Google Flexing its Mobile Might

Posted on | February 11, 2010 | No Comments

 

Google just announced that it’s bringing some serious location-based integration to its services, all centered around the new Buzz social networking tool built into Gmail. Google’s going to do location better than the usual latitude / longitude coordinates — it’s able to snap those to actual place names and then take context-aware actions depending on where you are. The new location services is integrated into the main mobile Google.com search page and the new buzz.google.com page for the iPhone and Android, and into maps for Android, S60, and Windows Mobile. Buzz is rolling out starting today, and it should hit everyone within “the next few days.”

Continue reading Google Buzz takes mobile location services to the next level

 

Text Donations for Haiti Relief

Posted on | January 14, 2010 | No Comments

So far there over $3 million raised through this Red Cross campaign! Text ‘Haiti’ to 90999 and a $10 donation will  be added to your phone bill. Learn More

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid

Posted on | January 6, 2010 | No Comments

The 3.8-pound IdeaPad U1 Hybrid is an 11.6-inch laptop with a retractable multitouch screen. When the screen is locked into its upright position in the laptop’s chassis, it’s powered by a CULV Intel Core 2 Duo processor and runs Windows 7 Home Premium. What makes this new model interesting is that when the screen is pulled from its shell it becomes a Qualcomm Snapdragon powered-multitouch tablet with a 16GB SSD that runs on a Lenovo’s customized Skylight Linux interface. The device is set to be debuted at CES and is slated for a $999 sale price. Can’t wait to see if the dual OS design is truly functional or just flashy, more to come once it is officially debuted.

Google Apps in Los Angeles: A Closer Look

Posted on | December 15, 2009 | No Comments

Posted December 15th, 2009 by Matthew Weinberger

The City of Los Angeles has finalized its decision to migrate its 30,000 city employees from their existing GroupWise e-mail system to Google Apps. One example: City of Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin says the project will cut the municipality’s electricity bills by nearly $750,000 over five years. Here’s an update.

The Google blog post, guest-written by Levin, describes why Google Apps was the logical choice for this particular project: Instant messaging and video chat options are included in the package; the Google web interface makes it much easier for employees to check e-mail and get work done from home; Google lets each user have more storage than their on-premises solution could ever afford.

Levin also offered up a video interview:

Money Matters

Now the showstopper. “Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes,” Levin writes in the blog post. “For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years.”

Moreover, city representatives are harping on the virtues Google’s usability and security edges over Groupwise: the familiar Gmail interface coupled with Google’s security and corporate compliance features make for what must seem to be an unbeatable combination to a city employee.

Key Considerations

This all sounds great, but there are two points to be made:

• Google competitors like Zoho offer enterprise-grade SaaS applications; was Google the best choice?
  
• Moreover, is it appropriate for government agencies to use the public cloud at all? The cost savings are nothing to be sneered at, but this means that sensitive confidential materials and possibly even personal records are sitting in a Google data center, not being watched over by a public servant.
  

In recent months, more and more MSPs seem to be siding with Google on the SaaS debate. Nearly 22 percent of MSPmentor 100 survey participants say they are recommending Google Apps to their customers. (The survey closed Dec. 11; results will be published in 1Q 2010.)

RedEye turns your iPhone and iPod touch into bona fide universal remote (video)

Posted on | December 2, 2009 | No Comments

By Darren Murph posted Dec 2nd 2009 2:27PM

 

Apple’s ‘Remote‘ application was a good start, but we’ve known for some time now that the platform was capable of far, far more. ThinkFlood is stepping up today and proving our assumptions right, as the RedEye universal remote control system effectively converts your iPhone or iPod touch into a remote for any IR-equipped component. The app itself is completely free to download, though it’s the $188 base station that really makes the magic happen; your handheld talks to said dock via WiFi, and if you’ve got an AV device, home automation system or pretty much anything that responds to IR signals, your iPhone can now control it. The setup supports multiple rooms, controllers and users simultaneously, and we’re told that it “controls a virtually unlimited number of devices and can store a virtually unlimited number of commands.” Heck, this thing even reacts to multitouch gestures and accelerometer controls. Don’t believe us? Check the vids just past the break. 

Top data center challenges include social networks, rising energy costs

Posted on | December 2, 2009 | No Comments

Data growth will hit 650% over next half-decade, Gartner says

By Jon Brodkin , Network World , 12/01/2009

Enterprise data needs will grow a staggering 650% over the next five years, and that’s just one of numerous challenges IT leaders have to start preparing for today, analysts said as the annual Gartner Data Center Conference kicked off in Las Vegas Tuesday morning.

Rising use of social networks, rising energy costs and a need to understand new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are among the top issues IT leaders face in the evolving data center, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio said in an opening keynote address.

The 650% enterprise data growth over the next five years poses a major challenge, in part because 80% of the new data will be unstructured, Cappuccio said. IT executives have to make sure data can be audited and meet regulatory and compliance objectives, while attempting to ensure that growing storage needs don’t break the bank. Technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication and automated storage tiering can help reduce costs.

