Tech World

Cloud computing is all the rage. "It's become the phrase du jour," says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition. As a metaphor for the Internet, "the cloud" is a familiar cliché, but when combined with "computing," the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is "in the cloud," including conventional outsourcing. Cloud computing is all the rage. "It's become the phrase du jour," says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition. As a metaphor for the Internet, "the cloud" is a ...

For startups, user growth, product growth, virality, marketing usually goes on the top of their priority list. As part of product planning cycles, embedding information security into their product/service is the last concern for most startups. Which is deeply ignored here? Information and data security. Often you see devops engineers, systems engineers, infrastructure engineers or system administrators wear the security hat in these startups and performs some of the small security fixes or patches. Even though they can perform research on the procedures to apply patches, harden databases, or implement remediation as a result of the industry breaches, they might not take every decision or option from security perspective. Consider the Code Spaces startup breach that basically caused them to go out of business due to improper hardening of the root passwords and not following the AWS security best practices. This deeply ignored lack of security awareness has actually...

The event in San Francisco was aimed mostly at enterprise customers, and Microsoft promised an OS that will be more intuitive for the millions of workers still on Windows 7 and older OSes. Here's a rundown of some of the key points we learned Tuesday about Windows 10. The natural name would have been Windows 9, but Microsoft is eager to suggest a break with the past. "We're not building an incremental product," said Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft's Operating Systems Group. Microsoft considered the name "Windows One," he said, to match products like OneNote and OneDrive and its "One Microsoft" business strategy. But he noted the name was snagged a long time ago, by a young Bill Gates. Perhaps Microsoft didn't like the idea of being numerically one step behind Apple's OS X. (A reporter asked jokingly if subsequent versions will be named after big cats.) Whatever the reason, Windows 10 it will be. "When yo...