Some of the highlights from the report were:

• Public cloud services spending will jump to $109 billion this year, compared to $91 billion last year.
• Global IT services spending is set to grow 2.3 percent to $864 billion in 2012.
• Spending on hardware will account for $420 billion this year, a rise of 3.4 percent.
• Enterprise software spending will be $281 billion in 2012, a 4.3 percent jump.

Click here to read more about the results of this report.

PC World — Early Thursday morning, Kaspersky posted a blog entry that details a new malicious app that has made it’s way to both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The app’s name is Find and Call, and it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a malicious app make it into Apple’s App Store.

Once installed, the app asks you to register your phone number and email address. Find and Call will also ask if you want to “find friends in a phone book” before discretely uploading your entire contact list to a remote server. The app will continue to upload your contacts, and will SMS messages to those people that contain a link to download the app themselves. These SMS messages show up as if they were sent from your number, so the recipients are much more likely to click on the link.

Find and Call appears to have been pulled from the Google Play Store, though it’s still live on the App Store as of this writing. Kaspersky was tipped off to the existence of the app by Russian mobile carrier MegaFon via Twitter, and the app appears to be getting blasted in its reviews as being a virus, according to Google Translate.

While malware in the Play Store isn’t anything new, it’s concerning to see such an app make it into Apple’s walled-garden. This raises questions as to how an app like Find and Call made it into the App Store in the first place, and what other dangerous apps have managed to slip past Apple’s screeners. Hopefully this was just a fluke, but in the mean time remember that if an app looks suspicious–even if it’s in the App Store–it’s best to play it safe and not download it.

Twitter gave its famous blue bird a facelift earlier this month. The new bird is crafted from overlapping circles to reflect how social networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect, says Doug Bowman, creative director at Twitter.

While some may find Twitter’s bird re-design to be too subtle or uninspired, California local Josh Helfferich felt it had superhero potential.  Upon turning Twitter’s logo upside down and altering the coloring, Jeff created Twitter’s alter-ego logo:

This fun fact was originally published at CIO.com.

The 15 worst breaches recorded so far this year are highlighted in Network World’s slideshow here.

Kirkland, WA – Agiliant, Inc., has made tremendous progress since its official launch last fall and its success has not gone unnoticed.  Seattle Business Magazine just named Agiliant one of the “Top 100 Companies to Work For” in Washington, ranking it 10^th best in the “Small Business” category.

This award recognizes businesses in Washington that have set the standard for leadership, benefits, work environment, innovative training programs and employee satisfaction, and are positively impacting the state of Washington through their employees. Once nominated for this award, employees were surveyed by Gilmore Research Group to determine initial rankings, and then a panel of judges reviewed the results to select and place the winners in each category.

“This award validates our efforts to build a company with a compelling value proposition for both our customers and employees alike,” explained Gary Stevens, CEO of Agiliant. “The passion, dedication and innovation consistently on display by the Agiliant team, enabling us to deliver world-class managed IT solutions to our customers, are the very same attributes that make it an exceptional place to come to work every day.”

Winning companies were recognized at an award banquet on June 14 at the Westin Seattle. On the awards list, Seattle Business Magazine highlighted one employee’s comment about Agiliant’s executive team: “Leadership gives us the tools, the opportunities and the confidence to be creative.”

The full list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2012 is posted here.  Interested in joining the highly acclaimed Agiliant team? Check out Agiliant’s current employment opportunities.  

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Check out these and the other innovative inventions that made Computer World’s list of hot new gadgets for summer 2012.

What constitutes an effective security strategy when a company builds a private cloud to augment existing compute resources, embraces public shared cloud services for other needs, and signs up for software as a service (SaaS) and still other cloud offerings? Oh, and now fold in the idea that virtual machines, with all their attendant security, network and storage settings, might be migrating among some of these environments.

The complexities are significant, affecting everything from performance to compliance and even job roles. Chances are security in this mixed environment will look little or nothing like it did in more traditional IT environments.

Is your business mixing and matching cloud services in order to satisfy various business needs? If so, you could greatly benefit from reading this article. Securing the Mixed Cloud Environment by Bob Violino for NetworkWorld.com.

Take these two statistics:

51% of businesses do not allow credit card data in cloud computing environments because of security concerns.

53% of companies do not allow confidential financial data in a cloud computing environment due to security concerns.

