July 1st, 2009
Google Voice Gets Presence
While Google Voice may revolutionize personal communications directing calls to the phone number of choice, businesses will find the service too simplistic for many of their needs. Yesterday, On-State Communications may have solved that problem by presence-enabling Google Voice. Now small companies can leverage the newest free Google Service to direct incoming calls to the right user regardless of his or her location or availability. Read the rest of this entry »
June 14th, 2009
Cloud computing security to grow in 2009
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve just completed a report with Osterman Research on the messaging security market. What we found will be good news for cloud computing providers.
While enterprise users continue to spend a large percentage of their workday involved with messaging activities, the Internet remains a dangerous place for users. Websense, for example, reported that 57 percent of attacks are delivered via the Web. Commtouch found that SPAM accounted for 72 percent of all email traversing the Internet in the first quarter of 2009.
At the same time, today’s economic climate favors cost-effective solutions. IT expects to spend significantly less in 2009 than in 2008 on messaging. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents expected IT spending to be lower in 2009 versus 18 percent who made similar projections last year.
As such, while server-based solutions will continue to dominate the messaging security market, cloud-based solutions will constitute a growing percentage of purchases. The number of respondents who deployed hosted security services grew by nine percentage points since last year. Over the next 12 months hosted anti-spam services, such as those offered by Kaspersky, Trend Micro and more recently Microsoft, are also expected to show their greatest growth.
Comprehensive security solutions will be particularly hot over the next 12 months. Although the vast majority of enterprises today deal with separate vendors for their various best-of-breed solutions (71 percent), the number of respondents preferring a consolidated comprehensive centrally managed messaging security solution double while individual best of breed solutions dropped significantly (to 33 percent of respondents).
June 11th, 2009
Toodledo service out because of storm
Toodledo , the popular collaborative to-do list service, is out of commission. A storm took out the data center where the Toodledo stores its database. The service notice says the following:
So, here’s the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefuly not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.
Update: Its obviously taking longer than we expected and we are really sorry for that.
More information when it becomes available.
UPDATE:
Although Toodledo doesn’t say the location of their server, Dallas is my best guess give a traceroute. Severe thunderstorms are currenty pounding the area.
June 8th, 2009
Wiretapping ruling protects carriers - not you
Should companies be punished for letting the government wiretap your phone line? The courts don’t think so. US District Court dismissed 46 civil suits filed against several of the major carriers, such as AT&T and Verizon, for allowing the National Security Agency to wiretap their networks without a court-issued wiretap. Read the rest of this entry »
June 5th, 2009
Did Cisco Misstep with its SMB Play?
Cisco’s small business play yesterday was more than just an announcement of four new infrastructure and communication products. It’s a reaffirmation of a basic tenant for Cisco drive value into the SMB’s underlying data networks by enabling more applications to share that network. That’s a smart strategy when the applications work as effectively on their own network as on a common network, but when you’re talking video surveillance, network consolidation can put your business at risk. Read the rest of this entry »
June 3rd, 2009
Why Does IT Hate Facebook and Twitter?
With as much as the media might talk about the “new enterprise” and “social media” you’d think that IT would be in lock-step with the rest of the businesswhen it came to social networking. But as my recent work with Michael Osterman shows, there’s a big difference between applications that are allowed by organizations and the ones IT professionals consider to be legitimate. Read the rest of this entry »
June 3rd, 2009
Paranormal Meets Verizon's Cloud Computing Service
I was speaking yesterday with Verizon about its new hosted data center service, Computing as a Service (CaaS), and flashed back to those spoon bending parties of the ‘70s. Back then stage psychic Uri Geller inspired normally sane people across the country to try to imitate his self-proclaimed paranormal ability to bend spoons and keys.
As a kid at the time, I had gotten to be really good and bending my parent’s patience and figured bending spoons couldn’t be that much more difficult. So I grabbed some of my mother’s good silverware, cooped myself up in a dark room, and tried channeling my inner energy (or was it demons?) down my fingertips into the spoon. In the end, I found a much simpler way to bend my mother’s spoons — a nice strong whack of a hammer. Needless to say she thought a whack somewhere else was more appropriate.
