Archive for July, 2011
The Difference Between VPN and Web Proxies
Would you like to access web content which has been blocked in your country? Would you like to access blocked web sites? Would you like to browse the web anonymously? Would you like to access blocked online services? Are you concerned about protecting your identity when accessing web sites? Then a web proxy or VPN [...]
Full StoryTop 10 SaaS Software Providers In Every Category For August 2011
Top 10 SaaS Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Infusion Software CLP Suite Commence CRM Appshore NetSuite SageCRM.com Salesboom Microsoft Dynamics eGain SofFront Top 10 Hosted Exchange Providers NetNation Hostirian FuseMail SherWeb Apptix MyOfficePlace Kerio Mail Hosting Apps4Rent Exchange My Mail Evacloud Top 10 SaaS Invoicing Software Services Zoho Invoicing Bamboo Invoice SimplyBill BlinkSale LessAccounting Intuit Billing [...]
Full StoryBiggest Challenges When Backing Up Databases
Database backups are very different from traditional flat-file backups, and there are a number of important points you should consider when protecting the databases that support your critical systems. Database Data is More Vulnerable Because databases typically experience much higher load volumes than other types of data, they are more vulnerable to failure. And a [...]
Full StoryTips For Securing Virtual Servers In The Cloud
When moving virtualized servers into the cloud, you free up a lot of the security burden for your hardware and underlying hypervisors onto an experienced third-party with lots of resources and trained on-staff expertise. But this brings up another security concern By moving to the cloud, you are giving hackers a single, centralized point of [...]
Full StoryHow Do Companies Benefit From Identity Access Management?
IT security is changing in some very important ways. In the past, you could insulate your organization within an internal network that is secured by virtual private networks, intrusion prevention systems and intrusion detection systems. And all of the IT security responsibilities remained within this protected little bubble. But now, all of that is changing: [...]
Full StoryThe Beth Israel Hospital Breach and Concerns for Small Healthcare Practices
On July 18th, the Boston Globe reported Beth Israel Hospital suffered a potential data breach. The likely cause? Their outsourced IT vendor opened up the security on a PC to do some work and then failed to re-secure the computer. A user managed to download a virus onto the PC, which then transmitted the data [...]
Full StoryHow Connection-Killing Attacks or FIN Attacks Work
A connection-killing attacked can be used by one person – either on a user’s internal network or a hosts’ internal network – to prevent one of the parties from communicating with the other. This attack relies on 3 common networking vulnerabilities. Any transmission is broadcast to all of the other users on your internal network. [...]
Full StoryBeyond Deduplication: Implementing a Comprehensive Data Protection Strategy that Meets Today’s Data Demands
IDC predicts that the total volume of data will reach 35,000 exabytes in 2020, compared to 1,200 exabytes in 2010, representing a 29 fold increase in the next ten years. Yet, organizations are still using technology designed to backup and recover megabytes of data rather than terabytes. Data protection strategies are in need of an [...]
Full StoryWhy Are Companies Resistant To Implementing Cloud Technology?
Although I’m personally a huge fan of cloud computing, I think it’s important to show both sides of the argument and let you decide for yourself. There are a number of counter-arguments against the adoption of cloud technology. But they mostly revolve around a few common themes. Below, I’ve listed some of the most important [...]
Full Story15 Neato Things You Didn’t Know Microsoft Exchange 2010 Could Do
Exchange is a great resource with a plethora of functions that would probably take you months of testing before you figured them all out. So I did instead. Here are 15 neat features you may not have known Exchange 2010 can do. 1. MailTips Mailtips offers administrators the opportunity to display messages remotely to the [...]
Full StoryWhat Is Cloud Data Privacy, and How Is It Defined?
The questions of “What exactly is privacy?” is a very difficult one to answer. Part of this difficulty comes from the fact that this it has a fluid and constantly-changing definition. Privacy requirements and standards can vary based on technology, regions, and industries. And new events, regulations and precedents are coming into play every year [...]
Full Story6 Ways Spam Filters Block Out Unwanted Messages Before Ever Reading Them
With spam growing at such an alarming rate, blocking it can be a very resource-intensive undertaking. In order deal with this threat efficiently, spam-protection companies have developed a number of tools for filtering out obnoxious or malicious email messages before they’ve even had a chance to pass through the network. Whitelisting and Blacklisting A whitelist [...]
Full StoryHow Does A SYN Flood Attack Work?
SYN flood attacks can be used to take down servers by overwhelming their capacity for open connections. Let’s suppose that there was a radio call-in show that you wanted to take off the air, and you know that they have a phone system capable of holding 7 callers on hold at the same time. So [...]
Full StoryAdvantages of ISCSI for Storage Area Networks (SAN)
In a typical Storage Area Network configuration, you might have a few servers sharing a pool of storage in a disk array. Ideally, the servers should be able to see these networked storage devices as local drives and run applications on them in the same way that you would run applications on the C drive [...]
Full StoryWhy are iSeries, System i, AS/400, etc… owners so fanatical?
IBM’s servers are somewhat enigmatic. Computer experts are always praising the virtues of these systems, but it’s often difficult to get specifics on WHY. And IBM isn’t of much help either. They’ve been success despite doing a HORRIBLE job of marketing their systems. If fact, you can visit their web site right now and ask [...]
