Anti Virus In the Cloud

We’ve been getting some good interest in a well used technology but one that has a different slant to it. Standard AV, it’s been around a while and works, but for most organisations with more than a handful of PC’s you have to have a server that looks after the management aspects i.e. setting policy, pushing out updates, producing alerts and reports. If you have one server, you should really have at least another one for business continuity.

With Resolutions MSP we’re able to provide the end-point agents (Kasperky powered by the way) but with all the management done via a web portal into a SOC (Security Operations Centre). The SOC is where you set policies, define groups of computers/users and push out the AV agent, signature updates and policy updates. It’s also where you produce the weekly/monthly reports.

The end-point agents are also interesting and operate a bit differently to normal. In the same LAN, once an update has been received by one of the low level agents, it advertises this to all of the other agents in the network and they synchronise with one another. This saves every agent from requesting the update via the Internet which could be a bit longwinded if there are lots of PCs in the network.

Even better, if a user if off-site for any period of time, they may not be getting regular updates via the in-house server. With Resolutions MSP this is not a problem. Like most good Software as a Service applications, being away from home makes no difference, it simple pulls the update directly from the SOC. But now the AV administrator gets alerts and reports from the SOC regardless of where the user is accessing the Internet.

This type of service enables the off loading of yet another time consuming IT requirement. No-one in their right mind wants to be looking after AV across the company, feeding and watering the servers to keep them up-to-date and operational. With Resolutions MSP it’s really easy to have someone else manage this task for you.

http://www.vioptim.com

 

Remotely Managing Cisco Phones

It’s been a roller coaster ride working alongside the guys at Unified FX. Their PhoneView application allows remote management of entire estates of Cisco IP Telephones through a very interactive interface where you can take screen shots of the phone’s display. Sounds simple? The guts behind the application requires a great deal of knowledge of the finer points of Cisco’s telephone management software – need I say more?

What has been fascinating is how the power of viral marketing has been demonstrated through the volume of interest and the hundreds of downloads that have been going on in just the last few days. The Cisco CCIE community has identified the application as “the hottest IP telephone remote control and estate management tool on the market today” (See Vik Malhi’s blog) and that, quite simply, did the trick.

What a fantastic way to build up a great contact list, full of exactly the people that you want singing the praises of your application. The interest has already been picked up by some eye watering commercial and government organisations world-wide all of whom need to get to grips with managing tens of thousands of telephone handsets. You wouldn’t believe the Webex sessions we’ve been having!

If you haven’t already had a look at PhoneView click here .

Managing Cisco Phones

It’s always good to get a call from enterprising people. This one came out of the blue and turns out to be an extremely interesting solution for managing small or large numbers of Cisco IP Telephones. Not an area that I’d really thought about as you naturally think that the manufacturer has sorted all this type of stuff out themselves.

However, having spent a couple of hours talking to a highly qualified and able Cisco CCIE, an expert in the design and deployment of IP Telephony, I realised that there is a real opportunity here to provide a relatively simple solution to a quite complex problem. If you’re responsible for looking after several thousand or tens of thousands of Cisco handsets, across, potentially, many different locations, how do you manage them effectively?

Unified FX has come up with a unique solution allowing complete visibility of Cisco handsets across the entire corporate estate. The ease of access is immediately obvious, the bulk operations so simple it makes you wonder why it’s taken this long to identify that there is a problem and find a solution for it. But this solution has all the hallmarks of a true engineering support tool. It’s been developed to fill all of the gaps when looking after IP phones allowing the management of these to be done totally remotely yet observing and operating the phones as if they were in front of you.

This is well worth a look here. Downloadable, free trial and some impressive users already.

The shift to SaaS

The .com “revolution” seems a long time ago now, talk of application hosting and the like, all seemed to vanish into thin air with the sounds of the Last Post bidding their farewell to such activities for ever. But never say never! The IT industry does like reinventing itself and the Software as a Service model has very much arisen from the ashes (sorry, couldn’t resist the cricket link here) and is here to stay.

I’ve been very impressed with the quality and capability of some of the SaaS applications in the market today especially in my field of interest, Information Security. It’s such a sensible, pragmatic, approach to resolving an absolute necessity of securing your organisation with such an easy to use methodology.

The take up of Cisco’s ScanSafe service has been excellent, up against some very tough and mature competition, rarely losing out to an appliance solution. The reason I’m sure is because ScanSafe have identified the market requirement very well and have developed a great reporting system in WIRe as well as the best solution available for zero hour threats using their Outbreak Intelligence system, a highly parallelised architecture that adds virtually no latency to the web request. With the additional ability to provide basic data loss prevention protection for web based email management and tamper proof laptop support, it’s a “must have” solution.

