That’s the way Symantec, a storage and backup company, sees it when they ponder that challenges brought about by virtualization and cloud computing. You can check out the Symantec story here. If your organization has tried to backup virtualized servers only to discover you can’t restore the data when you need it, you would probably agree. And so might your auditors.

Gartner, too, finds in its latest enterprise-class backup report that backup is changing although they might not state it so dramatically: While backup is among the most performed tasks in the data center, backup is undergoing significant change as organizations accelerate new technology adoption and show an interest in implementing new technologies, particularly virtualization and cloud computing.

In the report, Garter found that organizations have started complaining that backup needs to improve a lot, not just a little. This frustration with backup, the researchers suggest, implies that the data protection approaches of the past may no longer suffice in meeting current, much less future, recovery requirements. With backup being viewed as a key compliance component by auditors it pays to review the backup issue. more

As any treasurer knows, funding a business is challenging. That’s particularly true for start-ups. Crowdfunding, otherwise known as crowd financing or crowd sourced capital, is one way to navigate the hurdles. USLegal describes how crowdfunding might work: “An entrepreneur seeking to use crowd funding typically makes use of online communities to solicit pledges of small amounts of money from individuals who are typically not professional financiers.”

While firm statistics on the number of entrepreneurs that have turned to crowdfunding as a way to finance their ventures are hard to come by, several sites have sprung up to help them do just that. Among them: www.profounder.com, www.indiegogo.com, and www.33needs.com. more

The drumbeat of cloud computing has become so loud that no business manager can avoid it, a siren song of lower cost, greater business agility, and the perfect alignment of business and IT. If you somehow missed it you can catch the cloud wave at Cloud Computing Expos in June and November.

Cloud computing, however, has proven easier said than done. Even before the recent Amazon cloud disaster when hundreds of Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) customers lost access to their applications and data for most of a day or longer, technology vendors had been scrambling to make cloud computing easier to use and less risky.

Red Hat, the large open source Linux provider, is the latest to launch a series of cloud technologies that promise to mitigate the risk of deploying applications to the cloud. But IBM, HP, Microsoft, EMC, Dell and others have their own initiatives aimed at doing the same thing. more

However, Nothing Lasts Forever

When it comes to foreign exchange, “it’s a commodities story,” says Brendan McGrath, senior FX trader with Western Union Business Solutions.” Commodity prices are very high and that’s punishing the U.S. dollar.” For example, over the past six months, silver has skyrocketed by 50 percent, copper by 15 percent and crude oil has jumped by one-third, according to IndexMundi.com.

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This week, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (”FDIC”) released a special edition of its Supervisory Insights publication focusing on the recent foreclosure crisis in mortgage banking. In the report, the FDIC provides additional perspective on the deficiencies in internal processes, staffing and control that resulted in a foreclosure moratorium by several of the largest mortgage servicing institutions in late 2010. The FDIC worked with the lead regulatory agencies of the fourteen largest mortgage servicers in the United States to conduct extensive reviews of current foreclosure practices. more