Spare a thought for the compilers of dictionaries in the Digital Age. Technology is always moving beyond the confines of the alphabet.

If you were given only 26 choices, for example, what would you list as the chief concerns of IT professionals today? In the storage space alone, there have been more product announcements from suppliers of storage systems in the past six months than in the previous two years. And in the security space, not a week - sometimes not even a day - goes by without a new offering..

So, what should today's i-technology abecedary look like? A for Authentication, B for Backup, C for Clustering, D for Denial-of-Service, E for Encryption...

How about A for AIT (Advanced Intelligent Tape) or D for DAS (Direct Attached Storage)? And what about B for Bots, which are siphoning and transmitting sensitive information from compromised PCs, receiving and spreading malware updates, and being used in distributed, denial-of-service attacks on a wider scale than ever before.

Should F be for Firewall or Fibre Channel, H for Host-Based Security or HIPAA?

By the time you get to S you'd literally have to abandon all hope of narrowing the choices: SAN, Sarbanes-Oxley, SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association), SNMP, Spam, SSL...Why, with just 26 choices you'd probably never even reach U for USB Drives, V for Virtualization, or W for Worms. Let alone Z for Zero-Day Attacks.

Then would come the colloquies like "Disaster Recovery," "Utility Storage," "IP Spoofing," and the like. Never mind SAN/NAS/RAID, less familiar acronyms are arriving thick and fast, like DHS (Department of Homeland Security), SEP (Security Experts Panel) and even new institutions - like the Internet Storm Center (ISC), an all-volunteer early warning Internet global monitoring organization (http://isc.sans.org/). Often, amid this slew of technologies and innovations, each new approach seemingly spawns a secondary headache - such as the trend towards networked. IP SANs, which many see as likely to unleash security problems since those who would seek to do harm are so familiar with the IP protocol.

Some say that, in the great scheme of things, neither storage nor security is a front-burner issue - business is. Certainly it is true that, as a recent report noted, IT professionals are often embroiled in operational and tactical considerations, with little time or resources left over for a more strategic approach, and so an understanding of where the storage-security nexus fits in the overall business puzzle is important. But the devil is in the detail, and detail is what we will bring you in each issue.

Here at ISSJ we will cover what's new, what's best, and what's next in the ever more important nexus of security and storage. We'll look at key issues, such as whether open-source software means better security or worse.We'll ask where information lifecycle management is going; we'll explore every aspect of storage networking; we'll drill down into NAS management and object-based storage.

What's needed, ISSJ articles will show, is a careful, business-based balance between security and storage. Even the most sophisticated SAN isn't much use if it isn't secure - audit regulations require that companies not only log and archive critical data, but also that they do this securely.

As Lenny Heymann, general manager of NetWorld+Interop said, when we unveiled our preview issue at the Networld+Interop Conference & Expo in Las Vegas: "Today's IT buyer is taking a very pragmatic approach to networking purchasing decisions, and really scrutinizing the full range of implications those technologies might have for their company - so discussions about storage should absolutely include related security issues."

The security-storage nexus is here to stay. So is Information Storage & Security Journal.