Paul Murphy over at ZD Net has made a couple of "predictable predictions" about IT in 2007 and my favourite has got to be number 4:

4. By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.

Now I don't think this will come true (especially with the likes of Ubuntu around) but it would be awesome if Paul gets proven right. He then goes on to mention people's growing concern about identity theft. This made me think of my own prediction for 2007:

Corporations are NOT going to learn from all the stolen laptops in 2006, and will continue to allow their employees insecure access to vital customer data and will continue to allow them to download this to their laptops. More laptops WILL be stolen.

Some may take the steps of enforcing hard disk encryption and BIOS and OS passwords, but these aren't good enough as we all know people choose crap passwords or write them down somewhere for easy "remembering". They're also very easy to circumvent.

I've got a couple of questions banks and other companies that deal in private data can think about:

  • Why is my personal data leaving the bank's systems anyway? Provide me with at least 1 good reason.
  • Why are you not enforcing the use of secure remote access technology like VPN, Sun Secure Global Desktop or Sun Ray 2FS or, dare I say, other equivalent non-Sun products for remote access to the data?

There are plenty of ways to solve this problem and prevent your name from appearing in the "stolen laptop humiliation" list, so why aren't you employing them?

These are all technologies that already exist and are being used by many security aware companies, including Sun, so pull finger and get implementing. A fair number of these companies already use Sun technology, so give your local sale representative or account manager a call and find out more. There is no good reason for anyone's personal data to be on a laptop somewhere out in the wild.