I recently attended the 2011 World Economic Forum on Latin America in Brazil. The theme of the conference focused on sustainable business growth in Latin America and creating long-term economic stability. Brazil has one of the fastest growing world economies, and at a time when global interest in the region is ramping up, what better place to discuss its future economic outlook? The country has attracted strong attention from the rest of the world, resulting in increasing cross-border deal flow. A recent article appeared in the Financial Times stating that the volume of mergers and acquisitions in 2010 reached nearly $153bn compared with almost $60bn a year earlier. Banks like JP Morgan and Citibank are also staffing up in the region to support increasing business.

Cloud has been the buzzword for some time in technology. I’m delighted to have recently joined IntraLinks, which has been leading the charge since the beginning. That’s why it was great to see the article and the followup blog post in The New York Times last Friday that discussed the growing adoption of Cloud Services in B2B and the awareness around the benefits of cloud computing.

The primary challenge around adding two-factor authentication to online applications is that it is difficult to bolt-on anything to an existing product. The problem is usually unrelated to the security technology but is down to inherent problems with the web applications. Most are not designed with security in mind.

Traditionally, if access control was important, some kind of login functionality would have been added to the application. This has been the way since the early days of client-server model. Unfortunately not a lot has changed since then. Even the most cutting edge web applications are designed as a castle with a reinforced perimeter and a heavily guarded entrance in the form of the login page. Once in, all users will have access to everything they are authorized to.

An unseasonably wintery and very cold London played host on the 30th November to the Business Cloud Summit 2010, sponsored this year by, amongst others, IntraLinks, Microsoft, CSC, NetSuite, RightNow and Success Factors and attended by several hundred senior IT professionals, analysts and commentators drawn from a broad base of industries, the public sector, media and professional bodies.

This is the second year of the summit, one of the largest vendor independent cloud gatherings in the UK, a forum that serves the purpose of inter-industry networking as much as it reports out trends and discusses issues and, of course, provides a showcase for the propositions of the leading software authors and service providers in the space.

This is the next in a series of guest blog posts by IntraLinks’ collaborators, partners, and vendors. Andreas Grabner is Sr. Architect and Technology Strategist at dynaTrace. dynaTrace is a technology leader in application performance management (APM). IntraLinks selected dynaTrace Continuous Application Performance Management to improve the operation of IntraLinks’ platform during the production lifecycle in September of 2009.

The Cloud has become the hot topic in the past year, with many major technology leaders (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce.com, etc.) extensively promoting public cloud services. What is equally interesting is the growth of the so-called “private cloud”: whether large enterprises transitioning their datacenter infrastructure to cloud-based paradigms; or solution providers using their own cloud-based platforms to provide solutions more efficiently.