Year in review: May 2011

Security and privacy dominated headlines this month, starting with Sony Corp.’s announcement that it had to cut its online entertainment service after a huge hack affecting over 24 million online gaming accounts.

Speaking later in the month at a Toronto conference, Trend Micro Inc. CTO Raimund Genes commented on the recent Amazon outage and hack of Sony’s Playstation Network, saying cloud applications have to have “a Rambo architecture … able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own.”

South Korean officials raided Google’s Seoul offices, suspecting the search giant of collecting illegal information, and the FTC ordered human resources and payroll firm Ceridian and immigration law firm Lookout Services to undergo a security audit every second year for the next 20 years after data breaches exposed the personal information of 65,000 employees of the companies’ business partners.

Facebook Inc. didn’t look good, either, after admitting to running anti-Google campaigns. For its part, Google’s Chromebook laptop computer was released and got mixed reviews.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin criticized a possible deal between Facebook and Chinese search engine Baidu as a threat to free speech, though neither company had hinted at such a partnership.

Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., began accepting applications for its $35,000 Executive Masters in Technology Management program to begin in September, with core curricula focused on strategic and technology roadmapping, building innovative organizational capacities and fostering organizational renewal.

Research firm Forrester Inc. fingered the economy as the No. 1 cause of slow enterprise resource planning upgrades, noting that three-quarters of IT decision-makers surveyed said investments in ERP weren’t in the cards.

Intel said a new interconnect technology, based on silicon photonics and five times as fast as its existing Thunderbolt technology, could be ready by 2015. And networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. restructured its operations, streamlining its sales and engineering operations to focus on five key areas: routing, switching and services; collaboration; data centre virtualization; video; and business process architecture.