Tech:Touchstone Blog

London 20^th February 2012 - Tech:Touchstone announces its 3^rd Annual Information Security Executive Summit from the 28^th-29^th February at the Richmond Hill Hotel.  The 3rd Annual Information Security Executive Summit will cover the critical issues and considerations that Information Technology and Information Security leaders need to be mindful of when planning their IT strategy for 2012 and beyond.

The UK is under growing threat from Cybercrime, according to a recent article in the Huffington Post ‘The government must do more to help the UK public dodge malware and stay safe online’ say MPs on the Science and Technology Select Committee in a new report.

The surge in people going online to watch the London Olympics could break the internet. Or at least severely choke it, the UK government has warned.

Mobile working is on the increase, with more companies allowing their employees to use smartphones and tablets. Our recent Information Security survey showed that 53% of organisations are working on Data Loss Prevention policies to allow the use of tablets and 13.7% already have a policy in place that addresses all devices.

TechTouchstone recently carried out a survey with senior executives working within Information Security to find out what the key issues might be in 2012 and how budgets will change from 2011.

See why the Head of IT Services for Gatwick Airport attended the Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Executive Summit in November.

Tasked with improving the Airports infrastructure of 900 servers Mike Ede Head of IT Services for Gatwick Airport attended the Virtualisation and Cloud Computing event in November with his Security advisor to look at and evaluate the latest technologies in Cloud Computing.

• Universities and research institutes are used to pooling IT resources, but cloud computing could take it to a new level.

Organisations moving to the cloud are doing so because the shared infrastructure is cheaper and more flexible than conventional forms of technology.

BYOD was on the increase throughout 2011, in fact according to Infoworld many companies that have accepted the BYOD phenomenon are taking the next step, shifting from a passive acceptance spurred on by employees and executives who would use iPhones, iPads, and Androids anyhow to active exploitation of BYOD to increase productivity and reduce mobile telecom costs. In other words, businesses are learning that not only are mobile-equipped information workers a great way to increase productivity and ROI but that employees will foot much or the entire bill for the privilege.

Data Protection is a hot topic for 2011 and 2012, a survey taken at our Information Security Executive Summit in 2011 came out with very clear results as to what the key issues faces CISO and CIOs of enterprise organisations.

Cloud Computing is poised for rapid growth

2012 looks to be the year cloud computing will take off in UK enterprises. In November 2011 we surveyed delegates attending our UK Virtualisation/Cloud Computing Executive Summit. The survey revealed that cloud computing already has a significant share of UK large organisation IT budgets: the firms surveyed are now spending 10% of their IT budgets on cloud computing services, and plan to increase that number to 28% in the next 2 years. However, behind this average 10% figure there are two types or organisations: those that have embraced cloud as an important part of their future strategy and those that are still on the starting blocks. 43% of delegates surveyed were spending less than 1% of their IT budgets on cloud; the remaining 57% were spending on average 18%. The survey also confirmed that making the business case for cloud is becoming easier: earlier this year 60% of delegates at the June 2011 Tech:Touchstone Virtualisation/Cloud Computing Executive Summit with a zero spend on cloud were unsure of the financial benefits of cloud computing; now that figure is down to 27%.