Blog

Vodafone & CWW: consolidation and speculation

08 May 2012

Nick Ballard at Geo Networks writes: As anticipated it was confirmed last week that the Vodafone would offer just over £1bn for Cable and Wireless Worldwide (CWW) which values the company at a price of 38p per share – a 92% premium to the closing price of the company a day before the talks were unveiled!

Announcing OpenShift Origin – Open Source Code For Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

01 May 2012

The Cloud Computing team at RedHat write: It's been almost a year to the date since Red Hat launched the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) at Red Hat Summit. Since launch, OpenShift has established itself as a compelling PaaS choice for developers seeking enterprise capabilities.

The 2011 Internet Security Threat Report – There Is No Panacea to Protect Against All Attacks

30 Apr 2012

Kevin Haley at Symantec writes: When it comes to Internet security, organizations shouldn’t feel like it’s only a matter of time before they suffer a catastrophe. But at the same time, it’s important to recognize that there is no single preventive measure that will guarantee safety from all attacks.

Road to Elsewhere: Virtualised Data Centres

27 Apr 2012

Dave Schneider, senior manager, market development, Ixia writes: Recent years have seen IT organisations move their platforms and applications to “the cloud”. The details are still evolving, but for most enterprises the cloud is a set of services, data, resources and networks located “elsewhere.” This contrasts with the historical centralised data centre model where enterprises purchased, configured, deployed and maintained their own servers, storage, networks and infrastructures.

So just what is a collaborative conversation? Have you ever had one?

16 Apr 2012

Manish Sablok, Head of Marketing for CNE Europe at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, looks at how ground breaking developments in collaborative technology are enabling 'outcome driven' conversations across the enterprise.

Top tips from NetIQ ahead of World Backup Day

30 Mar 2012

NetIQ’s Mike Robinson writes:

Back up essential components. If the majority of disaster recovery budgets are allocated to protect only the most critical applications, a large portion of business-critical servers are left under-protected. Since the risk of downtime is so high, the need to deploy disaster recovery solution is not a matter of if, but when. Any business-critical server essential to maintaining operations will require costly fault tolerance and clustering solutions, while any business-supporting servers that are not essential to running the operations will employ ineffective restore and recovery solutions. Ideally, disaster recovery software should provide businesses with the ability to quickly move restored workloads to wherever needed.

Red metal networks: Red alert (1 of 2)

21 Mar 2012

Mike Ainger, Chief Operating Officer at Geo writes: In my role as COO, I frequently get to talk to operations managers about what concerns keep them up at night. International commodity pricing is probably not the one that springs most readily to mind, but the combination of inexorable rises in metal prices (copper is now around five times more valuable than ten years ago), and the troubled state of the economy (unemployment has nearly doubled over the same period), has led to an epidemic of copper theft.  This in turn is having a profound impact on the reliability of communications networks, as can commonly be seen in the headlines.

The Last Bottleneck: How Parallel I/O Can Attenuate Amdahl's Law

16 Mar 2012

Rex Tanakit, Director of worldwide systems engineering at Panasas writes: Parallel computing is becoming mainstream in technical computing.    Let me provide you with a few examples.  The Economist magazine ran an article on parallel programming last June,http://www.economist.com/node/18750706.   Its comfortable discussion of parallel programming is a sure indication of the topic’s movement into the mainstream.  A more technical example is to look at the average number of CPUs on the TOP500 (www.top500.org) in the past 18 years.  In 2001 the average core count was between 129 and 256 per system according to the article, compared with 4000 to 8000 in 2011, over 30X increase in shared processing power.

Apple’s New iPad and The Inconvenient Truth for Mobile Network Operators

08 Mar 2012

Mervyn Kelly, EMEA marketing director at Ciena: “Amid much fanfare, Apple has launched the new iPad – the third iteration of the dominant tablet platform on the market. While network operators clearly welcome the excitement Apple launches generate in consumers, with each new Apple product comes increased challenges around connectivity and capacity.

Power availability: when broadcast goes wrong

05 Mar 2012

Will Pitt Media and Broadcast Sales Director at Geo writes: Significant outages during live TV broadcasts in 2011 due to ‘unusual power spikes’ has brought the subject of power, and its resilience and reliability, into sharp focus.

Twinterview with MIME co-creator, Nathaniel Borenstein

05 Mar 2012

Justin Pirie writes:Almost twenty years ago, Mimecast’s very own Chief Scientist Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein co-created the email format Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension protocol (MIME) and, in doing so, laid the foundations for email to become the world’s dominant personal and business communication tool.

Understanding ShoreTel

29 Feb 2012

Adrian Hipkiss, managing director EMEA, ShoreTel writes: I joined ShoreTel as Managing Director, EMEA, this past October, and was invited to meet the board in Sunnyvale, California. Playing it safe, I dressed-up but was surprised to discover a relaxed group of senior executives. A “compliment” about my tie broke the ice and set me thinking about the parallel between Silicon Valley and ShoreTel.

DNSChanger Malware – Are you afraid you’ll lose Internet access on March 8th?

27 Feb 2012

Lauren Smith writes: Over 450,000 computers - including half of the Fortune 500 companies and over 50% of government entities – are still infected with the DNSChanger malware. Don’t be one of them! 