What do you think? Are these survey results aligned with your company’s policies or do you put more faith in your cloud?

More IT hiring managers and recruiters are optimistic about hiring than six months ago, when 65% said they planned to increase hiring.

Respondents are divided on the issue of finding technical talent, however. Roughly one-quarter (24%) said the time it takes to fill positions has shortened compared to last year, while 45% reported extended hiring times, due in part to an inability to find qualified professionals. The remainder — 31% — said the time to fill open positions is unchanged relative to 2011.

On the salary front, 58% of corporate hiring managers said salaries for existing IT staff are higher than they were last year. Dice.com also asked corporate hiring managers about attrition rates. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said voluntary departures have not increased, while 37% said they have.

Continue reading the article here.

The Top Ten Trends, as reported by CIO.com on behalf of Gartner are:

1. Consumerization and the tablet: Widespread use of tablets, such as the iPad, and other mobile devices in business isn’t seen as replacing the traditional computer desktop entirely, but the tablets trend will bring about “more specific applications to do specific things,” Cappuccio noted, and “the days of monolithic suites” of applications seems to be going away because of it. Companies using them, including for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) use, should recognize there’s a lot of unmanaged storage in tablets and smartphones they should be managing.

2. Infinite data center: The movement toward smaller size but greater density in data centers, combined with a trend to analyze performance per kilowatt, is leading to energy management as a newer type of discipline, even for “moderately energy-intensive organizations,” by 2017, said Cappuccio, where a focus on energy-management information systems is apparent.

3. Resource management: Virtualization of servers is well along but businesses still haven’t gotten the maximum performance benefits they can get in workload management. And water use as a coolant in data centers is another trend to know about. He said data center information management (DCIM) vendors should be evaluated to see if they can bring anything to data center resource management.

4. Mobility and the personal cloud: “The whole concept of PCs is going away,” said Cappuccio, noting that employees, who today often carry multiple mobile devices, may want to use some of them under BYOD conditions in the enterprise. Not only should enterprises immediately evaluate BYOD for their own situations, and consider a “self-service culture for users,” but acknowledge that mobility is going to have a cascading effect on how internal physical infrastructure is built — or not built at all — in the future.

5. Hybrid clouds: Through next year, more than 60% of enterprises will have some form of cloud adoption, and the majority will be exploring private and public cloud techniques, in what’s called a hybrid cloud. Into the next three years, private cloud focused on service-centric delivery of IT services to the organization will emerge. Companies should be evaluating what are commodity services and move them to the public cloud, recognizing the decision to virtualize is impacting rack-based bandwidth I/O profoundly, increasing it 25 times over.

6. Fabric data centers: Evolving from “server centrism to fabric infrastructure” for servers, networks and storage will mean more flexibility in workload mobility and placement based on continuously changing factors, such as number of users and time of day, said Cappuccio. Building these kinds of resource pools that can be managed and configured is worthwhile, he added.

7. IT complexity: The complexity of technical changes, combined with trend such as virtualization, mobility and cloud computing, are only increasing the complexity of IT management, he said. In this situation, what’s needed is a “generalist at a high level who can figure out what the cascade effects are,” and that kind of person in the center of things will play an increasingly important role is helping IT matters run well.

8. Storage and big data: When data storage hits a petabyte and more, suddenly there’s a lot of big data and companies would like to be able to analyze it to spot trends that could be useful to their businesses. But most of this data will be unstructured data which hasn’t been correlated in novel ways before, and there’s the challenge, said Cappuccio. But clearly companies are going to find ways based on “pattern-based strategies” to apply “intelligent analytics to this stuff.”

9. End of your service help desk: Mobility, consumerization of IT, the cloud — all of these trends are leading to another trend, the possible end to the traditional helpdesk. “It may be ending, or morphing,” said Cappuccio. The emerging trend is more reliance on crowdsourcing, such as the friend who knows the answer, the Web resources of vendors or blogs, and it all may mean a “transition strategy” related to how IT troubles are handled.

10. Software-defined networks virtualizing the data center: Over the next few years, there will be software-defined networks designed that have basically separated hardware from software in a way that will slowly do away with the “box-by-box” approach and “handcrafted configurations” of today, where tomorrow there will be an “automated workflow” for the next-generation data center. “These fabric-based systems are evolving that — be prepared,” said Cappuccio.