Publications

Navigating cloud management
Faster time-to-market, lower capital expenses, and the ability to rapidly scale are among the many potential benefits of cloud. Yet, cloud also introduces new complexities and dependencies into the IT management landscape—placing an enormous strain on traditional approaches. While these management challenges stem from an emerging service delivery and consumption paradigm, significant change is required for companies that want to realize the true value of cloud. As cloud continues to transform the technology landscape and service delivery paradigm, companies need to re-evaluate all aspects of their service delivery model—from processes, controls and tools to governance, skills and culture.
Managing cloud migration
Today’s IT customers are increasingly leveraging the cloud to transform their capabilities, and they are planning to move more than half of their workload to the cloud by 2014. As a result, we expect significant growth in IT contract restructuring efforts, as well as increased activity in deal renewals over the next 24 months. Having a well thought out strategy for contract restructuring and a clear plan for retained IT is essential for companies wishing to avoid the typical failure patterns that accompany a lack of strategic alignment, inadequate governance, and myopic IT service provider management.
10Minutes on the stark realities of cybersecurity
This 10Minutes discusses why cybersecurity is more than an IT challenge—it’s a business imperative. New technologies, well-funded and determined adversaries, and interconnected business ecosystems have combined to increase your company’s exposure to cyberattacks. Critical digital assets are being targeted and the potential impact to your business has never been greater. In order to sufficiently protect the business, future cash flows, and shareholder value, your approach to cybersecurity must keep pace.
A historic release of cyber indicators: This is your chance
The FBI released a 27-page Joint Indicator Bulletin on February 19, 2013, outlining several hundred Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, hostnames, and second-level domains that have been known to be associated with ongoing malicious cyber activity. Our brief outlines how companies can shape their future cybersecurity environment by expanding public-private information sharing, identifying and prioritizing US critical infrastructure, and building a cybersecurity framework.
Cybersecurity and Corporate America
The Obama Administration is taking steps to address/focus on cyber attacks on critical US infrastructure — the cyber identity theft, economic espionage, and sabotage activities that President Obama has called “real threats to our security and our economy.” Quote from the State of the Union speech These measures represent the Administration’s next steps in attempting to organize an in-depth defense of key assets, and the Federal Government is inviting the private sector to help shape and support this effort. Businesses with a proactive approach to cybersecurity may find opportunities in recent measures the Administration has announced. Our brief outlines how companies seize an opportunity to shape their future cybersecurity environment in three critical areas; expanding public-private information sharing, identifiying and prioritizing US critical infrastructure, and building a cybersecurity framework.
The Global State of Information Security Survey 2013
Information security has always been a high-stakes game. Today, however, it has become a pursuit that is almost impossible to win. The rules and the players have changed, and the risks are greater than ever. Those keeping score seem to agree that the bad guys are prevailing. Yet, respondents to this year's survey seem to be playing from an entirely different game plan. Among more than 9,300 executives across 128 countries and virtually every industry, confidence in their organizations' information security practices remains high. But given today's elevated threat environment, the odds are not in their favor. The reality is that many organizations are not facing up to the hard truths about their security weaknesses–and their security leaders can no longer afford to play a game of chance. Real leaders are preparing to play a new game, one that requires advanced skill and strategy to win.
How to align security with your strategic business objectives
As chief information security officer (CISO), you occupy the new seat at the executive table. In order to provide leadership in this position, you will need a clear vision for security, the ability to communicate its relevance and the managerial discipline to deliver its full value. This guidebook, based on our PricewaterhouseCoopers SecurityATLAS™ framework, explains how to achieve these goals.
Navigating security in the cloud
Cloud computing has proved it can deliver lower IT costs, diminished infrastructure complexity, and enhanced flexibility. As the technology advances into the mainstream, organizations are finding that it also can spur innovation by lowering the financial barriers to creating new products and services.
Capitalizing on the promise of Big Data
Big Data is about much more than data and is already transforming the way businesses are run. It represents a new way of doing business – one that is driven by data-based decision-making and new types of products and services enriched with data. This paper focuses on how and why companies must get started exploring Big Data. Organizations that delay starting the Big Data journey risk being leapfrogged by more data-savvy competitors.
Making the move to cloud-based ERP: Balancing the risks and rewards
With the emergence of cloud computing as a strategy to reduce costs and transform business beyond technology, many companies are considering the benefits of a cloud-based ERP system. This paper addresses the cloud’s risks and rewards for consideration when developing a strategy for making the best use of this increasingly complex environment.
Getting started in big data: Five steps to put big data to work
Big data holds the potential to boost sales, improve operations, facilitate the development of breakthrough products and services, lock in customer loyalty, and put distance between your company and your competitors quickly. It doesn't require a major investment, large block of time, or an onsite army of data wizards to begin exploring the potential for using big data to produce business results. Here are five steps you can take quickly to explore if and how big data may help you drive better business results.
How to drive innovation and business value
Leveraging emerging technology for sustainable growth
To be competitive in the global marketplace, organizations need to innovate products and services rapidly and do it in a cost-effective way. Even during the recession, CEOs were already focused on growth, and they expected technology to be the main enabler of innovation. While technology is a critical enabler, though, you also need a vision of where your company is going. A clear business strategy and goals will help define and set the context for the role innovation will play in enabling profitable growth. As one of the few executives involved in all aspects of the business, CIOs are uniquely positioned to not only develop the right strategy, processes, and organization to enable innovation, but also to drive innovation by leveraging emerging technologies such as social networks, mobile computing, analytics, and cloud computing.
Optimize procure-to-pay processes for profitability, efficiency, and compliance
Companies in today’s marketplace are facing an unprecedented level of global competition, uncertainty, and emerging risks that may impact both their financial and operational integrity. Managers are under increased pressure to meet regulatory demands while reducing costs and maximizing profitability, but siloed enterprise functions and a lack of real-time data visibility often complicate their best efforts.

