was president of Oracle On Demand, we made a proposal to deliver a discrete manufacturing application-as-a-service to a computer manufacturer. In the course of the discussions, the manufacturer’s CIO asked, “If this service goes down, we lose $1 million an hour. So, will y...

By Timothy Chou • June 11, 2012

Will Another Pro-business Online Bill Bite the Dust?

The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote soon on a business-friendly bill that would give companies access to information about threats to their networks’ security.The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would allow the government to provide classified intelligence...

By Sarah Johnson • April 26, 2012

Apple and China: A Love Story, With Risk

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer basked yesterday in the glow of a record quarter that saw his company nearly double its net income over the past year, while its second-quarter revenue rose to a little more than $39 billion, up from $24.7 billion a year ago. With quarterly profits driven by sales of i...

By David Rosenbaum • April 25, 2012

Doing Business Overseas Gets Riskier

Dozens of countries are riskier places to do business, in terms of terrorism and political violence, than there were last year, according to the 2012 Aon Risk Solutions risk map, released today. The map shows 37 countries with greater business and financial risk, including France, Germany, Italy,...

By Sarah Johnson • April 24, 2012

The SEC Wants a Raise

The Securities and Exchange Commission has requested $1.6 billion for its 2013 fiscal year, an 18.5% increase over 2012. But some legislators think the agency doesn’t need it.SEC chairman Mary Schapiro told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services in March that the agency would...

By Sarah Johnson • April 15, 2012

Four Barriers to Cloud Due Diligence

As a CFO overseeing your organization’s transition to cloud, how can you ensure your journey delivers on its promises over both the medium and long term? Focusing on the short term is the comparatively easy part. Entry costs are – as cloud vendors are quick to tell you – low relative to on-premis...

By Rob Livingstone • April 11, 2012

Under Heat from Congress, SEC Still Seeks 18.5% Raise

During a subcommittee hearing today where Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Schapiro was seeking an 18.5% budget increase, the chair of a congressional oversight committee contended that she would be “reticent to throw money at the SEC” until the regulator can prove it’s made signific...

By Sarah Johnson • March 6, 2012

Worker-Departure Disaster Waiting to Happen

It wasn’t long after American Superconductor (AMSC) employee Dejan Karabasevic was demoted and resigned before he went rogue. In a state of revenge, he covertly sold AMSC’s encrypted software key code to its most valuable customer. AMSC eventually detected this exploitation and identified Karabas...

By John Reed Stark • March 5, 2012

HP CFO Acknowledges Supply Chain Woes

In its quarterly earnings report yesterday, Hewlett-Packard announced that sales of personal computers fell 15% year over year; consumer sales fell 25%, and corporate PC sales fell 7%, all contributing to a 44% decline in profits. Overall revenues fell 7% to $30 billion, which was below expectati...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 23, 2012

Lawmakers Act to Stem Suppliers’ Abuse of Workers

Companies that do business in California may have to step up scrutiny of their supply chains for potential workers’ rights abuses, thanks to a new state law. And if a similar bill in the U.S. House of Representatives is passed, companies in the rest of the country could have to do the same.The Ca...

By Marielle Segarra • Jan. 25, 2012

Anti-Piracy Act Vote Postponed

A vote on the Protect IP Act (PIPA) scheduled for January 24 was called off today by Senate majority leader Harry Reid in the wake of Wednesday’s protests that notably included a blackout of the popular Wikipedia website.The PIPA legislation, along with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), was stro...

By David Rosenbaum • Jan. 20, 2012

HP’s CFO Speaks on the Cloud, Shadow IT, and Tumultuous Times at HP

In its most recent 10-K filing, Hewlett-Packard, number 11 among the 2011 Fortune 500, lists among its business risks “the growing demand for an increasing array of mobile computing devices” as well as the “development of cloud-based solutions,” both of which could “reduce demand for some of our ...

By David Rosenbaum • Jan. 12, 2012

Getting In with the Grid

Short of turning off the lights at night, few CFOs get involved with corporate energy management efforts. At EnerNOC, which recruits companies to participate in demand-response programs and become more energy-efficient in other ways, only 2% of the firm’s 50,000 customer contacts have “finance” i...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 16, 2011

Five Ways to Revitalize Your Supply Chain

With a new year fast approaching, there is no better time to think about new ways to strategically leverage your supply chain. To begin, we must learn to think beyond order fulfillment and meeting customer demand and consider instead how new-product introduction, improved business performance, an...

By Shawn Casemore • Dec. 12, 2011

The Data Sovereignty Minefield

Most, but not all, of the world’s leading cloud providers — Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Rackspace, et al. — are hosted in the United States. This means that data contained in U.S.-hosted clouds is subject to U.S. laws governing security and privacy, which further means that the laws of the United...

By Rob Livingstone • Nov. 8, 2011

To Err Is Human . . . and Punishable by the SEC

If you ran a chronically underfunded department that was part of an organization in urgent need of across-the-board belt-tightening, would you go out of your way to take on new responsibilities with your limited resources? I doubt it.But according to recent media reports, the Securities and Excha...

By Russell G. Ryan • Nov. 1, 2011

Risks of a Model Still Maturing

If one were to swallow the cloud-computing hype whole, its adoption in the enterprise is inevitable. It will lower IT costs and speed up IT delivery and business-project implementations. It will transform IT as we know it, all at the flick of a switch. However, back on planet Earth, the volatile ...

By Rob Livingstone • Oct. 17, 2011

Garbage Out, Trouble In

What should you do with your old computers? It’s not always clear. Federal regulations on recycling electronics have been historically lax, but new state laws are cropping up across the country. At least 25 states have enacted their own regulations regarding the disposal of computer hardware cont...

By Marielle Segarra • Sept. 21, 2011

Cloud Control

A recent Ponemon Institute study reports that a significant majority of 127 cloud-computing service providers surveyed believe it is their customers’ responsibility to secure the cloud, not theirs.Or, as Andrew Schrader, national sales director of e-mail hosting and services cloud provider AppRiv...

By David Rosenbaum • Sept. 1, 2011

Debt-Ceiling Distress

The federal debt-ceiling drama could affect companies in a number of ways, if Congress doesn’t raise the government’s credit limit soon. And while most CFOs are watching and waiting, a handful of public companies have been spelling out those ways in their recent filings with the Securities and Ex...

By Alix Stuart • July 29, 2011

Any Interest in Interest?

Among the many regulations of the Dodd-Frank Act is a rare gift for companies that becomes effective today: the ability of banks to pay interest on business checking accounts. Previously, banks were prohibited from offering interest on these accounts under a decades-old rule called Regulation Q. ...

By Sarah Johnson • July 21, 2011

How Western Union Smooths Out Risk

Western Union, the 160-year-old money transfer and payments company, operates across 200 countries and territories through 450,000 agents. Its consumer customers are largely migrant workers sending earnings back to their family in their home country. So changes in employment levels worldwide, tig...

By Vincent Ryan • July 18, 2011

Creating a Culture of Compliance

Cell-phone markets in Central America and Southeast Asia were booming early in the decade, and Alcatel SA paid dearly to get in on the action, in more ways than one.The Paris telecommunications giant doled out $8 million in bribes to “consultants” (including a well-connected perfume distributor i...

By Kimberly Blanton • July 15, 2011