Freeware – Think before you download!

Timely advice from Jonathan Westlake on how – and indeed if – to go about choosing and downloading freeware.

Freeware has been a great boon in recent years. At its best it can provide free effective applications for any size of business. At its worst it can be an avenue to problems for your PC or network. One fundamental difference between freeware software and commercial software is the responsibility or assurance that the software is clean of malware. Freeware is without any commercial comeback,  a sort of ‘downloader beware’ scenario.

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Key management offers best protection against government espionage attacks

Recently published research by McAfee, which shows a shocking, multi-year attack campaign against more than 70 governmental organizations in the US and other Western nations, highlights the security problems faced by public sector agencies, says Venafi, a provider of industry-leading Enterprise Key and Certificate Management (EKCM) solutions. Security experts believe this may be the largest coordinated attack ever launched. The involved hackers have over the past, several years worked successfully to infiltrate the computer networks of thousands of companies, organizations and governments, stealing reams of intellectual property, military information and state secrets.

According to Jeff Hudson, Venafi CEO, the public and private sector remain vulnerable to attacks like these due to difficulties in properly deploying and managing security systems within the infrastructure, including encryption keys and certificates.

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Ethernet: The Next Generation

Evolution, as stated by Darwin, is based on the survival of the fittest. Simon Pamplin, UK & Ireland SE manager at Brocade explains that, with Ethernet Fabrics, we see the next stages of networking evolution

Over the decades, Ethernet has evolved as new types of networking architectures have emerged. Today, data centre networks carry traffic for a diverse set of applications – each with different traffic patterns and service requirements. This diverse traffic places extraordinarily high demands on the network, which has driven the next evolutionary step in Ethernet networks – the Ethernet Fabric.

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Is corporate espionage undermining your business?

Espionage attacks on private sector businesses are a dominant feature on information security news wires. In 2010, the British press reported that a technology house had misplaced a prototype phone, prompting fears that the phone was the target of competitive espionage and an electronic espionage network dubbed ‘GhostNet’ was reported to have penetrated the networks of hundreds of organisations worldwide. The French newspaper La Tribune also reported that a major aircraft manufacturer had uncovered several attempts of espionage at its plant in France. By the end of 2010, both the UK and US governments had voiced their plans to secure national infrastructure from electronic or ‘cyber’ espionage attacks with the creation of an Office of Cyber Security (OSC) in the UK and a Cyber Security Office in the White House.

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Standing on a platform in the Cloud

The Cloud has promised much in terms of flexibility, agility, operational and cost savings. However, effective development of cloud applications relies on the availability of sound underlying platforms; for development teams to be able to build cloud applications effectively, they need the right platform on which to create and deploy those applications. This needs to allow for scalability, for the multi-tenant architecture of cloud applications, where resources and costs are shared across a large pool of users.

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