When it comes to embracing cutting-edge technology to protect business data, it appears the industrial sector is at or near the head of the pack.

More and more industrial enterprises are wising up to the fact that the development of a strong disaster recovery plan is a high-priority business task, and leveraging technology is one of the more effective ways to achieve that end.

Recent natural disasters, most notably the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, have only further brought to light the value of embracing technological solutions to maximize the effectiveness of a disaster recovery plan.  In an effort to better understand the level of disaster preparedness in the business world, Acronis, a provider of backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud environments, recently conducted a survey of 3,000 IT managers in small and medium companies across 13 countries.

“The premise behind the survey is to understand, from different IT managers around the world, what their level preparedness is for disasters and what is impacting their decisions or their perspectives on disaster recovery,” said Izzy Azeri, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Americas at Acronis.

According to the survey:

• 25% of servers within the industrial sector are already virtualized.
• 48% of IT managers believe more than half their servers will be virtualized by the end of 2011.
• 20% of IT infrastructure in industrial companies is already managed in the cloud.
• 33% of IT infrastructure is predicted to be cloud-based by the end of 2011.

According to Azeri, the willingness to embrace the cloud and virtualization varies from sector to sector.

“Some industries may be a little more hesitant to deploy some of these new technologies,” he said.

While those results are encouraging, the survey also found many IT managers are less than confident about their company’s ability to deal with business disasters. For example, the Acronis survey found:

• 33% of IT managers in the industrial sector are concerned that their backup and disaster recovery would fail in the wake of a serious incident or event.
• 30% of industrial sector IT managers state that they do not have ample resources to enable comprehensive backup and disaster recovery.
• 60% state that they have ample controls and procedures for backup and disaster recovery.

Azeri said the confidence level of these organizations depends quite a bit on the disaster recovery resources they have at their disposal. By leveraging technology to fit their needs, they can address their level of preparedness more easily and effectively.

“One of the things we see is cloud brings much more to these companies than their physical infrastructure ever could,” he said. “It would actually increase their confidence level to recover, because they now actually have resources that are off-site and aren’t necessarily impacted by these disasters.”

But perhaps the biggest takeaway from the survey is the desire of various business organizations to have a single solution for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. According to the survey, 76% of the total respondents feel that the best way to improve their backup and recovery strategy.

According to Azeri, adopting technologies such as cloud and virtualization has its benefits, but it also brings added complexity. A single solution effectively guards against that.

“So if they actually have something that will help them manage the resources across those three technology platforms – the physical infrastructure, the data center and the cloud – they can increase their confidence level,” he continued. “Having that one pane of glass will really increase the confidence level for some of these customers.”

Exinda, a provider of WAN optimization solutions, announced it will deliver a tutorial on Managing Mobile Devices in the WAN at the Mobile Computing Summit at the Hyatt Regency SF Airport in Burlingame, Calif., June 28-30.

According to a release, Kevin Suitor, Exinda’s VP of Marketing will deliver the tutorial as part of the Bringing Mobility to the Enterprise session on Wednesday, June 29 from 2:40 to 5:30 p.m.

“One of the top concerns of CIOs today is managing mobile workers on the enterprise network,” said Suitor. “Network managers must have the ability to visualize the mobile device traffic traversing the Wide Area Network, in order to apply policies to ensure that mobile workers have a high quality user experience. They must also be able to manage the millions of applications that mobile devices present to the WAN, ensuring they perform well without hindering the performance of other business-critical applications.

“Exinda’s appliances enable IT managers to prepare their WANs to deliver a high quality end user experience for traditional hardwired or wireless mobile or tablet users. The solutions enable reduced packet loss, reduced latency, support of various usage models, and ensure a superior user experience even when the user is connecting over a poor quality network.” Exinda’s solution brief entitled Meeting the Needs of a Mobile Workforce is available at exinda.com.

As banks search for their place in the fast evolving world of social media, they are increasingly looking to technology to help them cope with a tangle of potential regulatory and legal challenges.

Social media communication, by its nature, tends to occur in real-time, which affords financial institutions no time to vet their Tweets and Facebook posts via the usual retinue of lawyers and media handlers.

Sensing opportunity, several tech firms have jumped into the market with what they claim are solutions to handling the compliance and regulatory challenges of dabbling in social media.

