Letter From the Editor

AuthorJames B. Edwards
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22056
Date01 July 2015
Published date01 July 2015
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© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22056
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Letter From the Editor
Dear JCAF Reader,
After many years of ser-
vice, Barry Brinker has stepped
down as associate editor of the
Journal of Corporate Account-
ing and Finance (JCAF). Barry
has been a pioneer in the field
of cost accounting, espe-
cially activity‐based costing
and activity‐based manage-
ment. Barry’s work at Wiley
and other publishers is well
respected. We thank him for
his many years of hard work
and wish him all the best in his
future endeavors.
THE CURRENT ISSUE
This issue features articles
on information technology
and data analytics. The May/
June 2015 issue of JCAF
featured some of the best
articles of the past based on
frequency of access by read-
ers and the ongoing usefulness
of its content. It is fitting that
we call to your attention two
articles from the past worthy
of honorable mention, as they
provided some foundation for
current developments in data
analytics. “Big Data: Implica-
tions for Financial Managers”
by Kurt Fanning and Rita
Grant, published in the July/
August 2013 issue, revealed
what big data could mean to
financial managers, and “Big
Data: New Opportunities for
M&A” by Kurt Fanning and
Emily Drogt, published in the
January/February 2014 issue,
demonstrated the usefulness
of Big Data in searching for
acquisition candidates. Articles
relating to mergers and acquisi-
tions have been favorite topics
of interest to readers of JCAF
for many years. If you have not
read either of these articles, I
suggest that you take the time
to read them in addition to the
current issue of JCAF.
The current issue leads with
“Finance in the Cloud—Myth
or Today’s Reality?” by Craig
Barrow and Toby Hatch, and
addresses some of the more
prevalent myths and fears of
placing financial data in the
cloud. This article provides
insight to the variety of cloud
options available to bring some
clarity to the analysis and deci-
sion process associated with
implementing cloud applica-
tions. A checklist of the essen-
tial risk‐mitigating questions is
provided along with a quiz to
determine how “cloud ready”
your organization or company
is today.
As we move forward on
the frontier of information ser-
vices and data analytics, some
now see data being treated as
a service accessible right from
your desktop from the cloud.
The new acronym for this is
DaaS. The emergence of
service‐oriented architecture
(SOA) has rendered the actual
platform on which the data
resides irrelevant. Important
to these developments is data
access agility, data quality, and
cost‐effectiveness. DaaS allows
for the separation of data cost
and usage from that of a specific
software or platform. In “DaaS:
A Cost‐Savings Strategy,” David
M. Cannon and Kurt Fanning
explain how firms will be able to
achieve cost savings and opera-
tional efficiency by using DaaS.
According to the authors, the
firm can also easily scale up and
back with minimum investment
while using DaaS.
In “When BYOD Meets
Big Data,” Abbie Gail Par-
ham, J. Lowell Mooney, and
Timothy D. Cairney explore
the security and privacy issues
raised when organizations
collect Big Data from mobile
devices that belong to their
employees. Instead of discard-
ing much of this data, many
organizations now retain and
apply analytics to the data in
an effort to discover meaning-
ful patterns that might help
improve performance.

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