BusinessTechFeed

A Bad Week for Data Loss – Danger and a bite from Apple

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:54:49 +0000

It is a bad week for data loss. First, Sidekick, or more specifically Danger (owned and run by Microsoft and operating the service for T-Mobile) lost a large amount of user data. People have warned about the Sidekick service for a while. Essentially, data is stored in the cloud, and not on the device. A storage network migration went (very) wrong, and Microsoft / Danger lost millions of Sidekick users’ data.

A bug has also emoerged in the latest version of Apple’s OS X, So the problem isn’t just with cloud services. This from the Guardian:

Apple has admitted that its latest operating system harbours a bug that can accidentally delete data belonging to the computer’s owner. The glitch occurs when some users who upgraded to the Snow Leopard – which was released at the end of August – log into a “guest” account on their machines. When they log back in under their own name, all of the files in their home directory – such as documents, music and videos – have been deleted.

Leading to some annoyance on the Apple discussion forums. OS X does include back up software (aka “Time Machine”) which enables users with back ups to restore their data. The moral? If your data is stored in the cloud, make sure someone is responsible for back ups – either by keeping a copy on local storage, by backing up to another provider, or by ensuring that your provider is responsible for back ups – although a recent informal survey of providers Ts and Cs left me distinctly unimpressed. Most of them boiled down to “we’ll try and backup your data, but we might not, and even if we do, we are committing that we’ll get your data back” – and that was for paid back up services!

Data is still data, wherever it is. Hard drives fail and operational errors happen. An independent (and separate) back up is the best insurance you have against these failures.

MiFi – WiFi that goes with you

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:39:25 +0000

There’s a gadget that has had our interest for a little while now. The first encounter was in St James’ Park, where this wallet sized device was enabling the real-time uploading of photos in the middle of a picnic. Vodafone has now launched the Novatel Wireless Intelligent Mobile Hotspot 2352 – or MiFi to its friends – available on a data package from now.

Best described as a Mobile Broadband Hotspot, the MiFi acts as an 802.11 (WiFi) access point for up to five devices, which it then connects to the Internet via a mobile data connection – the MiFi has a SIM card tucked away in the battery compartment. In our trials, the device lasts up to 4 hours on a single charge, which is reasonably impressive for an access point. It is small and light (it tucks easily into a pocket in a jacket or a bag). Switch on, then fire up your laptop/iPod Touch/WiFi device of choice and surf the net anywhere up to 10 metres away from where the MiFi has been put down.

The MiFi supports a reasonable selection of 802.11 security features, to limit its use to selected devices, where that is a requirement. It also supports a MicroSD card (which can be up to 16GB), enabling local file sharing via a web interface. A very nice additional feature that boosts its usefulness on the road. The connection speeds (via the mobile network ) are up to 5.7 Mbps on the uplink and 7.2 Mbps on the downlink, which puts it firmly in the broadband space, with very attractive upload speeds too.

Initially the MiFi is available from Vodafone in Germany, Romania and Spain. The device seems a good fit for:

Mobile teams – enabling collaboration and share data access.
Road warriors with more than one device requiring mobile data access.
Small group meetings in venues without WiFi.
Telemetry/mobile monitoring with WiFi enabled sensors.
Backup connectivity for small offices that are WiFi/DSL based.

Embedding a Flickr Gallery in a Wordpress Post

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 02:58:18 +0000

One of the great things about social media and web 2.0 tools is just how easy it is to take content from one place and put it in to another – it is also why it so terrifies many it traditionalists.

This screencast shows how to take a image gallery from photo sharing site Flickr and place it into a Wordpress blog post. The screen cast itself is embedded from Jing/Screencast.com to this site (which is a Wordpress blog – did you see what I did there?).

Click here to view – it is a large file (40Meg) so may take a while on a slow connection.

Note: This method assumes that you have a Wordpress blog hosted on an independent server, rather than the free Wordpress.com service. If you want to know more about getting set up on your own domain with progress, do get in contact. If you are on the wordpress.com service, you need to use the vodpod feature and embed the flash file from there.

Twitter’s Bitter Lesson – What You Should Know

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:32:11 +0000

The ‘Twitter Hack’ is all over the blogosphere, although it isn’t really a hack on Twitter as such. An individual (or team) going by the name “Hacker Croll” gained access to the personal accounts of Twitter employees and associates, according to an email from Evan Williams (@EV – Twitter founder).

Based on the screen shots circulating the web, it would appear that admin staff at Twitter were using gmail for sensitive activities such as domain name administration – this meant that the hacker could potentially have used their access to redirect Twitter.com to a malicious site. Of course this is all great blogging fodder for the likes of TechCrunch, which is clearly enjoying baiting its readers. I don’t see that publishing Twitter’s company confidential information on a blog helps anyone, other than gaining traffic for the blog that posts it.

The fall out will inevitably be harmful to Twitter. It isn’t the first security incident associated with the darling of the web, and I know of other breaches of confidentiality that have happened, but not made it in to the public domain yet. Twitter needs to tidy up its act.

Key take aways:

Don’t send company confidential information over low-security email.

Public email services tend to send data over straight http, rather than https. This makes unencrypted data vulnerable to snooping on public LANs and WiFi hot spots.
Don’t forward (or allow to be forwarded) ‘corporate’ email accounts to public services. Yes, I know it is a pain, but the risks far outweigh the benefits. “Personal” and “business” email are best separated for a whole list of reasons.
Email can be the weakest link in a number of situations. Don’t use public email services for critical administration functions like account resets, domain name administration and the like.
Password recovery mechanisms can be gamed to escalate a hacker’s access. If someone has access to your email, what else can they gain access to?

Don’t store more in email that you need to.

Modern day inboxes have turned into huge document repositories. This isn’t a good thing.
Yes, gmail is wonderful, in that I can access emails from years ago. However, is that a risk as well as a benefit?
“Delete nothing” is great for information discovery, but turns against you the second an email account is compromised.
With IMAP-style email access giving the ability to neatly place emails into folders, it becomes all too tempting to store passwords in the mail archive. Many on-line systems (foolishly) email the new user’s ID and password to the user. Filed into a folder, or left undeleted in ‘trash’, these are a gold mine for a hacker. DELETE THEM. Change your password and tell the site involved not to email passwords. Ever.

WordPress 2.8 Release – Baker Hits the Street

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:24:15 +0000

Automattic, the team behind blogging platform WordPress have announced the release of version 2.8 of the platform. Code named “Baker”, in the tradition of the platform’s jazz inspired naming, the release focusses on making the blogging experience even simpler than before, whilst adding over 180 new features.

2.8 builds on the developments that lead to the plugin browser, to add a theme browser into the WordPress interface. It enables you to search the WordPress theme directory, without leaving your wordpress blog. Tick box selection narrows down the theme choices from the thousands of free themes available. I’m not yet clear on how this will work for commercially supported themes, important to businesses that are blogging. Most businesses have a custom developed theme, so this will most likely not be an issue.

The release also adds syntax highlihting into the theme editor, which makes it much easier to customise themes and will be a boon for developers. Widgets have been enhanced at multiple levels too, starting with the interface to them. There is a lot more control over how you can interact with them, together with support for multiple instances of a single widget, and a drag and drop interface to allow you to move widgets from one column to another. Again, this makes site customisation much simpler, and will cut down on the amount of coding required. There is also an “inactive widgets” pen, to save customisations of widgets for later use. This is a big improvement over the old interface, which simply lost customisations.

A Widget API has been added to simplfiy the widget development process, which will hopefully enhance the number and quality of widgets available for the platform. The administration interface is generally easier to customise, for example enabling changes to the number of columns and items per page, and scaling the page with the browser window. These features build on the improvements delivered in 2.7. There are some speed optimizations too, to speed up the process of blogging.

