A Few Reasons to Consider Cloud Security in 2012</h1> <article> <h1>A Few Reasons to Consider Cloud Security in 2012</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:33:50 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/few-reasons-consider-cloud-security-2012" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/few-reasons-consider-cloud-security-2012" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/few-reasons-consider-cloud-security-2012" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>While on-premises security solutions can provide robust defenses against spam, malware and other security threats, cloud-based security—used either as a standalone solution or in conjunction with on-premise defenses—offers a number of inherent advantages:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Most threats never hit the on-premises network—</strong>The use of a cloud service for spam processing, for example, eliminates the majority of content processing, storage and bandwidth associated with spam before it ever reaches the customer’s network, making the on-premise infrastructure more efficient. More critically, the bulk of malware can be eradicated before it ever reaches the corporate network, leaving on-premise solutions—if they are in place—to act as another layer of protection against these threats.</li> <li><strong>More efficient use of IT resources—</strong>One of the key issues that should be considered by any organization—but one that often is not—is the opportunity cost of IT staff members. Most CIOs and IT managers would agree that finding and retaining highly qualified IT staff is not an easy task. As a result, in-house IT staff should be used so that they can provide maximum efficiency to their employer, while also giving them a satisfying work experience that will motivate them not to move elsewhere. A cloud security solution—whether used for messaging security, Web security or other capabilities—allows IT staff members to move on from managing security servers and appliances and to work on projects that provide more differential value to the organization and that can result in greater job satisfaction.</li> <li><strong>Easier support for mobile and remote users - </strong>Given that a growing proportion of the working population is mobile—either because of corporate telework initiatives or employees who travel as part of their work—security for these employees can be difficult to manage using on-premise systems. Cloud security capabilities can provide a high level of protection for these employees, many of whom use Wi-Fi hotspots and other resources that are much less secure than their in-office counterparts.</li> <li><strong>Extending the life of on-premises solutions—</strong>Related to the point above is that cloud services allow an organization to extend the useful life of an in-house security solution. For example, if a company has reached the maximum capacity of its email filtering appliances, it could implement a cloud-based spam filtering service that would dramatically reduce the amount of incoming traffic and thereby allow new investments in internal hardware to be postponed or avoided altogether.</li> <li><strong>Improved disaster recovery and business continuity—</strong>Another important advantage of cloud solutions is that they can provide a very useful backup messaging solution in the event of an outage of the primary messaging system. For example, most cloud security providers will spool incoming email for at least several days (much longer in some cases) if it cannot be delivered to a customer’s server. This prevents an email server outage from causing bouncebacks to senders and ensures that incoming email is still being processed.</li> </ul> <p>We have just published a white paper on this topic that you can download <strong><a href="http://www.ostermanresearch.com/whitepapers/download156.htm">here</a></strong>.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Actually, Many Care About GroupWise</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:11:54 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/actually-many-care-about-groupwise-0" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/actually-many-care-about-groupwise-0" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/actually-many-care-about-groupwise-0" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>David Strom wrote an interesting piece about the just-released GroupWise 2012 entitled <em><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/01/no-one-cares-that-novell-has-a.php">No Once Cares That Novell Has A New Version of GroupWise</a></em>. His assertion is that GroupWise is yesterday’s news, has been supplanted by other platforms, and is simply a dying animal.</p> <p>Although Mr. Strom is a very sharp guy, I respectfully disagree:</p> <ul> <li>I’m certain that the vast majority of the 10,000 organizations cited in Mr. Strom’s article care about the new release.</li> <li>Same goes for the 47 state governments he cited that use GroupWise.</li> <li>Ditto for the many third-party developers of encryption, archiving, security and other products that are designed for use in GroupWise environments.</li> <li>Even competitors will care, since some have made public—and not so public—their strong desire to move GroupWise-enabled organizations to their respective platforms.</li> </ul> <p>Mr. Strom is right in that GroupWise has lost a significant portion of its customer base and the development of the platform has not kept pace with that of some competing solutions. However, the new GroupWise has some noteworthy and interesting features as he pointed out, such as integration with Skype for presence detection and an iPad client among them, that will help to keep interest in GroupWise alive. Moreover, given that migrating to a new messaging system is typically arduous and expensive, a new version with interesting new features might be enough to convince some decision makers that they can at least postpone the migration, if not put it off completely.</p> <p>Does this mean that the new version of GroupWise will cause the platform suddenly to reverse its slide and start picking up new customers in droves? Doubtful, but if this is the first in several steps focused on updating and improving GroupWise, predictions about the death of GroupWise may have been premature.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Some Thoughts on Lotusphere and the New Communications Paradigm</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:39:53 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-lotusphere-and-new-communications-paradigm" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-lotusphere-and-new-communications-paradigm" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-lotusphere-and-new-communications-paradigm" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>There is lots of talk about email going away: some are swearing completely off of email, others complain about how many messages they receive in their inbox, others use only email. Our own research shows that for many corporate workers, the importance of email continues to grow. Add to all of this the continuing discussions about migrating from GroupWise to “Outlook” (the subject of an upcoming blog post), how Notes/Domino is losing share to Exchange, etc.</p> <p>However, does it really matter? The fundamental goal of email when it was invented decades ago was to enable people to communicate in a more efficient way. That goal has never changed, but the tools that are available to corporate decision makers to enable that efficiency have. For example, we now have social tools that can enable communication in a way that enables easier access to and analysis of employee and customer sentiment. We have collaboration tools that make it easier for groups to work on a document instead of sending a file to everyone via email. We have text messaging and instant messaging that enable bursty types of communication that are more efficient than email.