Alex Goldman

Virtualization main players have long been touting the efficiency benefits of their technology. Now VMware is aiming to go one better, taking virtualization to the cloud with the release of vSphere 4.0. The technology builds on VMware’s Infrastructure 3 and Hypervisor products to further ease datacenter management, said John Gilmartin, VMware’s director of product marketing. […]

Those who want to know what the security industry is doing are paying close attention to the U.S. RSA Conference, this week in San Francisco. If the new products on display are any indication, the theme of this year’s conference is enterprise data security, focusing on data loss prevention (DLP) and compliance with industry and […]

IBM today reported better-than-expected earnings for its first quarter of the year, but Big Blue’s miss on sales expectations took its toll on shares in after-hours trading. The company reported diluted earnings of $1.70 per share for Q1, beating analysts’ estimates of $1.66 per share. IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) net revenue totaled $2.295 billion, down $24 […]

Software’s growing shift from the desktop to the cloud, and from the enterprise server to the grid or the virtual machine, promises new features — but also introduces new security concerns. The shift also brings new business models, although partnerships and outsourcing can also exacerbate security problems. Enter RSA, EMC’s security subsidiary, which is today […]

Oracle and Sun Microsystems are poised to tie the knot after Oracle this morning said it’s making a $9.50 per share offer in cash for the embattled server and Java player. The total price of the deal will be approximately $7.4 billion, but since Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) brings $1.8 billion of net cash to the deal, […]

Surely it’s bad form to criticize Amazon’s EC2 cloud service if that’s what you use to deliver your service? Maybe not if your service consists of all the reporting that Amazon EC2 fails to deliver. That circular paragraph describes the business of Tap In Systems, a service built on EC2 for users of EC2. “The […]

South African token provider Fire ID is launching today at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Company CEO Jenny Dugmore is at the show to raise the profile of the company, which to date has business relationships mostly in its home base and in Slovakia. The company offers a software authentication system that provides a […]

At the Billing & OSS World Conference and Expo, the NGN IMS Forum announced the formation of the Billing/OSS and Security Technical Working Group to address security and interoperability in these systems. Back end systems make the Internet work, and this standards process, still nascent, could affect the flow of trillions of dollars in the […]

Everything’s changing, but in new ways. Or maybe not so new. What was grid computing and ASP and on-demand computing is now the cloud. What was outsourcing and crowdsourcing and nearsourcing is now an ecosystem or a matrix of partnerships. As software changes form, hardware sublimates, turning instantly from a solid into a cloud. Business […]

Once again, software is fighting crime. Microsoft unveiled a suite of tools and initiatives for law-enforcement groups “specifically designed to improve public security and safety,” the company said. Law enforcement agencies, like businesses, face a mountain of data that they are not adequately analyzing. Microsoft’s Citizen Safety Architecture resembles IBM’s BAO announcement in that both […]

A report from Verizon Business says that businesses are making it easier than it should be to steal critical data. As criminals innovate, businesses are ever more vulnerable, and many fail to comply with even basic security standards such as PCI DSS, the credit card industry’s data security standard. Past security failures have flooded the […]

Businesses are failing to take basic security precautions in spite of the well-publicized cost of such negligence. A recent survey of 2008 security breaches by Verizon Business’ Response Intelligence Solutions Knowledge (RISK) team found serious security lapses in many cases. Some of the 90 victims studied by Verizon had deployed intrusion detection systems (IDS) but […]