All in all, another step forward for the usability and flexibility of the WordPress platform, which is growing from strength to strength, particularly as it starts to eat into the CMS application space.

Twitter Business? Business Twitter.

Better Targetting – Imagini’s VisualDNA

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:59:13 +0000

Today Imagini launched the VisualDNA Shops Beta. Behavioural Targeting is an increasingly hot area. On-line advertising models have a direct lineage from the off-line print world. Although the broad range of digital media enables marketing to be more targeted, most advertising is still based on a broadcast style model – everyone gets the same advert.

What if a web site had enough information about a visitor that it could target ads towards a specific user? Arguably this is better for the user (less irrelevant adverts) and better for the advertiser (better yields from each ad). The sensitivity – and sometimes the controversy – is how that additional information is gathered.

VisualDNA takes a more visible (quite literally) approach to gathering data. Visitors chose from a selection of images. The result of their selections are saved as their ‘VisualDNA’. This is then used to provide more product recommendations from the VisualDNA store. The process is fast and just requires a few mouse clips. I’m trying it out in a couple of spots on some blogs and will track the results with interest. Having tried the camera shop, it figured me out as a Techno Pro pretty quickly. I have a few beta invites, so if you would like to try it out on a blog, go to http://shops.visualdna.com and click “Create a shop”. You will be prompted for an access code – enter benjaminellisvisualdnashop and you should be off.

The VisualDNA store so far include a camera shop, gadget shop, mum and baby shop, phone shop, travel shop, computer shop, and entertainment shop. The shops exist as a widget that allows bloggers and web publishers to embed the function into existing sites, to provide personalised product recommendations. It also provides a new way to monetise traffic, with a percentage of every purchase made through the widget being paid back to the site or blog.

The shops are currently built upon Amazon.com. Imagini plans to also include products from sites such as eBay and Shopping.com in the coming weeks. The technology has a broad range of potential applications, but this first one should build the profile of VisualDNA in the Blogging community, which will be no bad thing for the company’s profile. There are product overviews on the VisualDNAshops site, voiced by none other than Stephen Fry.

Start ups – Get out of my Cloud

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:24:45 +0000

This Tuesday’s TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event included a presentation by Joe Drumgoole, “get of of my cloud.” It probably steered between too technical for non-tech folks and not technical enough for the techies. Launching a start up on a cloud infrastructure makes good economic sense – it’s a success-based cost model. The same holds true for start up projects inside of larger businesses.

However, Joe advised some caution, per transaction costs can kill you (this is ironic given that the concept of “Free” – so popular with the Web 2.0 world – is based on infinitely low transaction costs). Remember, with cloud computing, you can’t touch the hardware or see it, so monitoring is more important, he mentioned Nagios and Monitis which are great packages for doing just that.

Another big issue with Cloud Computing is the data problem – it takes a while to get data up, even if you have lots of bandwidth. That means it takes a while to get your data out in a hurry. You also have to deal with high latency, compared to working with servers on site.

The dynamics of programing in the cloud is transaction based, so you need to be thinking dollars. Poor programming costs you real money, so unit tests need to include a cost value. Security also needs to be at the forefront of what you do. Joe described the “The Britney Spears Problem “- you can’t expose your end user data to risk. Client side encryption will be needed in the long-term, but is a usability challenge right now.

In summary cloud computing is a great adjunct, but don’t get rid of your main servers just yet. Be ready to deploy to any other grid at speed, so that you have a recovery plan. Also, watch those transaction costs.

Here is a talk on Cloud Computing by Larry Ellison (of Oracle – who are set to acquire Sun):

CloudForce – SalesForce.com Jumps about in the Clouds

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:52:36 +0000

Today was CloudForce in London – SalesForce.com’s big event, which is touring the world, and touted as “your chance to get the insight you need to take advantage of cloud computing and salesforce.com applications in 2009.” And that’s probably where the problem starts. There wasn’t much cloud on show, at least not cloud computing as I understand it.

They had me in the palm of their hand. I was waiting to be wowed. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s highly energetic Chairman and CEO took to the stage and had at it like a fervent preacher, although one who’d slightly forgotten his gospel, having to glance down at his autocue as he stumbled over customer and competitor names, but that didn’t dim his obvious passion for what SaleForce.com had to offer. SalesForce.com has done a great job of selling to sales people. It is an excellent pipeline management tool for sales managers, and dashboard provider for exec teams, and I’ve used it successfully from both of those angles in the past.

However, during the day, salesforce was promoted as a customer service management tool, a financial data management tool, a content management tool and a social media monitoring tool. That’s a big stretch from where they started. Add to that, a firm claim on the cloud space. Benioff said that they had been “talking cloud” for ten years.

Salesforce.com is certainly evolving from a SaaS-based CRM provider, where it has done well, to a PaaS (platform as a service) provider. That puts it on a direct collision course with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft’s emerging Azure platform, as well as Google’s very own App engine. Those are big players, one’s that know their apples and pears.

During the morning Benioff made a big play about their ‘live demos’ and that’s where the wheels came off for me. Not in the demos themselves, they were super slick and flawless, almost too good to believe. And indeed they were. Orange was touted as a major customer, with 10,000 Orange customers claimed to be using SalesForce.com’s Facebook monitoring application. The problem was, the orange customer service twitter account used in the ‘live demo’ was a fake, as Redmonk’s James Governer discovered after tweeting about it (tweets in reverse chronological order):

And digging into the account they used as the example customer, well, that was a fake too, as you can see from their stream:

2 updates, 4 followers. In fact there’s a veritable ecosystem of fake accounts around ddbenson. Now, I have nothing against demos with dummy accounts. I’ve done the occasional one myself. Sometimes needs must, and they are important to protect people’s privacy, but when you do them, call them as such. Both James and I had asked our Twitter followers if they had any experience of interacting with Orange customer services via twitter. That’s a good few thousand people between the two of us. The answer? Nothing. Not a sausage. And why would there be? If Facebook asked you to install a SalesForce.com app into your profile would you? No, you probably wouldn’t. I even trawled Facebook trying to find this mystery app, but couldn’t see anything with more than 40 users. I’m clearly missing something here, since the Facebook integration was heavily promoted during the day.

There was much talk of how great SalesForce.com is, what wonderful things they do and their commitment to ‘the social contract’ (and their 1:1:1 model) and heavy claims for their social media credentials. A fair few people left during the keynote session, some tweeting their departure, and there was a general shuffling of feet around me as the pitch went on.

The sales pitch just didn’t seem to be connecting with those around me. Sure, the bloggers and journalists were comfortable at their big desks, with coffee and Ethernet connections, but talking to the customers and potential new SalesForce.com users in the pews, there seemed to be a general disquiet. “How am I going to use this for my support organisation?” asked one attendee, “the maintenance windows don’t allow me to run 24/7″. And indeed, while SalesForce.com proclaims >99.9% (the same uptime as this web hosting provider), that doesn’t include the scheduled maintenance windows, when they do their software upgrades. That’s the “No software” company’s software upgrades.

They are certainly transparent about system availability, with a real-time view of their operations, although that is fairly standard for a large service provider these days.

no software dude hugs me at cloudforce 09 on 12seconds.tv

Now, maybe I’m just smarting because I didn’t get hugged by the no software guy, but maybe that was because he was keeping his distance. I wanted to ask about the software the sales team had to run on their Blackberries to use SalesForce.com. I wanted to ask about the iPhone software from SalesForce.com. I wanted to know if they were going to support the Nokia platform that I happen to like, and what their plans were for Windows Mobile. Lots of software to ask about.

