Back in August, the New York Times published an article written by Ellen Messmer out of IDG’s Network World, titled: Security Start-Up Rohati Extends Access-Control Gear to the Cloud.
In it, she says that John Burke of  Nemertes Research stated:

….Nemertes in its research has found that fewer than 5% of organizations today have any type of funded cloud initiative.

Interesting to see how fast that’s going to change. In only a couple short months analysts have predicted that spending on cloud services will account for 10 percent of IT budgets by 2013, making up a whopping $44.2 billion in total IT spend (not that the $9 billion to be spent this year is chump change). This was pointed out by Dave Rosenberg on his CNET blog ‘Software Interrupted, where he wrote:

If public cloud services will be 10 percent of all IT money spent [by 2013], that represents a blisteringly fast growth rate. And while we certainly don’t wish the recession to continue, it’s interesting to see how companies have adapted their IT plans to take advantage of services that require far less capital expenditure.

CNET Graphic Showing Cloud Computing IT Spend by 2013

Evolution of the “Cloud” – 1.) Buzzword, 2.) Chris Hoff is snatched up by Cisco, 3.) Obama open’s Cloud store, 4.) $44 billion by 2013, 5.) Reality

Other thoughts recently thunk: I thoroughly enjoyed Forbe’s Lee Gomes’ led coverage of the next Silicon Valley God Rush – Virtualization. I especially enjoyed the Nemertes contribution from Andreas and John: The Virtualized Desktop. As a PR guy with a special interest in the intrigue of digital security, I also enjoyed Andy Greenberg’s piece: Virtualization’s Real Security Problem: Sprawl.

Couple new blogs I’ve added to my roll lately:

Gary’s Blog (Nimsoft CEO Gary Read)

Tales from the Si Valley Front (Ken Rutsky)

Posted by Joe Franscella –

Read an interesting blog post by Larry Dignan at ZDNet Between the Lines blog this morning, IBM targets Google Apps for business, undercuts pricing and touts reliability. One paragraph really caught my attention:

The LotusLive iNotes launch, set to be announced on Monday, pushes reliability in a big way. Taking a jab at Google’s outages, IBM said it’s imperative that cloud computing “is ready for the enterprise when it’s designed for the enterprise, by the enterprise, and of the enterprise.” Word of IBM’s iNotes move began to surface late Thursday and Big Blue has had a LotusLive iNotes site live for days.

It begs a couple questions: 1.) Who measures reliability? Do you leave that to that to the vendor or should you use a third-party app to provide a neutral perspective; 2.) What about seurity? How is access being managed, monitored and audited? (Note to Larry – Take a look at my email offer to provide some perspective – please, please, please!)

Sixty-nine percent of respondents defined a virtual firewall as software running on a virtual system. However, the largest deployment of virtual firewalls provided by the leading vendors are firewall devices running multiple firewall instances. This gap indicates a lack of understanding of virtual firewall solutions available, vendors’ failure to meet market demand, or both. At a minimum, it strongly suggests a need to more clearly differentiate the solutions being provided today.

The number one management concern about virtual firewalls is the increase in complexity caused by the growth in the number of firewalls, polices, rules and objects. Closely following the top concern is the additional management burden caused by the lack of automated tools and resources to effectively address the increase in complexity. These concerns may explain why 64 percent of respondents do not feel that virtual firewalls will gain widespread adoption for another two to three years.

Forty-two percent of respondents identified that their top security concern about virtualization is users creating unauthorized virtual environments. Twenty-seven percent of respondents are concerned about their limited view into the host operating system and virtual network to identify vulnerabilities. Similar to traditional firewalls, misconfiguration of virtual firewalls is one of the top three concerns.

The survey polled 109 conference attendees that are involved in the IT decision making process for organizations within a wide variety of industries, including health care, government, financial, insurance and telecom.

Join Secure Passage in a discussion of this survey and other security related topics on Twitter @Secure Passage, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For more information on Secure Passage, stop by booth 553 on the RSA Conference 2009 Expo floor.

Posted by Joe Franscells (Disclaimer – I represent Secure Passage)