</p> <p>Spending time at Lotusphere last week reinforced my view that IBM, more than many other vendors, really understands the new paradigm. To them it’s not so much about Notes/Domino losing share to Exchange (which, on a worldwide basis, is questionable anyway given that there are more Domino servers under management than at any time in the company’s history) or cloud vs. on-premise or social media vs. email. Instead, it’s about how communications is evolving into a new platform that integrates social into the business fabric—integrating new paradigms with the old where it makes sense to do so. It’s about a shift in corporate culture that doesn’t focus on siloes of information, but instead uses a variety of communication modes in a way that makes the most sense. For example, email need not—and should not—succumb to social media, but instead evolve into a tool that enables integration of various communication types that makes sense given a particular organization’s culture, regulatory environment, today’s customer base, future customer base, the geographic distribution of its employees and other factors.</p> <p>The bottom line is that email—and every other mode of electronic communication—is about how to let employees and customers communicate, collaborate, learn, change and act in a way that meets their needs and those of their employer. Those who get caught up in the email vs. social media vs. Web 2.0 vs. cloud vs. on-premise vs. whatever else discussion are often missing the bigger picture: this is much more about business and getting things done efficiently, and not so much about technology.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Social Media as Time Machine</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:50:33 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/social-media-time-machine" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/social-media-time-machine" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/social-media-time-machine" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>Outside of the financial services industry, very few companies actually monitor what their employees say on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the 1,000+ other social media sites around the world. Few companies scan short URLs for potential links to malware sites. Few have deployed systems to protect against spam delivered via social media. Few have deployed systems to capture whatever business records or other important content might be posted to social media sites.</p> <p>In a way, social media use in the vast majority of organizations is like email was back around 1997—not much in the way of anti-spam, anti-malware, content filtering or archiving is in place to protect organizations from all sorts of harm. Use social media today and—at least from the perspective of how protected you’ll be against spam and malware—you can recreate your email experience from yesteryear.</p> <p>Should you be concerned about? Yes:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203686204577112942734977800.html">Facebook says that about 4% of its content is spam and Twitter said that 1.5% of its tweets were spam-like in 2010</a> (numbers not dissimilar to email spam figures back in the mid- to late 1990s). However, <a href="http://oregonfaithreport.com/2012/01/new-wave-of-viruses-hitting-facebook-twitter/">Imperium</a> estimates that 400 million Facebook are victims of social spam each day.</li> <li>Last week, <a href="http://www.itworld.com/security/238079/malware-stole-45000-facebook-logins-highlights-security-hole-cloud">malware stole login credentials</a> for 45,000 Facebook accounts—a small proportion of the approximately 800 million accounts in use today—but 45,000 nonetheless.</li> <li><a href="http://oregonfaithreport.com/2012/01/new-wave-of-viruses-hitting-facebook-twitter/">Imperium</a> estimates that 40% of the social profiles in existence today are frauds.</li> <li>Our own research indicates that only a small proportion of organizations are archiving their social media content, despite the fact that some of this content is potentially actionable or might be subject to legal or regulatory scrutiny at some point.</li> </ul> <p>Clearly, there is a problem: lots of malware and spam floating around, millions of tweets and posts that probably should be archived, and few companies doing anything about it.</p> <p>We are in the process of writing a white paper that addresses these topics, and will be launching a major study within the week on how social media is used and perceived, and what organizations are doing to protect themselves. Let us know if you’re interested in what we will be finding from the research.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Four Predictions for 2012</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:37:01 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/four-predictions-2012" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/four-predictions-2012" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/four-predictions-2012" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>Here are four predictions, trends and developments that I believe will occur in 2012 and will have important implications for messaging, collaboration and related decision makers:</p> <h2><strong>2012 will be the year of social media management</strong></h2> <p>Imagine letting your corporate email system be whatever your employees choose—Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, whatever. Then let them say anything they want without any policy management, supervision or consequences. Moreover, don’t preserve any email content, even if it contains actionable or important business records that you really should keep for legal or regulatory reasons. Now, substitute “social media” for “email”, and that’s pretty much the situation you have in most organizations today.</p> <p>Some industries and organizations get the important of managing social media. For example, financial services firms—as a result of rulings by FINRA, IIROC, the FSA, etc.—understand that social media content must be managed. Important content must be archived, tweets and posts need to be monitored, and policies need to be established and enforced. The NFL gets it and has established specific guidelines for what players and coaches can post to social media before and after a game. However, the vast majority of organizations don’t get it—they let employees say anything they want on Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites without establishing any policies or guidelines whatsoever. If you’re unsure of the risk, search for “I lied to my client” or “my boss is stupid” on Twitter and see what comes up.</p> <p>I believe that will change dramatically in 2012 as decision makers become more aware of their risk. Unfortunately, I think much of that awareness will be of the two-by-four-upside-the-head variety as organizations are sued for sexual harassment or other actionable posts on social media. Wise decision makers will get out ahead of the problem and (a.) establish acceptable use policies for social media and (b.) deploy technology that will manage and archive this content according to those policies.</p> <h2><strong>RIM and Novell GroupWise will turn around</strong></h2> <p>I realize that I’m in a pretty small minority here, but I believe that RIM and Novell will have a better 2012 than 2011. RIM, because it will introduce some interesting new phones this year and because its robust security model still has lots of credibility in the IT space; Novell, because I think Attachmate will take the steps necessary to prevent the continued slide of the GroupWise brand and because GroupWise is still a pretty solid messaging platform. While I don’t expect a massive turnaround in either brand, things will improve.</p> <h2><strong>Apple will get serious about the enterprise</strong></h2> <p>I really like Apple products, but the company has never taken the enterprise market seriously enough in my opinion. Assuming that will change in 2012, I’m going to go way out on a limb here (hoping everyone who reads this forgets it if it doesn’t happen), but I think Apple will buy Parallels Holdings, the owner of the very popular Parallels virtualization platform as a means of moving the Mac into the enterprise as a robust Windows platform for enterprise applications. That would enable decision makers to deploy Macs with their somewhat lower cost of ownership while not having to rewrite any of their enterprise apps in order to do so. And, no, I’m not smoking anything!</p> <h2><strong>Spam will make a comeback—with a vengeance</strong></h2> <p>Spam volumes dropped dramatically in 2011 compared to 2010 because of the takedown of some key botnets and other developments. For example, Symantec.cloud reported that from spam’s high of 92.3% of all email traversing the Internet in August 2010, spam fell to 72.8% in April 2011—and it stayed relatively low through the rest of the year.