No skeleton key – protecting your organisation on the web

22 Feb 2012

Mark Knight, Director of Product Management, Thales e-Security, writes: Weaknesses in the SSL protocol (the protocol for encrypting information over the internet) or the public certificate authority (CA) ecosystem that underpin it have received a lot of coverage recently and the last couple of weeks have been no exception.

The expectation of collaboration

17 Feb 2012

DeLisa Alexander, SVP People writes: I believe that the future success for businesses to attract and retain top talent relies on a more open management and leadership approach. The workforce is evolving and the new employee is part of a major change affecting not only how we hire and who we hire, but how our companies operate on a basic level. It’s especially prevalent in the new generation entering the workforce.

Fiber-to-the-……

13 Feb 2012

James Donovan at CommScope writes: Over the past years, one infrastructure media technology in particular has become more and more common in catering to the trends in all types of networks, that of optical fiber. When I say networks, I mean it in widest sense to include Wide Area Networks (WAN), Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN), Local Area Networks (LAN), Cellular and Mobile Networks and Broadband Networks.

Certified Ethical Hacker's analysis of FBI-UK police call hack

03 Feb 2012

Graeme Batsman writes: It was reported in the media today that the Metropolitan Police and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have launched a criminal investigation after computer hackers intercepted a conference call between cyber security experts.

HP Software Introduces New Major Private and Public Cloud Discovery Capabilities with HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) Content Pack 10

02 Feb 2012

Michael Grainge writes:  Today I am pleased to formally announce the availability of HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) Edition Content Pack 10. This content pack ten introduces a myriad of new discovery capabilities – including discovery for major private and public cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and vCloud. Cloud and virtualization discovery allow DDMA to reach beyond the physical world and into the world of private and public cloud services, and virtualized environments. In addition, these new capabilities can address and escalate customers cloud transformation and associated planning activities.

PIM Happens – Why, What, When?

31 Jan 2012

James Donovan writes: For wireless cellular networks to achieve their full operating potential, each sector within the network must perform up to its design standard. When this does not occur, the economic impact to the service provider can be substantial:

More to Storage Efficiency than Capacity

30 Jan 2012

Hu Yoshida writes: In response to my last blog, Jon Toigo was kind enough to post a training piece that he wrote last year, reminding us that capacity is only one part of storage efficiency.

The Native App: Still a Firm Favourite with the Consumer

23 Jan 2012

Tony Speakman, Director of Filemaker, Northern Region writes: 

The best way to build an app has been the subject of fierce and intriguing debate. Professional and popular opinion is split into two main camps: those who favour ‘native’ and those who advocate ‘web based’ apps. The difference is relatively simple: the native app is built for a mobile platform, whereas a web application can be used on a variety of different machines and hardware via an internet browser.

Vint Cerf is Too Modest; Internet Access is a Human Right

16 Jan 2012

Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist at Mimecast writes: In his January 4 op-ed piece, Vint Cerf argued that Internet access is not a human right. While I consider Vint a friend and have tremendous respect for his achievements, I think he’s wrong in this case. Perhaps out of modesty, the man often called the “father of the Internet” is undervaluing the global network he played such an important role in developing. I fear his underestimation may be as fundamental and consequential as his belief, 30 years ago, that 4 billion Internet addresses would be sufficient — another of the rare times I disagreed with him. I believe that in the future, the Internet will be nearly as fundmental to civilized human life as food, clothing, and shelter. 

Safer digital identities in 2012?

13 Jan 2012

Mark Knight, Director of Product Management at Thales e-Security writes: Sometimes it takes a very public breach for the shockwaves to force an industry to tighten up security. I welcome the news that the Certificate Authority (CA) industry body that initially specified the standard for Extended Validation (EV) certificates has now published requirements (or standards of due care), for the issuance of publically trusted certificates. Certificate authorities that have signed up to the new requirements have 6 months to comply.

BYOD is the challenge of the decade

11 Jan 2012

Simon Wilcox, Head of Marketing Operations at web filtering and security technology specialistSmoothwall writes: Whilst instant internet access at home, work or even in coffee shops and on trains is something most people now take for granted, for many network managers the growing popularity of smart phones, tablets and other portable devices is causing a major headache. 

SSD: Imagine The Possibilities

10 Jan 2012

Scott Hansen Enterprise Sales Manager at WhiptailTech writes: How much of your storage environment is performance based versus capacity based? How many times do you hear, “I have an application only three terabytes in size but I need 90K in I/O at its peak?” If you haven’t, be grateful. But be warned, it’s coming.

Certified Ethical Hacker's analysis of "Anonymous" breach of Strategic Forecasting Inc

10 Jan 2012

Graeme Batsman, Director of Data Defender writes: Months have passed from the last major story relating to Anonymous and LulzSec. It seems they are back with their “robin hood” tendencies. They say their “goal was to use the credit data to take a million dollars and give the money away as Christmas donations”, from the target for this was Strategic Forecasting Inc which is an intelligence think tank with around 70 staff based in Austin, Texas, USA, which has clients from Apple, The U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force and the Miami Police Department. As you can tell, this is serious stuff.

How to Stop SQL Injection

05 Jan 2012

Rob Rachwald, Director of Security Strategy at Imperva writes: On the very last day of 2011, SANS published a story about automated SQL injection attacks affecting 1M plus websites.  What will be different with SQL injection in 2012?  Nothing.  Perhaps more, perhaps some new attack tools.  But otherwise, it is "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."