“Because financial services are so relationship- and referral-driven, social media is perfect,” says Clara Shih, co-founder of Hearsay Social Inc., of San Francisco. “But the financial services industry is also one of the most highly regulated.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority regulate the electronic communications of banks and other financial institutions. In January, FINRA issued specific guidance to broker-dealers and securities firms about tracking and archiving social media correspondence, as well as many other issues pertaining to social media interactions.

That affects many of the largest banks, which have securities trading arms. But it leaves communications from other departments, such as for marketing, on uncharted ground.

“Social media is rewriting the rules and [increasing the] speed with which banks have to respond,” says Mark Schwanhausser, a senior analyst for Javelin Strategy and Research.

Citigroup Inc. has been working extensively with at least three companies to support its social media strategy. They include CoTweet Inc., Hearsay Social and Socialware Inc.

Those partners “are totally focused on the financial services category and helping companies work through … regulatory issues so you can be out there and engaging in the appropriate way,” Robert O’Leary, Citi’s managing director of global advertising, told the Advertising Club in New York earlier this month.

Citi declined to make an executive available for this story. Frank Eliason, Citi’s senior vice president of social media, told American Banker in January that the bank uses CoTweet to manage workflow over Twitter. At that time, Citi had trained about 100 customer service representatives to track and respond on Twitter to customer queries and complaints.

Citi partner Hearsay Social works with more than a dozen financial services companies. It received $3 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, Calif., in February. In addition to social media tracking and archiving, Hearsay Social helps banks manage workflow that might be initiated by customer service requests received through Facebook or Twitter. It also works on marketing campaigns.

Other banks have been less vocal about the technology they use. “We believe that we have a best-in-class solution for meeting our regulatory and compliance needs for social media communications,” a Bank of America Corp. spokesman said in an email.

The bank, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., declined to offer further details, though one prominent use of Twitter occurred in January when B of A used the microblogging service to respond to customers during a partial online banking outage.

Currently, banks devote less than 2% of their marketing budgets to social media, said Ron Shevlin, a senior analyst for Aite Group LLC of Boston, after reviewing a survey conducted in the fall of 2010.

“The real spending [by banks] on social media compliance is far from mature or widespread, but there is clearly a market for this,” Shevlin said.

Schwanhausser said that many banks would rather work with a vendor than develop technology in house because it is costly and time-consuming to do so. That is particularly the case given the undeveloped state of social media channels at most financial institutions and the uncertain payoff from making significant investments in developing their own technological solutions.

Smarsh Inc. went into business in 2001 archiving email and has since expanded its applications to include social media. The Portland, Ore. firm works with 13,000 mostly financial service companies archiving email. However, it enjoyed triple-digit growth in demand for its social media archiving and tracking product in the second quarter.

“We are seeing more interest in social media activity than we ever have before, and of all the products we have introduced since inception social media is growing at the fastest pace,” says Sam Kolbert-Hyle, Smarsh’s vice president of business development and strategy.

CoTweet, a division of ExactTarget Inc., an email and interactive marketing company in Indianapolis, said it is seeing more interest from the top banks, particularly around CoTag, a convention it developed for Twitter. CoTag enables bank representatives to personalize and authenticate their correspondence using an identifying tag at the end of their Tweets, while archiving and organizing them into a coherent workflow.

CoTweet works with two dozen financial institutions including Citi, Suntrust Banks Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co.

“[Banks] no longer have a choice [of whether] they will participate in social media,” said Jesse Engle, vice president of social media for ExactTarget. “The volume of people who want to engage with companies via social media is increasing, and their level of expectation is also increasing.”

A survey of over 1,600 IT administrators and professionals that includes managers and C-level executives found that 55 percent consider “traditional” threats of malware and spyware to be the main threats facing the enterprise today. Notably, 44 percent consider Stuxnet a “very small” threat, due to its benign nature on corporate systems. It’s widely believed that Stuxnet was designed to cripple centrifuges used by Iran for uranium enrichment.

The survey was conducted by eEye Digital Security, and saw respondents indicating concern over lack of staff and resources, improper configuration and inability to protect against zero-day flaws. As eEye CTO Marc Maiffret put it: “Although cutting-edge headlines and horror stories may rule the air, most security professionals remain focused on the basics.”

Nine Arab startups have just completed a three day program in New York City with top technology pioneers at the capacity exchange program entitled “Silicon Badia Meets Silicon Alley” hosted by Accelerator Technology Holdings (ATH), Chadbourne & Parke LLP, and the Middle East Technology Pioneers Exchange (METPE).

The week began with the news that online file storage provider Dropbox had accidentally disabled passwords on all its user accounts, potentially allowing anyone to wander in and access other people’s files.