</p> <p>That said, I believe that spam will come back in a serious way in 2012 for two reasons:</p> <ul> <li>Traditional spam is still very effective and it’s incredibly inexpensive to produce, yielding extremely high ROIs even with very low clickthrough rates. Products that produce such incredible returns simply won’t go away.</li> <li>More insidiously, spam—in the form of phishing and similar types of attacks—is an effective way to deliver malware into organizations. Attacks that occurred at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the International Monetary Fund are good examples of how good employee training or robust defenses can still fall prey to targeted attacks. Bad guys love malware and are very motivated to deliver it in whatever way they can.</li> </ul> <p>I’d appreciate your feedback on these predictions.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The Clear and Present Danger of an Email Mistake</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:43:50 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/clear-and-present-danger-email-mistake" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/clear-and-present-danger-email-mistake" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/clear-and-present-danger-email-mistake" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>One of my favorite films is <em>Clear and Present Danger</em>. Early in the film, there’s a good exchange between the president of the United States and his group of advisors who are meeting to discuss the ramifications of a lifelong friend of the president who was killed by a Colombian drug lord. The advisors, using conventional wisdom, suggest that the president distance himself as much as possible from his friend, who was just discovered to be laundering Colombian drug money. However, Jack Ryan, the newest advisor to the president, suggests a totally different approach. He recommends that when the press asks the president if he and this newly discovered criminal were friends, to say, “No, we were <em>good</em> friends.” If asked if they were good friends, the response should be “No, we were <em>lifelong</em> friends.” Ryan’s point was simple: “Give the press no place to go.”</p> <p>During the last week of December, the <em>New York Times</em> crafted an email for a few hundred people who had cancelled their subscriptions, offering them a big discount on a 16-week subscription. Unfortunately, the <em>Times</em> <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/new-york-timess-mass-email-gaffe/story-e6frg6so-1226232442276">sent this email to 8.6 million people instead</a>. After discovering the mistake, the <em>Times</em> tweeted that they had never sent the email, but shortly thereafter corrected itself. To its credit, the <em>Times</em> honored the discount to anyone who responded, but only for a short while.</p> <p>There are five lessons that all of us can learn from this episode:</p> <ol> <li>Mistakes like this are fairly easy to make with email and other digital tools, so expect they will happen.</li> <li>Plan for these mistakes by crafting policies about how you’ll respond as a company. Make sure every employee knows what the policy is, why the policy is in place, and to whom they can turn if they have questions about it.</li> <li>Don’t pretend you didn’t make the mistake. In an age of social media, denying your mistake will work—for about 10 minutes.</li> <li>To the extent possible, make sure you are the one that tells the world about your mistake first—if you don’t, there is a 100% certainty that someone else will discover it, tweet it to the remotest parts of the earth, and make a much bigger deal about it than it really is.</li> <li>Eat your mistakes and suffer the consequences to the extent you can. If that means you offered a discount in error, eat the cost and use that to your advantage. A <em>Times</em> article with the headline “We Screwed Up and Saved You a Million Dollars” would have taken the edge off the incident and might have generated a decent amount of goodwill.</li> </ol> <p>In short, give the press—or the tweeters or bloggers or Facebook posters—no place to go.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Do You Really Think You Don't Need to Monitor Outbound Content?</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:12:18 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/do-you-really-think-you-dont-need-monitor-outbound-content" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/do-you-really-think-you-dont-need-monitor-outbound-content" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/do-you-really-think-you-dont-need-monitor-outbound-content" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>Electronic communications is a two-way street: With the right tools one can illuminate the world with words of wisdom and insight. Alternatively, one can demonstrate why the most powerful communication tool they should be given is a crayon.</p> <p>What reminded me of this was two things:</p> <ul> <li>We received an email this morning from someone who signed up to be on our survey panel 13 months ago. As we do with everyone who signs up for the panel and provides us with a corporate email address, we send an email to verify their identity. We received it and added him to the panel in November 2010. This morning, in response to a mailing, he replied “That’s nice…I don’t give a ****.”</li> <li>Also today, there is an <a href="http://www.nwdailymarker.com/2011/12/tweets-from-congressional-staffers-describe-on-job-drinking-in-office-of-congressman-larsen/">article</a> about three staffers who worked in the office of a Washington-state US representative. These staffers, probably not intending to get fired, did just that via Twitter. Among their less-than-wise posts were “Dear taxpayers—I hope you don’t mind that I’m watching YouTube clips of Nirvana at my government job. Thanks, you’re the best”, and “I really like DC, but I could have used another day away. The silver lining is that I don’t have to see my idiot boss.”</li> </ul> <p>Two really important lessons here, one for employees and one for employers:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Employees:</strong> Your electronic words exist forever on tape, in archives, in inboxes and, in the case of tweets, in the <a href="http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/12/library-of-congress-to-store-tweets-based-on-twitter-deal/1">Library of Congress</a>. They might come back to haunt you and, if they’re egregious enough, probably will as in the case of the Congressional staffers who were fired 70 minutes after their conduct was discovered.</li> <li><strong>Employers:</strong> Monitor what your employees are saying via Twitter, email, etc. A failure to do so can damage your corporate reputation, result in legal or regulatory sanctions, reduce your revenue, and leave you wishing you had deployed monitoring technology that is probably less expensive than you think.</li> </ul> </article> <article> <h1>An Interesting Approach to Cloud Storage</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:34:21 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/interesting-approach-cloud-storage" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/interesting-approach-cloud-storage" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/interesting-approach-cloud-storage" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p><a href="http://www.symform.com">Symform</a> is a Seattle-based company that has developed an interesting approach to cloud-based data storage. Instead of building out a traditional data center, Symform customers provide all of the local storage themselves that Symform assembles into a cloud-based offering. The system works like this:</p> <ul> <li>Data is uploaded from your local sources and divided into 64-megabyte segments that are protected using 256-bit AES encryption.</li> <li>Each 64-megabyte segment is then further broken up into one-megabyte segments.</li> <li>To each group of 64 one-megabyte segments, 32 one-megabyte parity fragments are added using a RAID algorithm.</li> <li>The 96 one-megabyte fragments are then distributed randomly across the base of Symform customers worldwide (although most are currently in North America and Europe, with a handful in Asia, South America and Africa).