Traditionally, enterprise data security has trusted a “fortress defense” approach: keep all assets within a company castle and build towering walls to maintain out the enemy. However, with an evolving threat landscape that comes with targeted attacks, social engineering and spear phishing, the model leaves numerous vulnerable attack points. With increasing employee mobility, IT professionals are challenged to expand their security practices to “armor” employees individually as well as the fortress. Consequently, IT budgets are stretched thinner, leading to the necessity to examine the return of investment of popular security practices. Within the battle against data breaches, which practices – “fortress defense” or “armored defense” – provide the best ROI? 1. Identity and access management (IAM). The drawbridge of the fortress defense is IAM: only people with preapproval can access the company castle and management decides where they are able to go once in. IAM provides a powerful defense against data breaches, but requires a major period of time and energy to be deployed right.... Read More »

8 Great Cloud Storage Services eMeter is a 200-employee unit of Siemens that produces software for electric, natural gas and water utility management systems. Its EnergyIP platform is intended to permit a utility to mix information from smart meters with information at the grid’s operation to higher serve customers. With portion of its development in India and part in Redwood City, Calif., eMeter turned to Bluelock cloud data centers in Indianapolis and Las Vegas to store the recovery copies of its systems. Under a Bluelock service launched in early May, virtualized copies of first-tier production systems were created and stored in a Bluelock data center, with a continuing data feed from production systems associated with the identical data center. Within the event of a disaster, the sleeping virtual machines can be woken up and information fed into them reflecting the last known point of knowledge integrity. That became necessary, recalled Pat O’Day, CTO of Bluelock, when an eMeter customer in India botched its try to... Read More »

When you glance out the window today, the view might look in regards to the same as yesterday. But do not be deceived — our world is being transformed by a brand new, often invisible, reality. Everything from how our electrical energy is delivered, to how and where we shop and pay for goods and services, is undergoing great upheaval, transforming how we conduct our lives. Entire industries were revolutionized by the transformative forces of digitization enabled by new consumer-oriented technologies — namely, social, mobile, analytics and the cloud, or what we call “the SMAC Stack.” Consider that MasterCard now describes itself first as a technology company and second as a payments industry leader, and little wonder, considering its success facilitating mobile commerce. Much of the disruption is invisible, as data events occur without our awareness — attributable to transponders and digital tags — as we drive our cars, navigate airports, walk the aisles of a shop or go through our virtual workdays at home... Read More »

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff took part in a forty five-minute conference call on Thursday to discuss the nine-year strategic partnership announced this week. The stated purpose was to offer the click and monetary analysts an opportunity to invite questions, however the two executives spent a lot time lavishing compliments on one another and emphasizing the comparatively simple act of integrating cloud apps that they left little time for questions. What’s more, a few of the questions that were asked weren’t adequately answered. It’s been a monumental week of strategic partnerships for Oracle, starting with the cloud partnership with Microsoft announced on Monday, the Salesforce.com partnership announced on Tuesday and the NetSuite deal unveiled late Wednesday. Oracle President Mark Hurd fielded questions for the red team in the course of the joint press calls with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and NetSuite CEO Zack Nelson, respectively. Benioff, the previous Oracle employee who often cites Ellison as certainly one of his mentors, was... Read More »

Oracle announced partnerships last week with competitors Microsoft, Netsuite and, most surprising, Salesforce.com. These announcements serve an identical purpose because the Argentine junta’s invasion of the Falklands — they seem to be a riveting diversion from what is going on wrong at home. Oracle is missing its numbers, and that i do not know when Oracle last missed three out of 7 quarters. One drain on Oracle is its decline inside the CRM market. Earlier this month, Gartner declared Salesforce.com, approaching a $4 billion run rate by the tip of 2013, the market leader for the primary time. Among other things, the hot Oracle/Salesforce partnership signals that the CRM battle is over and Oracle has lost it. The subsequent threat is the growing presence of Workday, which has conquered human resources and is looking for to become the Salesforce of online financial applications. And behind Workday is Intacct, ServiceNow, SugarCRM and 100 online software startups, all marching on Fortress Oracle. Oracle desires to do something,... Read More »