It may now be possible for anyone, even if they follow rigorous privacy and anonymity practices, to be identified by DNA data from people they do not even know.

Only about 20 percent of Americans think Macs are vulnerable to viruses, compared to more than half who describe PCs as "vulnerable" or "very vulnerable" to attack by viruses, according to Alex Stamos, a security analyst at iSec Partners.

IT people who try to secure mobile devices in a big company face three big conceptual problems.

While mobile and smartphone security is the hot topic of the moment among virtualization security gurus, plenty of other virtualization security topics demand IT's attention right now. At the recent RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, the interest in virtualization security ran high - with good reason. Different IT departments are at different points on their virtualization journeys, of course, and some are still thinking about security in the old physical world terms, analysts say.

It's no secret that corporations are drowning in data. IDC estimates the volume of computer data worldwide will reach 1.2 million petabytes during 2011. A November, 2010 Gartner study found data growth was one of the top three challenges for data center managers at 47 per cent of large enterprises.

CEOs and the technologists who work for them like to say the applications they rely on -- especially the kind custom-written by specialists at banks and investment companies with fortunes behind them -- are safe as houses.

Though most U.S. companies still list customer and other corporate information as their most valuable assets, many keep pushing this data farther from safe lockdown in the data center--and are about to give it another strong shove in that direction.

Most companies virtualize servers to save money, save space and act faster on IT requests from the business. Human-resources outsourcing service The Sullivan Group virtualized its servers partially because company executives were worried about hurricanes.

Two major identity management companies are forging ahead with products designed to satisfy what a cloud-computing consortium calls one of the trickiest problems preventing secure and automated connections between internal IT infrastructures and external service providers: identity and authentication.

Moving to a nearly fully-virtualized infrastructure in 2008 made Joel Braverman a lot more confident in both the physical and digital IT infrastructure at his (relatively new) employer Universal Audio. As manager of IT and the guy responsible for security on that infrastructure-one that supports a company whose products are both expensive and almost entirely digital-it also made him extremely nervous, he says.

In surveys of senior-level IT managers, security is consistently one of the top five concerns, along, specifically, with security related to the hot technology of the moment. Most recently those worries have included social-networking technologies such as Twitter and Facebook and other outlets through which employees could turn loose company confidential data. But the security of virtual servers and virtualized infrastructures also rank near the top of the list-and rightly so, according to analysts.

Among the consequences of VMware's battery of vSphere 4 announcements Tuesday about its new virtualization infrastructure and add-on components, third-party software vendors specializing in fault-tolerance and high-availability are feeling new pressure now that VMware has added basic versions of those functions to its core product.

VMware is widely expected to announce the next step in its road to its previously announced Virtual Data Center operating system in a webinar on Tuesday, April 21st.