Stories about: Citrix

When it comes to security, the British government's Consulate-General in New York, part of the United Kingdom's diplomatic mission for business and visa-related activities, is taking no chances on spies or other intruders sneaking onto its network.

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.

The Department of Defence has chimed in on the network security debate, stating organizations need to be more proactive if they expect to ward off attackers that readily exploit the high levels of trust usually reserved for employees and known systems.

As enterprises seek out ways to reduce IT costs, optimize resources and improve operational efficiencies, three technology trends have started to dominate: virtualization, service-oriented architecture and mobility. More promising yet is the intertwining of these unique technologies.

There are two ways to predict the future with 100% accuracy. You either have the power to shape the future to your predictions (the God method) or you make your predictions vague enough so that they fit most conceivable outcomes (the Nostradamus method). For those of us without omnipotence and with a desire to write something meaningful, that leaves the alternative: extrapolate from in-depth research, solid statistics and current trends and hope for minimum volatility (disruptive innovation or externalities) in the outcome.

Virtualization introduces new potentials for flexibility and change over and beyond anything the world of network security has ever seen. Unfortunately for a host of large security vendors, most of the typical devices being used to protect physical data centers require a certain level of stability (or inflexibility) in order to promise proper protection.

Businesses may unwittingly leave themselves open to application-layer attacks because they don't understand their networks lack defenses to deflect them, according to a study by Forrester Research.

The Australia Federal Police (AFP) has started a recruitment drive to fill no fewer than 12 IT positions spanning reporting, analytics, cryptography and eavesdropping.