Many of the security issues we see with desktops and laptops today can be explained by the fact that such end-point computing devices were never designed to be connected together. It was only with the arrival of affordable network cards, then operating systems such as OS/2 and Windows 3.11, that PCs could be connected to the corporate LAN.

Since then, we’ve seen wave after wave of security issues as first smart-Alec students, then malicious hackers, then commercially motivated practitioners of the dark arts devised increasingly complex attack vectors. From the earliest email-borne computer viruses to the kinds of breach we see today, each wave also caused a protective response from security companies.

While nobody would suggest switching off all the protections that are in place today, most would accept that things would happen differently if they could start from scratch today. PCs have become like a car with a thousand bumpers...

Going back a few years, IT security was all about prevention. Most organisations had a well-defined set of computer systems needing protection; a security breach would usually consist of someone trying to get access to something they shouldn't. To counter the threat, we would perform detailed penetration tests on computer systems which, if passed, would indicate there was nothing to worry about. 

 A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. We have the Internet, the Web, mobile communications and smart phones; any ideas about security being simply about prevention are long gone. All the same, best practice has continued to focus on risk-based approaches, based on having an understanding of what might go wrong. Define and rank the threats, then you can define the countermeasures.

 The term 'zero day attack' was coined back in 2005 to illustrate that breaches were less and less straightforward to predict. Attack vectors continue to...

by Daniel Lamorena - Director Storage and Availability Marketing

Use of Linux in the data centre is continuing to grow. Looking at the year-on-year analyst figures from the likes of IDC, Linux server usage is increasing a few percentage points a year – this is largely down to Linux taking a bite out of legacy UNIX installations (Windows is holding steady). Organisations are not migrating away form proprietary platforms for altruistic reasons – making a shift can result in quite considerable savings in terms of both hardware and software. 

This doesn’t tell the whole picture, however. While Linux is pretty solid at a kernel level, it doesn’t offer as comprehensive facilities as commercial operating systems when it comes to more advanced features such as High Availability. This is less about functionality, and more to...

With many organisations giving cloud computing serious consideration, a question we are often asked is, "Should we be putting our data in the cloud?" Organisations should be concerned about their data, wherever it is - it's a strategic business asset, after all. Indeed, this concern should extend to wherever the data is, depending on what it is and how it is being used. 

Each organisation is different and no blog post would be long enough to map out all the different risks and options, but we can get an idea of where to look for causes of concern. Here we separate risks out into non-scientific but nonetheless helpful categories of security, privacy, supplier and compliance. 

Security risks first, then. When we say data need to be kept secure, what we're really thinking is that malicious third parties can't get hold of it, to use or damage it in some way. Of course you need some kind of assurance that a cloud provider is protecting your...