</li> </ul> <p>When a customer pulls down data from the cloud, it’s gathered from these disparate sources and assembled into the file(s) that have been requested. The 32 parity segments for each block of 64 one-megabyte segments adds 50% to the overall storage requirement, but makes the system highly redundant when local storage is corrupted, customers’ storage systems are turned off or otherwise unavailable, etc.</p> <p>One of the fundamental advantages of the Symform approach is its very low cost: the first 200 gigabytes of storage is free, while unlimited storage for three users is just $100 annually. The only “catch,” if you can call it that, is that customers must provide as much storage locally as they receive in the cloud, since they—in effect—<strong>are</strong> the cloud. Symform’s goal in using this highly distributed model is to drive down the cost of cloud-based storage, making it comparable in price to local storage.</p> <p>This model of cloud storage raises a couple of important questions:</p> <ul> <li>Are data protection laws obsolete, such as those that require data not to leave a certain geographic region? Because data using the Symform model is encrypted, then broken up into small bits and then distributed all over the world, content stored in this manner is actually more protected against inadvertent or malicious interception than it is if data is stored traditionally in a “protected” geographic region.</li> <li>Can cloud storage be as inexpensive as local storage? While Symform’s current pricing model makes cloud storage only modestly more expensive than local, it will be interesting to see if the model is sustainable (I believe it will be).</li> </ul> <p>Symform’s innovative offering is very definitely worth a closer look if you’re at all interested in using the cloud to store some or all of your data.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Why Even Stupid Criminals Can Still Cost You Lots of Money</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:47:45 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/why-even-stupid-criminals-can-still-cost-you-lots-money" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/why-even-stupid-criminals-can-still-cost-you-lots-money" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/why-even-stupid-criminals-can-still-cost-you-lots-money" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>An interesting <a href="http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/11/29/41751.htm">article</a> was published yesterday regarding innovative job-seeker Attilla Nemeth, a 26-year-old Hungarian who was eager to get a job in Marriott International’s IT department. While “innovative” and “eager” are normally good qualities in an IT staffer, Mr. Nemeth’s decision to commit extortion in pursuit of this job was—at best—ill advised.</p> <p>Here’s the story: on November 11th of last year, Mr. Nemeth sent an email to Marriott telling them he had been accessing their network for several months and had obtained confidential information as a result of his snooping around. In the email he threatened to reveal this information publicly if he was not given a job as an IT staffer. After Marriott did not respond to this threat, Mr. Nemeth then sent them some of the documents he had accessed, purportedly as a result of an infected email attachment he had sent to several targeted Marriott employees.</p> <p>Marriott contacted the US Secret Service and created a bogus HR employee to serve as the contact for Mr. Nemeth in an effort to catch him. He believed the ruse and continued the dialog with the agent/employee. After several weeks, Marriott purchased an airline ticket for Mr. Nemeth who arrived in Washington, DC, and was interviewed for the position he sought. During the interview, he told the agent/employee that he had stolen Marriott data, sent the extorting emails, demonstrated his technique for infiltrating the Marriott network, and identified where in Hungary he was storing the stolen information.</p> <p>Mr. Nemeth has pled guilty to two counts that could land him in federal prison for up to 15 years—he will be sentenced in February 2012.</p> <p>Even though Mr. Nemeth may not have been the brightest bulb among those seeking a job at Marriott International, he had a major impact on the company’s IT department. Marriott was forced to have more than 100 employees search across its network to figure out exactly what Mr. Nemeth had stolen and how he accessed this information. Marriott estimates that it spent anywhere from $400,000 to $1 million in consultants, employee salaries and various other costs associated with this exercise.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Some Thoughts on Short Attention Spans</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:37:27 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-short-attention-spans" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-short-attention-spans" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-short-attention-spans" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>In yesterday’s mail I received two unusual pieces of correspondence: The first, a handwritten note from a collaboration expert—and a very nice man—that does some industry analysis for us as part of our annual information service; and the second, a letter inviting me to attend some 15-minute Webinars. Both were unusual in that they were written on paper and sent through the mail, not electronically.</p> <p>That got me to thinking about how our communications has changed from mailed correspondence to fax to email to SMS and other very short modes of communication. While the speed of delivery is certainly improving over time, I believe the primary driver for migrating to faster and shorter modes of communication is television. For example, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-04-05-tv-bottomstrip_x.htm">studies</a> have shown that an increase in television viewing among children shortens their attention span, which I believe translates into other realms, as well. For example, the average sound bite in the 1968 presidential election was <a href="http://articles.boston.com/2011-01-02/bostonglobe/29339490_1_sound-bites-quotations-presidential-election">43 seconds</a>, but dropped to <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/node/384">9.8 seconds</a> in the 1988 election and <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/node/384">7.3 seconds</a> by 2000. Moreover, television changes our mindset into believing that every problem on a funny TV show can be solved in 30 minutes, while problems on serious shows require a full 60 minutes (minus 16 minutes of commercials) to resolve.</p> <p>If our attention spans continue to get shorter, what impact will this have on our ability to communicate meaningfully in the future? Can you say enough about your product in 10 seconds to get people interested in what you’re selling? Can your 140-character Tweet or 160-character text message really convey your actual meaning? More important, can you as a business decision maker or voter or parent or consumer gather enough information in just a few seconds to make a well-informed and meaningful decision?</p> <p>I’m not sure what the solution might be and welcome your thoughts on the topic, particularly in the context of business communications and how we will convey information in the future. I think it’s an important topic to discuss.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Making the Case for “Social” Media</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:14:54 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/making-case-social-media" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/making-case-social-media" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/making-case-social-media" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>To some decision makers, “social” media has the somewhat dubious connotation of people telling the world what they had for breakfast or spending a couple of hours each day keeping up with family and friends when they should be working. To others, it carries with it the connotation of excessive corporate risk because employees will use Twitter or Facebook to say something in violation of corporate policy. As an example of just how scared some corporate decision makers can be of social media is the NFL policy that forbids players to tweet 90 minutes before a game commences and through final postgame media obligations. Chad Ochocinco, for example, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/trainingcamp10/news/story?id%3D5493157">was fined $25,000</a> for two tweets and possession of an electronic device during the 2010 pre-season when he played for the Bengals.