At the recent RSA Conference 2009 in San Francisco, United States, McAfee CEO DeWalt called for a global security architecture.

"Security threats are on the rise as the economy declines, and the solution will likely come from collaborative partnerships that span all IT platforms and international boundaries." "DeWalt painted a grim picture of the security landscape. Consumer confidence has gone down while unemployment and has risen, he said. And as the economy has gone into a tailspin, cybercrime has seen a sharp upward spike, with more malware detected in 2008 than in the previous five years combined. Last year, 80 percent of cybercrimes were financially motivated, he added."

"Many organizations are vastly underprotected or fail to regularly update patches and security software, which have opened up copious threat vectors for attackers, DeWalt said. In addition, the explosion of malicious threats in the last year can also be attributed to lack of user education and best security practices, as well as lack of comprehensive security." "One of the solutions, DeWalt proposed, would be to build comprehensive security architecture across numerous IT platforms that would be able to interoperate with companies' existing network infrastructure. That architecture would ultimately allow organizations to create correlating reports for every department and system, while allowing greater overall visibility into their organization's network, DeWalt said." "Cross-platform collaboration provides IT administrators a panoramic view into their network and allows communication across the threat vectors to shore up otherwise unseen security holes." "That same type of collaborative architecture will ultimately be required to extend across international borders and throughout global networks as the threats continue to become more sophisticated and the attacks more prevalent, DeWalt said. "The most depressing part of this is that we do not have a global architecture in place," he said. "We need to work together. Undoubtedly, (attacks) will continue to increase."

Read the full story on ChannelWeb.

The European Journal of ePractice yesterday published its second issue on "New e-ways of doing the Government's job" with some case studies that show Administrations are willing to experiment. From interoperability, to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) via online portals to bridging the digital gap, public actors take home important insights every day thanks to e-Government applications and services. The second issue of this journal includes topics of interest in e-Government such as:

• Interoperability and the exchange of good practice cases
• Using online auctions to sell surplus property
• Some best practices in e-Government
• Using RFID in healthcare organizations
• Example of a city library trying to bridge the digital divide

For more information on the European Journal of ePractice as part of ePractice.eu, an interactive initiative created by the European Commission, click here.

The U.S. Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL) conducted a study on The Value of Provider-to-Provider Telehealth Technologies. Assuming some specific healthcare settings such as emergency departments, correctional institutions, nursing homes and physician offices the cost-benefit analysis focused on three technology systems, i.e. store-and-forward, real-time video, and a hybrid model combining the first two.

The CITL study found that benefits outweighed costs for all three systems, but the research organization recommends the hybrid model as the most cost-effective one for the U.S. The report is available at citl.org.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced to launch HealthVault, an online platform to securely store personal health-related information online. The business model relies on performing vertical internet search tailored for health queries. Several organizations signed up to participate in the project including hospitals, disease prevention organizations, and health care companies.

For more information, see articles online of the New York Times, the Economist, discussions in several blogs and the company's press information.

On 16 July 2007, the European Commission issued a set of draft recommendations on eHealth interoperability. This supports the idea that connecting people, systems, and services would be vital for the provision of good healthcare in Europe.

The lack of interoperability in systems and services has long been identified as one of the major challenges to the wider implementation of the Union's e-Health applications.

The goal of this Recommendation is to contribute to enabling the provision of a means of authorised healthcare professionals to gain managed access to essential health information about patients, subject to the patients' consent, and with full regard for data privacy and security requirements. Such information could include the appropriate parts of a patient's electronic health record, patient summary and emergency data from any place in Europe: within countries, in cross-border regions, and between countries.

The proposed actions cover the following areas:

• The overall (political/legal) level of eHealth interoperability inclusing privacy and confidentiality
• Creating the organisational framework (or process) for e-Health interoperability
• Applications (including semantic) interoperability
• Architectural and technical interoperability including security, certification and accreditation
• Monitoring and evaluation

For full information, click here.