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This past year has definitely shaped up to be the year of acquisitions and mergers and strong alliances as far as the technology industry is concerned.

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My post discussing a VDI pilot project in conjunction with netbooks produced a variety of responses. These readers chose not to post their comments to the public site, so I thought it would be a good idea to highlight two of the most interesting ones.

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Or else. It’s no surprise that organizations are now looking at adding netbooks into their device mix. A recent InformationWeek Analytics survey found that 72% of enterprises surveyed planned to expand their use of the devices over the next 48 months.

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I need to add an FTP server to my environment, and as I sit here and struggle with how I'm going to do that and stay under my annual budget, it occurs to me that the cloud isn't a bad option anymore. The savings are pretty compelling, in fact; read on for a quick and dirty cost analysis.

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New recommendations from a federal task force last week about breast cancer screenings have infuriated many cancer survivors as well as medical professional organizations, including the American Cancer Society. The guidelines were based on data analysis of the risks and benefits of mammograms for women under age 50.

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I recently wrote a column for InformationWeek Analytics that got some e-mail responses, and I thought the discussion was interesting enough to post the column and some of the comments that sparked the discussion. So here goes.

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Some of the best advice on being an IT executive that I ever got was from an ex-boss. Jonathan, he said, there are two types of CIOs. The first type looks into the data center, and the second looks out of the data center to interact with customers. The first type, he said, isn't nearly as useful and doesn't last nearly as long.

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What's different about cloud computing versus the forms of computing that have gone before? It's really just a matter of scale, isn't it? The Google or Amazon.com or eBay data centers are maybe a little bigger than a big enterprise data center, right? Wrong. One answer lies in an example like Hadoop.

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Man, it's great talking to folks who are actually taking a chance on new ways of doing things instead of just speculating about doing it. I chatted with Mary Ann Buch today. She's the director of technology for a school district in upstate New York. They've actually been using Netbooks and VDI for a proof of concept project in the classroom. Kids and teachers like it, and she says the financial models are pretty compelling. "It's just a school district"? "That doesn't apply to my for-profit enterprise"? Think again.

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Blue Coat has identified a new malware trick just in time for Halloween. Unsuspecting victims are redirected to one of two malware sites after searching for Halloween related sites. These distribution sites are typically used for hosting of warez, pirated digital content, but have been switched to malware distribution in the past 12 hours.

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I just put the wraps on an InformationWeek Analytics Informed CIO report on the rise of netbooks in the enterprise. These babies continue to make their way into the office, despite the somewhat weak claims from Intel and Microsoft that they're not appropriate for business use.

Says who? Not folks in IT. In our recent InformationWeek Analytics Windows 7 survey of 1,414 business technology professionals, 36% of respondents said they already have some level of netbook use in their organizations today. This is expected to grow to 72% of companies over the next 24 months.

Why? Simple: Netbooks fill a major computing gap between the smartphone and laptop and do it at a terrific price.

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Why do IT people resist end users bringing their own equipment to the enterprise network? Those same IT folks are typically pretty proud of what they've achieved with their infrastructure. The message is typically, "it's a security risk." But the implied message is: "we have an inadequate network to deal with this challenge."

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Sun disclosed Tuesday in regulatory filings that it plans to cut 3,000 jobs from its workforce, as it awaits the go-ahead on its takeover by Oracle. It's cut 7,600 workers in three rounds of layoffs over three years, according to SEC filings. Will this mark the end of the downsizing?

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Our esteemed Director of InformationWeek Analytics, Art Wittmann, has a theory that I’m secretly working as a cheerleader for underdog technologies. And our esteemed Executive Editor of InformationWeek Analytics, Lorna Garey, often asks if my favorite drink is Koolade. To my dismay, they have proven themselves right once again. 18 months ago, I predicted that private cloud storage would take off for the Tier-2 storage needs of enterprises. You won’t hear me say this often, I WAS WRONG.

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Business continuity and disaster recovery have long been sore points for enterprise IT. Can virtualization change all that and make true continuity a reality ... or at least, make recovering from disaster a faster and more thorough operation? That's the premise of our latest InformationWeek Analytics poll.

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I had a great conversation last week with Kurt Milne of the IT Process Institute. ITPI is the source of the Visible Ops Handbook, unarguably one of the most usable and practical ITIL books out there, and I'm delighted that they've turned their focus to one of my pet IT peeves: demand management.

