Tom Jowit

Four out of five enterprises are now giving cloud computing a try. New research has confirmed that at least 80 percent of IT managers are looking at the technology.

Earlier this month, a survey for grid specialist Platform Computing found that more than a quarter of IT executives planned to introduce private clouds this year. But now new research from F5 Networks has confirmed that cloud computing has indeed gained critical mass within large enterprises, with more than 80 percent of respondents saying they are currently trialling public and private cloud computing deployments.

Developing countries are risk of becoming a dumping ground for e-waste unless there are effective controls in place to stop Western countries from "passing the toxic buck."

So said analyst house Gartner in a new report entitled "Emerging Markets Are Becoming Dumping Grounds for Secondary PCs."

PC maker Lenovo hopes to give IT managers a helping hand with encrypted hard drive systems after announcing a new password management tool.

Called Hardware Password Manager, the tool is designed to allow system administrators to manage and reset staff passwords with all brands of hard drives, including those that have full disk encryption. A demonstration of the product can be seen here on YouTube.

Igel Technology is offering businesses an updated version of a card that converts aging desktop PCs into thin clients, thereby extending the operating life of old equipment.

The PC to TC (thin client) Conversion Card also gives businesses a cost-effective way to migrate to a virtual desktop or server-based computing environment, said the Bremen, Germany-based company. The company has also directly marketed thin client systems, implementing one in a Boston hotel.

Critical vulnerabilities have been found in HP's OpenView product, which could potentially affect millions of organisations currently using the systems and network management software.

According to an advisory from Core Security Technologies, an engineer at its research arm (CoreLabs) discovered the problem while investigating the feasibility of exploiting a set of previously disclosed vulnerabilities in HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) by researchers at Secunia.

A panel of security experts agreed that security needs to thought of a lot earlier in the software development lifecycle, and that the IT industry needs to start shipping "hardened" products, especially with the advent of the cloud and visualisation making the location of sensitive data even more difficult to locate.

Speaking at Alcatel-Lucent's Dynamic Enterprise forum in Paris last week, a panel of experts including Wyatt Starnes, the founder and CEO of verification provider SignaCert, discussed how there are now thousands of applications out there, and that the traditional model of securing them via third party or add-on security packages, is now outdated.

IBM is to build a hugely powerful supercomputer capable of performing at 20 petaflops per second, twenty times faster than the current record holder, namely the 1 petaflop Roadrunner machine it delivered back in June to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

IBM has been contracted by the US government to build the machine, dubbed Sequoia, and is still developing the technology needed. It has also been asked to build a smaller computer called Dawn. Both machines will be constructed at its Blue Gene facilities in Rochester, Minnesota.

Graphic: Diego AguirreIT managers should start familiarizing themselves with a new security tool -- the paint brush -- as Japanese researchers have come up with a paint that they say will block high-speed wireless signals, giving businesses a cheap option to protect their wireless networks.

The problem of securing wireless networks has been an issue for a while now. Wi-Fi LANs with no encryption or running the obsolete WEP system, run the risk of having hackers outside the building eavesdrop on wireless LAN traffic, or simply stealing bandwidth. However, there are a number of solutions, besides encryption, for companies wishing to secure their networks.

Illustration: Randy LyhusFujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) is to offer a security bundle for its customers that will allow them to locate their laptops, as well as protect confidential data, in case of theft.

FSC is offering SystemTrack (tracking software) and DataProtect (data protection software), which will be available from the first quarter of 2009 in selected Lifebook models, and in all business line models of the Esprimo mobile series.

Valuable mission data gathered by NASA's Apollo missions to the moon 40 years ago looks like it may be recovered thanks to a donation of an ancient IBM tape drive by a Sydney computer society.

The Apollo 11, 12, and 14 missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s gathered valuable data on moon dust for NASA, using 'dust detectors' that were invented by Perth physicist Brian O'Brien, according to ABC News in Australia.

IT managers are "grossly underestimating" the explosion of unstructured data in the enterprise, according to Hewlett Packard.

HP published new research carried out by Coleman Parkes Research, which surveyed more than 1,020 CIOs and department heads of large enterprise organisations across the UK and Europe.

UK systems integrator, Centrix Software, has taken the unusual step of developing its own software package to resolve the fragmented user experience of staff having to deal with multiple applications and services.

WorkSpace is described as an application aggregation and publishing platform. The product has been already around for 18 months already, but now version 3.0 is being officially launched to the market today.