The Relative Risk of the Cloud vs. Data Centers? It Depends

You are out of capacity. You’ve got data that you don’t have a home for. So you have to decide whether to build out additional capacity within your existing data center (if you have one), in a colocation data center, or in the cloud.Let’s consider each in turn.Option 1: Build new capacity in your...

By Rajendran Avadaiappan • June 15, 2016

Cloud Providers Have a Lot at Stake

Keeping data in your own data center feels like the right choice. After all, it’s your business on the line.Chip Wentz Yet the largest application cloud providers have even more at stake in terms of their businesses and reputations. They are responsible for protecting the information of thousands...

By Chip Wentz • June 15, 2016

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The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

The Case for Cloud Storage Vendors

Just a few years ago, most people would have answered the question of whether data is more secure in a company’s data center or in a vendor’s cloud storage system with a resounding answer in favor of organization’s data center.Ashley Vukovits Companies hired very smart security people and gave th...

By Ashley Vukovits • June 15, 2016

Wendy’s Says Hack Hit More Payment Terminals

Wendy’s has disclosed that a cyberattack on its restaurants was more extensive than it initially reported, saying the attackers used malware to breach a second payment terminal system.The burger chain has been investigating reports of fraudulent charges on some credit and debit cards that had bee...

By Matthew Heller • June 10, 2016

Suit Against Oracle Spotlights Cloud Accounting

Accusing her Oracle supervisors of trying “to fit square data into round holes” to boost financial results, a former senior finance manager at the firm with responsibility for cloud revenues has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the technology giant.In her lawsuit, which demands a jury trial,...

By David Katz • June 2, 2016

Smartphone Sales to Rise Only 3.1% in 2016

“Phone fatigue” may be increasing, as market research firm IDC on Tuesday reduced its forecast for 2016 global smartphone shipments growth and predicted iPhone sales will decline more sharply than originally expected.In its latest quarterly survey of the smartphone market, IDC said that after ris...

By Matthew Heller • June 1, 2016

How to Be a Data-Driven CFO

Today’s technology, cloud, and IoT-driven world is continually generating a wealth of data, creating both opportunity and challenge for those tasked with deciphering and analyzing it. CFOs in particular are now facing increased pressure to connect the dots between multiple data streams to identif...

By Rodger Howell • May 27, 2016

Fitbit Makes Move Toward Finance Technology

Fitbit has taken a step toward adding new features to its wearable fitness trackers some time next year by acquiring mobile payment technology from Silicon Valley startup Coin.The deal includes “key personnel and intellectual property specific to Coin’s wearables payment platform,” Fitbit said, b...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • May 18, 2016

The Wide World of IoT and Precision Technology

Many people think the Internet of Things (IoT) is about your toaster talking to your refrigerator. While there will no doubt one day be very useful consumer IoT applications, more immediately there are many industrial applications, and many more potential ones, to consider.This article, the first...

By Timothy Chou • May 17, 2016

Mobile App Installs Climb to $156 Billion in 2015

Mobile device users installed nearly 156 billion applications worldwide in 2015, but the growth of app installations and direct revenue from them will slow by the end of the decade, according to a new report.International Data Corp. predicted installations will increase to more than 210 billion i...

By Matthew Heller • May 9, 2016

Facebook Can’t Dodge Suit Over Photo Tagging

Facebook has lost a bid to escape a class action lawsuit over its photo tagging technology as a judge ruled it can be sued under an Illinois law that protects biometric privacy.The technology uses facial recognition software to scan photographs that have been uploaded onto Facebook, creating “fac...

By Matthew Heller • May 6, 2016

Big Data Overwhelms the C-Suite

Across many industries, both business planning and key decision-making are increasingly informed by big data. As pressure mounts to match business operations to the record pace of current, aggressive market innovation, more organizations are looking to base decisions on hard numbers in order to m...

