Over the past year, I've noticed a significant shift in my conversations about cloud with senior IT managers.

Increasing enterprise growth, reducing costs and attracting new customers are the three areas CIOs are focusing their attention on in 2011, according to the latest research from Gartner.

Telecommunications companies are predicted to be the next major players in the world cloud computing market with SaaS ticking all the right boxes for telco CIOs.

Malware, brand damage and loss of productivity are just a few of the consequences of social media use in the workplace CIOs need to be aware of, according to the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA).

It’s the bête noire of C-level managers the world over — too often, it’s easy to be pulled into the morass of day-to-day issues at the expense of strategy. If the role is predominantly operational, fair enough, but being forced into operations when you were hired to be strategic (or vice versa) is frustrating for everybody involved. So how do CIOs balance operations and strategy? Aligning the departmental business plan with the organisation’s strategic plan is an obvious starting point. Beyond that, however, CIOs have developed their own methods of staying strategic.