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.

Yahoo begins transition to new socially enabled platform

Yahoo laid the foundation for a ‘universal profile’ by commencing its transition to a new socially enabled platform.

Users will be in position to incorporate limited changes to their profiles such as adding friends in social graph from the Yahoo address book, listing interests and updating status as well as changing settings, control permissions and managing notifications of Yahoo properties.

Profiles of the members of Yahoo 360 will be migrated to the new system without scrapping 360 for the time being, informed Yahoo’s vice president of communities, Jim Stoneham.

He added that there was not much to demo in the new foundation release which enables other things to happen and facilitate developers to do things. Jim explained that Yahoo wanted to make sure that new release worked before switching on connections to big traffic properties. He remarked big bang approach would not help at this scale.

Jim disclosed that more of Yahoo property activity feeds would appear on the profile page. Mail users would receive contacts’ messages, activity updates and connection requests. A new universal header would be added on every page of service unifying navigation elements.

According to head of Yahoo’s Audience Technology Group, Yahoo is working on three key challenges: making Yahoo Mail work on mobile devices and desktop, converting profiles to universal profile data privacy and lighting up social graph.

Microsoft keen on providing ‘instant on’ feature to Windows users

Microsoft has undertaken limited survey of select users whether they would prefer an ‘instant on’ feature for Windows where usable desktop could be rushed to screens in few seconds.

As per the Engadget posted excerpts form the survey, ‘instant on’ would enable a completely turned off or powered down computer to perform specific functions in a very short time

The survey states that ‘instant on’ is quite different from ‘Full Windows’ in the sense that it puts limits on activities that could be carried out and restricts access to some applications only.

Microsoft is allocating top priority to quicker boot times and is planning to include it in Windows 7, the next operating system form the software giant.

According to Michael Fortin, engineer in Microsoft, a top goal for Windows 7 is to enhance a number of systems with very fast boot times. He added that less than 15 seconds is the boot time expected for a very good system in the lab.

Microsoft put in a lot of effort with the PC makers both on Windows Vista and Windows 7 to improve boot time apart from many other things. Some PCs with this improvement are expected emerge in the near future.

Acer topples HP in the EMEA region

Acer’s success in the growing netbook market has helped it in toppling HP from the top position in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) PC selling league.

Although HP still topped the spot in global stakes, Acer climbed up from second position in the EMEA region as per Gartner’s third quarter preliminary results of this year. Globally Dell is placed at second place while Acer remained at third position.

The report attributed HP’s top position loss in EMEA to its delayed entry in the mini-notebook market. According to the Gartner report Asus and Acer benefited significantly from sales of low-cost subnotebooks or netbooks.

According to principal analyst Ranjit Atwal for client computing markets, EMEA PC market was dictated by manufacturers that supplied mini-notebooks, lending them opportunity to climb up in top five rankings. He added that HP feared potential loss of existing notebook markets and delayed introduction of mini-notebooks without realising that Acer would grab the opportunity so quickly.

Atwal pointed out that large volumes of netbooks were shipped to Western Europe’s telecommunications operators.

It was first time since its merger with Compaq in 2002 that HP lost its top position in EMEA PC sales in the third quarter of this year.

BT offers mobile-broadband connection at no extra cost

BT wants to capture the small-business market. It has floated two schemes around 3G wireless data, with offers on airtime and corporate gifts in the form of free USB dongles.

BT Business Total Broadband Option 2 & Option 3 will now be offered with mobile-broadband connection free of cost, the company said in a statement.

According to Retail Director of BT Wireless Broadband, David Hughes, users would be given a modem and access to BT Openzone Wi-Fi hotspots in addition to mobile networks. They would also be entitled to 2,000 BT Openzone minutes plus 1 GB data-use per month as per ‘fair-use’ policy.

The Broadband Option 2 with mobile connection costs £29.99 per month and includes antivirus, anti-spam software, modem on USB stick and 24/7 support.

The Broadband Option 3 in addition to all O2 options includes unlimited usage and security pack for 5 PCs at monthly cost of £40.50.

Unlimited use under fair-use policy means 3GB, 4,000 Openzone minutes. Beyond this limit additional cost will be 10p per megabyte.

BT hopes their corporate gifts and competitive deals on airtime will draw in more people from the small-business sector.

David Hughes asserted that usage policies were not stringent since use above 3GB of mobile-data amounted to breach of governing rules. A BT spokesperson stated that if some users exceeded limits accidentally, the company would help them to avoid such problems reccuring.

BlackBerrry smartphone “Storm” was initiated by Vodafone, confirms RIM

RIM has announced its touchscreen smartphone “Storm” and disclosed that it was initiated by Vodafone. Hoping to ’storm’ the consumer market is the reason they decided to name the advanced gadget as they did.

Vodafone’s Jens Schulte-Bockum, global director of terminals and RIM co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis were in London last week to show off the smartphone.

Vodafone had invited Lazaridis last summer and sought a breakthrough innovation from him to reposition RIM into the heart of consumer space.

The BlackBerry maker was under tremendous pressure to provide something unique to excel in a densely crowded high-end mobile market after the launch of Apple’s iPhone, which replaced the keyboard with touchscreen that transformed public perception of smartphone and fuelled a nascent market.

Lizaridis explained that with Storm, RIM took a multitouch capacitive touchscreen; put it underneath a second sub-system which enabled clicking the device no matter where you pressed. The Storm has subtle movement and an interesting suspension system which allows clicking by pressing at any place.

Lizaridis added that if you watched somebody using Storm, not seeing the front display, it would look as if tat person was typing on a keyboard.

Apart from touchscreen the HSDPA Storm has all the bells and whistles included, such as a 3.2-megapixel camera, high resolution video playback screen, GPS and MP3 player. Although despite all these great functions, some mobile phone users still prefer simpler phones, such as the Nokia 6500 Slide.

Storm, to be launched in time for Christmas, will be exclusive to Vodafone’s UK network. It is likely to be made free with a £35 tariff per month, if consumers opt for 2 years’ contract.

Debate over improving accuracy of the broadband speeds in the UK

Virgin Media, the internet, television and telecommunication firm, will be working with speed test providers with an aim of improving the accuracy of broadband speeds. It recommended tests devised by broadband comparison website SamKnows, which makes use of hardware - attached to the customers’ modems directly.

Ofcom has adopted the SamKnows kit. It attracted many trial seekers who were keen to check the system. It came about since the SamKnows founders were themselves not happy with the correctness of other available broadband speed tests. Sam Crawford, the founder of SamKnows, said:

“We wanted to make it far more comprehensive, not so much about speed as its overall performance.”

However, the head of broadband comparison website ThinkBroadband, Andrew Ferguson, says his speed tester is accurate.

He said “We are certain our speed tester can handle 50Mbps and faster broadband connections.”

The head of broadbandchoices.co.uk, Michael Phillips, felt some of the issues brought up by Virgin were fair. He added he would put some caveats on his website’s speed test. But he feels that for most users - on lower broadband speeds - such tests remain a key barometer of services.

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