Real-World Security in a Virtual Infrastructure – Part 7
(from Virtualization.info) Network stability is a concept most system administrator instinctively know about: however, no organization actually had any need to willingly enforce it or even care about until recent years.
It’s only with the huge rise of mobile devices and their penetration inside enterprise environments that network – or better, infrastructure – stability has indeed become an issue.
What do we mean with infrastructure stability?
Stability is a property of any system behaving in a consistent, somehow foreseeable way. Most things in the world are somehow stable: you are not expecting your house to fall on your head, nor the hole in the wall you spent your Sunday fixing to pop open once again.
Just the same is true in networks, especially large networks. While new systems are being added on a rather regular basis, the vast majority of the infrastructure components keep running consistently until they stop serving their intended purposes and are then stopped forever. (…)
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Social networks teeming with spam and malware
The dirty Web is getting dirtier. Today 95 per cent of user comments in blogs, chat rooms, message boards and other social forums are actually spam or links to malware, research shows.
Nearly 95 per cent of user comments in blogs, chat rooms, message boards and other social forums are actually spam or links to malware, according to a recent report from Websense Inc., a Web security software developer in San Diego, Calif.
What’s more, security tools provided by sites such as YouTube and BlogSpot are only 25 to 35 per cent effective in protecting Web users from “objectionable content and security risks,” noted Carl Mercier, director of software development at Websense. (…)
Forrester: IT spending in U.S. to jump 6.6 percent in 2010; Will the optimism stick?
Declaring the tech downturn history, Forrester Research came out with a rather optimistic view of IT spending in the U.S.
According to Forrester projections, IT spending in the U.S. will grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion. In 2009, IT spending fell 8.2 percent. Projections for IT spending in 2010 have been moving gradually higher.
The global outlook goes like this: IT spending will grow 8.1 percent in 2010 to top $1.6 trillion. In 2009, global IT spending fell 8.9 percent.
Software and hardware will garner most of the investment as companies start a “new multi-year cycle of technology investment growth.” Forrester predicts a 7-year buying cycle led by analytics. These smart computing efforts will have technologies such as service oriented architecture, virtualization and cloud computing as pillars. (…)
Six Enterprise mega trends to watch in 2010
Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years. Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) long before SOA was over-hyped. And most enterprise technologists I know were investigating constructs of scalable, elastic Cloud Computing capabilities long before that became the dominate theme in trade journals, conferences, and tech blogging. With all the hard work and progress seen in enterprises to date we could be in store for some very positive improvements in 2010.
There are other mitigating factors to watch, however. Some that come immediately to mind are the steady pressures to reduce budgets and the constantly increasing security challenges. Mission requirements are also continuing to accelerate. (…)