Full StoryBeware of Virtulization Sprawl
Although virtualization is amazing for reducing power consumption, cutting down maintenance costs, improving disaster recovery and resiliency, and just doing more with less… there’s another aspect of virtualization that you need to be careful with. One of the key things that you’ll notice when you start running virtualized systems, is that it will be incredibly [...]
Full StoryHow DDoS Attacks Get Around IP Address Filters
So now that DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks are becoming more common, you might be wondering why web hosts and network admins don’t simply block traffic from suspicious locations. The answer is a bit complex, but very interesting. The TCP/IP protocol is the universally agreed-upon set of rules that dictates how machines talk to [...]
Full StoryProtect Yourself From “Dark Clouds” and EDoS Attacks When Hosting Servers In The Cloud
Any time a new technology empowers people to do good, there will be people who use this power to do evil. And this is especially true on the Internet. As a result, the amazing popularity of cloud computing has opened up a number of new security threats. With Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), computing power becomes a commodity. [...]
Full StoryCost Reduction Benefits Of Cloud Hosting (Video 3)
Over the past few days, we’ve features a series of video interviews from CoreVault, discussing the flexibility and availability benefits of cloud computing. But there is one major factor that makes clous computing especially attractive to bueinsesses: Cost Savings. And that’s the topic of today’s video, which is the last of the 3-part series. The [...]
Full Story7 Ways The Current Economy Is Affecting IT Spending
Things are pretty bad right now for businesses, and things seem to only be getting worse. In order to survive the extended financial storm, companies need to squeeze every possible bit of unnecessary spending out of all corporate cost-centers. One of the areas being most harshly affected by these cutbacks has been the IT department. [...]
Full StoryWhat Is Operating System Virtualization?
When we typically think about virtualization, we imagine a hardware device which can host multiple different operating systems within the same box, with each of these operating systems having their own separate resources and acting independent f the other guest operating systems. In this example, the operating systems reside on top of the virtualization software. [...]
Full StoryAccessibility Of Data And Services Hosted In The Cloud (Video 2)
Our friends at CoreVault have recently published the second video in their 3-part series on cloud hosting. If you’ve ever been curious about the accessibility of your servers when moving to the cloud, I’d definitely reccomend checking out this video. Here is a short description, according to CoreVault: Accessibilty is the name of the game [...]
Full StoryThe Difference Between IaaS, SaaS and PaaS
With every new technology, comes a new set of trendy IT acronyms that we must memorize. With the case of cloud computing, 3 of the most important are IaaS, SaaS and PaaS. In order to fully understand the implications of these acronyms, you first need to understand virtualization. Since virtualization is the underlying technology that [...]
Full StoryThe Difference Between CDP and Scheduled Backups
When shopping around for online backup services, you’ll often find that these services come in one of 2 varieties: Continuous Backup and Scheduled Backup. So how do you know which is most appropriate for you? Let’s take a look at both methodologies, and compare their features and benefits. With CDP backups, the backup software is [...]
Full StoryWhy Companies Should Consider Cloud Hosting (Video 1)
This is the first in a 3-part series about the benefits of cloud hosting. It was put together by our good friends at CoreVault, and I strongly recommend checking this out. We recently introduced our new Cloud Hosting services to the marketplace leveraging VMware’s industry leading technology. So like with any new product and especially with all [...]
Full StoryKey Trends Driving Server Virtualization
There are a number of key trends driving the current popularity of server virtualization. In this article, I’d like to highlight a few of – what I consider to be – the most important ones. The Ability To Run On Commodity Processors Virtualization technology has been around for several decades. But until recent years, it’s [...]
Full StoryHow strong admin safeguards protect your practice (HIPAA IT Disaster Protection)
It is 3am and you receive the dreaded phone call from your alarm company. There is a fire in progress at your practice and the fire department is on scene. You quickly scramble out of bed to dress and head to the clinic to inspect the damage. You are relieved when you get there. The [...]
Full StoryComputing 101: What Exactly Is Virtualization?
Virtualization is currently one of the hottest topics in IT. This is the technology that’s enabling a number of other major trends such as Green Computing, Cloud Computing and High Availability to become practical and cost-effective for companies. But before I can explain WHY virtualization is important, you must first understand exactly what it is [...]
Full StoryFactors to Consider Before Setting Up An Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)
Intrusion Prevention Systems are designed to analyze your network traffic, and block or report any suspicious or malicious traffic activity. Intrusion Prevention Systems come in many different flavours, each with its own particular customer scenario in mind. It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all product. Before your company starts evaluating Intrusion Prevention Systems, you need to have [...]
Full StoryDatacenter Space Usage Is Becoming A Hot Topic Again As Petabytes of Data Becomes Commonplace
Thanks to Moore’s Law, we’re getting exponentially cheaper and faster chips in our systems every year. Moore’s Law doesn’t just apply to chips. It also applies to other areas of IT such as bandwidth and storage. Unlike an all-you-can-eat buffet, our appetite for computing power never seems to fill up. Just when we think we’ve [...]
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