According to the 2010 Information Security Breaches Survey (ISBS) from PriceWaterhouse Coopers, there has been a big shift in the number of companies moving to hosted applications. Three-quarters of all enterprises now use services such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing, and of these, 44 percent were entrusting critical services to third parties.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/042610-cloud-and-social-media-lead.html

Companies should take better care warns PWC

Google received a firestorm of criticism when it first released Buzz for violating Gmail users’ privacy. Google added users’ Gmail contacts to their Buzz lists without first asking their permission, say privacy groups and some lawmakers.

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/90701-google-plans-to-add-buzz-to-its-enterprise-version-of-gmail

“We got a bit of a ding by the press,” he said. “Fortunately we were able to correct it and in four days changed the policies.”

http://web2.sys-con.com/node/1258820

Web Application Security Will Grow to Be a Bigger Area of Concern

It is a vast orphanage, yet its inhabitants are not children, but millions of books that have been unceremoniously dumped by their owners, locked away unseen and unread. Many of the books’ authors are still alive. That is not the problem. The trouble is that the copyright owners – the publishers – no longer think they will profit from making these books commercially available. Yet the owners decline to free the books and make them publicly available, in case someone else makes money from them. Many books will only be in commercial print for a couple of years before they are packed off to the orphanage to spend decades in the dark.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/07/cloud-computing-google-apple

From Google’s library project to Apple’s iTunes store, ‘cloud capitalism’ provides an innovative way forward for business – but raises more questions about privacy and security

The unveiling of Apple’s iPad was hailed by many as a revolution in computing, the latest in a line of glossy devices that would change the way we live and work.

John Suffolk, the Government’s chief information officer, wants to give the public sector a sprinkling of that Silicon Valley dust — a flavour of the ground-breaking technology of Google, Facebook and Apple.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/public_sector/article7023927.ece

Mr Suffolk also believes civil servants and public sector workers should be more active on social networking sites. He runs a blog, although it hasn’t been updated for almost a month.

The first decade of this millennium closed out with a lot of economic uncertainties. Tightening IT budgets at many enterprises forced some security firms to struggle; others shuddered. The year was also marred with the largest data breach in history and embarrassing attacks on social networks. Rather than releasing major security innovations, experts used 2009 to talk about cloud computing insecurities and the need to focus on security basics. In 2010, there could be less hyperbole and more action. All signs point to more security improvements for the payment industry, better methods to lock down social networks and increasingly savvy attacks aimed at stealing account credentials and other sensitive data. Here are five emerging security themes to watch at the start of this new decade:

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com.au/articles/37916-Five-security-themes-for-2-1-and-beyond

DNSSEC deployments move forward

THE TEMPTATION, of course, is to sum up the decade in terms of brands. Thus the noughties could be seen as the period of Google’s inexorable rise, of Apple’s metamorphosis into a music and mobile phone colossus, of Amazon’s increasing dominance, of mushrooming user-generated content (Flickr, Blogger) and social networking (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), of the emergence of Wikipedia as the world’s leading reference work, of YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer – and of corporate stumbles (Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, innumerable record labels and newspaper groups).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/27/web-goes-mainstream-in-noughties

The noughties have been technologically inspiring and liberating: but the threats to a wired world have also become starkly clear over the past 10 years

Cloud computing. While cynics may also refer to this as the reinvention of time-sharing, Cloud computing has quickly become a critical part of future WANs. Finally, after years of lip-service, the network and the processor are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. But moving to the cloud also raises myriad questions. For instance, there’s a question of whether you use a public cloud or a private cloud. Additionally, all of the traditional issues such as compliance, security, application performance still abound. For a great overview of the entire cloud arena, see Jim’s two reports (very highly recommended.)

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/frame/2009/122109wan2.html

In this, our final newsletter for 2009, it seems appropriate to look back at some of the major products, services and trends for the year. And what a challenging year it has been!