Data security - with a focus on virtualization and cloud computing - was the topic of a CIO Roundtable held in Makati City, Philippines this week, produced by Computerworld Philippines. The conference was staged at the Asian Institute of Management.

The "consumerization" of IT was a prominent topic, in a discussion led by Emiliano "Third" S. Librea (pictured), partner and CIO at llocal consultancy Punongbayan & Araullo.

Librea noted how the new generations of smartphones and tablets are being purchased by consumers but making their way into corporate offices, where their owners expect them to be integrated into enterprise IT. (This book-ends the trend in the 80s when PCs first found their way into corporate culture in the same manner.)

Not only that, but large numbers of people use cloud-based Google gmail and similar services, providing an unyielding challenge to enterprise IT management to control where potentially proprietary information is flowing, who is seeing it, and to what degree it can be misplaced, lost, or hacked. Librea noted that any form of control will impede productivity to some degree, so the challenge is how to balance what a company's employees are doing with the need to control and protect data.

Ogie Tabor, a sales engineer with security software company Sophos, pointed out the costs of data breaches, saying the loss or theft of a single record costs in excess of $200US, with the average breach costing companies more than $7 million. He also noted that only 10% of data breaches were criminal hacks; the vast majority are due to employee carelessness or ill will.

The conference featured presentations and exhibits from security vendors Symantec, Sophos, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky Labs, as well as a review by Brother of the weak link encompassed by corporate printing infrastructures.

There was also a presentationb by Arnold C. Carlos from local datacenter company ePLDT, in which he laid out the CAPEX-to-OPEX argument for third-party (public) cloud computing, and went through his company's security regimen. I'll be following up with an interview about this datacenter in a few days.

Note: Computerworld Philippines has published some of my initial Tau Index findings, and has invited me to speak on the topic at an upcoming Web 2.0 roundtable in November. The magazine has been published in the Philippines for more than 20 years, and has taken an aggressive editorial stance in covering cloud computing and the enterprise.