There is little doubt that the promises of “big data” comes with risk. Steve Durbin, global vice president of the Information Security Forum (ISF), breaks down these risks into five areas: cybersecurity, data in the cloud, consumerization, interconnected supply chains, and privacy.

Cybersecurity is primary, because cybercriminals are getting more organized and are using more sophisticated techniques and tools. Even if the risk is small, a breach can wreak havoc within an organization, damaging reputations, creating substantial legal liability, and in the worst case, ruining companies financially. More...

Network World recently reviewed some research by Forrester that outlined five  rising and five declining security technologies. There was one clear trend in every technology mentioned: everything is moving toward the cloud.

With security, it may not be obvious why security can be much more efficient in the cloud, but a lot of it has to do with what you can see from a bird’s eye view. Spam filters are a good example. Non-cloud filter paradigms examine each email in isolation, trying to determine if each is legitimate. In the cloud, a mail filter can look at all of the email that is being sent through its services, easily identifying the number one characteristic of spam: if it was concurrently sent to thousands and thousands of people. More...

Gartner recently released its webinar on the Top Security Trends and Takeaways for 2012, and here are a few highlights. Most interesting is the perception versus the reality, and some tips on making security relevant across the entire enterprise. More...

At the recent Interop trade show, according to news reports, security was a big topic, including cloud-centric security.

That’s a good thing, and it shows that the market is working as it is supposed to. There’s no doubt that enterprises are interested in taking advantage of what the cloud can offer in terms of hosting data, applications, and infrastructure. But they have to be sure that everything “out there” in the cloud is as safe as it would be if it was under their roof, in that locked room, with people whose job it is to ensure authorized access of the data. More...

At breakneck speeds, the enterprise world is changing. Consider the technology advances in just one year: new mobile devices and business applications, the social networking phenomena, the explosion of cloud computing, and the evolution of Unified Communications. Let's take a look at a few key business trends and the impact on enterprise IT: More...

No doubt enterprises are realizing the benefits of cloud computing today.  There is still a ways to go.  What’s exciting is the movement toward standards and transparency. More...