Brian Prince

SAP’s $5.8 billion deal to acquire Sybase shows the company is doubling down on in-memory database technologies. The Sybase acquisition continues SAP’s push for in-memory database solutions, the use of which Forrester Research predicts will grow in the next four years to the point where roughly a third of enterprises will be using in-memory databases […]

The Senate has confirmed Gen. Keith Alexander (promoted from lieutenant general the same day) May 7 as head of the U.S. Cyber Command. He will have his work cut out for him. “There is a glass,” James Miller, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy, told the Defense Department’s American Forces Press Service May […]

Dell is pitching a combination of its server and storage offerings and the newly released Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as an answer to data center and data warehouse management challenges. Dell is touting support for SQL Server 2008 R2 on its complete line of 64-bit PowerEdge servers as well as PowerVault, EqualLogic and Dell/EMC […]

Symantec launched a new cloud-based offering aimed at the small and midsize business market. The service – dubbed Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection – is designed to be managed from a Web-based console and is focused on protecting Windows-based laptops, desktops, and file servers. Leveraging Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network for threat information, the service includes anti-virus, […]

A team of security researchers has released a report laying the groundwork for enterprises to compare and assess the security strength of their application development processes. The report, Building Security in Maturity Model 2, describes 109 activities carried out at organizations such as Intel and Bank of America as part of their secure development life […]

Mozilla has enhanced its plug-in checker to support other browsers besides Firefox. Back in September, Mozilla started a program to help its users keep their browser plug-ins up-to-date and secure. At the time, that took the form of a message that would appear warning users they were running an outdated version of Adobe Flash Player. […]

The software piracy rate inched up globally last year, costing the IT industry billions of dollars, according to the seventh annual Business Software Alliance/IDC Global Software Piracy Study. The piracy rate is the percentage of software installed on PCs in a given year that is unlicensed. In 2009, that rate increased two percentage points to […]

Verizon Business outlined its strategy for pushing its security portfolio into the cloud. The announcement is meant to complement the company’s on-premise MSS (managed security service) offerings, and will be rolled out in phases between June and early next year. “Secure connectivity is the natural entr??«e into higher-end services of the everything-as-a-service model…CAAS, cloud-based storage […]

McObject has updated its flagship embedded database with a host of new features intended to improve performance, reliability and security. In ExtremeDB 4.1, McObject has added hooks to “enable developers to provide a desired character-sorting sequence (collation) for data stored as text, including collation that supports a particular language or combination of languages,” the company […]

Microsoft issued two critical security bulletins today as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday. The release comes a month after the biggest Patch Tuesday of the year, which took aim at 25 bugs. Today’s update addresses two bugs; one a vulnerability in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, and the other a vulnerability impacting Outlook Express, […]

As if the past few weeks hadn’t been long enough for Facebook, the account of Facebook board member Jim Breyer was used May 9 to blast malicious links. Sunday morning, some of Breyer’s roughly 2,300 Facebook friends received a Facebook message from his account that asked, “Would You Like a Facebook Phone Number?” and then […]

A security researcher has uncovered a critical bug affecting Apple Safari that could be exploited to run malicious code on Windows computers. The discovery of the flaw is credited to researcher Krystian Kloskowski. According to an advisory from Danish security firm Secunia, the vulnerability is due to an error in the handling of parent Windows […]