Computerworld UK staff

Global PC shipments will top 366 million units this year, according to a new forecast from Gartner.

The analyst is predicting a 19.7 per cent increase from 305.8 million units shipped in 2009, with global PC spending forecast to reach $245 billion (£163 billion) in 2010, an increase of 12.2 per cent from 2009.

Illustration: Diego AguirreCloud computing is being over-hyped, and enterprises should be wary after high-profile outages at providers such as Amazon cloud services, said analyst firm Ovum.

A raft of IT-as-a-service offerings have emerged in recent years, including Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) along with Google Apps offering and the Salesforce platform-as-a-service product.

Most IT staff would steal sensitive company information, including CEO's passwords and customer details, if they were laid off, according to a new survey from Cyber-Ark.

A staggering 88 percent of IT administrators admitted they would take corporate secrets, if they were suddenly made redundant. The target information included CEO passwords, customer database, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company's list of privileged passwords.

Security applications delivered as cloud-based services will more than triple by 2013, according to Gartner.

The firm said 20 percent of the revenue of messaging security tools, such as antimalware and antispam services for email and instant messaging, currently comes through the cloud delivery model. But this will jump to 60 percent by 2013.