In a new research survey from CIO Insight, the firm found employers that have a BYOD, or “Bring your own device,” policy see massive gains in productivity among employees, despite the inherent risks. That productivity will come at a price, however, as companies will need to start investing in mobile integration policies.

Let’s check out some of the stats from CIO Insight that show how BYOD policies are transforming the workplace for the better. For instance, the research found that 62 percent of the 500 IT and business executives that took part in the survey said that BYOD policies increased productivity. Fifty-nine percent said that it leads to more employee flexibility, and 47 percent said that such policies lead to cost savings.

Of course, companies still distribute smartphones and other devices among some employees. Fifty-eight percent of the surveyed organizations said that they will supply employees with devices, but also allow them to bring their own instead. Only eight percent of those surveyed said that they leave device acquisition entirely up to the employees.

Those who do supply employees with smartphones or other devices will have to start budgeting out those purchases now. Thirty-four percent of those surveyed said that they will have to invest in hardware bundles within the next two years. Even if your employees do bring their own device, companies will still have to budget out the hardware required to distribute information among those smartphones.

That being said, only 13 percent of survey respondents said that there’s heavy integration of mobile devices within companies. Those that have integrated mobile devices, however, are working on a number of projects to increase productivity among workers on mobile devices. Forty-nine percent of respondents are implementing virtual desktop systems so employees can work on the go, while 29 percent are building custom mobile apps to be distributed across business networks.

The point of all this is to say that mobile integration is incredibly important. A BYOD policy only helps to increase the speed in which mobile integration occurs. Not to mention, employees will be pleased to use their own Android or iOS device, instead of a business mandated BlackBerry device.

In a blog post on Microsoft’s technet blog, the company said that its annual TechForum, which was hosted at Microsoft’s HQ this week, was focused on the move from information technology to intelligent technology. What this means is that computers will no longer play a passive role in our everyday lives as an input tool, but rather take part in our lives in a meaningful way. Machines, such as your smartphone or tablet, will learn just as much from you as you learn from it.

The TechForum event was focused on the three ways that Microsoft is helping lead the charge into a future of intelligent technology:

All three of these technologies will become more important over the years as our relationship with computers grows deeper. More technologies will also undoubtedly emerge over the next few years that will make us rethink our relationship with computers yet again. All of this leads us to the idea that technology is not merely something that humanity creates, but rather its a living, breathing creation that evolves alongside mankind. Moving to rename information technology to intelligent technology is the first step to realizing our intertwined future with machines.

[Image: Microsoft]

These instances are especially helpful for applications that require a lot of memory on one instance or require taking advantage of distributed memory architectures, the company says.

“Memory-intensive workloads such as real-time applications used by healthcare providers, social networking companies and advertising technology providers require large amounts of memory to maintain high-performance,” said Amazon Web Services VP of Compute Services, Peter DeSantis. “We designed the High Memory Cluster instances specifically for these workloads, and this is the third instance family (along with High Storage instances and High I/O instances) launched in the past six months designed specifically for high performance applications. We’ll continue to listen and learn from customers and provide additional instance families and capabilities to meet the requirements of their applications.”

VP of HANA Cloud at SAP, Sapan Panigrahi, says, “The new High Memory Cluster instances provide sizeable CPU cores and storage to run even larger workloads on SAP HANA in the AWS cloud. By leveraging the strength of SAP HANA in-memory computing, with the agility and low cost of the AWS cloud, a new generation of solutions are now possible. We look forward to enabling these instances to help our customers run real-time applications in the cloud.”

According to Amazon, the the High Memory Cluster instances are the most cost-effective that the company provides, as far as distributed memory-intensive applications go.

“The GSA 7.0 helps you find information stored anywhere in your organization, whether you’re using a desktop, smartphone or tablet,” says Matthew Eichner, General Manager, Enterprise Search at Google. “Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites. GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience.”

“Users are happy when they get relevant results returned quickly,” says Eichner. “At Google, speed and relevance are the core components of a great search experience. With GSA 7.0, we’ve refined our relevance signals so that the most useful information for each particular user is always easy to find. Assisted navigation makes it easy to refine search results, and requires no manual configuration from administrators. Entity Recognition automatically identifies and suggests content you might be looking for, and GSA 7.0 also harnesses the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ allowing employees to add their own search results.”

The new GSA also comes with document preview, Google Translate, updated language capabilities, a new interface and improved scale. You can view thumbnails and flip through full-screen document previews alongside search results. Search results can be displayed in over 60 languages. According to Google, a single rack of GSAs could now fit the equivalent of the entire Google.com index in 2000 (a billion pages).

IBM announced its Mobile Foundation, which is an effort geared toward helping enterprises capitalize on the entire mobile environment. As Paul Brunet, the Vice President of IBM Application and Integration Middleware, explained to WebProNews, this type of system is especially important given mobile’s dominance across the board. IBM studies show that the current $22 billion mobile market is expected to grow to $36 billion by 2015.

With this foundation, IBM focuses on the parts that enterprises concentrate on as well, which are scalability and security.

“There’s this middle ground of all the things that really make it scalable, reliable, secure… and that’s really what IBM is focused around in regards to delivering the mobile foundation,” said Brunet.

The mobile foundation is built on IBM’s acquisition of Worklight but expands it to include the company’s WebSphere Cast Iron capabilities. As a result, organizations have the ability to build and connect applications to the cloud or other internal apps. Furthermore, Brunet told us, they have a stronger control over the communication and ideas that go out through the apps and mobile devices.

