Neil Pound Pound argues that innovation is as much the province of users as it is of engineers and technologists. He then wonders why the UK public sector is not more adventurous in setting visionary goals to force the pace of innovation in the IT industry enabling more creative delivery of some public services. 

Something stuck with me in a recent discussion with a customer about our data center and cloud solutions. Whilst focusing on future expectations, someone jokingly said that he could see the occasional cloud on the horizon but it didn't seem as completely overcast as everyone was forecasting. This got a laugh but also caught my attention because this was not the first time I had heard uncertainty about what the cloud will eventually become and on what timetable. I don't have a crystal ball, but there are some challenges that we can identify now. The trick, however, is to make sure our solutions to these challenges are flexible enough to help organizations prepare for and/or migrate to the cloud. One of the areas that I’d like to focus on is the problem of securing the cloud. How do we secure an elastic, shared resource where all interaction modes are allowed: client device to client device, client device to computing utility, computing utility to computing utility? Read more...

Imagine walking into someone’s office and seeing desks full of computers, each one powered on and running. When you ask why he has so many PCs, the office’s occupant says, “Oh, that one is for email, that one is for CRM, that one is for my project management software…” and so on. When you walk into the next office you see the same thing, and the next, and the next: dozens of machines, each serving a single function for a user in close physical proximity. Read more...