That old saw about every cloud having a silver lining is true -- at least when it comes to data breaches and ID theft.

Bad as these may be for the average consumer, they open up a great opportunity for vendors.

That burgeoning opportunity now sees CA strengthening its SiteMinder Web Access Manager by teaming up with Arcot, which offers risk-based authentication in its RiskFort product.

The combination of the two will help detect, assess and block fraud attempts in real time for ay consumer- or enterprise-facing portal.

Here's how it works: RiskFort keeps logs of where consumers or enterprise staff normally log in from. If they log in from somewhere else, it uses statistics and analysis to calculate a risk score.

Based on that risk score and policies put in place by companies using the two, CA SiteMinder will then grant or deny access or initiate some other action.

"SiteMinder tells you who can do what within an enterprise; we're adding higher assurance that the who is the right user," said Ram Varadarajan, president and CEO of Arcot.

The deal will help CA continue its attempts to broaden the authentication capabilities of its security product line.

RiskFort works well with SiteMinder, and "strong authentication solutions such as tokens haven't been successful in the online consumer world because they need to be deployed, and that's expensive," Bill Mann, senior vice president, CA Security Management, said.

Tokens are needed in two-factor authentication which is increasingly becoming desirable as the growing number of breaches and the growth of ID theft show. Security experts generally agree that a user name and password is easily cracked and is proving inadequate as cyber criminals get more sophisticated.

The problem with tokens is that the consumer or user needs to carry them around, and often forgets to do so. Arcot's approach is based on offering a software alternative to a physical token.

"As Web 2.0, software service, collaboration and social networks get used more in business, the demand for identity assurance will become even more critical," Mann said. Indeed, and enterprises need to be able to authenticate that people are who they claim to be online.

My old pal Bob Dylan never spoke a truer phrase than when he said the times they are a-changing.

Not a million years ago, the concept of software as a service began taking off; then Salesforce.com launched the platform as a service concept with its Force.com application development platform.

And now we have testing as a service, from a company by the name of uTest. "We're the SaaS marketplace for software application testing," uTest CEO and co-founder Doron Reuveni told me. "There's no long term contracts, when you're ready, come to our Website and sign up, define your parameters and tell us the kind of testers you want."

Reuveni said uTest has 8,700 professional software testers from 135 companies worldwide, most of whom do the same thing in their day jobs. About 60 percent of them have three to 10 years' testing experience.

The company signs agreements with testers and pays them with a debit card. Testers log their results, and, over time, uTest will "create the largest repository of knowledge and statistical information about software testing, and knowledge base of methodologies of how to test," Reuveni said.

Customers pay per bug found, and pay for performance. When they sign off on an application and pay for the testing, they also grade the tester.

Some companies, especially those using agile development methodologies, subscribe to the service because "they need our services on an ongoing basis," Reuveni said. They get a discount on the bug rate, but also have to commit to a minimum amount of usage monthly.

The service was launched as a pilot with 12 customers "of various sizes from small, innovative companies to large enterprises," all of whom are full-time customers now, and uTest has added another 12 customers, Reuveni said.

So what's in it for the testers? The thrill, kiddies, the thrill. "We give testers the opportunity to test brand new applications, we expand their knowledge and expertise, and we run forums and Webinars that cater to them," Reuveni said.

Raritan Helps Manage Virtual/Physical Data Center Equipment

Virtualizing the data center to consolidate servers and reduce costs has been top of mind for a while, and the big boys -- HP, IBM and CA -- have added virtual machine (VM) management capabilities to their data center management tools.

Which is as it should be; their customers are the mega-corporations. But you know that virtualization in the data center really taken hold when a relatively small player like Raritan adds VM management capabilities to its data center management offering.

Raritan's product, CommandCenter Secure Gateway, simplifies the management of heterogeneous IT environments through a unified portal, and Release 4.0 of the product, unveiled yesterday, provides standard data center management tools -- discovery, access and control, power management and auditing. It does this for both virtual and physical servers as well as networking equipment and power devices.

Release 4.0 also tracks migration of data between physical and virtual machines, and, in essence, lets administrators do pretty much anything to a VM that they can to a physical server.

"We view a virtual machine as one more item in the IT infrastructure that CommandCenter Secure Gateway can manage," Henry Hsu, Raritan's director of enterprise product management said.

Think that's a Eureka! moment? At this point in time, yes. But some day, all IT administration tools will be built this way.

In the little world I inhabit, all the people spent the weekend watching the Olympics. From the opening ceremonies Friday through the last showings we could catch Sunday and still get enough sleep to get into work on time. Tired, sleepy-eyed but on time.

The medal fever mounted as the weekend wore on, and, by the time the gymnastics were broadcast, everyone was hoping and praying the U.S. would win. Put it this way: Nachos were the staple in our diet, and nobody even wanted to get a fresh bag or another beer in case we missed something.

There's another way to do this, of course, one that is not quite so hard on the stomach, and still lets you get a good idea of how we're doing at the Olympics now, and compare the results with how we did at the 2004 Games.

You can get statistics on the Internet, live and in real time, here. There are four dashboards, two showing 2004 Games results and the other two this 2008 Beijing Games results, the latter live and in real time.

In the spirit of the Olympics, Shadan Malik , president and CEO of iDashboards, which put up the site, decided to use his company's business intelligence software for a little bit of fun. "The Olympics spirit is strong around here," he told InternetNews.com.

The four dashboards will be paired off. Each pair will have one dashboard showing 2004 results and the other showing 2008 results so viewers can get a side by side comparison of results.

One pair of dashboards will each show a scorecard and maps of countries, listing how many gold medals they won.

The other pair will each have a map of the world with the countries color coded. TO see any country's medal tallies, just position your cursor over it. The medal tallies will be broken down by type -- gold, silver and bronze.

Figures for this year's games are in real time, of course. Happy viewing.