</p> <p>My recommendation to those who are fearful of or resistant to the benefits of social media is to spend a day or two at the <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/">Enterprise 2.0 Conference</a>. I was there on Tuesday and—while I am already sold on the many benefits of social media—came away with a renewed appreciation of how important this technology will be in improving business processes, reducing costs, speeding decision making and improving overall corporate performance. More on what was most impressive in another post.</p> <p>However, for social media to work there are three important questions that decision makers in any organization need to consider:</p> <ul> <li>First, do you have a corporate culture that will enable social media to add value? A culture that rewards information-hoarding or that encourages employees to build their own little fiefdoms within your corporate walls will simply waste money deploying even the most promising social technologies. Because social media is about, well, being social, organizations in which employees trade information only to get brownie points or to establish their own reputation will simply be wasting their time and money.</li> <li>Second, will the social media technology that you deploy simply be another thing for employees to do, or will it integrate with existing business processes so that social media becomes a natural extension of these processes? If the former, fuhgeddaboudit—it will simply be a waste of your IT department’s and employees’ time.</li> <li>Third, do you have a plan for social media? If not, don’t bother—as one keynote speaker put it, “Social without a goal is a whole lot of noise.”</li> </ul> <p>In short, make sure that your corporate culture, integration plan and goals for social media are set before you deploy the technology. If you don’t, you’re probably better off not deploying social media in the first place.</p> </article> <article> <h1>What Is the Real Value of Social Media?</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:22:30 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/what-is-real-value-social-media" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/what-is-real-value-social-media" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/what-is-real-value-social-media" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>This post is aimed at people who don’t think that social media offers much real business value and that it’s more time-waster than productivity tool. One of my favorite quotes from Jimmy Fallon:</p> <p><em>“Did you guys notice this? Twitter was down for two hours on Saturday. It was horrible. I was forced to call random people out of the phonebook and just tell them what I had for lunch.”</em></p> <p>And that pretty much sums up how many people view social media—as an avenue for possibly meaningful content, but primarily as a means of sharing information that doesn’t have much business value. However, while social media actually does provide substantial business value, I believe two of its more important benefits in a business context will be (a.) its ability to allow people to communicate useful information in a way that would simply seem silly when delivered in another format, and (b.) to delve into a knowledge base of information that today is more or less kept hidden in people’s brains. Here’s what I mean:</p> <ul> <li>Imagine that you wanted to tell people you were at a particular Starbucks, enroute to another city, attending a conference next week, etc.—information that might be relevant to maybe three people at any given time (who might be at that conference or a block away) in your circle of friends, associates or acquaintances. Now, imagine sending an email with that information to a few thousand people three or four times a day. Worse, how about sending them a fax? It simply wouldn’t happen, and you wouldn’t be able to obtain the benefits of sharing this useful information.</li> </ul> <p>Of course, this is an obvious example of how social media is used today, but it underscores the point that social media represents a new medium, not a replacement for email and other, more traditional forms of communication. Our own research shows that the a much larger proportion of people view email as more important compared to a year ago than view it as less important, indicating that social media really is a supplement to traditional communications, not its substitute.</p> <ul> <li>More important, social media—particularly purpose-built, corporate social media—represents something of a knowledge directory that is generally not available via other systems. While the idea is not new (Linkadoo and others were focused on this years ago), social media enables the sharing of information in ways that are simply impractical via other methods. Let’s say you want to find someone with knowledge of Hadoop-based software who also had worked in healthcare earlier in their career. Or someone who was familiar with the particular marketing manager with whom you’re on the phone right now. Or you need to find just the right restaurant for a customer event in a city with which you’re unfamiliar. The right social media capability can act as that repository and distribution mechanism for the tidbits of knowledge that are perhaps too obscure to put into a database or to codify on a resumé or that would never be assembled across the diverse array of contacts you might have on Twitter or Facebook. In short, social media represents a tool for bringing that kind of information together and to provide real business value as a result.</li> </ul> <p>And, in case you’re wondering, I had an enchilada and an apple for lunch today.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Social Media Requires a New Approach to Customer Service</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:44:28 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/social-media-requires-new-approach-customer-service" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/social-media-requires-new-approach-customer-service" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/social-media-requires-new-approach-customer-service" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>As communication evolves, it becomes more viral and more rapid in its distribution. For example, a letter is essentially a one-to-one communication. An email is, at best, a one-to-several communication. Social media, on the other hand, is potentially a one-to-millions communication. The implication of such an enormous increase in the speed and breadth with which communications can occur is that the response to such communications when things go wrong becomes much more important: ignore a complaint delivered via a letter and little will happen—ignore a complaint delivered via Twitter and lots of bad things could happen.</p> <p>Take the case of Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office. On Tuesday, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2011/10/paid-to-tweet-rainn-wilsons-del-taco-promo-controversy/">Wilson tweeted</a>, “@DelTaco I will accept $12,000 to plug their [expletive deleted] food.” <a href="http://mashable.com/2011/10/26/rainn-wilson-satire/">Four minutes</a> later he tweeted, “Please disregard last tweet—was a private text to my assistant”. Five minutes after that he tweeted, “Loving the new <a href="http://twitter.com/DelTaco">@DelTaco</a> Macho Bellgrande Burrito! It’s Beeftacular(tm)!” Whether or not this was a planned exchange or a mistake by Wilson who thought he was sending a direct message to his assistant, it illustrates the viral nature of social media communication.</p> <p>There is an interesting new company whose focus is on helping organizations to manage customer service using social media as a platform. <a href="http://www.conversocial.com">Conversocial</a>, based in London, offers a cloud-based platform to help organizations manage comments, complaints and interactions with customers and commenters using Twitter and Facebook. The tools included in Conversocial’s offering include workflow management so that individuals can be assigned various tasks, tracking tools to enable management of customer and commenter interaction, prioritization of content (complaints get handled before general comments, for example), analytics to gain insight into how a company is engaging with the Facebook and Twitter communities, publishing tools that include the ability to schedule updates across multiple pages, and other capabilities.