Data center security market heats up: Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and McAfee lead the data center and virtual security market, Infonetics Research reports, with Cisco holding nearly one-third of the data center security appliance segment and McAfee leading data center security overall. A potential battle among equipment vendors (where Juniper (NYSE: JNPR), McAfee, HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Fortinet trail Cisco) is shaping up, said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics. "But there are a number of appliance vendors that don't yet crack the top 5 that we expect will have a strong position in data center security overall later this year, and others already in the top 5 that we expect will strengthen their positions, including McAfee, Trend Micro, Check Point, Arbor, Palo Alto, SonicWALL, and F5." News release
Disaster prep shortfall: Just 31 percent of small businesses surveyed in a recent AT&T (NYSE: T) poll send their company data to a remote location, the carrier reported in a recent press release. It's part of a larger issue in which two-thirds of all small businesses in the United States, according to the Ad Council, do not have an emergency or disaster preparedness plans at all. Businesses with 51 to 99 employees were more likely to have some kind of plans to secure their data, computers and wireless devices than smaller businesses, the AT&T survey found. Awareness of cloud services has grown rapidly in the past year, from 68 percent to 91 percent, among the small businesses surveyed, but only 37 percent use cloud services—a rise of just 4 percent from 2011. News release
Mobile broadband still the rule in Africa: GDP growth in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is expected to return to 6 percent annually from this year forward, following 2011's presidential election-spurred unrest. With just 1 percent fixed line and 71 percent mobile penetration, the African nation is poised for growth amid a highly competitive mobile market, says Research and Markets in a new report. Its chief operator, Libyan-backed LapGreen, is "in limbo," while on the mobile side, two more operators—Warid Telecom and Nigeria's Globalcom—are prepared to jump into the fray with five existing players. Four new international fiber optic submarine cables planned and 3G services are in the country's near future, the research firm says. News release