Anyway, you can watch the whole keynote - the SalesForce.com team got the content up quickly. I’ll write more about the new features just as soon as I have checked them out.

Letting MOSS Grow Under Your Feed – SharePoint UG

Benjamin Ellis — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:26:15 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a London SharePoint user group meeting at Microsoft’s offices in Victoria London. Michael Noel of Convergent Computing gave an excellent overview of building the perfect SharePoint farm.

Michael is one of the authors of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, and well know for his SharePoint expertise. He did a walkthrough of build process, from best practices perspective, covering small deployments with all SharePoint roles and SQL server on the same server, though SharePoint roles on a a single box, with SQL server on separate box, to a fully redundant set up with multiple query servers and an index server. That set up requires 5 servers, and is the smallest redundant farm configuration.

For larger user populations, SharePoint scales using multiple web role servers, query server, etc… That also provides the opportunity to have a production farm and an independent test/development set up. That can either be achieved with additional dedicated servers, or by making use of server virtualization. Microsoft server licensing allows for up to 4 instances of a virtual host on a server. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is an excellent option and cost effective, according to a number of conversations during the evening. Third party virtualisation is supported as well - see Knowledge Base Article 897615 – including VMware and Citrix XenServer. Michael’s advice was that not all roles should be virtualised, although the best candidate for virtualisation is the web frontend.

In anything but a smaller set up, the SQL database role requires a large amount of space, especially if versioning is turned on in document libraries (resulting in every version being stored). Likewise, reasonable hard drive space needs to be allocated to the index and query services. Given the continual fall off in hard disk storage costs, and increasing capacities, this shouldn’t present an issue in most deployments.

Michael suggested that the more memory and processor cores that can be given to SharePoint the better, in the following priority: the Database Role, the Index Role and lastly the Web/Query Role.

Something else to bear in mind is that 64 bit computing is now truly upon us, and a server refresh needs to be part of your strategic IT planning if you plan on running the latest Microsoft applications. The next version of SharePoint is x64 bit only. SQL Server 2008 is recommend, especially if you require transparent encryption of databases for security (although that should only apply to high compliance environments).

There is relatively little complexity to the network-level security for SharePoint. Opening port 1433 on the firewall to let the SQL server talk to SharePoint servers is required, important if you are using the built in Windows firewall capability. Michael gave a number of recommendations for setting up accounts, and they are covered in the slides and the book.

Some analysts weren’t so convinced about SharePoint’s Web content Management capabilities (at least back in 2007), but things have moved on a great deal. There are third party applications to enhance search, provide backup management and also SharePoint-aware anti-virus products. From the begining of April SharePoint Designer will be free, and there may well be some new tools too.

Something to remember with SharePoint is that it is a tool, and tools can be used badly as well as effectively. It isn’t uncommon to come across SharePoint installations that have turned into hundreds of information pockets, rather than an enterprise-wide collaboration tool. All too often, IT staff end up structuring set ups around organisational groups, rather than functional teams. The two things are very different, and achieve different results.

From my perspective, business should be careful not to use SharePoint to replicate departmental silos. Instead, it should be used to ensure that data and resources are both discoverable and protected.

The evening ended with a very extensive Q&A. If you want to develop your SharePoint skills, you might want to check out the April best practices conference. A number of tools that were discussed during the evening will be demonstrated there. Check out the site for details of the London conference.

SharePoint has certainly caught my interest again with its growing feauture set. There is still a long way to go for it to catch up with some of the more mature wiki systems, but the gap is definitely closing.

On The Way to Unified Communications – with Avaya

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:29:59 +0000

Recently I met up with Christopher Barrow at Avaya’s Guildford offices to talk through Avaya’s latest moves, and the evolving world of communications enabled business processes. Chris is an Avaya old hand, having been with the company through its many iterations, most recently as Product Marketing Manager for Avaya in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. We talked about the state of collaboration technology, from the use of solutions like Sharepoint to managing with mobiles in the enterprise.

Avaya’s focus is increasingly on unifying the user experience, from the desk phone to the mobile phone, from the office to the road. Avaya views workers as existing across one of four solution domains, based on in-office or remote, and fixed or mobile: the desk based worker, the tele-worker, the mobile worker (on-site, but no desk) and the road warrior. It is a nice segmentation, and one that proves useful in understanding employee needs.

Recent licensing changes by Avaya mark a shift in how the solutions are sold. Essentially, rather than the old model of buying a number of licenses for each of the different modes, you can now purchase one license per worker to cover all of the modes. That means you don’t have to worry about changes in the split of your workforce, which will make life easier for IT departments and Human Resources alike. I suspect that it also reflects increasingly dynamic work places, as businesses continue to adopt modern working practices, the working styles in use are changing.

The in-premise mobile workers are addressed with Voice over WiFi, while off-site workers make use of Avaya’s 1x capabilities to reduce mobile costs and provide a single telephone number. The functionality effectively extends the PABX out to wherever the user is. Interestingly, Chris sees more use of privately owned mobiles by employees.

The Avaya solution enables separation of business and personal calls and costs, together with the ability to set up a “business profile” on the user’s mobile handset. This means IT departments can integrate user-provided mobiles with the corporate phone system, something that is becoming increasingly common as mobile phone choice becomes more of a fashion statement than a technology choice. The solution’s text to speech and speech to text functionality allow a reasonable degree of hands-free use whilst on the move – from looking up an employee’s number, to reading the subject of an urgent email.

Telephony is becoming less and less of a stand alone application, with Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, as well as Avaya, pushing unified communications. From click-to-call desktop applications, to email integration, this is the future of the phone system. Despite Microsoft’s wrangles with the OCS APIs, Ayava still integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft software environment. I’ll tackle that topic, together with some case studies, in part II.

Britannic Technologies – Convergence in Communications

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:38:05 +0000

A little while back Britannic Technologies held their 5th Annual Convergence Summit. The wonderful surroundings of Mercedes-Benz World, in Surrey, provided a high tech back drop to a very high tech day. There were a number of guest speakers and I’ll call out some noteworthy points they made:

Niall Anderson – CMO Global Crossing – gave some background on GC (see here and GC have blogs here).

Tim Stone – Cisco - cited Forrester’s study, which identified collaboration as a key critical success factor. He listed the following drivers:

Business/financial – globallization, scale -> speed, productivity.
Legal – compliance/governance, policy, security.
Technological – continuus connectivity, real-time info, web2.0, SaaS.
Societal – green, mobility, consumer-driven.

With SaaS and Web 2.0 seen as growing and disruptive – something I’d heartily agree with. He also provided some comfort to the gather IT crowd in the form of Gartner’s view of continued IT spending growth.

Tim also suggested that the following business priorities were key:

“Save to invest” – save, then invest the saving in getting more savings.
Unlock employee potential – which I’d put in the productivity bucket.
Drive true customer intimacy.
Distance yourself from your competitors.

And that technology would enable the transition to a borderless business… with employees working across the silos within the business and beyond. Technology had to meet the following demands to achieve this:

Employee needs: why can’t i work form home. let me use a mac…. “The New Workspace”.
Partners - give me equal access.
Customers – give me faster better services. Let me contribute.
Business leaders – transform our customers, transform the world.

“The network is the platform for colaboration” is a convenient phrase for Cisco, but it is increasingly one that rings true, with video conferencing, unified communications and Web 2.0 based social applications. Cisco see teleprescence generating as much trafic as the whole of today’s Internet – quite a scary thought. They see the future IT architecture as a mixture of on-premises and SaaS with an API layer above it it. The would provided “the unified workspace” with collaboration applications: Cisco apps, partner apps, customer apps. Note that Cisco position Webex as SaaS (see earlier post).Cisco are focussing their efforts on adding intelligence into the network, and that has been their differentiation strategy for quite a while.