</p> <p>The primary goal of Conversocial is to enable rapid response to comments and complaints on Twitter and Facebook, while at the same time reducing the amount of time required to manage these interactions. The company offers various packages designed for single social media managers through large teams of individuals who are charged with responding to social media communications. Their solution is quite interesting and is definitely worth a closer look.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Thoughts on Two Recent Events</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:48:24 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/thoughts-two-recent-events" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/thoughts-two-recent-events" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/thoughts-two-recent-events" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>Last week I attended the Sendmail Messaging Infrastructure Summit 2011 and the week before that Trend Micro’s Insight analyst event—both very good meetings! Here are some thoughts on both companies:</p> <ul> <li>Trend Micro is doing very well financially: the company’s CFO reported that Trend could fund 891 days of its operating costs with no revenues coming in—Microsoft, also doing well financially, could do so for 434 days, while one of Trend’s biggest competitors in the security space could do so for 108 days. An unusual measure of a company’s financial health, but an interesting one nonetheless.</li> <li>Trend has a strong focus on security in virtualized environments and it’s a focus that I think is serving and will serve the company quite nicely. The company’s Deep Security offering is the foundation of their cloud security capability and offers a wide range of capabilities, allowing security to be built around the data itself so that it can, in essence, be self-defending. Given that virtualization will be key to success in most cloud data centers, the ability to efficiently provide security in a VM environment is essential. Trend’s agentless anti-virus, for example, can reduce overhead on physical hosts, allowing greater VM density relative to agent-based approaches. Without going into details, Trend is winning a lot of key accounts using its agentless security model and has seen its server security revenue increase fairly dramatically. Trend is also making a major push with enterprise public cloud providers, as well as in the SOHO market, in mobile, and in the big data market.</li> <li>The primary message from the Sendmail event—and one with which I wholeheartedly agree—is that the cloud for mid-sized and large enterprises will be based on a hybrid model. While smaller companies can likely use off-the-shelf offerings from cloud providers, larger companies tend to have specialized applications and use cases that demand some proportion of the infrastructure remain on-premise. Even Microsoft admits in its BPOS documentation that it may be necessary to keep some of the email environment on-premise.</li> <li>The meeting also provided some valuable insight into how companies decide to go to the cloud. For example, the CIO of one of Sendmail’s customers was impressed with BPOS—aided by a personal visit from Steve Ballmer—and decided to migrate the company’s many thousands of users to the cloud. However, the decision was made before the review, input or approval by any of the company’s IT architects. After their review was completed, the company concluded that more than one-half of its key requirements could not be satisfied by BPOS, and so the migration of email was put on hold, although the company is migrating SharePoint to the Microsoft cloud.</li> </ul> <p>While completely unrelated events, one of the key themes running through both meetings was the importance of very good planning for large companies migrating to the cloud, whether public or private. Clearly, the cloud is where much of messaging and collaboration will migrate over the coming years, and for good reason—it allows better allocation of resources, lower costs, greater efficiency, etc. However, for large organizations every aspect and nuance of the messaging and cloud experience needs to be thought through very carefully, particularly in the context of security and application support. Yet, many key decision makers are not doing so with enough rigor or input from key stakeholders, and without sufficient consideration of every ramification of a wholesale move to the cloud.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Why It’s Important to Double-Check Industry Rumors</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:07:29 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/why-it-s-important-double-check-industry-rumors" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/why-it-s-important-double-check-industry-rumors" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/why-it-s-important-double-check-industry-rumors" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>Over the weekend, I heard from a friend that Messaging Architects was going out of business. This rumor was based on a comment attributed to someone at Novell about the expiration of their licensing with MA. I checked out the rumor with both MA and Novell and found the following:</p> <ul> <li>Messaging Architects is alive and well, they are profitable, and they are seeing growth in both software and service sales.</li> <li>The rumor was borne out of an expired license resulting from the transition of Novell’s IT to ACS, but the license was immediately replaced by a temporary one from MA’s support team.</li> <li>A senior person at Novell had also heard the rumor, but knows nothing of its origin.</li> <li>A senior person at MA told me I was the only one that had checked with them about the rumor.</li> </ul> <p>Three takeaways from this:</p> <ul> <li>Rumors might or might not be true, but they always need to be checked with people in the know to avoid coming to erroneous conclusions.</li> <li>During times of change, as we’re seeing with the transition of Novell to new ownership and a <strong><em>perception</em></strong> by some that the future of GroupWise is unclear, it’s critical for everyone to work even more closely together to share information and build confidence. Just as economies suffer when there is a lack of confidence, so do companies and brands.</li> <li>GroupWise continues to have a strong and active partner community in MA, GWAVA and many other companies that are actively seeking the success of Novell and GroupWise.</li> </ul> </article> <article> <h1>In Search of a More Intelligent Messaging System</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:47:28 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/search-more-intelligent-messaging-system" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/search-more-intelligent-messaging-system" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/search-more-intelligent-messaging-system" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>I had a good discussion with <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Andrew_Barnes"><a href="http://twitter.com/Andrew_Barnes">@Andrew_Barnes</a></a> last week about the evolution of email and messaging in general. We discussed a column I had written a few years ago about a truly intelligent messaging system, which I have rewritten and updated here with some additional thoughts on where I would like to see messaging go.</p> <p>Today, most of us can be contacted, or have files or information sent to us, using any number of addresses or contact numbers. In my own case, I have a corporate email address; a calendar; multiple personal email addresses; a fax number; a corporate telephone number; a personal telephone number; a mobile number; accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+; a corporate postal address; a personal postal address; several instant messaging handles; a Dropbox address; a YouSendIt account; an account for the online document repository for our annual service subscribers; as well as various other accounts. For the most part, these services are separate and do not share information, nor is there any sort of policy applied to how, when and why they are used.