Just what lengths will hackers go to? Multi-stage attacks based on a foundation of social engineering. At the beginning of this month, a hacker finally achieved his goal: to change the password on a customer account hosted by Web acceleration company CloudFlare, and change the customer's DNS records (LINK: http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-atta...). 
 
The compromise was made possible through a separate hack, of the company CEO's personal Gmail account. This was achieved by compromising his mobile phone account, itself made possible by calling the AT&T support desk and impersonating the CEO, offering his social security number as proof of identity.
 
Armed with this information, the hacker was able to access the CEO's corporate Gmail account, and the rest is history....

In my first blog I talked about the importance of having good data that is coherent across teams and departments. While it’s inevitable that groups will choose reporting periods that show them in the best possible light, senior execs need a single view of the truth.

But what about planning? It is easy to create forward projections that are more optimistic than realistic, particularly in the current financial climate. While can be difficult to predict buying behaviours with any certainty, however, it should be more straightforward to present sensible worst-case scenarios. But is it?

A long time ago, when I was an idealistic young marketing exec, I prepared a detailed business plan for one if my managers. He looked it through and threw it back at me. “That's no good,” he said, “I need a better worst case scenario.” In other words, one which wasn’t quite as bad. At the time I thought that was the craziest expression I...

Data is one of our most critical assets, and we’ve all got too much invested in it to lose it. I'd say the same thing to an elderly relative about keeping valuable photos in a biscuit tin, as I would to a large corporation with a broken backup strategy and years of backup data. And, the chances are, I would get much the same response - a combination of agreement and an embarrassed shrug, suggesting the problem is clearly important, but that the same old approach works well enough for now. 

Where corporate backups are concerned, it's not as if people haven't tried to make change. Backup strategies have been around since someone first suggested putting punched cards in a fireproof safe. And these strategies have evolved as well, but a number of very real issues, not least of which include complexity and data growth now demand a new approach. 

Every few years an organization will make it a priority to update backup systems, storage and...

Some of the reticence around using “the Cloud” seems to have come from the question of whether it can be trusted – particularly when it comes to managing corporate data. Cloud has its risks, just like any architecture or approach, which need to be weighed up against the risks of running things in-house. 

I think there is a bigger question however, which goes beyond mere risk. Cloud computing came into existence as part of a natural progression in how we use technology resources. But this goes far wider than merely cloud. Two additional factors illustrate the broader landscape, namely how we are becoming more mobile, and how people are increasingly making their own technology decisions. 

This is not the moment to delve into these parallel trends, respectively nicknamed mobility and consumerisation. The point is that they are inextricably linked, and internet-based technology service delivery – aka cloud computing – is another...