An IDC study commissioned by Microsoft claims that SMBs could recover their investment on deploying Windows 7 across their business in as little as seven to eight months.

IDC surveyed SMBs in both the US and the Netherlands, ranging from firms employing just eight employees to larger enterprises with as many as 300. The disparity in size and employee numbers led to a varying bottom line result. Yet Randy Perry, IDC’s vice president of Business Value Consulting, said that all of the firms surveyed by IDC displayed a positive ROI based on their deployment of Windows 7.

“The cost savings per PC results in an overall reduction of 51%,” says Perry, “Windows 7 pays for itself in reduced IT labour costs, depending on the PC.

Given that the study looked at direct implementation of the new operating system, the savings could be even greater for a company who sourced their IT solution from via a hosted service from a Microsoft small business specialist, particularly if it was integrated into an existing Microsoft small business server arrangement.

The key improvements for SMB ROI were identified by IDC as user productivity across a variety of areas both large and small. For example IDC saw that there was a “dramatic” drop in the need for remote IT support, as well as a decrease in the number of reboots per workstation.

According to Small Business Computing, Microsoft has now sold 150 million licenses for Windows 7 in just eight months.

As reported by PC World, professor Mike Nelson claimed that, as the web continues to develop, cloud computing will overtake the internet with regards to importance. That’s because he isn’t sure that developers posses the foresight to continue develop and grow the internet, he told the conference.

According to Yahoo News, the Georgetown University professor said that cloud computing will allow developing nations to access software that was once reserved for affluent contries. It would allow small businesses to reduce their capital expenditure by using cloud services to store and compute data and could change how enterprise functions currently provided by a small business server are accessed by businesses.

The cloud is more exciting than the internet, claims Read Write Web. The evolution of the cloud is shaping up to become a central nervous system for “a new universal communications instrastructure” they claim.

However, there are challenges facing the development of the cloud, reports Yahoo News.  

“There are a lot of forces that could push us away from the cloud of clouds,” said Nelson. He said he believes that cloud providers will develop technology that locks users into one service provider, rather than opening it up to allow users to swap between providers.

He also said that privacy regulations that clamp down on piracy pose a significant challenge.

This prediction is supported by a poll conducted by Information Week, which found that 60% of IT managers already use cloud computing, or plan to in the next two years.

As reported by Cnet News, 35% of people admitted snooping last year, but the figure has since almost doubled. Now 67% of IT professionals admit accessing confidential information that isn’t relevant to their jobs.

The research, conducted by a security company, questioned IT staff in the US and UK. It found that, when asked which department was most likely to do the snooping, over half of people said IT because of the department’s power and responsibility in maintaining computer systems. 11% of people pointed the finger at the HR department as the second most likely, followed by administrative assistants.

According to the researchers, it’s data which is also at risk due to the worrying levels of snooping. Ex-employees were blamed by 37% of people, followed by human error as the second most likely cause of security breaches, reports PC World.

Customer databases were the data type most commonly grabbed by competitors, followed by R&D plans, according to Cnet.

The research found that businesses are increasingly stepping up their controls, such as computer network support, in a bid to prevent snooping.

This could be working, as on 61% of people said they could sneak past the controls. Whilst this is an alarmingly high number, which illustrates more still needs to be done, it’s an improvement on last years figure which stood at 77%. 

One company which provides cloud computing saw this as an opportunity to reinforce the message that it is employees, rather than technology, which pose the biggest threats to security. ”Companies that continue to use in-house servers instead of outsourcing their applications to a vendor may be equally as likely, or more likely, to face security threats,” claims the company.

According to The Register, the Information Commissioner’s Office found the councils guilty of breaching the Data Protection Act.

A statement released by the ICO, said that LB Barnet council lost an unencrypted, non-password protected USB stick and CDs which contained personal information about over 9,000 children and their families, when they were stolen from the home of an employee. The employee downloaded the data without authorisation, however the council hadn’t provided training and didn’t have relevant security processes in place to prevent such downloads.

The statement also states that in the case of West Sussex council, a laptop with personal information of children involved in childcare proceedings was stolen from an employee’s home. Just like the USB stick, this wasn’t encrypted and the employee wasn’t given any training on data protection or IT security. The ICO found that more than 2,300 unencrypted laptops were likely to be in use across West Sussex, although steps are being taken to do so.

Furthermore, Buckinghamshire County Council lost documents containing sensitive information relating to two children at Heathrow Airport. “After further analysis by the ICO, it was apparent that no real thought had been given to the security of this personal data during travel,” said the ICO statement.

“These three councils have shown a poor regard for the importance of protecting children’s personal information,” said Ally-Anne Poole, enforcement group manager at the ICO. “A lack of awareness and training in data protection requirements can lead to personal information falling into the wrong hands.”

The implications of the news extends beyond the public sector and can easily be applied to the private. Businesses who don’t have some type of remote back up face the risk of losing data should any data get lost. However, prevention is better than the cure. Businesses must consider their IT policies and how easy it is for employees to make copies of data. Improved security measures would mean that employees can’t copy, distribute or remove data without authorisation which would not only prevent the loss of data, but also one of your greatest business assets from falling into the hands of competitors.

According to Computer Weekly, a survey found that former employees were the most likely way that information was leaked. Customer databases, research and development plans are the most sought after types of information, according to the study.

Perhaps most worryingly, the survey uncovered that one third of IT administrators are turning a blind eye to what is happening in their networks.

Adam Bosnian, executive vice president at the company behind the research, said it was a business’ responsibility to protect information. “Failing to do so makes the company as bad as those who are abusing their privileged positions,” he said.

