Every innovation, every business process improvement, comes with an IT complexity tax that must be paid by CIOs in time, money and sweat. Here are strategies to mitigate the increasing complexity of IT as it enables new business.

December is a relatively slow time of year at MLB Advanced Media, the company that brings you the official Major League Baseball Web sites. From pitch-by-pitch accounts of games to streaming audio and video -- plus news, schedules, statistics and more -- it has baseball covered. Doing so requires serious horsepower, so much so that the company's Manhattan data center is pretty much tapped out in terms of space and power, according to Ryan Nelson, director of operations for the firm. Strategic use of virtualization technology enabled him nevertheless to forge ahead with implementing new products during the 2007 season, and promises to smooth a shift to a new data center in Chicago in time for the 2008 season.

When the Estonian government was hit with major, sustained denial-of-service attacks this spring, the headlines screamed that it was the first incident of modern cyber warfare.

If Apple were a football team, the New England Patriots would have had some serious competition this year.

While rapid-fire cost-savings and consolidation efforts typically dominate an IT executive's annual to-do list, what's getting the green light this year are multiphase projects that protect organizations from regulatory fallout and data leakage.