Stories about: Burton Group

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.

Antivirus software has been around-well, nearly as long as viruses. But thanks to the ever-growing variety of threats to the PC environment, this is a fast-changing market that is undergoing two major trends:

A Web application firewall (WAF) is designed to protect Web applications against common attacks such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection. Whereas network firewalls defend the perimeter of the network, WAFs sit between the Web client and Web server, analyzing application-layer traffic for violations in the programmed security policy, says Michael Cobb, founder of Cobweb Applications, a security consultancy.

While Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks have been wildly popular with consumers, efforts to measure the technology's success for businesses have returned mixed results. In fact, recent research from the Burton Group indicates that business leaders have struggled to define best use cases, measure their success and chart returns on investment.

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.

IT and business both understand the need to protect regulated customer and business data -- so long as they're in business, analysts say. Here's a look at how some folding businesses are falling short protecting data and the possible liabilities for the IT group and CIO.

The role management software vendor community is relatively young, and as such, Burton Group says there is no clear market leader. Vendors can be categorized into two segments: general purpose solutions and embedded solutions.

Role management software enables the creation and lifecycle management of enterprise job roles, according to Forrester Research. It does this by discovering and logically grouping application-level, fine-grained authorizations and entitlements into enterprise job roles, which can then be assigned to people by rule-based provisioning or request-approval workflows.

Security issues often seem to smolder more than burn, but these six are certainly capable of lighting a fire under IT professionals at a moment's notice. Handle with care.

The rapid consolidation in the anti-data leakage market in the past year is enough to make an IT manager's head spin: This segment of the security sector ballooned to include dozens of start-ups, then even more quickly dwindled down to a few independent companies as larger vendors cherry-picked smaller ones to add data leakage to their own product portfolios.