Verizon’s CaaS works its own metal-bending magic, but one that provides real value to anyone interested in outsourcing their data infrastructure. CaaS lets IT move and reprovision physical servers much as they do physical ones. The trick isn’t psychic power and certainly not hammer-whacking, but an intelligent software layer Verizon calls its Automated Resource Engine. The Automated Resource Engine stores physical server images on a SAN not the server enabling physical servers to be moved and reprovisioned in minutes much the way VMWare’s VMotion does for virtual servers.
By supporting physical and virtual severs, CaaS positions Verizon to address a missing spot in the cloud computing market. Many cloud computing services today are based around virtual machines, which aren’t well suited for delivering I/O intensive applications, such as database or email servers. Delivering physical servers enables Verizon to target these markets. By focussing on redundant configurations the company claims to be able to drop overall costs by 30 to 60 percent. According to the SLAs, Verizon will deliver virtual servers within 60 minutes of ordering and physical servers within 120 minutes.
CaaS caps a series of cloud computing roll outs for Verizon over the past two weeks that saw the introduction of Asset Assurance fault management, monitoring and reporting tools, an enhanced Internet Security Assessment service, and new managed security capabilities. The new service positions Verizon against rival AT&T not to mention providers such as Amazon and numerous hosting offers.
If there’s something lacking today in CaaS it’s automation. Verizon does not provide enable organizations to automate their CaaS implementations the way they can do today with their data centers. Verizon says it plans to expose the API underlying the Automated Resource Engine enabling organizations to automate SaaS though a specific date for that release was not made available.
CaaS is currently available in the U.S. and Europe and will be rolled out to the Asia-Pacific region in August. Pricing is highly dependent on the customer requirements. Verizon requires organizations to purchase at least one virtual farm ($24-$28 per day) against which they can provision virtual or physical server resources. Each virtual farm includes: a multi-tiered Network (DMZ / Trust VLANs), firewall, and load balancing. Virtual servers ($8 - $12 per day) can be configured with Windows. The virtual machines assume a single CPU with 1 Gbyte of RAM and 20 Gbytes of storage. Physical servers ($17 - $22 per day) are also configured with Windows and consist of a four core system with 8 Gbytes of RAM and 50 Gbytes of storage.
May 19th, 2009
Open Source Softswitch Adds Skype
Here’s an interesting teaser for you Skype aficionados. Later this month, the new release of FreeSWITCH, the first open source softswitch, will enable carriers and enterprise to integrate Skype into their VoIP services and platform. Read the rest of this entry »
May 12th, 2009
Ban Mobile Devices and Driving
Should you be allowed to talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time? Perhaps not. A debate ignited by Verizon Wireless’s recent backing of a ban on texting and driving underscores the dangers all mobile activities pose while driving a car. Read the rest of this entry »
May 11th, 2009
Shame on you, Facebook!
How far ought organizations go towards censoring what’s published on their social networks? Here at ZDNet we have pretty stern view on racist language in our comments section and certainly in our articles. That’s not just smart business. It’s just common sense.
Yet as Michael Arlington points out today, Facebook seems to be lacking that sort of common sense. The social network censors photos of lactating mothers, but allows holocaust denial in the spirit of “open discourse.”
Something’s seriously wrong with that sort of view and Dallas attorney, Brian Cuban, is making it a personal crusade to get Facebook to change its way. The attorney has pointed out that as a private business, freedom of speech doesn’t apply. Holocaust denial violates Facebook’s terms of service and should be stopped.
This isn’t about providing an open forum of ideas. Whether it’s Holocaust denial, gay-bashing, or overt racism there are some things that just don’t belong in social discourse. ZDNet is smart enough to realize that. TechCrunch gets it. Let’s hope Facebook wakes up as well.
David Greenfield is the principal in STAnalytics. a global technology-marketing consultancy where he advises enterprises on emerging technologies. See David Greenfield's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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