</p> <p>Now, imagine that I had only a single point of contact, such as my email address, and a management/policy engine that managed my interactions with people, data, calendars, physical addresses, etc. For example:</p> <ul> <li>I could establish a policy that traditional email communications would go to my email inbox and be tagged appropriately: urgent, normal, business, personal, etc. Urgent emails could be turned into a text message or a voice call to my corporate, personal or mobile phone based on time of day or where my calendar said I should be. Invitations could be turned into calendar entries to await my approval, but invitations for appointments within the next 12 hours would be sent to me as a text message or instant message.</li> <li>Any files that were sent to me would automatically go to the appropriate online document repository and I would receive a notification based on their urgency and content: an email for non-urgent communications, a text message for urgent content, etc. Moreover, all content would be scanned and archived appropriately.</li> <li>Voice calls would be sent to the appropriate device (corporate desk phone, personal phone, mobile phone) based on the sender, urgency of the content, the time of day or my location.</li> <li>The management engine would know my calendar, location and transit status (moving or stationary) and would notify me appropriately: my mobile would never ring with an urgent message while I was in a meeting, while driving or when I was in a theatre unless it was from my wife or daughter, for example.</li> <li>Social media content would be scanned for information that was relevant to me and I would be notified appropriately based on the timeliness of the information, the author, the subject, etc. For example, a Twitter post extolling the virtues of the Eggs Benedict at the Four Seasons in London would simply post to my Twitter account, but the post ‘Apple and Microsoft to merge’ would be sent as a text message to my mobile.</li> <li>Text messages sent to my mobile could be received as text messages if they were urgent or received only as emails if they were merely informational.</li> <li>Faxes could be sent to me as an email based on their content, or relevant information from the fax could be culled and sent as a text message if it was urgent.</li> <li>The system would attempt to contact me about urgent issues until I had responded in some way.</li> <li>In addition, and in rare cases, I could designate that some types of attachments be printed automatically and mailed via postal services.</li> </ul> <p>Such a system would benefit recipients because the right information would be received on the right device in a coordinated fashion, and all communication could be received via a single interface. A system like this would also benefit the sender, since he or she could send any content to a single address with a greater assurance that the information would be received on the right device, at the right time and with the appropriate level of urgency.</p> <p>Some of the capabilities I’ve described above exist today—and the technology to manage all of this certainly does—but we have a long way to go in terms of building truly cohesive messaging systems that will enable this type of seamless communication.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Some Thoughts on Steve Jobs’ Legacy</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:47:19 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-steve-jobs-legacy" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-steve-jobs-legacy" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/some-thoughts-steve-jobs-legacy" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>It’s difficult to see a reference to Steve Jobs’ passing yesterday without also seeing the word “visionary” within a few words of his name—and rightly so, because he truly was a visionary, the likes of whom we see only a few times each century.</p> <p>But let’s consider what Jobs did from a purely economic standpoint:</p> <ul> <li>His vision, passion and hard work created tens of thousands of jobs (roughly 50,000 people work for Apple), all of which provide employees with discretionary income to contribute to a variety of causes.</li> <li>In FY2010 Apple generated $65.2 billion in revenue and paid $4.5 billion in corporate income taxes, not to mention the personal income taxes paid by its employees and the sales taxes paid by its customers.</li> <li>When Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, its adjusted stock price was $3.28 per share (as of 12/31/1997); the stock price on the day of his passing was $378.25, helping to fund the retirement accounts for tens of thousands of investors.</li> <li>The technology and design for which he is responsible has generated entire industries that themselves produce enormous amounts of employee income, retirement income and tax revenue.</li> </ul> <p>Jobs did his work almost without reference to himself or his politics. He was responsible for creating more wages, more wealth and more tax revenue than the vast majority of politicians. Instead of trying to change his world by running for office or marching through city streets or bloviating about what <em>should</em> be done, he simply went out and did what <em>could</em> be done. While he probably did little direct volunteer work, his indirect contribution to charities and other laudable efforts around the globe are incalculable. In short, his work and vision and passion were more responsible for helping others than those who talk about helping, but do little to make it happen.</p> <p>Jobs will be sorely missed in many ways, not least of which is the economic impact he had on the world around him.</p> </article> <article> <h1>How Will You Know When It’s OK Not to Fear the Cloud?</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:04:19 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/how-will-you-know-when-it-s-ok-not-fear-cloud" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/how-will-you-know-when-it-s-ok-not-fear-cloud" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/how-will-you-know-when-it-s-ok-not-fear-cloud" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>Many decision makers are fearful of moving any—or at least all—of their users to cloud-based email, collaboration, storage and other services. Their concerns focus on a variety of issues, including the security of their data when stored in remote data centers, the security of data in-transit between their firewall and these data centers, their ability to retrieve data when required, the government’s potential access to their data, the uptime provided by cloud providers, and other issues.</p> <p>To an extent, these concerns have some grounding in reality. Some cloud providers don’t have a stellar record of uptime. Some don’t make it particularly easy to retrieve data on demand. Some might not encrypt data as rigorously as they could. To be sure, there are lots of very good providers that keep data highly secure, but the concerns still linger.</p> <p>This raises two important issues, and several questions, that any decision maker should consider:</p> <ul> <li>How will you know when the cloud—or a particular provider—is sufficiently safe to earn your trust? In other words, what are the metrics that you will use to decide if a particular provider meets your requirements for adequate protection of your content or if they provide enough uptime? Have you even established these metrics? If not, when and how will you develop them?</li> <li>Have you applied these standards to your own, on-premise infrastructure with the same rigour? That is, do you encrypt all of your content between remote locations and your firewall? Is the content stored on your on-premise servers sufficiently protected from access by unauthorized parties inside of your organization? Is your content protected from intrusion by external parties as you demand from cloud-based providers? What sort of uptime does your on-premise system provide?</li> </ul> <p>The bottom line is that decision makers should be concerned about content security, uptime, unauthorized access to data and other important issues. However, they should be just as concerned about their on-premise infrastructure—and they should be asking the same questions of internal IT as they do of cloud providers.