10 of the Top Data Breaches of the Decade

ABC News (from June 14th) -- The Internet cried foul last week when news broke that an AT&T security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of at least 100,000 owners of Apple's iPad 3G.

But industry observers are quick to point out that this is hardly the first -- and hardly the worst -- data breach that the tech world has ever seen.

"The fact is 114,000 is an impressive number and they're e-mail addresses. ... [But] that's almost public information," said Dan Tynan, a technology reporter and co-author of the technology humor site eSarcasm.

Some companies publish relevant e-mail addresses on their sites, and even when companies don't outright reveal addresses, it's often easy to guess them, he said.

"What these guys did was something that spammers do every single day," he said.

While it's discomforting when any personal information is compromised, Tynan said that this breach didn't expose seriously valuable information, such as social security numbers, bank account numbers or medical records.

But other security breaches over the past decade have disclosed the kind of information that could potentially threaten the people behind the data. Read more >>

Global CIO: Oracle Reveals Strategy And Customers For White-Hot Exadata

InformationWeek -- Oracle's 22-month-old Exadata Database Machine has leapfrogged the data-warehousing market and become a major player in high-end OLTP environments, and is now being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform due to its unprecedented capacity and throughput.

After rejuvenating its data-warehousing business and giving the company a foothold in the high-end OLTP systems market, Oracle's white-hot Exadata Database Machine is now also being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform that can handle all of the above for CIOs while delivering faster, cheaper, and better results.

In Oracle's first detailed public discussion of its Exadata strategy and market dynamics, senior vice president of database and server technologies Andrew Mendelsohn identified 15 global customers using the product and said Exadata Version 2 is rapidly becoming the foundation technology for banks and other large enterprises looking to build what he called "virtual private clouds."

Mendelsohn said that Exadata's unique combinations of optimized software and networking along with mostly commodity hardware allow it to handle a range of high-end tasks that competitors' systems can't match, making Exadata a more-attractive alternative for CIOs looking to harness greater performance at lower cost while also simplifying their maddeningly complex environments.

The system's blend of flash memory chips with hard-drive memory, he said, allows it to address not only the sequential I/O scanning requirements for data warehousing but also the random I/O needs for OLTP, which creates a vast difference between the value offered by Exadata V2 and that offered by single-function data-warehousing appliances from Teradata, Netezza, and more recently the EMC-Greenplum pairing. Read more >>

Real Application Testing: A Business Case

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