Tim touched on the ‘green IT’ issue, and talked about the Cisco eco board, responsible for: power steering comitte (reducing power consumption inc power consumptions of power). “98% of emmisions are not from IT… look elsewhere for savings” he said. My perspective is that IT can actually tackle those issues with things like intelligent buildings and collaboration apps, so I’m not sure I’m on the same page there. 50% of world emissions come from buildings. Tim pushing home working as an environmentally positive. The jury is out on that one (a good article here), but there are other good reasons to make sure that you have broad home-working capabilities.

Paul Butcher – President and COO of Mitel Networks – was next up, and quick to point out Mitel’s strength, especially in the UK. There are 25 million Mitel users around the world. His take on market demands was that users want to have seamless connectivity with their usual office (working from home, hotel, wifi hot spot, evenoffice functionality on their cell phones). Also that customers want to talk to a live person, a gentle knock against IVRs and speech to text systems.

Paul predicted that by 2010 we would be dealing with carbon metrics and disclosure. Something key to understand, given that 40% of the cost of running a data centre is power. He had some other interesting energy statistics:

An office = 16.4kw hours/square foot, per year.
7% of that is for lighting.
Data centre is 575kw hours/square foot, per year.
50% for IT equipment. 43% for cooling. Quite sobering.

He cited IDC’s YOU, Me and Green IT 2008 report, which suggests:

Financial savings.
Protecting the environment.
Supporting corporate values.
Regulatory requirements.
Improve the brand.

It is getting close to the point of spending more on cooling and power than on the servers he said. Reduce travel, but keep teams and business processes connected. Mitel appear to be working closely with Sun, and showed an integrated Sun Ray box and Mitel phone. A typical PC 80 use Watts, while the Sun Ray uses closer to 4 Watts. Of course you still need to factor in the power used by a display and by the servers, but it is an impressive energy saving none the less. ”Let’s talk green” said Paul. Good to hear, Paul!

Robert Jones - Avaya’s inimitable mobility/uc man was on the stage. Entertaining as ever, he cut through the marketing hype. Build a more productve work force, don’t waste time and money, he said. His 4 steps to Unified Communications:

One business number for staff - for desk phone plus mobile phone.
Location independence.
Desktop integration – drive productivity.
Presence – real time communications

Very much in-line with Avaya’s offering of course. He talked about One-X, which is a multi-leg mobile call solution. The challenge? Training mobile users to use FMC and getting them to change their habits to save money. Avaya are also launching the Intelligent Presence server, which supports XMPP and SIP simple. Most businesses haven’t yet cracked the presence problem, but it is a key productivity tool, at least for communications.

Jim Craig – Sun Microsystems – talked about the three phases of computing, comparing applications on the client, Hybrid – apps on desktop then client server (eg SAP), and display only – app on the network – SaaS, web, display protocols. The Sun Ray was the main focus, with its model of no local data and smart card login. A solid state solution, with no moving parts and low power consumption. A 76% ROI according to the Forrester TEI paper.

John Sharp – KHA continuity – rounded off the external speakers, and dealt with ICT continuity management.

Definition: “ICT continuity is the capability of the organization to plan for and respond to incidents and disruptions in order to continue ICT services at an acceptable predefined level”.

He gave an overview of BS25777 (which complements BS25999). It is a code of practice (art II), not a specification. Effectively a management systems standard (that builds on ISO27001 and ITEL v3) and will feed into ISO 27031. It outlines 6 principles: protect, detect, react, recover, operate, return. Sound stuff.

The Britannic team put on an excellent event (and I wrote that before I and some others won a prize). The business has grown from strength to strength and earned itself some very loyal customers. The day included a presentation of some of their customer case studies, but it was talking to the existing customers there that really impressed me. They had found real solutions to real business problems. IT at its best.

Behavioural Targeting

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:16:20 +0000

This is a topic those working with data are going to have to get their heads around. It’s a big topic, so best get that thinking in early. Behavioural targeting is finding initial use in the marketing space, where the ability to observe a user’s activities and adapt the advertising they are presented with increases returns quite dramatically. However, there are other applications too, from identifying children at risk and applying early intervention, to spotting employees with work-affecting issues.

Make no mistake, it is an area that is both murky and controversial. One of the shining lights in the space is Phorm – or perhaps “kicking boy” is more apt. They have had a far bit of churn in their senior management team of late. However, they were prepared to participate in a recent debate. A little while back I headed in to London for the NMK Behavioural Targeting event (very many thanks to Ian Delaney). The very distinguished panel included Guy Phillipson, CEO, IAB as chair, and included Nick Barnett, UK Commercial Director, Phorm, Rupert Staines, VP Europe, Specific Media and Ian Brown, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute. Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Member, House of Lords was due to join, but was detained in parliament (it has been rather busy there of late, and I’m not talking about the Christmas Tree going up).

The session was titled ”Behavioural Targeting: The Fire and The Fury” – although I couldn’t help noticing that the event URL was actually “behavioural-targeting-the-filth-and-the-fury”. So, why is the marketing industry pursuing this technology and why is it so controversial? You could start with the Wikipedia Definition or this FAQ from Ottawa University. Let me summarise it this way: The Internet content industry needs advertising in order to continue. Today, most websites sell less than half of their advertising inventory. People are advertising less, because advertising is becoming less affective at driving sales. No purchases, no advertisers. No advertisers, no Internet content. Using user data to adapting the advertising gets users to read more and to respond more. That is good for business. This idea is not new. The Guardian has been using certain behavioural technology on their site for some time, as have many other sites.

Most implementations use cookies, stored via the users’ web browser, to create a ‘unique id’ for each visitor. This is a number to track where the user goes, when they visit and how regularly they visit. The technology needs volume and reach to make it effective. If I see that you have read five articles on fishing, it is probably a good guess that I’ll get a better response from showing you an advert for fishing kit than I would showing you an advert asking you to sign up to an anti-blood sport campaign. A little provocative, but you can see why people are getting hot under the collar about it.

Phorm, and others, are working with the IAB, which has set up a behaviour marketing workgroup to look at the many issues around the technology. As Ian Brown rightly pointed out, this sort of tarketed ad serving has been going on since the start of the Internet. However, Phorm, and particularly their rocky trials with BT, have thrust things into the spotlight. One significant difference with Phorm is that they can collect data based on all of the sites a user visits, rather just ones within the advertising network. More than that, Phorm potentially has relationships with 3 ISPs, giving them visibility into 70% of Internet users in the UK. That has privacy activists watching their every move.

Phorm provide an explanation of their technology on their website, although it would be nicer to see this coming via validation from an independent third party. It would also be good to see similarly up front information from others, including the likes of Google. According to the organisers, they were asked to join the debate, but declined to attend.

Many users, and even IT professionals, are not aware of how much data is handed over to websites behind the scenes. I’m not the snooping kind, but even the very standard stats package I use on this site keeps track of the site you came here from, pages you visit and where you went next. It is only collected anonymously and in aggregate data, so I have no idea who you are or what you did as an individual. Most other websites collect significantly more data. Are you sitting comfortably?

The site managers, and advertisers, would argue that using this data provides users with a benefit: we get to see more relevant ads. Alan Patrick and I both pointed out that most users probably would not see that as a benefit! The issue of user benefit is an important one. Remember, we live in a country where most of us will happily surrender aspects of our privacy in exchange for a few discount vouchers – how many of us have supermarket loyalty cards? Phorm now position their solution as offering anti-phishing and malware/spyware protection – ie a user benefit. Later the discussion drifted on to the topic of the government collecting user data and monitoring, but that is an altogether different topic, although it should be noted that it isn’t a completely separate one.

