Storage: The regulatory burden just might be making U.S. companies less competitive, depending on your viewpoint, reports Mario Apicella in Getting compliance out of the datacenter. A new pact inked by AXS-One and EDS, in fact, enables customers to do just that via outsourcing. “Staying compliant is not optional and has a big cost for all but the smallest companies.”Security: Call it criminal adaptability; Roger Grimes does as he explains car thieves’ workarounds to beat tracking systems. Grimes encourages users to investigate related offerings for notebook PCs. “With nearly half of all data theft incidents now involving stolen mobile computer devices, expect services like these to become the norm in the next few years,” he explains in Lojack for laptops. “It’s great piece of mind.” Best of the blogs: SOA, it seems, might be falling into the 80/20 rule, with 20 percent of the services handling 80 percent of the processing. “Many SOAs that I’m seeing deployed have a tendency to be out-of-balance or a disproportionate portion of the processing is taking place within a small group of services, and the others are not pulling their load,” suggests David Linthicum. Thus the increasing need for services balancing. Technology Industry