Move over Messagelabs is the cry from Mimecast’s unified email solution. As email is now one of the critical applications in any corporate environment, maintaining its availability is a top priority. Once again, Mimecast has taken a good hard look at what matters with securing email both in terms of its availability and its content. The ability to archive emails for a 10 year period whilst making the archive searchable directly from Outlook is a major step forward for usability. No longer is it a question of who makes the decision to archive which emails and when, it can all be done automatically whilst allowing the user to search their Inbox regardless of where the actual email is stored. Goodbye out of control .pst files all over the place. Gone in a flash!

Here is the beauty of the SaaS service. If the Exchange Server becomes unavailable, Mimecast automatically switches the Outlook user to communicate directly with the cloud based service. It’s all transparent, the user having no need to know whether they’re getting a local or remote connection, as long as the email service is still running everyone is happy.

More and more applications are getting the SaaS treatment, but security SaaS solutions are a huge benefit when trying to do things that a company has to do but is not core to their business. The return on investment arguments are generally very compelling but, as always, there will be times when the good old appliance solution still does the job. But their days are numbered, mark my words.

email archiving in the cloud

Although I still like the “pass through” methodology employed by the Postini (Google) email filtering Software as a Service solution, I’ve been concerned at the lack of a fully integrated archiving service. Integrated in the sense that it is more easily accessible from a user perspective as there are two primary reasons for archiving:

• long term archive for audit, regulatory and legal reasons
• an effective way to reduce the proliferation and growth of Outlook’s (and similar) data files (.pst)

The first is relatively straightforward in that an email, passing through the email service, simply gets pulled aside and stored. It’s easy to do this in-the-cloud but it’s the user access to this that becomes an issue. Emails are generally accessed directly from Outlook be that in the Inbox or via a sub-folder within the Outlook sub-file structure. Archiving these documents and deleting them from the Outlook system makes them harder to find as a separate web portal is often required to access them.

If Outlook itself uses a file structure that exists in-the-cloud, then all email searches and history will be available as if on-line but actually stored off-site. This means that the decision to archive or not is no longer a big deal. That means less growth of local repositories of emails and an answer to many an organisation’s problems dealing with email storage.

Having been looking at the market for a while, the best solution that I’ve found that ticks all the boxes comes from Mimecast. They have made the archive available directly from Outlook and the interface remains consistent regardless of whether you are searching local or remotely held storage.

I’m pleased to report that Vioptim has signed up as a Mimecast partner and is looking forward to introducing this technology to our customers and prospects. For further information please view here.

Cloud Computing, a definition

 Take a trip in an aeroplane or climb to the top of a high mountain and you’ll see that regardless of how you look at a cloud you can’t really define it. Where are its edges, what is its substance, where does it start and finish? That’s what I like about the term cloud computing, it defines it so well without recourse to hard facts.

Okay, I’m also the first to jump up and down about trying to understand concepts and having a common vocabulary, so I need definitions too but perhaps we should define the services that run “in-the-cloud” rather than the cloud itself. We have other concepts around cloud computing like software as a service, platform as a service, storage as a service and several similar terms which are the ones that can be defined more thoroughly. Wikipedia has a definition for Cloud Computing, the only point that I would disagree on is relating it entirely to the Internet. The idea of a cloud in communications has been around for a long time, for instance the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through which we’ve all made calls over many, many years. MPLS is another cloud that has become a popular way for corporations to connect their own offices together providing a private cloud.

Apart from defining (or not) “the cloud”, there has also been much discussion over its validity and longevity. Many forum contributors have given the concept the thumbs down on the basis that it’s not secure, it’s too difficult to control access and manage, someone else is looking after it, all contributing to its instant demise. Funny that the same arguments were proffered when the mainframe was under threat from networked workstations and PCs but look where we are today. The fact is that when a new concept starts to impact the mass market, sides will be taken and obstacles placed in its way. It’s also a fact that these obstacles will be neutralised, removed, avoided and ways will be found to provide the necessary secure services and management practices needed to make it work. It just takes time.

Of course, there are also those that seem to think that everything will be totally fine simply by shifting to the cloud. Hand my problems over to someone else and blame them when it all goes wrong. At this stage of the development of cloud computing, that would be a major mistake. Any organisation embarking on a cloud computing strategy should look at it very, very carefully just as you would have done in the move from mainframe to minis to distributed computing. A business risk analysis should be undertaken both in terms of pushing the application or service into the cloud and the suppliers that are providing the service. But be assured, cloud computing is here to stay. Why?