A key issue raised was the nature of the relationship between the monitored user and whoever is collecting the data. You are a customer of your ISP, so you can exert pressure on them, even if that is by leaving them if you do not want behavioural data used. That isn’t the case for all users of behavioural data. It is a complex area, and not well understood. All too often users end up clicking “accept” on privacy policies and end-user license agreements that are either unread or too complex to interpret, as witnessed in the recent launch and subsequent changes around Google Chrome.

A case of surfer (and IT manager), be aware.

Why the Cloud Need Standards

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:03:51 +0000

This post carries on from CloudCamp London, and picks up one of the themes of my special guest post on James Govenor’s RedMonk blog. During the second half of the event I shepherded the “standards and interoperability” open space, alongside Matthias Kohl of Zimory. The session started off on potential standards for system images. While that sort of portability is a valid concern, there are much bigger concerns around standards within cloud computing.

The definition of ‘cloud’ computing and services is undergoing distortion on a daily basis, as vendors pile on the bandwagon, eager to ‘cloud-ify’ their wares. That’s just one of the prices of fame. Stepping away from that set of issues for a while, the critical reasons that cloud computing needs good standards can get a little lost if you get stuck down in the operation weeds. To quote myself, from the post on RedMonk, seeing as IT Knowledge exchange picked up on it:

It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind.

Let me draw some parallels with the early days of the broadband DSL market in the 90s. For many years the market for DSL was caught up in the battles between different hardware+software vendors, each out to prove that their version was better than the others. Eventually the market settled on a standard (initially ADSL). Equipment prices fell. On the face of it, not a good thing for the vendors, but actually revenues soared, as customers started to feel safe in making purchases, knowing that they were no longer reliant on a single vendor. If they needed to change providers they could. More importantly, tendering became a competitive process – something that enables a market to come alive.

The broadband market didn’t learn from this lesson for long. Soon the broadband providers, rather than the equipment vendors, were at each other’s throats, fighting for subscribers. It was the wrong battle. They fought over the 1% of users who had figured out what DSL was. Those early adopters had figured out that it would given them their downloads faster, and the providers ignored the 99% of the market who had no idea what “digital subscriber line” technology might do for them, or why on earth they might want it.

Back to the cloud. The current variations in storage architectures, database technologies and support of network features all contribute to blocking migration between services and inhibiting the market. To be fair, some of these things will end up being market wide innovations, or competitive differentiators, but for now most of them just stop development efforts being portable, and mean that there is no ‘back up’ option in the event that a provider fails. Sure, IBM are muscling in on the cloud action with their “cloud validation service“, and other kite mark efforts will attempt to validate individual providers as good fellows, but that won’t build a sustainable market. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s three day outage, and if you can’t move your application you are probably yesterday’s business.

It is unlikely that a single body will be able to standardize all of the different aspects involved in a full cloud service. Even if they could, standards bodies always struggle to keep up in rapidly developing space – I should know, I’ve suffered in enough of them. It may be that we settle on a lowest common denominator approach for now, and a core set of functionality emerges across providers. Alternatively, development tools might get smarter at providing a “write once, run anywhere” solution.

Regardless of how we get there, the cloud needs some form of standardization, so that a market can emerge and thrive. From my days working with VCs, I remember a phrase “if you haven’t got any competitors, you haven’t got a market, and you have a problem.” Right now no-one is tackling their biggest competitor in the space: Do nothing.

Expand Networks Grows WAN Optimization User Base

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:29:34 +0000

Expand Networks announced another customer win today (Wingspan Care Group)

“The pain of WAN communications continues to increase as organizations become more dispersed globally, and remote workers increase in number,” said Efi Gatmor, Chief Technical Officer of Expand. “At Expand, our goal is to solve that pain wherever it may be, with technology that has the capacity to be virtually everywhere.”

Recently I had a discussion with Michael Cucchi, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Expand. Not only have they been adding customers, but they have also added an ROI Calculator to their site (ROI calculator here). It is a web-based version of a more complex tool they use to help customers calculate the savings reaped from making more efficient use of wide area network bandwidth.

The Expand solutions enable network managers to trade CAPEX (capital costs in the form of purchasing WAN optimization boxes) against OPEX (spending less money each month on bandwidth bill from operating the network). WAN optimization has often been viewed as a trade off against bandwidth, but there are other benefits too. With Ethernet WAN services providing cheaper connectivity, it is increasingly obvious that bandwidth isn’t the only issue that affects network and application performance.

While network costs are going down, Michael pointed out that satellite bandwidth costs aren’t on the same price curve. Ethernet WAN services still have a relatively small reach, when you think about them in the context of a global business, or one with many remote sites. Traffic patterns on the network are shifting too. As well as “recreational” peer to peer traffic (read: music and video file sharing), there are a growing number of other IP applications that have peer to peer traffic patterns, for example VoIP and instant messaging. WAN optimization tools like Expand’s are looking to control traffic, as well as providing acceleration. Priority packets can be sent ahead of lower priority ones, boosting performance, and that is before any application-specific algorithms are used to reduce or accelerate the applications.

In all of this, the latency challenge remains – the speed of light isn’t changing, and that is a fundamental hard limit of the time it takes traffic to get from a data centre to a remote office. Applications are dependent on round trip time, and this is another area where WAN optimization can help. Long round trip times, due to high latency, make applications sluggish. That isn’t the only problem, because of the way that TCP works (using acknowledgement packets and sliding transmission windows), that latency can also limit the maximum bandwidth that an application can make use of. It isn’t unusual to see a high bandwidth link under used, because of high latency between a client and the server.

Digging into the Expand offering a little more, they have an interesting licensing model. Products are licensed by upstream bandwidth, that saves money if you are using large amounts of DSL, where the upstream bandwidth is more restricted. Something to bear in mind when costing out solutions. They are also doing a little bit of surfing on the virtualization wave, by providing a solution that can run inside a Virtual Machine. In general their offering seems to reach further than many of their competitors, since they have a server and desktop client. This gives more granular control, by user and application, and also reduces the amount of network hardware, where that is an issue.

The general trend towards desktop virtalization (eg VDI and see the post on VMWare), which is a server based paradigm with servers pulled back from branch into the data centre, means that network performance will become even more critical than it already is. Expand support a broad range of remote desktop protocols, supporting Sun, Citrix, HP and Microsoft solutions (and the open VNC offering).

One issue with adding additional hardware, such as WAN optimization boxes, into the network is potential negative impacts on reliability on performance for non-accelerated traffic. Expand are very conscious of this, and aim to ensure that no packet is on box for more than a 1ms and employ VRRP/HSRP redundancy protocols to deal with failure.

Expand is very strong in Satellite based networks, as well as the obvious applications in server-based computing mentioned earlier. However, businesses with large amounts of mobile traffic might want to investigate their solutions too, since the challenges are quite similar.

VMWare or is that VM Where?

CRM from Tactile goes 2.0

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:04:09 +0000

Affordable CRM took another step forward today. Tactile CRM has released version 2.0 of their CRM tool for small businesses. The new release includes a number of additional features, and some refinements of existing functionality. Clients and leads are now grouped together, under the new class of ‘organisations’ (Jake Stride of Tactile CRM describes the reasoning in this post). Tagging capabilities have now been added (examples on the Tactile blog).

Tagging makes navigating and organising large amounts of data significantly more efficient. Tactile CRM now even features a tag cloud, which makes a nice visualization to help you understand how your CRM tool is being used. As you’d expect, tags can be renamed, merges or deleted.