One way businesses can help safeguard themselves from data theft is through computer network support. By making the network more secure, it will be more difficult for any unauthorised persons to access the data.

The survey found that insider sabotage has increased by 7% compared to last year. Now, 27% of respondents think insider sabotage is responsible for loss of sensitive data. In fact, 41% of people admitted using administrative passwords to snoop on sensitive and confidential information. That’s an 8% increase compared to last year.

The next most likely cause of data loss was human error, followed by external cyber attacks and the loss of mobile storage devices.

The company behind the research said the results are little different to last year’s, recommending that more should be done to safeguard the data.

The report, from Home 3’s Business Emergency Assistance division, shows that power failures top the list of on-site problems which have affected SME owners over the year ending April 2010. Power failures can be particularly damaging to SMEs which provide or rely upon IT services and infrastructure, as they can result in the loss of vital data through corruption or the failure of storage hardware.

Without a disaster recovery system such as a remote back up strategy, this data can be lost forever.

According to the survey nearly a quarter of businesses affected by on-site disruptions have suffered a loss of earnings as a result. Almost one in ten has lost valuable customers as a result of the breakdown of vital services, and nearly a fifth of SME’s had been forced to close their premises as they could not conduct business until the problems were resolved.

“In the current economic climate, small businesses are seeing their profit margins squeezed from every angle,” said Steve Narey, product and marketing director for Home 3. “Any interruption to business continuity costs a company dear but unexpected emergencies are a particular problem for SME owners. It’s imperative that SMEs put procedures in place to plan for business disruptions.”

According to Computer World the security researcher who first uncovered the flaw said Adobe hasn’t managed fixed the vulnerability sufficiently.

Belgian researcher Didier Stevens discovered the bug back in March, which allows hackers to exploit the “/Launch” function which executes other software from within a PDF document. He discovered that, combined with another trick, the flaws could be used to trick people into launching malware which poses as legitimate software.

This technique has been consistently used to infect Windows PCs since April.

According to Independently Posted, Stevens confirmed on his blog that the patch didn’t affect his flaw a few days ago.

As published on his blog Didier Stevens, the researcher wrote: “I did some research and discovered that Adobe implemented a blacklist of extensions for the launch action,” but goes on to explain they don’t work properly. Instead he offers his own fix, with step-by-step instructions.

As reported by FierceCIO, Adobe said the vulnerabilities had been corrected by the patch. However, Stevens’ own method of fixing the problem shows that “nothing more than the inclusion of a quotation around the launch command is required”.

FierceCIO claims that people have questioned how seriously Adobe is taking this security issues, especially considering the damage malware could do to everything ranging from an isolated computer to a small business server or a network of machines.

However, a vulnerability which allowed an attacker to modify the warning message has been fixed, which makes it harder for the bug to succeed.

The CWU sent out ballot papers last month after an ongoing pay dispute with the British communications giant failed to be resolved. They say that its members deserve more than the 2% wage increase offered by BT, as this increase would be below the rate of inflation and the union already accepted a period wage freezes and redundancies. The company has seen rising profits go to shareholders over the past year whilst the company’s chief executive was awarded a £1.2m bonus for his work last year.

If the union’s members had approved taking industrial action, then thousands of communications engineers would have gone on strike across the country.

This would have been the first such strike of its kind since 1987 and could have left broadband and phone access across the country crippled. Problems that arose in the network exchanges would have been unfixable without the support normally offered by these communications workers, leaving businesses and users unable to access anything from email to services like remote IT support.

However the strike will be postponed indefinitely now, as the union has called off its ballot following legal advice that technical breaches in the process would have invalidated the result. The CWU says that is has received an offer from BT to meet for further negotations and will be taking the offer up.

One in ten PC’s is capable of being breached and controlled by hackers according to the firms wordwide study. This could see a PC without disaster recovery protection wiped of valuable data as the outside party turns the PC into part of a botnet – a computer used to run security attacks on other systems by remote hackers.

“The statistics show that a substantial number of vulnerable computers in countries worldwide have been compromised and are being used as bots to launch cyber attacks,” said Jon Ramsey of SecureWorks. “The study shows that organistions are not only putting themselves at risk by not securing their PCs but are actually providing cyber criminals with a platform to compromise other computers.”

In the worldwide study, the UK has been placed fifth in the overall rankings for favoured targets by cybercriminals. The firm found that an average of 107 attacks had been launched per 1,000 computers over a six-month period.

The US was the worst however, with a staggering 1,600 attacks per 1,000 PCs. India as the lowest with only 52 attacks per 1,000 computers, perhaps representing the relatively low use of IT infrastructure in the country.

In the onepoll.com survey of 3,000 users around a third (31%) of respondents said they had lost important or irreplaceable information from their PC.

The Register reports that AVG is highlighting how many users are complacent about adopting strategies such as remote back up despite the growing dependence on digital formats for personal information and documents.

The survey also identifed that the top reason that people lose information is hardware malfunction, accounting for 45% of all data loss. Viral corruption was the next most cited reason (26%), followed by simple human error (11%), damage to the computer (8%) and finally, the ever present threat of data loss due to power cuts (5%).

The poll revealed that for many users, online back up would be well worth the cost. Nearly half (47%) of respondents said that they would have paid at least £250 to retrieve the data they have lost.

Simon Steggles, a director at Disklabs – a consumer disaster recovery firm specialising in data forensics – told The Register that many of the data recovery jobs are the result of malware rather than damaged hardware. He said that the number of data recovery jobs that it handles are split equally between hardware and software problems, though many software problems are due to other problems than malware infections.