IBM also announced new elements to its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems. According to Brunet, IBM is hoping to reduce the costs and complexities associated with IT and application development with this new offering.

“The family of PureSystems really looks at integrating the hardware through networking, through storage – all the way to the middleware to the integrated management,” he said.

At this point, many organizations are spending 70 percent or more on management and maintenance costs. Brunet told us that IBM is trying to change this trend by allowing businesses to get new services to their clients while also optimizing and driving greater efficiencies in their IT departments. The company has created “patterns of expertise” for streamlining these processes and is also enabling its clients to build their own patterns.

“Harnessing these patterns and making sure that a client… who might typically take anywhere from 3-4 weeks to deploy one of these environments… is really allowing them to do it in a number of hours,” explained Brunet.

Ultimately, he said that IBM wants to alleviate workloads in order for enterprises to focus on making their products and services better.

IBM’s new software systems are currently available.

The answer is that it is all of these things. Many of our organizations don’t have very good security, there are lots of folks who like to hack in and steal information, and there’s a lot of hype about security threats in the media everyday.

This next infographic from Bit9.Com gives us some powerful insight and statistical analysis about what’s really going on out there with cyber security. It appears there’s a lot that can be done to make it less likely your organization will be victims of an attack, and most of it is just about being proactive.

I think this graphic is relevant to almost everyone today. Take as look at it and decide for yourself if you’re doing everything you can to stay protected. It’s filled with great facts and useful information.

Research shows that many people who spend time in the knowledge field waste a great deal of time with the IT solutions provided to them. In other words, the system which is supposed to serve them is often the largest barrier to efficiency and success. Rypple.Com is the provider of this next infographic that seeks to stress the importance of cutting wasted time and streamlining communication through cloud-based IT solutions.

It is a very revealing infographic and speaks directly to many real-world complaints I have heard from people in these industries in the past. So if you’re frustrated with how communications are getting managed in your workplace, take a look at what they found and what they believe the solution could be.

Enjoy:

But, on the other hand, how better to stay abreast of new developments, know who’s who and did what in the world of technology than to keep a vibrant social presence?

Software developer harmon.ie has compiled a list of Fortune 250 CIOs that are most socially active across LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. They also considered the activity on the Interwebs about these people when calculating their impact on the social scene. How often were they mentioned on blogs? What were their Alexa scores? And, generally speaking, what happened when you Googled their names?

Kelly, whose unique draw (other than his age) is the fact that he’s a software engineer, participated in a reddit AMA on Monday. AMAs (or Ask Me Anything) kind of work like crowdsourced interviews, where the interviewee can choose which questions to respond to.

This reddit AMA caught the eye of one University of Kentucky graduate. You guys probably know him more for his work with Google. “A software engineer running for US Congress…In Kentucky? Right on,” says Matt Cutts:

Kelly has lived in Lexington, KY for 20 years and is a graduate of the University of Kentucky with a degree in Computer Science. He works as a software engineer for a local company and also does freelance work.

He started off his AMA with this:

To save some time I’ll tell you I’m anti-NDAA, anti-SOPA/PIPA/internet regulation, anti-patriot act, anti-drug war, pro-legalization, anti-war, pro-marriage equality, pro-thorium, among a host of other things and my opponents support of these things is a big part of why I got into the race. While we on reddit may not agree on the details of everything, I think it’s important that most of us probably share the same goals and that it’s important to keep a civil discussion.

Kelly will be running in the Republican primary for U.S. Congress. Maybe Matt Cutts will do a little campaigning for him (if they match up on the issues, of course).

Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Reports explains the challenge many organizations face when dealing with cloud technology:

“Companies that cannot compare costs for public cloud services versus internal IT will be in rough shape once they build private clouds and adopt a hybrid setup,”

“And just avoiding cloud won’t be an answer, if enterprises don’t want a stark IT cost delta between them and startups.”

Jonathan Feldman, author of the study, explains a little more about the confusion in calculating ROI:

While there’s an air of inevitability around cloud computing, the ROI calculation has stayed in flux. A lot depends on whether we’re talking SaaS, PaaS or IaaS; some are easier to wrap your arms around than others. Because of SaaS’s very granular cost methodology, it’s actually pretty straightforward to calculate investment and who benefits, and thus peg return on investment. For example, especially for commoditized enterprise applications like email, it’s fairly trivial to figure out how much personnel, storage, servers, software and licenses cost to come up with a per-seat price for in-house email. Then you can compare apples to apples.

Here’s some findings from InformationWeeks’s report:

* 82% of our survey respondents have or expect a formal mandate or a preference to evaluate cloud computing as an option for any new IT services or systems.

* 60% are concerned or very concerned over the potential for runaway costs if cloud services scale up inappropriately, whether due to error, mismanagement or an attack such as DoS.

* 31% say it’s highly likely they will comprehensively evaluate ROI for the expected lifespan of a cloud computing project; 54% of those likely to evaluate their return on investment will use a three- to five-year time period for comparison.

* 27% report incorporating time savings for business unit employees or IT staff has a high likelihood of being included in an ROI study regarding the business value of cloud computing.

The survey information is based on responses from 374 participants in InformationWeek’s Cloud ROI IT survey for 2012. Hopefully these results shed a little light on subject for those who are making decisions about the right ways to invest in cloud technology.