I’ve blogged about Tactile before and we have given it a good try out here in the office. With the latest release, the number of sales opportunities supported in the ‘Micro’ and ‘SME’ versions of the service have also been increased. The team are very excited about the new functionality. I caught up with Jake Stride via Twitter earlier today, and over the course of a few tweets he said:

“It’s great to finally release all the hardwork the team has put into Tactile CRM based on our user’s feedback & suggestions over the last couple of months. We now have powerful searching and data maintenance, which even established competitors are missing and we’re not stopping there – we’ve already started on the next set of features which will see integration with other online services and some new graphing/reporting functionality”

For those wanting to dip their toes into the CRM water, you can sign up at http://www.tactilecrm.com/signup and use the code ‘redcatco’ in the ‘Sign up Code’ box, That will enter you into a prize draw for their business plan, which is worth £420. Sounds like a good deal!

A Cloud Computing Tour – London CloudCamp

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:05:52 +0000

Last Thursday night saw the second CloudCamp in London. The first one spawned: Nailing down the Cloud – A Definition for Cloud Computing? and this one was a sell-out gig, with the venue packed to capacity.

The fact that a few hundred people came out on a cold wet London night to discuss Cloud Computing is a testimony to the growing fascination with all things cloud-like. One way or another, it is a phenomenon that will disrupt the status quo in software and service provision.

The evening kicked off with a set of speedy presentations: 5 minutes per presenter, brutally speedy. Their velocity and compactness made them hard to summarize, but let me try:

Simon Wardley, now with Canonical, was first on stage. Always an interesting presenter (I might have been biased by his love of ducks and the fact I that I was using his power supply, stealthily borrowed). Actually, the fact that I could use his power supply on my laptop is a testament to the importance of portability and the power of re-use, which was the theme of Simon’s presentation. It continued his XaaS theme from the last CloudCamp, making the case for the importance for standards. Simon also argued for the importance of transparency in cloud services (cf. recent happenings in the financial world as the result of opacity). Who owns and operates the equipment isn’t always obvious in cloud services. An immaculately timed 4 minute 59 second presentation.

Joe Bagley, CTO Europe of Quest Software, was next up, asking if the cloud is really green. Here we are, putting 20kw of power demand into a rack, then trying to keep it at 22′c. Less than 0.3% of the electricity used makes it through to the processor. Rather than looking at how much processing each watt gives, Joe argued that the new question people will ask is: for each service in use, how much energy is consumed? Server power consumption doesn’t scale linearly with use. An idle server still consumes huge amounts of power. Even so, virtualization doesn’t give the power savings many expect. Even worse, while VDI (desktop virtualization) is trendy, it moves even more processing into the datacentre and uses lots of RAM, and therefore even more energy. Then you throw away the old desktops… definitely not very green. Joe’s advice? Go green: take a hybrid approach, re-use and rethink. Oh, and make sure you get the (power) bills. (4 minutes 50 seconds).

Paul Watson, of Newcastle University, has been doing some work on behalf of Arjuna. Throw away the cloud infrastructure, or get cloud from existing infrastructure? Paul suggested that you should create a private cloud, and spread the load. Put service agreements on sharing resource in place, and then share computing resources between different departments to make efficient use of (unused) computing power. Then link that to public cloud services to cope with peak demand. Paul’s model suggests the idea of many federated clouds (both public and private) – a kind of cloud of clouds. Interesting.

Duncan Johnston-Watt, Enigmatec CTO, performed a canned demo (using Elastic fox), showing how the cloud might be used for disaster recovery. Apart from his very correct use of the work “momentary”, the demo was a little pedestrian. Thankfully Cisco’s Phil Dean hopped on stage to tell us what CIOs want from the cloud. A reminder from Phil that CIOs are seeking to be business leaders. Accord to him CIOs like Cloud’s offer of consistency for all users, service simplicity (cost and 24×7 operation) and service orientation (for business agility). They don’t like the loss of control, risk management issues (business continuity and security) or migration and hybrid operation. I found myself thinking that perhaps CIOs don’t understand Cloud Computing yet, and are still wrapped around the axle trying to understand Web 2.0. Never the less, cloud needs a business focus says Phil.

Zimory’s Philipp Huber used his commanding stage presence to talk about what pervasive cloud computing might look like. He wheeled out comparisons with the energy market. Why does the energy market run so smoothly? Multi-tier supply – energy products, distributors, resellers – and 100+ years to get where they are. Both private and commercial demand, with well educated customers, and well established infrastructure standards (fuses, plugs… ). SLAs and quality standards, operating in an open market. How does cloud computing compare? New cloud providers emerging daily. Increasing demand, but driven by early adopters. The early majority still has major concerns about security and stability. Standards are emerging, but still not providing a seamless experience. Full interoperability is still “in the clouds” – fundamentally it works against the cloud producers, since it reduces stickiness. Billing models need to be transparent between clouds too, and easy to understand – again, something that might not be immediately attractive to providers.

Rhys Jones (from RBS) laid out an IT department perspective in “Clouds are cool (so why aren’t we using them yet)”. Power is nothing without control was his cautious note, before laying out some key benefits from his perspective: Switching from capex to opex is attractive. Cloud can do things that couldn’t be done before (due to resource constraints). Cloud gives ability to scale down (relevant currently). Someone else can do the optimisation, leaving you free for higher value activities. Rhys doesn’t see the cloud as just another form of box rental. Because of the cost structure, it enables rapid, low-risk trials – that opens up new possibilities for innovation. He noted that moving to the cloud is a cultural shift, and changing culture is hard. In corporate IT, demand outstrips supply, and the demand has always been upfront. That steers against Cloud technology.

Wayne Horkan, Sun Microsystems CTO (UK and Ireland), talked about the global cloud infrastructure build out. A little unsurprisingly, he sees cloud computing as becoming dominant. He cited bandwidth figures from Amazon showing S3 using more bandwidth than Amazon web sales – I’m not sure that’s a proof point, but interesting none-the-less. Wayne said, “This is the Klondike gold rush…” – I agree that the building wave is definitely starting to feel that way. Wayne drew out a nice layered model, from network up to operations…. “What’s the next stack?” open source he says. Wayne ran out of time and was gracefully ushered from the stage by a gracious host.

Neil Hutson, senior director at Microsoft, outlined their vision. Drawing a linear platform evolution from mobile, to client, to server, to cloud, Neil outlined the changing economics of software towards a consumption based model. He pointed out that Microsoft already run their own data centres, and have done for a long while, supporting their Live offerings. He outlined the Microsoft Azure announcement, and the themes contained in it: standards and simplicity, and citied support for HTTP, REST, SOAP…. The Azure announcement has been covered just about everywhere, so nothing new to add. Only time will tell where it goes…

[Open Spaces Round up next...]

Collaboration and Unified Communications – TechwiseTV

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:42:30 +0000

TechwiseTV is running ran a webinar on UC and collaboration, together with a real-time conversation via Twitter, (under the tag #twtv): “Pushing the Boundaries of Collaboration”

I am of the view that effective communication and collaboration tools are the best competitive weapon that any business can have. As the description of the webinar said, “[they] overcome the technology walls between organizations, while preserving security.”

Unified Communications, which is really something of an umbrella term, is starting to pull together the various communications channels that exist in a business. One of the exciting developments is that new advanced features, such as presence information (so that you can see if I am available before you waste your time trying to call me), has the potential to be federated (joined up – see this post) across different businesses, or at least across different business units.

David Knight, Director of Product Management for WebEx, ran through the WebEx infrastructure – the data centres and interconnects, and how they monitor and manage it all. This MediaTone network, which is the backbone for Webex, was discussed in reasonable detail. It comprises 9 global datacenters, connected via a real-time optimized network.