By Ashok Noah • April 26, 2016

FBI Warns of Rise in Business Email Scams

The FBI has issued a warning to businesses about fast-growing email scams in which fraudsters posing as company executives order staff to transfer money to accounts controlled by criminals.There has been a “dramatic rise” in such “business email compromise” scams, resulting in more than $2.3 bill...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • April 8, 2016

WhatsApp Strengthens Privacy Wall for Users

Instant messaging service WhatsApp has announced that all communications between its one billion users will now be protected by full end-to-end encryption, firmly positioning itself on the side of privacy amid efforts by law enforcement to access data.The hugely popular Facebook-owned app started...

By Matthew Heller • April 6, 2016

Iranian Hacker Used Google To Hack N.Y. Dam Computer

“Google dorking,” a widely accessible method for locating computer vulnerabilities, enabled an Iranian to find and then hack into the unsecured computer system of a New York dam in an attempt to sabotage its operations on behalf of the Iranian government.So say people familiar with a federal inve...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 29, 2016

When Will We Be Able to Trust the IoT?

If you had an unlimited budget and little need for sleep, you could attend most (but not all) of the dozens of Internet of Things (IoT) events scheduled around the world in 2016. You’d not get much actual work done, but you’d hear a lot about what’s possible when everything gets “smart and connec...

By John Parkinson • March 28, 2016

Mac Computers Hit by First Ransomware Attack

Apple has updated the operating system for Mac computers after cybersecurity experts discovered what is believed to be the world’s first fully-functional ransomware that targets OS X machines.Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, typically asks victims to pay ransoms in h...

By Matthew Heller • March 8, 2016

Only 37% of Retailers Equipped for Chip Cards

U.S. merchants have been slow to adopt chip-enabled credit and debit cards, exposing them to liability for fraudulent transactions perpetrated with traditional magnetic strip cards, according to a new survey.The Strawhecker Group (TSG), a management consultancy, found that only 37% of retailers w...

By Matthew Heller • March 1, 2016

Share and Share Alike

(Listen to an interview with the writer about “Cyber Threats and the Problem of Sharing” in a new episode of CFO Podcasts.)Long-running tensions between corporate defenders of data privacy and the federal government are heating up — or cooling down, depending on your point of view.In a case with ...

By David Katz • Feb. 24, 2016

Apple Not Budging in Fight Over Data With FBI

Seeking to avoid a legal showdown with the U.S. government, Apple on Monday called for a government panel to review the issues of data privacy and national security raised by the FBI’s demand that it unlock a terrorist’s iPhone.Apple said last week it would oppose a court order requiring it to he...

By Matthew Heller • Feb. 22, 2016

Cyber Risk Demands All Hands on Deck: Proofpoint CFO

In the view of Paul Auvil, the CFO of Proofpoint, a cybersecurity firm, no single way of fighting online attacks against companies is infallible.Hence, on January 20, the company announced that it had formed a partnership with Palo Alto Networks, which builds firewalls to defend clients against c...

By David Katz • Feb. 10, 2016

U.S. Data Breaches Almost Match Record High

U.S. data breaches in 2015 dropped only slightly below 2014’s record high, with hacking incidents accounting for more than one-third of the breaches, according to a new survey.Organizations reported 781 breaches last year, the Identity Theft Resource Center said, compared with 783 in 2014. The IT...

By Matthew Heller • Feb. 8, 2016

Easy on the Ears

It Is hard to identify the moment when podcasting took off, because it keeps having them. In June last year Barack Obama showed up at a Californian man’s garage to tape a podcast (“WTF with Marc Maron”) while “Serial”, a podcast series about disputed real-life stories launched in 2014, has surpas...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 20, 2016

Self-Driving Cars Less Prone to Crashes

Self-driving vehicles may crash less often than those with a driver behind the wheel, according to a new study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.The research was commissioned by Google and compared national crash data and data from naturalistic driving studies to data from Google’s fl...

By Matthew Heller • Jan. 11, 2016

Cybersecurity CFO Hustles to Foster Firm’s Growth

As the new CFO of CrowdStrike, a firm zeroed in on preventing other companies’ worst fears about cyberattacks from coming true, Burt Podbere has a persistent worry of his own. Could the company somehow lose its advantage in what he sees as a market with huge growth potential?Burt Podbere Asked wh...

By David Katz • Dec. 30, 2015