Businesses are adopting new technology at an unprecedented pace, and the cloud is one area where we’re making the most progress. And by now it’s clear that the cloud provides significant advantages to businesses, improving agility and reducing costs. But there is a darker side as well that organizations may overlook – hidden costs of cloud implementation that can negate the benefits if not properly contained.

The 2013 Symantec Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud Survey reveals some of these unanticipated challenges businesses face as they look to take advantage of today’s efficient cloud solutions. The businesses surveyed showed that, compared to a year ago, cloud adoption is seeing significant progress. In fact, 90 percent of them are now at least discussing the cloud, an increase from 75 percent a year before. But at the same, cloud computing presents its own set of challenges, and industry experts anticipate that security issues and outages will...

It’s no secret that information is the prize in today’s war between businesses and cybercriminals. And just when organizations had come to terms with the fortress-style protection needed to keep information safe within the corporate walls, technology evolved to include virtualization and cloud. These advances provide increased business flexibility, improved scalability and can create significant cost savings, but they also increase your exposure to outside threats and therefore drive up risk. And, as if to make matters worse your InfoSec team has to figure out how to keep corporate data safe when it is being accessed out of the office on mobile devices, as well as ensuring the security of the virtualized data center which is highly dynamic in nature.

Symantec is teaming up with the leading virtualization provider VMware, to address some of the most pressing security issues affecting businesses globally as they take the step to virtualize more business critical...