One of the challenges of any Internet based service is that, no matter how good the application provider’s networks, you are still at the mercy of the ISP providing you access – something to bear in mind when choosing your ISP.

Cisco have now added Wiki functionality into the team space offering (a nice way to reduce email dependency), which is good to see. Wiki’s are an excellent way to collect and consolidate information. The team room can be customized (there is a widget framework to enable custom collaborative applications).

The webinar also featured a section on the Cisco Learning Network and Cisco professional certifications. That sight, slightly amusingly, seems to be hosted by collaboration software provider Jive Software. Anyway, the learning network is looking for the next real IT star to build a documentary around, following their path to certification. It will be a talent competition, complete with audience voting. A chance for 15 minutes of fame for the backroom guys.

Linking Network and Database Security

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:35:04 +0000

When I last spoke with F5 Networks (F5 Networks – A Case of Applications and the Network) it was clear that they were getting more focussed on the higher application layers. Our discussion touched on Secerno, a specialist database security company based out of the UK. Today the two companies have announced a joint solution which should be of interest to anyone building web-based applications that have a database back-end.

I spoke with James Spooner of Secerno and Bill Beverley of F5 Networks about their solution, which is based around the F5 BIG-IP ASM and Secerno DataWall products. Essentially they are working together to provide a more joined up security solution. While much has happened to deliver more integration between the lower network levels and applications, no-one has really tackled the problem of integrating application and database security – at least not in the web application space.

This is where F5 Networks and Secerno have jointly focussed their effort. By using customized rules on the F5 box, DataWall can be notified of anomalies at the web traffic layer. This gives Secerno’s product user-level visibility (down to the session level) of what is happening in web applications. In theory this approach should increase the ability to protect back-end databases, and reduce the number of false positives.

The F5 BIG-IP provides more than half a dozen attributes that can be used to correlate web transactions to database transactions, enabling very granular blocking of attempts to exploit SQL security vulnerabilities (see here). Suspicious activity can be reported up to SIM/SEM security management products and used for security forensics.

It is an interesting development, with lots of potential for expanded functionality. Using web-based applications is an attractive way of sharing information outside of the organization, either via Web 2.0 style APIs, or web portals. They can be quick to develop, and provide efficiency and competitive advantage. The downside is that such applications often require access into databases with sensitive information. The F5 and Secerno solution is a worthy attempt to deliver high levels of security, but still enable business flexibility – making both companies’ solutions more attractive.

Identity Management

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:07:43 +0000

Yesterday was spent huddled up in a Dockland’s hotel in London, discussing issues of identity management. The Whitehall Media IDM2008 event brought together public and private sector experts to talk about the big, and little, challenges of identity assurance in today’s IT infrastructures.

From document management to remote access, compliance to shiny web 2.0 style portals, identity management is central to running a secure and efficient IT infrastructure. All the more distressing that it is also one of the most problematic elements of business IT architectures, with forests of directory trees and multiple ‘authoritative’ information sources. Now is the time to get that sorted out.

Dr. Hellmuth Broda, from the Liberty Alliance, talked about their efforts to standardize mechanisms across the industry. Questions from the floor challenged their ability to do that, with big names like IBM and Microsoft missing from the project. That said, they are re-using existing standards, rather than creating their own, so that may not be such a barrier. Kerberos received frequent mentions. This near-ancient standards-based security continues to feature, even in the upcoming Windows 7 security (read this introduction to Kerberos for more). It is a good technology that works well and is network friendly.

There were some impressive projects discussed during the day. Glow is a project for the Scottish educational system that supports millions of users on a national schools intranet, with up to 250,000 individuals authenticating at peak times. It has proved the ability of directory technologies to work at scale, but still be very feature rich – it supports the ability to have users in dozens of groups and with overlapping roles.

A number of vendors were on hand to discuss their products: integration products from Salford Software and Quest Software, server software from Sun Microsystems, and professional services and consulting from the likes of DNS, Logica and PA Consulting Group.

Dormant unused accounts are a potential security hazard, while password resets are a massive resource sync – figures quoted suggested taht a password reset costs an average of £50 in lost time and accounts for over 40% of all help desk calls. Getting user identity under control is a critical business governance task, and makes good commercial sense for any company from medium sized upwards.

For me, the most insightful comment of the day came from Alan Coburn of identity management specialists DNS, who said this: “Don’t treat an identity management project like just another IT project. Identity management projects are business transformation projects.”

If you want to dig into Identity Management in more detail, I recommend checking out Kim Cameron’s identity blog, starting with his introduction.

NetBenefit – UK Hosting

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:28:22 +0000

Another hosting provider that exhibited at eCommerce Expo in London was NetBenefit. Mark Stephens and Kristel Scattergood of NetBenefit were kind enough to spend some time in conversation about where they see the challenges and opportunities for users of hosting.

NetBenefit are part of the publicly listed Group NBT plc (LSE:NBT) and have a broad customer base. They first came to my attention for their domain registration services, but also offer managed hosting and co-location. They have started to provide virtualization services, based on VMWare technology, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about that later this year.

It is almost impossible to have a conversation about hosting with out ‘the green issue’ coming up these days. Kristel and Mark confirmed that they are frequently asked questions about their policy and how they source power. Their latest data centre uses renewable resources, something that is becoming a theme for many. It seems a reasonable question to ask of a supplier, as environmental policies start to propagate up the supply chain. If you aren’t being asked questions about your energy usage yet, then expect to be soon.

The majority of customers are building services on Apache with mySQL (now part of Sun’s empire), and hybrid set ups are very common – where users have their own data centre, together with some servers in a hosting provider’s facilities. This set up provides the best of both worlds, keeping key applications in-house and on-net, while putting Internet bandwidth-hungry apps off-site. Interestingly, Mark noted that Web 2.0 adaption has resulted in growing bandwidth requirements, due to richer content and more interactivity – something to be aware of as you adopt the technologies.

NetBenefit partner with Panther Express to provide their content delivery network service (See NetBenefit CDN), a solution that has worked to great effect for The National Archives, supporting well over a million downloads over the course of four days. “CDNs aren’t just about cutting costs,” said Mark, “they are about better user experience, performance and moving the content closer to the customer.”

Many hosting providers are challenged to provide CDNs, due to the need for a large number of geographically dispersed hosting locations, so partnering with a CDN player is a smart move. It is a good complement to traditional hosting, and something to think about if you have very high traffic volumes to a global audience.

NetBenefit, like many in their space, see Amazon S3 and Google as a big competitive threat, but are quick to point our their advantages in customer support and pre-sales consultancy. They don’t compete at the lower end of the market (Group NBT has the Easily brand to cover that space). They seek to differentiate themselves by using quality equipment (they use Dell hardware), and pride themselves on their highly experienced staff.

Rackspace Heads for the Clouds

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:20:04 +0000

Rackspace (UK site here) has been in the news, and rattling around the blogosphere a fair amount these last few weeks. Not just because they are the top dedicated hosting provider (see Gartner report), but because of their recent adventures:

Acquired on-line storage company Jungle Disk.
Acquired specialist hoster Slicehost. (see Rich Miller’s post)
Struck a CDN Deal with Limelight Networks (detail at CloudPundit)
And launched a cloud strategy with Cloud Sites, Cloud Files and Cloud Servers.

I think they’ve rather swallowed this cloud computing thing, and swept in talent from the space. This week’s ecommerce expo in London gave me the chance to catch up with Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director of Rackspace.

We had a very feet-on-the-ground discussion around cloud computing. Fabio agreed that cloud wasn’t the future for everyone, but that it made sense for some. Rackspace sits very much at the premium end of the market, catering to mission critical needs. This has kept them clear of the commoditization of hosting, letting them invest in quality support and adopt a packaged approach to meeting customers’ needs.

