Stories by: Kevin Fogarty

Only about 20 percent of Americans think Macs are vulnerable to viruses, compared to more than half who describe PCs as "vulnerable" or "very vulnerable" to attack by viruses, according to Alex Stamos, a security analyst at iSec Partners.

IT people who try to secure mobile devices in a big company face three big conceptual problems.

There's a simple reason so many people say cloud computing will change everything about the IT universe: The cloud democratizes technology to a degree even more profound than when the PC first gave nontechnical people the ability to create unmanageably large spreadsheets they could play with instead of work.

Until recently, almost no IT industry vendor or analyst questioned the assumption that nearly all kinds of virtualization deliver quick, significant cost savings compared to computing only in the physical world.

Virtualizing and consolidating data-center servers provides such clear a financial benefit that there are few companies of any size, in any industry that shouldn't virtualize at least some of their servers and applications, industry analysts say. But companies that start virtualization projects looking for cost savings, without planning for a second phase of migration that requires spending more on new tools than the project might save in short-term costs, will get stuck in phase one -- saving money on hardware, but getting only a fraction of the benefit of the virtualization products they've bought, analysts add.

Neither Cloud computing nor virtual servers were intended as agents that would change traditional IT organisations, says Rachel Dines, a researcher at Forrester Research who specialises in IT infrastructure and management. But IT organisation and management issues are turning out to be nearly as important as the technology itself to making large-scale virtual-server migrations effective.

It's unlikely that hordes of VMware, Citrix or Microsoft Hyper-V users will flock to open-source virtualization or cloud-computing platform as an alternative to the hypervisors and virtualized infrastructure-management software they've already chosen, analysts say. So where does open source fit in the cloud world? Think lock-in and migration flexibility.

More than three quarters of U.S. companies virtualize at least some of their x86-based servers, but few get their full money's worth out of virtualization efforts -- due to management blunders, analysts say.

During the past three to five years, when most companies began rolling out virtual servers in earnest as replacements for physical servers, acceptance has grown so quickly among both end users and IT staffs that more than half of all companies now deploy new applications on virtual servers by preference, rather than physical ones, according to a December study from IDC.

Cloud computing platforms aim to improve IT's ability to be agile. For instance, cloud platforms let you quickly build and install applications, and change the resources underneath later to make them run better.