Joanne Cummings

A demo by a U.S. Energy Department lab shows how an event-driven service-oriented architecture can support a power marketplace that lets residential and commercial customers change their power consumption nearly in real time

Lawsuits are a fact of life for organizations today. Recent surveys show that the average U.S. company faces 305 suits at any one time; that number jumps to 556 for companies with US$1 billion or more in revenue

The virtualization concept has taken on a life of its own. Beyond the server, vendors are now touting products for virtualizing any and every layer of the infrastructure: Network, storage, desktop, application, database, user interface

With more organizations facing a barrage of security threats -- worms, viruses , zero-day attacks and even insider abuse -- a new category of security tool is expected to gain traction in the enterprise in 2007: network behavior analysis. NBA tools use traffic-monitoring techniques coupled with security intelligence to spot anomalous actions within the corporate network and mitigate threats quickly

This sidebar to our "Winning with enterprise-wide virtualization" article gives you some tips on how to recognize virtualization when you see it.

Beyond such complexity, there also are problems implementing virtualization in an environment in which not all layers are virtualization ready. This is especially true for security, which Antonopolous calls a virtualization laggard.

Today, companies can implement virtualization across the IT infrastructure without management and security headaches by sticking to standards and designing with regard to overall business objectives. Wachovia Bank in Charlotte, N.C., is one such user.

With VMware's success, virtualization has taken on a life of its own. Beyond the server, vendors are now touting products for virtualizing any and every layer of the infrastructure: network, storage, desktop, application, database, user interface - even security and mobility.