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Being Part of the Underclass…and What You Should Do about It</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:02:29 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/being-part-underclass-and-what-you-should-do-about-it" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/being-part-underclass-and-what-you-should-do-about-it" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/being-part-underclass-and-what-you-should-do-about-it" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p>There’s an interesting <a href="http://adrianshort.co.uk/2011/09/25/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it/">post</a> on Adrian Short’s blog about the “Web underclass”—those of use who use free Web services and have no control over the content that we post, how it is used, how we can retrieve it, etc. In essence, Adrian is saying there are three tiers of a Web experience:</p> <ul> <li>If you pay for a domain, you own and control the content and experience.</li> <li>If you pay to use services on someone else’s domain, you’re a renter.</li> <li>If you use a free Web service, you’re a guest subject to the whims of the owner.</li> </ul> <p>He makes a good point. While there are many good free Web services that provide significant value in a personal and business context, there are a number of serious risks that business decision makers should take into account when opting to run some aspects of their business using these free services, whether they intentionally do so or do so implicitly by not having policies or technologies in place to manage them.</p> <p>Expanding on that theme, here are some questions that any organization’s decision makers should ask about their business operations:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Should we use Facebook to market our company?</strong><br /> Doing so can provide enormous exposure, but it also has some downsides that should be seriously considered, such as the presentation of your company information alongside adverts over which you have no control. For example, Infiniti of Chicago’s Facebook page that I’m viewing as I write this is presented along with adverts for the University of Phoenix, Seattle’s Lecosho restaurant, an SAP certification program and a company that can re-level and raise concrete floors—all good organizations, I’m sure, but these are offers attuned to Facebook’s perception of my needs and location, not Infiniti of Chicago’s.</li> <li><strong>Should we use Twitter or other free social media tools instead of deploying a private social network?<br /> </strong>Again, Twitter is extremely useful, but it has some downsides: Twitter maintains a (sort of) archive of old tweets, but they are not obligated to do so; your employees can post anything they want to the world without any sort of controls unless you have deployed technology to monitor their behavior; and you are exposed to the potential for malware infiltration through short URLs, again unless you have deployed technology to protect your company.</li> <li><strong>Should we allow the use of free Dropbox accounts to share and store content?<br /> </strong>Again, Dropbox is a great tool, but one with a less-than-perfect record for securing content, and they offer no guaranteed service levels or content preservation.</li> <li><strong>For small businesses, should you use free Hotmail or Yahoo! accounts as your email address?<br /> </strong>Again, nothing wrong with these services per se, but you lose not only an advertising opportunity when you don’t use your own domain, but you also lose the ability to transport your email capabilities to other providers and you have less control over your own content when you don’t use your own domain.</li> </ul> <p>The issue here, whether you’re a huge multinational or a mom-and-pop operation, is to carefully consider the right balance between cost and control when it comes to the communication, social media, content management and other capabilities you need to run your business.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Should You Have Email-free Days?</h1> <p>Michael Osterman — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:10:44 +0000</p> <div class="fb-social-like-widget"><fb:like href="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/should-you-have-email-free-days-0" send="false" layout="box_count" show_faces="false" width="55" action="like" font="arial" colorscheme="light"></fb:like></div><div class="tweetbutton"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="messagingnews" data-related="messagingnews:News and trends on the latest in business email and messaging technology, including email & web security, virtualization, e-Disc" data-text="" data-counturl="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/should-you-have-email-free-days-0" data-url="http://www.messagingnews.com/osterman/michael-osterman/should-you-have-email-free-days-0" data-lang="en">Tweet</a></div><p><a href="http://www.essential.co.uk/">Essential</a> has posted an interesting blog entry about <a href="http://www.rhondda-cynon-taf.gov.uk/Index.aspx">Rhondda Cynon Taff (RCT) Homes</a>, the largest landlord in Wales, with regard to their decision to have an email-free day once per week. The goal of this initiative is to help RCT employees understand that email is not always the best way to communicate with others, and that other forms of communications—such as face-to-face meetings or telephone calls—might be more appropriate than relying solely on email. RCT has gone so far as to implement technology that will enable management to determine if their program is effective by monitoring email traffic before and after its email-free days, as well as compliance with the rule on those days. You can read more about the initiative <a href="http://www.essential.co.uk/knowledge/newsitem.php?news%3D34">here</a>.</p> <p>Should there be email free days? While the decision is certainly laudable because it represents management’s desire to improve the sense of community and the quality of communications and interaction within RCT, I believe it’s the wrong approach for two reasons:</p> <ol> <li>Email is simply a tool for communications, content transfer and recordkeeping—and a very useful one at that. While it’s true that some may become too reliant on email and neglect their obligations to interact with other employees, customers and others on a more personal basis, that’s not a good reason to ban email one day per week. Let’s say you were a general contractor and you found that your carpenters were not only nailing the frame of the house together as they should, but were also nailing the hinges to the doors and door jambs instead of screwing them in. Your response could be a hammer-free day once per week to drive home the point that hammers and nails are being used excessively, or you could provide training on a better way to install doors—and electric screwdrivers.</li> <li>While useful, email should not be the only tool that people use. However, instead of banning email for certain periods, I believe it’s critical for management to undertake a program to implement additional tools to improve communication and collaboration. This might include encouraging more personal interaction, but it should also include deploying social media, collaboration, real time messaging, document management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing and other technologies that will enable employees to have the right tools available to do their work. For example, a social media tool might be the best way to notify employees about a just-published article that is relevant to the corporate policy. A document management tool with good version control capabilities might be the best tool for groups of users to create and modify a document. An instant messaging tool might be the best way to find a subject-matter expert for a time-sensitive customer inquiry. Web conferencing could be the right tool for quick brush-ups when training seasoned employees.</li> </ol> <p>In short, corporate IT and business management needs to implement tools that will enable employees to complete their work in the most efficient way possible while striking the right balance between efficiency, community and camaraderie. Simply banning email one day per week, in my opinion, is the wrong approach because it does not require management to be sufficiently proactive about solving the problems that it perceives email has caused.</p> </article> </main></body></html>