In late 2013, news of a massive data breach at Target surfaced. Hackers stole personal and credit card information of nearly 70 million shoppers, and the breach ended up costing Target $162 million and the resignation of the CEO and CIO. While this was one of the largest and most widely publicized data breaches, it’s by no means one of few.

Just recently, LinkedIn came clean about its 2012 data breach – a few days after it was discovered some of the information was being sold online. While LinkedIn originally reported the email and passwords for 6.5 million people were compromised, it just admitted the real number is as high as 117 million accounts. Though LinkedIn advised people to change their passwords when the attack was first made public, it wasn’t until four years later that the company decided to cancel passwords that were affected.

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Salesforce has announced that it has agreed to purchase enterprise cloud commerce solutions provider Demandware in a $2.8 billion cash deal.

Salesforce will commence a tender offer for all outstanding shares of Demandware -- which boasts the likes of L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer as customers -- for $75.00 a share, with the transaction expected to close at the end of July 2016.

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A growing number of organizations are moving to hybrid networks as a means of meeting their business and technical needs. Hybrid networks let companies connect a variety of locations from large offices and data centers to branch offices and remote workers. And the ability to select the service and performance levels needed by various business activities and enterprise applications make for an agile enterprise.

Your network is the central nervous system of your business. Traditional networking solutions are rigid, hard to manage, and lack visibility and control. Pure "over the top" solutions that make exclusive use of the internet certainly make life easier, but the performance required for business critical applications can’t be guaranteed. Getting it right "most of the time" isn’t an option. The market for hybrid network services is growing rapidly, which is being driven by and large by the increase in enterprise bandwidth consumption -- growing by 30 percent a year, according to Gartner’s market research. This is due to the increase in the number of devices connecting to corporate networks, the types of business critical applications and the increasing use of video communications.

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At this year’s Computex show in Taiwan, Intel announced that it is adding new chips to its Xeon E3 1500 line of server processors to help service providers handle the massive amounts of online video-related traffic created by the "visual cloud".

Webcasts, video-conferencing, digital TV broadcasts, cloud gaming, video transcoding and even the delivery of remote workstations all make up what the company and other chipmakers have begun to refer to as the visual cloud. The new chips that Intel is adding to its Xeon E3-1500 line have been created with extra capabilities that aid in accelerating video and multimedia workloads.

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In order to keep up with a rapidly changing market landscape and deliver better customer experiences, organizations are building and enhancing software and mobile applications at a rapid rate.

This is leading businesses to rethink their internal software development processes in order to support development methodologies like Agile, Lean, and DevOps.

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Cyber security affects all of us, but it only makes the headlines when it's big companies that are the target of attacks.

Threat intelligence provider Anomali has produced a new study focusing on vulnerabilities in businesses on the UK's FTSE 100 list of the largest companies. Among the findings are that over the last three months, 81 companies in the FTSE 100 had potentially malicious domain registrations against them, enabling cyber criminals to create dummy websites that can be used to trick users into supplying private data.

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Microsoft has today announced a new department designed to invest into disruptive start-ups in their early phases.

The department, led by Nagraj Kashyap (corporate vice president) and executive vice president of business development Peggy Johnson, holds the name Microsoft Ventures.

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It’s an open source world. Black Duck and Northbridge’s recent 2016 Future of Open Source Survey found that 78 percent of the over 1300 respondent companies said they run open source software. The number is likely much higher.

Black Duck finds open source software (OSS) in over 95 percent of the applications we analyze for clients. It’s easy to understand why. Open source adds needed functionality while lowering development costs and accelerating time to market. But securing and managing open source code still remains a challenge for many organizations.

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It takes a lot to launch a business in today’s competitive landscape. Unfortunately, not all find success and some end up shutting their doors for good. A company could be going through a merger or acquisition, as is the case with Office Depot, which is in the process of closing up to 400 locations following its 2013 merger with OfficeMax. Of course, there’s another reason -- a company could be facing mounting debts and a decline in sales. That’s what is happening to the once popular fashion retailer American Eagle, which has seen its net income take a huge dip from $400 million in 2008 to $80 million in 2015 and will be closing 150 locations by 2017.

Once any business makes the decision to shut down -- even if it only has one location -- there is one very important, but often forgotten, step that needs to be taken. Data needs to be permanently erased from every single piece of equipment and environment where corporate, customer and employee data are stored.

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BYOD has now become so prevalent that 29 percent of UK secondary schools are now operating some sort of BYOD policy including asking students to bring their own devices. While the enterprise world has been talking about BYOD for years, it’s this kind of mainstream use that confirms BYOD as a way of life, and of business.

While there are clear benefits in terms of productivity for example, unfortunately, security still remains a key concern. In order to take advantage of the potential benefits and avoid the security risks, organizations need to do three core things: develop a robust BYOD policy, choose the right security technology, and support the people using it.

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The growth of the Internet of Things, increased reliance on analytics to support decision making, and greater use of video means businesses are storing more and more data. That data has become a crucial asset and storing it so that it's accessible and safe is a major challenge. Solutions from major vendors are costly but data storage operating system specialist RAIDIX has come up with a product that can offer fault tolerance on commodity hardware.

We spoke to Sergey Platonov, product owner at RAIDIX to find out more about the solution and why data storage is now a major challenge.

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As organizations rely more and more on data, so keeping it secure and making sure it can only be accessed by the appropriate people becomes increasingly important.

To address this, identity and access management company SailPoint is launching an updated version of its SecurityIQ solution that provides an integrated and comprehensive approach to governing all data in the enterprise.

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Iron Man. Captain America. IT administrator. Yes, you read that correctly. As organizations make their shift to cloud computing technologies, including Microsoft Azure and Office 365, IT admins can be crucial -- but often overlooked -- assets.

These superheroes of the technology world can save their organization from technological chaos, stop compliance issues in their tracks, and spread their technical knowledge for the good of the organization. So how can admins prove their worth in the rise of the cloud?

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Citrix and Microsoft announced recently that they will be expanding their partnership. More precisely, Citrix will use Microsoft’s Azure as its cloud.

Besides Azure, they will also integrate Citrix XenMobile and NetScaler into Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite.

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If we look at the world of cyber security through the eyes of the media, it’s a pretty frightening view. We hear story after story of security breaches hitting major companies and the next data leaks that follows affecting thousands of people. It’s enough to fill any business with trepidation.

With cyber security such a big talking point, we tend to see a lot of information floating around -- some of which is not in the least bit true. If a company wants to enhance its IT security it is imperative to be able to separate facts from fiction.

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