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The Cisco UCS "Ventura" server blade is ready to hit the store shelves, with an approximate release date of 10/16 according to Cisco. Read on to find out how it ups the ante in the utility computing space.

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The FTC's new rules on what constitutes an endorsement should be required reading for anyone who renders an opinion on products or services, and for those of us who give these bloggers a venue.

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Having worked with an organization that got good press for saving money through an automated PC shutdown program, I've fielded a lot of questions from IT managers looking to make sustainability and green moves. I can consolidate my advice on the topic into two short points: First, remember that green is the color of money. Second, overseed.

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Are tight budgets crimping your ability to provide adequate web security to your organization? Can you afford $30/month per user instead? Don’t lament if you can’t afford a shiny new Bluecoat ProxyAV, you may be able to get the same level of service in a subscription based model.

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I'll admit it, I was raised paranoid. So, part of me is highly suspicious of Google when the IT world seems like a bunch of crazed lemmings leaping to ADOPT GOOGLE'S SEXSAH NEW OFFERINGS RIGHT NOW. But Google, despite the fact that it is a Massive Empire, may well be the real deal when it comes to understanding what smart CIOs need. And frankly, they may be contributing to reversing a terrible public policy trend.

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Some enterprise teams that I work with, when confronted with the question, "what do we do with this new social networking thingy" immediately shoot back, "we're getting killed with emails -- we can't deal with the information we have." It's not that new social information isn't useful. It's that when you're already drinking martinis from a firehose, somebody offering you a cosmo is ironically tragic.

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The best thing about my job is hanging out with smart people. I had that opportunity last Friday when I attended the filming of a series of videos on unified communications.

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As security professionals we are paid to know how to do bad things. We must know how to do these bad things in order to defend from bad people. What separates us from the criminals is our integrity. We hack for the good of humanity.

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I got a question yesterday from a large organization's IT leadership asking for recommendations on how to report infrastructure uptime to a governing board. The answer? Your governing board doesn't care.

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It’s both a tough time and an exciting time to be in IT. It’s exciting because the systems and services that IT offers business can provide true competitive advantages.

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Like every conference attendee, I was way too busy dealing with logistics to deal with most anything else. But now that I'm all unpacked, here are a few things of note that I left out of my conference blog, including advice from the Department of Homeland Security, cloudy goodness from Dmitry Kachaev of the District of Columbia, and why we might all want to be teleconference luddites.

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We predicted this eventuality here, in this blog, 6 months ago. The MA Data Privacy law, touted by some as the most far reaching in the nation, is too unwieldy for small businesses to follow. However, the law is getting watered down a bit, making it more palatable for small businesses.

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I'm here in Rhode Island at the GMIS International 2009 conference, and it's apparent that even though budgets are tight, local governments are still investing in training conferences that make sense and that ultimately benefit citizens. There's good attendance and sessions ranging from the coupling of 311 and local government metrics program to cloud computing (moderated tomorrow by yours truly).

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After $80M invested by its VC partners, over $9M of which was received earlier this year in order to fund future growth, an innovator in the Network Access Control space, ConSentry Networks, closed its doors for good today. What does this say about the viability of the NAC space?

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Forrester Research predicts that growing interest in predictive analytics will spur a new wave of consolidation in the business intelligence software market. So I asked the king of predictive analytics, SAS Institute, if the company is up for sale. Here's the answer: "We don’t have a sign in the front yard by any means."

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The Social Security Administration is launching a project to electronically collect health data pertinent to people applying for disability benefits. From a political standpoint, isn't this bad timing considering Obama's contentious healthcare reform push? My gut tells me conspiracy-mongers will spin this Social Security plan as another alleged example of Big Brother attempting to ration healthcare and dig into people's personal medical information.

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Every day I speak with numerous security product companies. The reasons for these discussions vary. Some are pitches for InformationWeek product reviews, others are for my security consulting day job at Alvarez and Marsal (yes, shameless plug), and some are for companies I advise. Here is my dilemma. I am pitched so many products each day but I rarely hear of anything that is really new and ground breaking.

PR reps, keep reading and don’t bombard me with hate emails. Yet.

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As news of the Facebook and Twitter DDoS trickles in, I ponder why attackers launch attacks in the way they do. I don’t even really consider why they do it, just why they take a certain approach.

