Since last month’s cyber attacks on defence company Lockheed Martin, there has been a flurry of announcements from both UK and US governments about how they intend to deal with the growing threat. In the UK we have been told that such attacks are being put on an equal footing with other conflicts; meanwhile, CIA director Leon Panetta warned that a cyber attack could be “the next Pearl Harbor … that cripples America’s electrical grid and financial systems.”

Hacking isn’t new – we’ve all seen films like War Games and Sneakers (though the latter did try to rule the planet using Microsoft Excel running on a Cray supercomputer, which was a little far-fetched). People have been trying to break into computers as long as they have existed. So, why are cyber attacks becoming so important now?

The world is a very different place from a couple of decades ago, when such films became popular. Today, the Internet is accessible from...

The battle for brand loyalty in the mobile space continues to be hard fought, with players such as Apple, Blackberry, HTC, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung duking it out on devices, and Google, Microsoft and Apple in terms of operating systems. Understandably so – the consumer in most of us is a follower of fashion, with only a minority buying a device purely on functionality. 

Given amount of noise generated on comparison sites, forums and blogs, not to mention in pubs, cafes and elsewhere, how can Enrique Salem claim that devices are irrelevant? “You don't really care what device you have,” he says. “If you have a BlackBerry device or an Apple device or a Motorola device, that's not what matters.” How does this square with that very human desire to share the experience of what’s current?

Fashion has a short memory. According to Gartner’s latest figures Nokia...

In this industry it's not so hard to spot the changes as they happen: what's harder is to do something about them, given what's already in place. Technology is presenting organisations large and small with new opportunities, but also creates new challenges and pressures which might be easy to fix if those in charge had the chance to start with a clean sheet of paper.

Nowhere is change having more impact than in security and risk management. When the Jericho Forum was set up in 2004, its goal was to look at the challenges faced around 'de-perimeterisation' - that is, what does security need to become when the perimeter of the organisation starts to weaken based on how people are using IT? A question which has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Seven years later, for many organisations the perimeter has gone completely. Cloud computing, the umbrella term we use to describe internet-based applications and services, has arrived on the technological...