siliconindia|12|January 2013IT security threats have always been an issue of concernfor CIOs. The problem has amplified since the intro-duction of neoteric trends in the IT Sector such as mo-bility and cloud. Hackers are constantly on the prowl tograb enterprise data. So when it comes to incorporatingcloud in their daily work operations the CIOs find them-selves in a catch – 22 situations. The world has seen a significant increase in the num-ber of cloud users in 2012 amounting to approximately 61percent in 2012 as compared to 41 percent in 2011. Around10 – 12 percent were unperturbed towards cyber security.Nonetheless, CIOs are reluctant to shift to cloud despite theadvantages it offers in terms of cost reduction and flexibil-ity of service.But with the availability of security measures such asimproved physical security, business continuity processes,external audit provider as well as the means to identifymanagement systems it just might prompt the CIOs to thinkotherwise and move to cloud.The findings are based on the survey conducted byCloud Industry Forum (CIF) which concluded that around45 percent of the companies do not test the security sys-tems and procedures provided by the vendors despite thesurge in the security threats. These statistics indicate thateither there is an inherent trust in cloud service providers;that they have good security governance in place or there isa lack of visibility of potential risks associated with usingthem.Whatever may be the case, cloud service seems to bean intriguing topic that needs to be handled with care andanalyze the pros and cons before CIOs make the leap.CIOs uncertain to embrace cloudWorld to have more cell phone accounts thanpeople by 2014The pervasiveness of cell phones has become a real-ity for the whole world. By2014 the world will havemore cell phone accounts than peo-ple on Earth at the current growthrate for that service, concludes a re-cent study by International Telecom-munications Union. The ITUexpects the number of cell phone ac-counts to rise from 6 billion now to7.3 billion in 2014, compared with aglobal population of 7 billion.Over 100 countries have thenumber of cell phone accounts ex-ceeding their population. China was the first country in theworld to exceed one billion peopleand it will soon be followed byIndia. Russia, with almost 250 mil-lion cell phone accounts, has 1.8 times as many cellphones as people, and Brazil, with 240 million accountshas 1.2 times as many cell phones as people.Of the six billion cell phone accounts that currentlyexist, 1.1 billion are mobile-broad-band, almost twice the number offixed-broadband accounts. Thestudy points to China as the mainmarket for smart phones and ashome to a quarter of the world'sinternet users.However, it also reveals defi-ciencies in the new technologiessector by noting that two-thirds ofthe world population still has nointernet access. While 75 percentof households in developing coun-tries have television, only 20 per-cent are connected to the web.In terms of the impact of thesetechnologies on the economy,earnings from services related toinformation and communication technology totaled $1.5trillion in 2010, or 2.4 percent of global GDP.
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