Cloud Computing
Essays

Major technological innovations in the last five (5) years:

Verizon's continued growth in consumer and business-based subscriber levels can be attributed to the depth of customer insight and intelligence the company has operated with, in addition to their unique approach to selling services contracts. Cellular and telecommunication services providers must balance a transaction focus to sell more with a relationship focus to keep customers signing up year after year. Many businesses rely on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to manage this balance between transactions and relationship-based selling (Chen, Popvich, 2003). Verizon is a sales-driven company that has grown quickly through mergers, acquisitions and alliances, and as a result, a transaction mentality pervades the company. The combination of the mergers, acquisitions and alliances and the priority put on new business over renewals has made Verizon suffer at building and maintaining relationships with customers. The company has a disjointed, disconnected series of customer processes that need to be unified through a Cloud-based CRM system. Company Background Verizon (NYSE:VZ) is one of the leading providers of cellular and telecommunications services globally, operating in 150 countries with 92.2 million customers globally. During their latest full fiscal year (FY), the company reporting $110B in revenues, an increase of 4% of their previous full fiscal period. Verizon attained a $12.8B operating profit in their latest fiscal year, which was a decrease of 12.1%. Net Profit during these two time periods also decreased by 5.7% during these fiscal years as well, with the company reporting $2.4B in FY2011. As with many cellular and telecommunications services providers, Verizon has gone through several reorganizations, each being focused on making the company more efficient at driving top-line revenue growth. The strategy has worked to this point and today the company has two globally-based business divisions, Verizon Wireless and Wireline. Verizon generates the majority of their revenues from the consumer segment, the majority of profits from the business and government sectors. In these latter segments it is more difficult to displace a cellular or telecommunication provider once contracts and service agreements are in place. This strategy of lock-in in the business and government sectors have compensated for the exceptionally high churn with consumers and small businesses, a problem hat a CRM system could solve. Business Problems Verizon today operates in 150 nations has partnerships in place with Cellco and Vodafone globally at the service provider level of their business. Verizon also has hundreds of partnerships with local cell phone, cellular equipment and enterprise networking companies as well. The two dominant divisions, Verizon Wireless and Wireline, rely on a procurement and supply chain management system that has over time been customized to the unique requirements of the company. The procurement and supply chain management systems are disconnected form the over two dozen CRM systems in the company as of 2012, which makes it nearly impossible for sales representatives, managers and senior managers to see what equipment they have available for sale. Instead, Verizon has integrated their procurement and supply chain management systems to their catalog management systems first. This is ideally used in a more inventory-based approach to selling which does not take into account customer needs first. Instead, Verizon sales reps are told to sell the products and services that are the most profitable without regard to customer needs. While this approach has been exceptionally successful in driving top-line revenue growth it has not yielded a high level of customer satisfaction. One of the most critical success factors of a CRM system is designing its many attributes to reflect what customers expect to be a successful interaction and relationship (Hsin, 2007). Verizon has today created the integration of their procurement, supply chain and catalog management systems to their many CRM systems for transaction efficiency first. Designing a CRM system for customer satisfaction first and transactions second or even third is critical to meeting and exceeding customer expectations on a consistent basis (Adalikwu, 2012).

The healthcare sector has recently experienced various legislation geared towards the improvement of service delivery. This study focuses on how the HITECH Act has played a critical role in shaping how healthcare organizations can improve their service delivery methods. The steps towards the realization of the same are identified especially those relating to the implementation of HIT systems. Healthcare professionals must always be involved in the making of critical decisions aimed at furthering the performance of the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to define the business plan necessary for launching a new information systems and consulting firm. Included are pro forma financial statements and assessment of risk and growth. There are also insights into the specific controls for the balance sheet's largest items.

The more critical aspect of any enterprise-wide security management strategy is to align system resources to the strategic initiatives and goals of an organization. Increasingly this is being accomplished through the use of role-based access and authentication privileges and process workflows that audit and evaluate use of sensitive information (Shih, Wen, 2005). The role of enterprise security management drastically changes however when ubiquitous Web Services are used for capturing, aggregating, analyzing and effectively using confidential data to make financial decisions (Phifer, 2011). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how intrusion and intrusion detection systems can be used in the 21rst century, state-of-the-art IT systems that are to a large extent Cloud-based and often have remote access points that make them particularly vulnerable (Phifer, 2011). Also included is an assessment of the types and threats from hackers and the risk they pose to confidential corporate data. Enterprise best practices dictates that a company control assets by multiple levels, authentication approaches and through architectural constraints that minimize risk while also providing agility and quickness of retrieval (Microsoft, 2011).

The paper analyses what cyberspace is and discusses the different definitions provided for the term. In the paper the context of cyber terrorism is discussed. The various ways that prove that cyberspace is the dominant domain in war are discussed. Technologies that make cyberspace the vital empire are listed and discussed.

Amazon faces increasingly higher levels of price, product and service competition globally, with its main business model being assailed from several different directions at once. As traditional book publishers fear…

This article details the factors that may influence Dell--the third largest computer company in the U.S.--to go private. It also includes crucial details that are of benefit for going private and that are drawbacks to doing so. The author is fairly equivocal in denoting which option is best for the computer company.

Planning for this methodology is crucial, as the wrong tradition and framework would not allow for the most successful. There is a clear distinction between research traditions, method, an analytic framework (Schram, 2006). From this, the current research can define its research tradition under the phenomenology approach using semi structured interviewing methods with analysis focusing on coding and interpreting participant perceptions. The methodology will consist of semi-structured interviews where participants who have handled insider security threats in organizations share and elaborate on their experiences of how the threat occurred within the context of cloud computing components and platforms.

In many cases, companies of all sizes and types fail to realize the full benefits of their available resources based on a lack of coordination between departments, so-called "turf battles" and a reluctance to share knowledge, among other reasons. As a result, internal and external customer service and profitability will suffer. There are some steps that can be used to help companies maximize their available resources, though, including environmental analytical techniques such as SWOT and force field analyses. To gain some fresh insights into how these methods can be used to maximize resources, this paper provides a review of the relevant literature, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the paper's conclusion.