Once upon a time there was one computer, a big mainframe, that an organisation would either own or rent time on. This was only accessible from specific points in an office environment. Then came the time sharing mini which enabled many more organisations to have their own hardware and helped to develop the software industry. Then came networked workstations for engineering and electronic computer aided design and at this stage the technological developments accelerated at an extreme pace as these tools developed faster, better CPUs and storage which enabled even more rapid developments. Then came the ubiquitous personal computer which eventually started taking over all of our lives and networked computing hit the big time with everyone having their own computer, possibly more than one. Now we have computers that we carry around with us, that have high bandwidth access to the Internet and to our corporate systems including email and a variety of applications.

It’s the latter that will determine the success of cloud computing. As each of us has multiple computers we will demand access from anywhere at any time. Traditional corporate systems can’t cope with this very easily but cloud computing can. That’s why it’s here to stay and will be the next “type” of computing. It’s all to do with ubiquitous communications and very mobile computers. Whether the corporate IT manager loves or loathes cloud computing, they need to get to grips with it or become the mainframers of the modern time, a dying race. Or maybe the mainframers will be reborn as cloud computing may have the effect of centralising vast computer resources all over again.

And so the cycle continues……

When is spam, spam?

An interesting dilemma arose last month when an emailer that was sent out by us from Vioptim relating to helping people reduce spam led to an email back saying that this is what we were sending out. The situation has arisen because Vioptim is still a fledgling business with an email contact list consisting of names gleaned as a result of a variety of sources both personal and networking through Vioptim and its associates.

There is a good deal of information on the Internet relating to the concept of “Opting in”, a method of helping to reduce emails by getting prospective customers to agree to taking your email messages. Actually, in the UK, this is only a legal necessity when a business is dealing with members of the public as individual consumers rather than people working for businesses. It’s an understandable position in that how do you get business people to opt-in without sending them something to ask their permission, er an email perhaps?

Okay, there’s always the web site to show off your wares and capabilities but for a new business how do you get people to go there in the first place especially if you’re dealing with a relatively niche market area? Maybe send them an email to invite them?

So the only real option that any new business can operate under is the “opt-out” option. This, at least, gives the recipient the opportunity to have their name removed from the mailing list in an easy to manage way if they really don’t want the news letter or whatever subject matter is being promoted.

It’s a tough world out there but let’s separate out the real spammers from the guys that are genuinely trying to add some value and promote serious business propositions. Maybe suggesting we can help reduce spam and archive emails is close to suggesting that we’ve got pills to help with certain recreational activities. Can’t help but feel that’s a significantly different proposition, but for some people maybe not!

Getting it right first time

Last time around I discussed the idea of optimisation and a simple, 3-step process, which is basically sound engineering practice. Well, same theme but this time it’s about getting things right first time. It’s a long, long time ago that I read an article from IBM who had researched many of the worlds largest manufacturers and had come up with the not unsurprising result that it is a lot cheaper in the long run if you avoid problems ocurring in the field. Spend more time and money in the design and development stages and you’ll save a huge amount if product hits the streets and doesn’t work.

Car and white goods manufacturers are well known in this space with Toyota being well and truly in the frame earlier this year. The cost of getting their design wrong could end up bringing the company to its knees not just because of the cost of recall but ultimately the cost to their reputation.

Last week I attended the Avaya TechShare conference in Maidenhead, a two day event aimed at bringing Avaya and Nortel partners up to speed with the integration of the two suppliers, now of course, all Avaya. A great conference, well organised, well attended and good food. Key areas were around SIP, IP Telephony, networking and Contact Centres and how these areas are coming together with the acquisition. I was there as a sponsor for Codima, the network management toolbox and managed to have a good number of useful and interesting conversations. However, I have to report that all but one of the partners that I chatted to have ever run pre-deployment tests for VoIP readiness. That is, will the customer network be able to deliver a sufficient quality of service (QoS) to handle IP Telephony adequately.

We’re in the realms here of business critical operations. Unified communications has to be a very strong candidate for “getting it right first time” and the emphasis has to be on several areas:

1. The manufacturer, in this case Avaya, to make sure that their partners are qualified to provide the service required and can prove that they have gone about the proof of concept properly
2. The installing channel partner, one of a number of value added resellers who work in this market place. The partner should be proving to the end user that his system is capable of running VoIP
3. The end-user i.e. the person whose business is at risk if the deployment fails or cannot be made to function correctly.

Each stake-holder above has a duty of care to ensure that they are not putting their’s or anyone else’s business at risk by not taking adequate measures to ensure the success of the project. But still the excuses come out that “there’s no time to do it”, “we haven’t had a failure yet”, “the customer won’t pay for it”, “we know what we’re doing, thank you”. Yet I’ve heard from both Avaya and one of their arch rivals that things do go pear shaped and then the cost of putting it right is just astronomical. Reputation is affected, time and money invested to repair, customer stands to lose money due to operational impacts and so the list goes on.

