Where Facebook edges out cloud computing

By CIO New Zealand | Monday, February 08 2010

Smartphones and utilising social technologies at the workplace keep CIOs awake at night.

ICT chiefs expressed the most concern about the rising business use of smartphones and Web 2.0 social technologies, more so than cloud computing or data centre virtualisation, reports Forrester.

The analyst firm interviewed ICT decision-makers in North America and Europe in the third quarter of 2009, and found that when it comes to new technologies or initiatives, nearly half (46 percent) of enterprises expressed concern about smartphones, and 38 percent were concerned about Web 2.0 technologies.

In comparison, 37 percent expressed concerns over cloud computing, and 34 percent with data centre virtualisation.

Consumerisation, not cloud computing, is the new technology trend of most concern, writes Jonathan Penn, senior analyst, in the report on ‘The State of Enterprise IT Security and Emerging Trends: 2009 to 2010’.

“This is likely because, from a security perspective, consumerisation represents a greater loss of control
of oversight of the computing infrastructure, whereas cloud and virtualisation merely represent a changing management paradigm,” Penn reports.

The document states IT security investment and adoption fared well in the past two years compared to other areas of IT, as organisations recognised the need to maintain current levels of risk by continuing to support IT security and compliance efforts.

Forrester expects security investment to continue to grow with the more economically optimistic environment, but sees the nature of security investment to change.

The report states 42 percent of enterprises expect spending on new security technology to increase significantly (meaning a greater than 5 percent increase in budget) and only 10 percent expect spending in new security technology to significantly decrease.

The greatest spending increases are in network security and governance, risk and compliance.