Virtualisation is hackers’ next target

Hackers are on their new mission of attacking Virtualisation, which is being adopted by the businesses at a rapid pace. The worrying fact is that not many businesses are aware of the risks or acting adequately to protect from the hackers, noted the market observers.

According to Ovum’s principal analyst Graham Titterington, threats to virtual machines are increasing significantly as virtualisation is getting more and more global prominence. While acknowledging that there was little evidence of foundation layers of virtualisation environment having been attacked yet, he said that strong possibility of attacks did exist and businesses needed to be extra vigilant.

Titterington added attackers could take down many virtual machines in a single attack with the help of virtualisation itself. If the hypervisor security of virtual machines, sharing same physical platform was broken, the information held on machines could also get attacked.

Titterington’ assessment was concurred by Symantec’s manager for systems engineering, Ronnie Ng, looking after Indonesia and Singapore operations. He remarked that although hypervisor breaches were rare, threat of compromising hypervisor layer was quite high, and it could put all virtual servers running business applications at risk.

Secure Computing’s managing director of Asia South, Benjamin Low stated that it would be just matter of time before hackers attack unprotected vulnerabilities of technology and warned that virtualisation could become next frontier for hackers’ attacks.

Sony offers high specification Vaio laptops for business

Sony has launched the TT Series laptops for the businesses at premium price with very high specifications.

The base model of Vaio, 2GB memory laptop is CS1, at £1,599. The higher range model Z2 with 4GB memory costs £1,999.

Z2 laptop is also offered in another version which comes with full disk encryption and security at no additional cost.

The TT laptops carry Vaio trademarks, operate at low voltage and consume less power. Their slim carbon fibre structure makes them light weight, just 1.3kg. They come with LED-backlit screen and multi-standard DVD reader.

The battery life for typical use is 8 hours on full charge. One hour of charging is sufficient for 4 hours of usage. The Ultra Low Voltage Intel Core 2 Duo processor, used in the laptop enables low power use.

Laptops are provided with Motion Eye webcams and communication is made through 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 2Mbps HSUPA and Wi-Fi.

Nicolas Barendson, head of Sony’s Vaio business in Europe, disagreed with the view that TT series would be too expensive compared to other compact laptops in the present economic crunch.

Barendson claimed that Sony differentiated itself with technology, security, mobility and reliability. People opt for Vaio for the features it offers for the business needs.

Satyam to close £1bn of outsourcing deals in the UK

Outsourcing giant, Satyam, looking for new business opportunities in the credit-crunch-hit financial sector is set to clinch up to £1bn of outsourcing deals in the UK.

Satyam will be clinching 10 deals worth £20m to £100m each, claiming that it was making headway in manufacturing, telecom and retail markets.

Satyam’s European business head, Dr. Keshab Panda, told that deals were countering the slowdown in financial sector where businesses were postponing outsourcing agreements.

Panda ruled out a reduction of staff adding that its UK headcount had doubled in the past 2 years and it provided employment to 5,200 new workers during the first 6 months of financial year 2008/09.

Satyam’s second-quarter financial results for the current year showed jump of 38.8% year on year to £338m (28.8bn rupees) and 7.6% on last quarter.

Panda predicted tough third quarter for the company with revenue remaining flat between 29.4bn and 30.3bn rupees.

According to Panda, financial and banking services were larger segment for Satyam’s business. He claimed that quarter 3 was always a difficult period for business worldwide and Satyam had predicted flat quarter 3 but it clinched 10 deals at this time in the UK. Panda added that many customers were interested in doing outsourcing to reduce costs.

Panda informed that EU market was growing faster than the US accounting for 21% of Satyam’s business. Of 21%, 52% accounted for the UK and 48% for Europe.

Open source software a better economic model, asserts Red Hat CEO

Red Hat CEO, Whitehurst on his tour of Asia-Pacific region claimed that there will be a boost for open source software during the current global economic upheaval. He said that companies would be compelled by the crisis to reduce spending and consolidate technology infrastructure.

He remarked that when things get difficult people resort to cutting investments in the future. But he thought this would make more companies to opt for open source software. He also expected slowdown in spending over new systems. He considered open source to be in much better position to take companies out of the financial crisis.

Whitehurst explained that open source software was most useful option since it provided superior economic model for software creation.

The Sydney-based analyst, Kevin McIsaac, at Intelligent Business Research Service, holds a different view. According to him open source software is not likely to contribute in increasing market share of companies. He believes that financial climate will not drive people to Red Hat in big way. He considers deteriorating economic scenario not being conducive, since enterprise level open source software involved significant costs.

McIsaac suggested that a simple way to cut costs was to audit your licences and get those cancelled which were not needed by you.