Using advanced financial controls in Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to optimize procure-to-pay processes can not only help organizations recover profitability, increase efficiency, and improve regulatory compliance, but it can also maximize underutilized investments in existing GRC solutions.
Optimizing ERP projects with GRC’s advanced financial controls
Leveraging the advanced financial controls in Oracle’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance controls suite during upgrade or implementation projects lets you automate and optimize processes while embedding compliance objectives into the design of your system
Technology has become an increasingly critical factor for driving value in an enterprise. As organizations go through upgrades and implementations, they are choosing to leverage those projects to transform their businesses. By automating and streamlining processes, organizations gain opportunities to improve operations and achieve efficiencies. Transformation efforts also introduce significant change from a technology perspective, particularly during the upgrade or implementation project itself. This is where Oracle’s advanced financial controls (part of the GRC technology suite) come in. While many organizations have viewed them as only a Sarbanes Oxley-driven internal audit or compliance tool, advanced financial controls can offer much more—especially during a technology change. This paper discusses how organizations have been able to leverage Oracle’s advanced financial controls during their Oracle upgrade or implementation project to optimize processes, accelerate various implementation activities, and embed compliance objectives into the system design, as well as to provide additional long-term value after the upgrade or implementation project is completed.
Cyber security: Why you can't afford to ignore it
Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting private companies in hopes of easy access. The cost to a business can be high, ranging from financial loss to reputational damage. With heightened awareness, private companies can fight back.
Data Loss Prevention: Keeping sensitive data out of the wrong hands
An increasing number of high-profile data security breaches have made headlines. These events can not only expose a business to costly and devastating legal ramifications, they can severely denigrate a brand— sometimes to a point beyond repair. Point solutions don’t work. For data loss prevention (DLP) to be effective, companies must decide on the right strategy, engage the right people, target the right data, and employ the right technology.
Data appliance platform selection and delivery: 10 pitfalls you must avoid
Investing in a data appliance helps accelerate data movement across the enterprise. Unfortunately, many enterprises stumble or don’t know where to start during their project. The proliferation of data warehouse (DW) appliances brings with it benefits, challenges, and risks. Finding the “best-fit” solution requires the investment of sufficient time and effort up front, involving internal stakeholders in selecting vendors before issuing your RFP.
Strategic portfolio management
As businesses gear up for growth, many find they are hobbled by inadequate portfolio management (PM) practices and resources. Some businesses, for instance, invest significant capital spending on programs and portfolios that do not directly align with strategic corporate objectives. Others struggle to balance risk with the opportunities required to achieve these objectives.
PwC Book: Strategic IT Portfolio Management
This book explores and identifies the knowledge, techniques, and strategies needed to maximize technology investments and achieve long-term business transformation for all types of organizations.
BYOD: Agility through consistent delivery
The consumerization of IT has become an unstoppable force. This trend, also referred to as “bring your own device” or BYOD, describes an environment in which employees use personal technology – laptops, smart phones, tablets, and even desktop PCs – to access corporate networks, applications and data.
Managing security in a mobile world
Today, mobile devices have been adopted across industries – including healthcare, insurance, financial services, and retail and consumer companies, to name a few – to enhance employee productivity. Their flexible data input options, portable size and ubiquitous connectivity have redefined when, where and how work is done. As a result, telecommuting has become available to a broader set of employees, an option that enables an organization to better attract and retain top talent, particularly younger workers.
PwC-Book: Strategic Enterprise Architecture Management
Hundreds of books, white papers, and articles deal with Enterprise Architectures (EA). They address important questions and create inspiring views, some of which are referenced in this book. But they are unlikely to answer business people’s or executives’ questions about enterprise architecture management (EAM). The current documented body of knowledge in this domain focuses on engineering techniques such as modelling, patterns, reference architectures, tools, repositories and so on. But if we want to unleash EA’s benefits, we need to better understand its management context; in other words, we need to value EAM as a top management topic.
Minimum access, maximum SOD validation
How an integrated, automated segregation of duties solution can reduce risk and enhance compliance
As businesses adapt to comply with an ever-mounting volume of global regulations – Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS), and the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA), to name a few – appropriate, up-to-date user entitlements and segregation of duties (SOD) controls for corporate applications and data are critical. Automated solutions for administering user access privileges as well as tools for monitoring and validation of SOD can go a long way toward improving compliance efforts, but unless organizations can proactively identify and manage SOD exceptions during the access provisioning process, they may find themselves exposed to greater organizational risk and increased costs.
Master Data Governance : Model and Mechanism
This article presents a perspective on the critical components of a governance model, the processes required to get to an operating governance model and insight into key challenges expected along the way.
Architecting the data layer for analytic applications: A look at solutions designed to work in today's data-intensive, high-volume, read-only environment
Analytics are a major component of any Business Intelligence (BI) application, but traditional data strategies no longer work in today’s data-intensive, high-volume, read-only environment for large-scale data analysis (BigData) and very large data warehouses. To help you navigate through the maze of available alternatives, this paper examines the data or persistence layer in the BI stack, comparing and contrasting some of the key architectures now available to you.
Cyber Crisis Management: A bold approach to a bold and shadowy nemesis
Cybercrime and data breaches can have a devastating effect on your reputation or financial position. This requires far more than technological solutions. You need to have a cyber crisis management solution in place.
Security for social networking
Social networking is pervasive in today’s workplace. At any given moment, on-the-job employees are updating Facebook statuses, reading Twitter feeds, and networking on LinkedIn.
Protecting your brand in the cloud: Transparency and trust through enhanced reporting Protecting your brand in the cloud: Transparency and trust through enhanced reporting
Cloud computing is becoming a foundation for benefits well beyond IT cost savings. Yet, many business leaders are concerned about how they will address the issues that surface in every conversation about the cloud: security, privacy, availability, and data protection. Faced with the risk of a potential threat to their brand, companies need transparency into how well cloud providers' environments address concerns.
Are you compromised but don't know it? A new philosophy for cyber security
Time and again, we find the same common denominator across cybercrime investigations: Digital evidence and breach indicators were present in the environment long before the victim became aware of the breach. Had those breach indicators been recognized, the victim could have intervened and minimized risk. Read on to learn more about how you can better protect your business from cyber threats by applying a new philosophy to cyber security which is founded on the realities of the cyber threat landscape.
10Minutes on Information Security
Emerging technologies such as cloud computing and social media, along with the increasing sophistication of hackers, pose new information security challenges for companies. With budgets expected to remain tight, companies need to ensure that they’re protecting valuable intellectual property and other critical data while enabling business initiatives that can spur growth. Our 10Minutes identifies 10 key questions to help CEOs and directors assess how well their companies manage information security risks and where they can do a better job.