I know from my time in the Valley that many a start up owes its success to Rackspace offerings, keeping servers going in all Internet weather. Cloud services haven’t had a great reputation, with some big players suffering a number of big outages. Fabio sees cloud services as a lower-SLA form of service. I’m not sure that I totally agree – cloud brings with it a very different philosophical approach than the one used to build web-applications on dedicated services. But there is a good argument for using cloud-based services for applications with elastic capacity demands and less stringent availability requirements.

Hosted and cloud services alike are a good way of moving spending from CAPEX to OPEX, smoothing big capital expenditures into recurring operational costs. That makes even more sense in times like today, when budgets are tight. It is also a more success-based model, since you buy more services as and when you have the business growth to justify them. No point being stuck with a huge, out of date building and servers for a business that didn’t hit its growth targets.

Another advantage of moving applications into a hosted environment, or for that matter a cloud, is gaining the economies of scale that a company like Rackspace have. Very few businesses would be able to afford to build their own state of the art data centre to match the recently opened facility in Slough. Rackspace understand dealing with customers directly, and also working with partners. According to Fabio, they have a strong channel model, with about half of their business being indirect.

Competition in the space is intense. When the likes of Amazon (with their S3 offering now out of beta) and Google appear in the competitive landscape, it is time for some strategic thinking and action. Even more so when Microsoft decide that they want to play in the cloud too. While many providers at ecommerce expo were holding their heads in their hands, Rackspace seem to be keeping their head above the clouds (don’t groan!). Their very high service levels, and the addition of some leading-edge cloud-based offerings, keep them at the top of the game.

Can Opensource Save a Business Money?

Benjamin Ellis — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:10:59 +0000

It seems an apt question for the current times. Some businesses have fully embraced opensource, others have steered well clear of it. The pros and cons have been hotly contested, usually by people with an agenda, if not an axe to grind. Regardless of your historic stance, now is the right time to be looking at how to cut IT costs.

A blogger-in-technology that has much to say about the matter is JP Rangaswami of BT Design, and rightly so. His confused of calcutta blog is a firm favourite of mine, and of many others. “Learning about why people don’t adopt opensource” is a long, but worth-while read that circumnavigates many of the issues around open source software. It is in two halves. The first speaks to why people don’t use opensource:

They hate the principle.

They believe it’s insecure.

They’re out of their comfort zone.

They know a better way.

They don’t know about it.

They can’t do what they want with it.

The move represents serious operational risk.

The second half covers a case study that will make your head spin. As an IT manager and MD/CEO, the issues at the top of my agenda would be around skills and support.

If there is a fault that affects my business, can I get it fixed?
Do I have access to the skills to install and support it?
Do the users have the skills to use it, or can they be trained?

The answers are surprising. The nature of opensource means that you have the source code, and can hire a programmer for the day (or week!) to fix a problem or add a missing feature. A number of companies are springing up to provide support for opensource software and bridge the gap between ‘commercial’ applications and opensource, and people like RedMonk have been providing analysis on the space for a long time. Many of the applications are similar in usability to their commercial counterparts, tackling the training issue.

Version 3.0 of OpenOffice has recently been released, and received a very significant number of downloads even in the first few days (3,009,832). For other companies and applications to watch, I’ll refer you to this list back in September, from Jeff Nolan of Venture Chronicles as a starting point:

Zenoss - Network and system monitoring software.
Enomalism - Build your own private elastic compute cloud.
rPath - Virtual appliances.
Qumranet (part of Red Hat) - hypervisor technology.
OpenAir - Project management software for professional service organizations.

F5 Networks – A Case of Applications and the Network

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:38:12 +0000

As far as the network is concerned, F5 Networks have become part of the furniture for most hosting providers, and I mean that in a good way. Load balancing across multiple servers has progressed a long way since the early days of Cisco’s Local Director, and Checkpoint’s early load balancing capabilities. F5 have evolved too. A number of acquisitions now puts them in a strong position in the market, and with a broad range of products and technologies to offer to customers.

Talking earlier this month with Bill Beverley, Security Manager at F5 Networks, F5’s focus is clear: “deploying applications is really the central role of IT”. That’s certainly part of it. Keeping them up and running is too, and that has been bread and butter business for F5, delivering kit to put in front of servers to deal with the peaks in capacity and inevitable server failures.

Load balancing provides availability, but acceleration and optimization are also key in today’s infrastructures. That has made WAN optimization a hot area, especially now that bandwidth prices are no longer falling rapidly. Bill talked about how F5 are adding extra layers of security for web applications, something that is big in PCI and compliance driven environments. F5 see their solutions as complementary to the network firewalls, with the firewall dealing with the high-load, low-intelligence packet filtering. As Bill was keen to point out, “if you have a really efficient smaller piece of kit doing that job, then we can deal with traffic in an effective and more intelligent way.”

F5 boxes terminate the TCP connection and then regenerate it out of the other side. Since the devices have application-level visibility into the application streams, this is the perfect place to apply application acceleration and application security magic. However, this isn’t going to be a clean battle. The traditional firewall players like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Checkpoint, are keen for a piece of the action too.

A battle is brewing between the folks coming from the application towards the network, and the network folks heading up the stack to optimize applications. On the application side, F5 might be the baby gorilla, but there are a number of chimps ready to fight it out with them. Database security has seen specialist players like Secerno emerge. In talking to Bill about SQL security, his comment was “I think you will see consolidation in that area.” I wouldn’t take that as a statement that F5 is feeling acquisitive (although they have been), but rather that smaller players will get swept up or washed away in the coming quarters.

Hosting and data centres are becoming more and more sophisticated environments, as you can see from the diagram. Layers have been added to the network to provide security, then availability, and now application acceleration. Those layers are spreading in their functionality too, with SSL VPN being added to the security layer, and storage virtualization added into availability. The latter will help many IT managers to clear up the NAS(ty) mess on the network, by balancing across multiple NAS devices, and migrating data at rest to slower storage devices.

F5 solutions are purchased as a mixture of sticking plaster remedies and strategic design, where acceleration and availability are part of the fundamental architecture, rather than an add on when capacity gets exceeded. F5 have some interesting developments coming down the line in the virtualization space. Because they see the application performance, then can provide feedback into VMotion / ESX running on the servers, to tell it to provision extra servers or deprovision them. The integration works through SNMP and SYSLOG, so could potentially be open to other vendor combinations too. Certainly lots for F5’s channel partners to apply their expertise to.

London CloudCamp Update

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:02:32 +0000

A comment from Chris of Cohesiveft, reminded me that an update is due on London CloudCamp. The notional October meeting is now actually happening in November, details here. It kicks off at 6pm with drinks and registration, followed by a series of lightening talks, then 3 ‘open spaces’ discussions. Expect a who’s who of the UK Cloud Computing world.

If you are in the UK and interested in finding out more about Cloud Computing, this is probably the best place to come and listen. The previous event was excellent (and packed). As ever, I’ll be there with my camera, and blogging what I learn…

The Importance of Storage – Storage Expo

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:40:36 +0000

This week finds me in Storage Expo, held at London’s Olympia. With compliance issues, data retention legislation, and data discovery all swirling around the IT press over the last year, it is hardly a surprise that the who’s who of the IT industry is here.

Despite what you read about IT cutbacks, the floors are packed with people catching up with the latest developments in the storage industry. Some are more human that others of course. Still, a friendly chap. Symantec is just one of the big names about.

Over the next couple of days I’ll share the best discoveries, together with an overview of how IT infrastructures are increasingly being optimized around storage. Its a large and rapidly growing space, wit new technologies and players to navigate.

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