By Mark Hall, ComputerWorld.com,
IT protects IP first; customer data ...... well, that's not as important. That's the finding from a survey of 1,500 IT leaders in five countries by London-based Datamonitor PLC for security vendor McAfee Inc. What most surprised Carl Banzhof, McAfee's vice president and chief technology evangelist, was that despite the media hoopla about the cost of not protecting customer information, "the type of data most valued" by IT executives is intellectual property (IP). Even among retail businesses, "IP was more valued than customer data," he reports. Perhaps with good reason. The study shows that the average cost of a single IP loss for a company is US$1.68 million. One-third of the respondents said they worried that a major data breach could put their firms out of business. Moreover, 60 percent of the companies that responded said they had experienced a data breach in the previous 12 months. Most of the security snafus were the result of unintentional mistakes by clueless insiders, although 23 percent of the internal breaches were malicious actions by disgruntled workers, according to the survey. Banzhof says Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee hopes to help matters a bit when it ships its Data Loss Prevention Gateway on May 21. He says the appliance's software can tag or fingerprint sensitive documents, folders, file shares, servers -- whatever. It then watches who uses them and how. If a user violates policy -- say, by e-mailing a protected file outside the company -- the appliance can perform a variety of functions, from blocking the action to merely tattling on the offender. Pricing has not been set.
Share your Web drive ...... in a secure group setting. You have quite a few choices if you want to create a shared data store over the Internet. Michael Ryan, CEO of South River Technologies Inc. in Annapolis, Md., wants you to consider SRT's GroupDrive 5.0 when it ships this summer. GroupDrive, which is often used by businesses with far-flung workers who need to share data, provides support for multiÂfactor authentication, encryption of stored files and stronger scrambling of data while it's in transit, Ryan says. It also includes file locking so that when someone is working on a file, other users can only read it. Pricing starts at $5,500 for 100 users.
Server sprawl sucks up...... data center resources. The proliferation of commodity x86 servers is a major IT management headache. You know that. Numerous vendors offer "solutions" to the problem. Here's another -- one that may be worth your review. Bob Quinn, CEO of 3Leaf Systems Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., says his company's goal is to "deconstruct x86 servers into a pool of compute, memory and I/O cores." Those cores are then shared by applications that can grab more resources as needed and return excess capacity to the pool as demand decreases. 3Leaf's first product, available in limited quantities in May, is the V-8000 Virtual I/O Server appliance. In effect, the device creates a low-cost storage-area network for up to 40 servers or blades. Quinn contends that today's SANs are too pricey to implement for x86 systems and claims that the V-8000 can cut capital costs for a 100-server deployment by 50 percent through savings in storage, network and host-adapter gear. A typical redundant V-8000 installation runs about $100,000, Quinn estimates. The real triumph of 3Leaf will come later this year if the company delivers on its promised memory and compute cores. Combined with the I/O core, they could put the brakes on server sprawl in your data center.
Use the 'wisdom of crowds' ...... to win over individuals. That's the theory behind Baynote Inc.'s Community Guided eCommerce service, which begins today. Jack Jia, CEO of the Cupertino, Calif.-based software-as-a-service operation, says his software "identifies like-minded peers" based on their behavior on a Web site. He says Baynote uses sociological and psychological principles in the software's "behavioral heuristics," which create "fingerprints" of users as they meander through your site's content. While a visitor is roaming around, his behavior will mirror that of some previous visitors, and that lets Baynote predict which content the new visitor is likely to appreciate. Jia insists that Amazon.com's "Customers who bought this item also bought ..." approach is wrongheaded. "You don't have to purchase the same product to be considered like-minded," he argues. He says you need to factor in what similar folks considered -- that is, viewed. Does it work? Well, let's say Baynote is putting its money where its heuristics are. If you don't care to pay the $2,000-per-month subscription fee, you can pay Baynote around 15 percent of sales that result from its service.
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