Oracle's virtual desktop infrastructure is no longer reliant solely on the company's own storage infrastructure, giving customers a range of new options that won't tie customers into one vendor.

VMware is offering a private-cloud based platform for document sharing and device syncing that could rival  Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive by giving companies more control over their data.

In summing up the experts' thoughts, Network World's Brad Reed put it rather succinctly about the emergence of Google Drive: “We like it, but couldn’t it have been released two years ago?”

Privacy advocates voiced strong concerns today over how data stored on Google Drive may be used during and after customers are actively engaged in using the cloud service.

Your PC's hard drive is packed with your personal data. So when you want to get rid of your system or drive, you should permanently erase your storage device drives before you get rid of them. If your drives are encrypted and you trust the encryption protocol (full disk encryption is pretty safe), all you have to do is delete your encryption keys. If you want to safeguard your privacy further--and prevent data theft down the road--here are a few cheap and simple tools designed to wipe your hard drive, solid-state drive, or USB flash drive thoroughly before you dispose of it.

Ah, what a week it's been. Ravelling the unravelled and fixing stuff I thought was fixed.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

Cisco today announced a virtualized version of its Video Surveillance software for use on its Unified Computing System platform for enterprise- or government-operated video-camera deployments.

Either because server disks are full or because virtualization is a natural growth path, organizations large and small are moving toward shared storage. For large enterprises, high-capacity storage-area networks make sense, but what about small or mid-sized enterprises new to shared storage?