It’s been a long time in coming but it looks like security has finally risen to the top of the business agenda.

This may strike some security professionals as improbable, but a new report from IBM suggests that overall IT security situation may actually be improving.

Identity management is one of the issues that almost every organization wants to address, only to discover how complicated it actually is to accomplish from both a technology and business perspective.

Nothing is ever quite as random as it seems. There are patterns to be discovered in almost everything we do and security is no exception. The challenge is deploying software that not only can identify those patterns, but also ultimately share that intelligence with other systems and applications in a way that is actionable.

With the rise of mobile computing just about every task associated with security management is getting more complicated. Where there was once a limited number of devices to worry about there are now an array of options that are all finding their way into the enterprise. The challenge facing IT organizations is finding better ways to manage new classes of devices that with each new addition can consume increasingly large amounts of sensitive corporate data.

There are not nearly as many IT organizations using encryption as there should be. But among the organizations that do, an interesting problem is emerging: Various database systems have different encryption schemas that all come with their own management framework.