While Dropbox fixed the issue, which was the result of a “code update,” the accounts were unprotected for four hours. The company claimed only a small fraction of accounts had been accessed during that time period and that it didn’t seem as if anyone had acted maliciously.

Many irate customers threatened to take their files to other competing services, reigniting the debate over the security benefits of server-side encryption, which Dropbox uses, and client-side encryption, favored by several other cloud-storage companies.

Speaking of the cloud, Jim Reavis, of the Cloud Security Alliance, pointed out that companies are taking the outsourcing mentality when it comes to moving applications to the cloud and not thinking about the underlying architecture. Organizations need to take a measured approach to make sure they are covering all the key points, such as security, business continuity and disaster recovery, Reavis said.

Law enforcement has been busy this week, as British police, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrested a 19-year old hacker and charged him with attacking the United Kingdom’s Serious Organized Crime Agency’s Website.

In a series of coordinated raids around the globe, the FBI broke up two cyber-crime gangs that had racked up nearly $74 million distributing scareware and fake antivirus software to more than a million users.

Two studies painted a bleak picture of enterprise security, with one finding that organizations are almost certainly to be attacked, and the other showing that security professionals consider regular malware a bigger threat to their organizations’ networks than advanced threats.

The Ponemon Institute reported 90 percent of surveyed businesses had at least one IT security breach over the past 12 months, and more than half expected to be hit in the next 12 months. Over half, or 55 percent, of IT security professionals surveyed by eEye Digital said mass malware was a “very large” or “large” threat to the enterprise.

It was the week to pick on end-users for poor security practices, as well. An analysis of user passwords from the Sony breach revealed that users are not picking strong passwords and two studies found that users were not being careful when surfing online. If that wasn’t enough, scammers are taking advantage of the intense interest around Apple’s forthcoming iCloud platform to hijack search-engine results to distribute fake antivirus software to end-users.

Apple rolled out what may be the last major security update before it releases Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” this summer, perhaps in July. Apple doesn’t schedule updates like Microsoft or other vendors do for their software.

So it’s not entirely out of the question for the company to squeeze in another update for “Snow Leopard” before the big launch. However, this update is “Lion-ready,” in that the Mac App Store was updated to make the upgrade process easier.

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions, today announced it will deliver a tutorial on “Managing Mobile Devices in the WAN” at the Mobile Computing Summit at the Hyatt Regency SF Airport in Burlingame, CA from June 28-30, 2011. Kevin Suitor, Exinda’s VP of Marketing will deliver the tutorial as part of the “Bringing Mobility to the Enterprise” session on Wednesday, June 29 from 2:40 to 5:30 pm.

“One of the top concerns of CIOs today is managing mobile workers on the enterprise network,” said Suitor. “Network managers must have the ability to visualize the mobile device traffic traversing the Wide Area Network, in order to apply policies to ensure that mobile workers have a high quality user experience. They must also be able to manage the millions of applications that mobile devices present to the WAN, ensuring they perform well without hindering the performance of other business-critical applications.”

Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions have enabled network operators to significantly reduce bandwidth consumption by mobile device applications. The solution has reduced bandwidth usage by applications incorporating FTP and CIFS protocols by more than 85%, and those incorporating HTTP by more than 95%.

“Exinda’s appliances enable IT managers to prepare their WANs to deliver a high quality end user experience for traditional hardwired or wireless mobile or tablet users. The solutions enable reduced packet loss, reduced latency, support of various usage models, and ensure a superior user experience even when the user is connecting over a poor quality network,” added Suitor.

Exinda Mobile Client (EMC)

The Exinda Mobile Client delivers application acceleration for sites and/ or individual devices, providing mobile workers with improved response times and download speeds over a wide range of applications – includ-ing email, CRM, ERP, eDRM, file-shares and collaboration applications such as SharePoint. The Exinda Mobile Client incorporates compression, caching, de-duplication and protocol optimization techniques to improve performance.

Exinda’s solution brief entitled “Meeting the Needs of a Mobile Workforce” is available at www.exinda.com.

About Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The Exinda Unified Performance Management (UPM) solution encompasses application visibility, control, optimization and intelligent acceleration – all within a single network appliance that is affordable and easy to manage. Founded in 2002, Exinda is headquartered in Andover, MA and has established regional offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to support the growing global demand for its products and services. Exinda is a 100% channel business with products being distributed by a worldwide network of solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.