Cameron Sturdevant

Vipin Samar, vice president of database security at Oracle, provided some candid information about when to use some of the new security features in Oracle Database 11g, which I reviewed in early October. In a session at Oracle’s OpenWorld titled “Oracle Database 11g: Secure Your Data Transparently,” Samar talked about how tablespace encryption now includes […]

Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies, talked again today about Oracle’s Teradata-killer, Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Dell and EMC. The name alone shows how Oracle is using integration—a theme of Oracle President Charles Phillips opening morning keynote—to fashion products out of mature technologies. Mendelshon spoke at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco […]

Here’s the last installment of my lost and found Treo 650 mobile phone story. Many of you wrote me about Butler. I was using a 2005 version of this Palm utility and, on your advice, I bought the newest version to get the remote data lock and wipe capabilities. But I was greedy. I got […]

When I thought I lost my (now found) Treo 650 mobile phone and all my personal data, I was a little panicked that I had put all of my data into the hands of a stranger. Several readers let me know about Butler, which has a facility to lock or erase data from a handheld […]

It was big news in early October when federal officials essentially deleted the ca.gov domain because the Transportation Authority of Marin Web site was hacked up to redirect to serve porn pages. While speaking with Dianne Steinhauser, executive director of the Marin transportation authority, I advised her to shut down the Web site until competent […]

I got to see one of the only IBM BladeCenter S systems in the world yesterday. It is comparable to the HP BladeSystem c3000 “Shorty” that was reviewed by my colleague Wayne Rash. The systems were on display side by side at an IBM office in San Francisco and it was quite a show. Now, […]

I got home last night, felt for my cell phone, a Treo 650 that I’ve had since 2005, and found only an empty holster. Crap. I immediately flashed back to when I probably lost it. I was sitting on the floor of the BART train because I wanted to talk with a friend, there weren’t […]

Salesforce.com (again) showed off Force.com, its platform-as-a-service application development platform, just one month after unveiling the offering. Everyone was brimming with pride and joy and talking of “developer happiness.” Salesforce.com Vice President Adam Gross was joined by James Ward from Adobe and Natan Zaidenweber of StakeWare, an AppExchange incubator partner that uses the Force.com platform, […]

Denver International Airport is among the busiest airports in the world and boasts one of the longest runways in the United States. The airport also conducts a lot of business using credit cards. DIA recently completed its Level 1 (more than 6 million transactions per year) PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) audit, […]

Compliance Without Tears Practically every enterprise must abide by and demonstrate compliance with some group of regulations intended to head off the next Enron or WorldCom scandal or headline-grabbing data breach. Whats more, since so many of the routes through which organizations reach and demonstrate compliance run through their IT infrastructures, this rats nest of […]

Until now, most retailers have escaped the embrace of regulatory compliance, but the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS, is changing all that. A 12-part, private-industry-defined rule set, PCI DSS governs cardholder data handling and transaction processing among merchants, banks and card processing companies. The PCI standard references technologies such as firewalls, […]

10 Things You Should Know About PCI Compliance Up-to-Date Network Map Requirement 1.1.2 asks for a current network diagram with all connections to cardholder data, including any wireless networks. This is essential for managing any network and will significantly decrease the time needed to l 10 Things You Should Know About PCI Compliance – 2. […]