Beyond Insights: Meaningful interactions and brand defining experiences
PwC's Customer Experience Transformation Offering

How technology helps to create an agile enterprise
Oracle alliance overview

Business Transformation

IFRS is on the horizon: Are your systems ready?
Oracle IFRS whitepaper

10Minutes on realizing ERP value
10Minutes on realizing ERP value discusses how economic downturns can be the best time to undertake a wide range of ERP-related actions

Human Capital Transformation

Creating an agile workforce through human capital and talent management transformation
Oracle human capital transformation overview

Creating an agile workforce: Leading practices in transforming talent management
Oracle human capital transformation whitepaper

Corporate Performance Management (CPM, also known as EPM)

How to leverage technology to drive sustainable corporate business performance
Oracle corporate performance management overview

Achieving value by effectively anticipating and managing change
Oracle corporate performance management whitepaper

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)

Leveraging technology to integrate governance, risk and compliance
Oracle governance, risk and compliance overview

Security and Identity Management (IdM)

Security at the speed of business
Enabling the next generation of identity and access management
PwC’s Oracle security and IAM practice

PwC’s Oracle Access Management Solution
Providing an integrated solution for controlling access to applications and data, from the endpoint to the cloud.

PwC’s Oracle Identity Analytics Solution
Providing role engineering, role governance, and access certification functions for sustainable identity governance and analytics.

PwC’s Oracle Identity Management Solution
Providing an integrated, scalable identity management platform to manage the lifecycle of user identities across your enterprise

PwC’s OIM Upgrades Solution
Providing key approaches and tools for modernizing identity management platforms through OIM upgrades and migration

From people to process: Unlocking the value of identity and access management with Oracle technology
Oracle security and identity management whitepaper


Customer Effectiveness

Customer effectiveness: Advance your ability to win, keep and deepen relationships with your customers

Finance Transformation and Implementation

SAP and IFRS: Complying with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS): Getting your systems ready to meet financial consolidation and reporting requirements

Enterprise Transformation

Customer Effectiveness: The heart of your business*
Advance your ability to win, keep and deepen relationships with your customers.

Governance, Risk, Controls and Compliance

How to navigate risk management and compliance complexity
Leveraging SAP® BusinessObjects™ Process Control to transform risk management into a strategic investment and reduce compliance spend.

Business Intelligence and Enterprise Data Management

How can your organization empower decision-makers to anticipate, manage, and create change
Embrace the Enterprise Decision Management framework to harness the power of your data management, business intelligence, and knowledge management assets.