There’s been a great deal of talk going on about cloud computing. The benefits are clear, because organizations realize that the network is an extension of their data center and that they can avoid many of the scalability and capacity problems of the past. The fundamentals of the concept are compelling and real.

Yet there is still a great deal of trepidation, especially when it comes to security. That’s because that the concept of cloud computing needed to be tested first.   The first generation of cloud computing services addressed whether the infrastructure made sense.  Was it possible to build the types of services with the quality and reliability of an in-house application?

I think we’re turning the corner on the first generation and that’s why people are talking about security.  We’ve moved past whether the concept is feasible.  Now we need to know if it’s practical and safe. The second generation of...

These days you don’t need to wait for holiday sales to buy the tiniest, highest capacity USB thumb drive you can find. A 2GB USB drive sells for under $10 in the US, and works great to put family pictures, your favorite music (yes, the 80s were a good era) and oh yeah, the customer files you need to share with Bob at the audit firm. There’s only one problem: these drives tend to get lost easily, or as what often happens with most people, you just can’t remember where you put it. If that happens, you have now put out confidential company data (and possibly personal data) free for all to see, out into the world. This can very quickly turn into an organizational nightmare when it turns out that the drive was indeed lost, and now your organization has to inform investors, its customers, and just about everybody else about this loss. A look at the...

Doug McLean - Blogmeister

I audited a class at the local college recently. In the final 5 minutes of the final class, the instructor asserted that, “…social media will kill email.” As one of the very early adopters of email and responsible for bringing a number of email technologies to market, I dismissed his claim as the ranting of a tired lecturer who allowed his mouth to get a beat or two ahead of his brain. In retrospect, however, I’ve concluded he may have had a point.

I have to admit I didn’t see his point until I read a headline recently indicating that 92% of global email traffic is now spam. The fact that most email is junk isn’t news as the percent of measured spam has been hovering around 90% for quite some time. The fact that spam has dominated the email landscape for so long is helping to drive some interesting user behaviors, however.  We’re starting to see...

I'm pleased to announce that, as of today, we are starting a new blog entitled "Ask the Expert." The goal of this thread is to give customers, partners, and others a forum to discuss encryption technology,  solutions, and issues from a somewhat different perspective than we normally do on our current websites. While we will certainly discuss PGP products, this isn't meant to be a replacement for PGP's Customer Support portal which is designed to answer detailed product usage and implementation issues.

Instead we'll discuss questions like:

• When would should you use PGP Whole Disk Encryption vs. File/Folder Encryption?
• What exactly is a hash function and why is the industry working so hard to develop new ones?
• How to PGP Portable and PGP Zip differ functionally and from a security perspective?

We'll also take up non-product related issues...