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Shortly after posting something for sale on my local Craigslist site, I was bombarded with 5 responses within minutes. Cool I thought, one of these nice folks was sure to get rid of this nagging item from my garage, but I was wrong. I was the victim of a piranha like PHISHING ATTACK. Are you a phisherman? I will paypal you 10 dollars if I select your series of answers to my questions, read on.

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I’ve been covering desktop virtualization quite a bit lately; it’s a pretty hot topic. After debugging the Matrix for the last 6 months in the InformationWeek Desktop Virtualization labs, I’m trying to free my mind and consider the potential uses of desktop virtualization beyond running MS Office, here’s some pretty cool ideas. Gaming companies, listen up.

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McAfee and the FBI teamed up at Black Hat to discuss Russian online organized crime. The standing room only presentation was part fact and part hype. With a mission to publicize the FBI’s work, Russians were made to be some of the most organized and threatening of all cybercriminals. While this could be true, the connections to American and other hackers around the world were drawn and cannot be ignored.

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For those living in a box, Black Hat is currently underway in Las Vegas. The first talk of the day I attended was by Bill Hoffman and Matt Wood from HP’s Security Labs. They discussed their browser-based darknet called Veiled. Billy is best known for his web security research while working for SPI Dynamics, acquired by HP, and authoring a book on AJAX security. Matt leads development on HP’s Scwaler and SWFScan security tools.

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You read that right. Network Computing, the only IT magazine For IT, By IT is back with the first digital issue (registration required) on WAN optimization and application delivery in a virtualized data center.

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Sometimes it’s hard to gauge whether or not a particular technology has real interest or just the native curiosity all IT professionals have when something is 'new'.

In the case of Windows 7, the interest is real. InformationWeek Analytics launched a research survey this week on organizations plans for Windows 7. Typical research surveys get 500 respondents; folks that are genuinely interested in the topic, not just filling out the survey to win an IPod.

How many have taken the time to review their plans and thoughts on Windows 7?

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Things that make us say "hmmm" include these stats: The percentage of respondents to our 2009 Strategic Security Survey rating encrytion as effective in reducing risk dropped from 57% in 2008 to 48% in 2009. Use of disk, file and backup media encryption ALL fell year over year by at least five percentage points. Backup encryption usage is down 10 points.

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Seems like every pundit has a take on the upcoming Windows 7 OS. But instead of squawking at you, InformationWeek Analytics wants to listen. And clearly, you want to talk: Our Win7 reader survey got more than 800 responses in just a few days.

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On the same day that Google announced the Chrome OS, my mother announced that she was no longer going to take the paper version of the of Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, forgoing a 75 year tradition for the online version, which she admits is not all together satisfying.

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Oh, sure, you may be a high flying enterprise architect, DBA, infrastructure engineer, or coder, but your friends and family all think: you work in IT. You love IT. And, "you must want to take care of my consumer grade tech needs because you love IT so much." Riiiight. How can you satisfy them and still have time for summer fun?

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I chatted up a group of IT pros running full tilt towards virtualization. They all seemed to have left their management hats at home... How 'bout you? We'd love to get your view on VM management.

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For large enterprises, the procurement of IT hardware, software, and services is in desperate need of an overhaul. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra would like to see the GSA provide a central location for ordering these services, and eventually to move its IT procurement processes away from schedules and toward what he calls a "storefront" model.

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It’s time to think differently. Mike Fratto, lead Analyst at InformationWeek Analytics, has a new report on improving delivery of applications by leveraging performance tools and appliances.

He does a great job digging into the challenges of managing application performance across a wide range of organizations. The report is based upon a survey of 267 tech folks across the US.

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I ran my local chamber of commerce's 5k this past Friday. Total time elapsed from leaving the office to going home: 90 minutes. Previous experience showed that I could change, travel, then run the same course on my own with half the total elapsed time: 45 minutes. Many participants of a large IT project would be seriously ticked off at a 200% inefficiency; but that would be silly.

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Finjan's most recent Cybercrime Intelligence report pulls the covers off a clandestine, underground network of buyers and sellers of a new and valuable commodity, your spyware infected computer! Read on for the details.

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Back when I did a lot of security work, we used to joke around that single sign on should be called "single vulnerability". Maybe single provider cloud models should be called "single point of failure".

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