For everything cloud computing offers – speed, convenience, simplicity, offsite backups – its “public” nature remains a touchy subject for enterprise.

This simple fact explains why many organisations have been slow to embrace the cloud. In business, data security is everything. And for decision makers at big firms, trusting all mission-critical data into the care of a third-party IT vendor sounds just a bit too risky.

But with the arrival of the private cloud, organizations can enjoy...

Recently I’ve been lucky to meet with the CTOs of two important Canadian public sector organizations, Canada Health Infoway and the Province of Ontario.

Indeed Dennis Giokas kindly presented on Cloud Computing in Healthcare at our recent seminar in Toronto.

This presentation was about the recent 

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has released a new report designed to examine the most pervasive security threats still threatening cloud in 2013.

Called “The Notorious Nine” – presumably using the same nomenclature that Enid Blyton employed for the protagonists of her fabled children’s books – the CSA enlisted the help of industry experts, and is designed to be used in conjunction with other CSA best practice guides; “Security Guidance for Critical Areas in Cloud...

In 2013, expect to see the pace of mergers and acquisitions for cloud computing, mobile and analytics technologies accelerate as software vendors look to fill gaps in their product and service strategies. This and other key insights of how cloud computing is reshaping the merger and acquisition landscape can be found in the latest Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) report published today.

The US Technology M&A...

The data boom is a very real mark on the industry landscape, with the potential and hype surrounding big data expected to increase dramatically. But what can this data practically do?

Speakers at a Mobile World Congress conference session on Monday gave various insights into the discussion, with the conclusion being that, in both developed and developing markets, big data has the potential to be a lifesaver.

One of the big players in this sphere is IBM, with CTO Paul...

Mark Little, Principal Analyst, Consumer, Ovum

“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it,” Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy is quoted as saying at a product launch back in 1999. McNealy will surely have grown almost as tired of hearing his famous quote as consumers appear to be of being tracked on the Internet, and Ovum’s latest Consumer Insights survey suggests that two-thirds of the Internet population is very tired indeed.

Internet players and data collectors of every type are at risk of taking the...

Luca Schiavoni, Analyst, Regulation, Ovum

The celebration of the Data Privacy Day on January 28, 2013 came at a moment when awareness of the importance of the matter is higher than it has ever been. However, many obstacles get in the way of full data privacy, including companies’ unwillingness to fully disclose what they do with their users’ data, consumers’ unwillingness to actually read lengthy terms and conditions pages when signing up to a service, and the fact that some companies’ business models...

By Greg SchulzDepending on whom you talk to or ask, you will get different views and opinions, some of them stronger than others on if magnetic tape is dead or alive as a data storage medium. However an aspect of tape that is alive are the discussions by those for, against or that simply see it as one of many data storage mediums and technologies whose role is changing.

Cloud service provider Interoute has announced the launch of CloudStore, an enterprise app store which doubles up as a compute and storage facility, hosting OS and databases, as well as business apps.

Interoute, known for its virtual data centre and owning Europe’s largest cloud platform, is further focusing its efforts on the enterprise – understandable, given that’s where most of its client base lies – but featuring a much more rounded...

The eighth annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from security provider Arbor Networks has revealed how cloud services and data centres are “increasingly victimised” by cyber attackers.

The report, which looked at a 12 month period ending September 2012, asked nearly 200 security-based questions to 130 respondents in the enterprise and network operator fields.

The key points of the research were:

• 94% of data centre operators reported security attacks
• 76% had suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks towards their customers, whilst...