For not a lot of money, the Codima Toolbox will decrease the risk of a VoIP deployment not working. Okay, it’s not the only tool out there but that’s not my point. Why do organisations persist with risk to them, their business reputation and that of their customers by simply not doing the job they should be doing. Check it out first. If it was an aeroplane you’d expect a lot of analysis before the thing takes off. If it’s a new drug you’d hope that the major side affects are understood before you start taking it. Wouldn’t you? So how come, in this day and age, we can still have a run at IT deployments without testing them out first. Crazy!

End of rant! Do have a look at http://www.codimatech.com especially the VoIP tools.

3 Simple Steps to Network Optimisation

It never ceases to amaze me that there always seem to be the two extremes of views and methodologies in the IT business. I suppose I shouldn’t be when considering the political views that are held and, in this run-up to the General Election, polarised views are what we expect.

I’m referring to what I consider to be a basic principle of good practice, change is a 3-step process:

• Identify
• Measure
• Change

You simply go round and round this loop, making changes, identifying differences and measuring the impact of the change. In this way you minimise the exposure to loss by making fundamental mistakes and changing things that either don’t need to be changed or need to be changed in context with other changes going on. But not everyone does this often because they have no system set-up to provide the fundamental elements of the process and often changes are forced upon them due to, perhaps, a new application coming on board. Unfortunately, it’s also true that many organisations don’t pay due respect to their IT infrastructure and starve the IT people running them of the neccessary investments to provide this essential information.

One of the best systems around for implementing this straightforward process for the infrastructure is Codima’s network management toolbox. The various tools have been designed to fully integrate with one another so that a network device discovery provides an asset list and Visio diagrams of the network. It’s then a very easy process to ping and to monitor those discovered devices providing fundamental base lines and operational health checks and to get into the details of what is happening at a protocol level through and analyser.

But in this era of unified communications when more and more systems are taking on real-time traffic such as VoIP, Codima’s Toolbox comes into its own. There is a very capable VoIP pre-deployment assessment tool which basically stress tests a network (LAN & WAN) to see how it will perform in a VoIP environment. Once deployed, the Toolbox can be used to monitor Quality of Service for SIP and Skinny phones as well as monitoring WAN links against QoS regardless of whose IP Telephony system is being used.

It all seems very logical to me but I’m amazed by the extremes of views and opinions out there. There is still the view in many camps that you simply wait for the phone to ring because the users will identify a problem way before the IT department. I call this reactive management and I know for a fact that it’s far more costly to operate in this mode and ultimately leads to less job satisfaction and more people churn. My message is “become pro-active by implementing good-practice”.

For me, Codima provides the basic 3 elements of good practice. Identify what you have, see how its performing, make changes. We all know that this is just a start because it’s then important to ensure that your storage is working correctly, that applications and the servers that they are running on are set-up properly and that due consideration is given to security. No-one said that it would be easy but following best practice is a good place to start.

Where virtualization, optimization and security converge ..

I was reading an interesting article last week mentioning that small and medium sized businesses on the whole believe that they are in a good position to recover from a disaster. The report, by Symantec at the end of 2009, begs to differ from this apparent feeling of calm and confidence. It remains an incredible enigma to me that any organisation that doesn’t have a real focus on their IT housekeeping can believe that they will be back up and running as a business in a few hours following a disaster. It would appear from the report that the ‘disaster’ may well be the crashing of an in-house server with the loss of the disk containing the business information.

The fact that some organisations do not backup daily, worse, some perhaps just once a month, belies belief. No wonder we see so much in the IT press about data loss, virus infestations and the rest of it. If so many organisations don’t look after their business continuity properly then their concerns about such security issues are probably a long way down their list of priorities.

Perhaps company auditors should be taking a more active interest in this aspect of an SME’s business. They certainly do with the larger organisations especially when associated with business risk concerns. If all auditors highlighted these concerns every time they do the books then maybe, just maybe, the business owners would take more notice.

There are some simple solutions to many of these problems and these solutions lie at the heart of Vioptim’s approach to business solutions. We look at the converging areas of virtualisation, optimisation and security where there is a rich vein of solutions and services that can help automate these areas whilst taking away the hassle of managing them.

The convergence of Virtualisation, Optimisation and Security

This graphic is just a brief view of what solutions can come from these areas of convergence. There’s a long way to go but the richness that these capabilities and technologies provide are a blue print for many organisations, especially SME’s who need to move to best practice as quickly as possible without spending too much money to do so, too much time to implement or too much time to manage.

The problem still remains that until business managers recognise the risks to their business and stop assuming that the IT management have got everything tied down, the budget to do this type of work is often not there. How do IT know what the risk is to the business without it being worked out by the people who own the numbers?

Business risk analysis must start at the top and move down the organisation, not the other way around. Vioptim specialises in bringing solutions that exist in these areas of convergence to businesses of all sizes across all markets.