“If you’re not doing thin provisioning in storage today, you need to start,” Cappuccio said. “It’s an easy, logical way to reduce storage consumption.”

Deduplication is another technology IT officials have to examine. Many IT shops are seeing storage reductions of 50% to 60% with dedupe, which eliminates duplicate copies of stored objects and files, he said. Another money-saving technology is automated tiering, which makes sure data is stored on appropriately priced boxes. As much as 80% of data on high-speed drives is almost never used and should be moved to less expensive storage tiers, he said.

Cappuccio listed 10 key issues for IT managers to examine: virtualization; the data deluge; energy and green IT; complex resource tracking; consumerization of IT and social software; unified communications; mobile and wireless; system density; mashups and portals; and cloud computing.

Social networks are coming into the enterprise whether CIOs want them to or not, Cappuccio said. Twitter use grew an amazing 1,382% in 2008 and the majority of new users were between the ages of 39 and 51, he said.

“It is a growing phenomenon which we can’t shut down,” he said. Employees and customers are using wikis, blogs, Facebook and Twitter and “it’s affecting you now whether you know it or not.” Businesses need to examine Web-based social software platforms because they are transforming interactions with both customers and employees, he said.

IT managers are also being forced to look more at energy use, as many organizations are moving the energy bill from the facilities department to the IT department. “What’s happening now is CFOs are asking embarrassing questions [about power use],” Cappuccio said.

The energy cost of two racks of servers, at full density, can exceed $105,000 a year, he said. And servers are only growing denser, with new blades that incorporate servers, storage, switches, memory and I/O capabilities. At today’s prices, the money spent on supplying energy to an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server within three years, he said.

IT managers are accustomed to being asked to “do more with less,” but that need is taking on new levels of meaning as IT is forced to curtail energy use, Cappuccio said. The energy bill has not traditionally been a part of the IT budget but CIOs can expect it to be incorporated into their spending plans soon, he said.

Want to compare storage products? Visit our Product Showcase now

Energy costs are the main reason businesses are pursuing server virtualization. Despite what hypervisor vendors might have you believe, virtualization typically doesn’t reduce complexity or management costs but the energy savings from packing multiple virtual machines onto a single box are very real, Cappuccio said.

Gartner analysts noted that there is declining level of trust in the IT market on the heels of the recession, but the research firm expects global IT spending to rise a modest 2.3% in 2010. “There’s no denying that it’s been a tough year,” Gartner analyst Joe Baylock said. Enterprises are extending the life of old equipment to save money, but this is also subjecting users to higher failure rates caused by aging hardware.

Future spending growth might be driven by cloud computing, but Gartner analysts are predicting that most cloud spending will initially focus on building private cloud networks rather than outsourcing services to external cloud providers.

Successful virtualization: The “Central Vac” versus the “Dust Buster”

Posted on | November 13, 2009 | No Comments

12 November, 2009 By Joanne Moretti, SVP Product Marketing & Analyst Relations, CA, Inc.

 

Data center virtualization is here to stay, as enterprises seek to lower IT, energy and real estate costs while also improving their ability to support changing business demands. One estimate from Forrester Research is that 31 percent of [new server] operating system instances were virtualized in 2008, and that will grow to 54 percent in 2010.

The challenge now is not simply deploying virtualization, but optimizing it not only for tactical cost reductions but also for more strategic business results. And to achieve those results, holistic management is essential. Operating virtualized environments as just another IT silo can actually end in higher costs and less flexibility. Succeeding with a more strategic approach to virtualized environments requires comprehensive management that unifies virtualized and physical systems.

There is no lack of tools and utilities offered by virtualization technology vendors designed to manage the virtual partitions, and they can be valuable. But they don’t provide the visibility and intelligence needed to manage virtualized services in today’s large scale, complex IT production environments. I think of those platform specific tools as “dust busters”–very much needed for those specific spot jobs, however not as effective as a built-in central vacuum system that keeps the entire IT house clean. Those “Central Vac” management disciplines like Performance and Availability Management, Security and Compliance Management, Change and Configuration Management, IT Asset and Financial Management–and of course the real accelerator to driving ROI in a virtualized environment, Automation Management–must be comprehensively deployed across virtualized and physical systems in order to get the full return on the technology. [business intelligence]

Why virtualization took off

When virtualization was introduced, commodity servers offered an affordable computing alternative to the mainframe. For high-volume, business critical applications, powerful Unix clusters and mainframes were still the norm. But less complex applications and services could be supported by off-the-shelf hardware. Typically running Linux or Windows, these servers were built to handle one application per box, and their relatively low price meant their numbers grew dramatically across departments as well as inside IT.

In addition to the departmental sprawl that occurred, IT generally provisioned more capacity than necessary to ensure horse-power for peak operating periods, or for failover measures. This “Just in Case” provisioning coupled with departmental sprawl spelled huge: “server sprawl”, and as a result many enterprises experienced floor space and power consumption issues. Facilities meant for tens or hundreds of servers suddenly had to accommodate thousands. New data centers had to be constructed. All of this growth required a huge increase in support staffing costs. And ironically, it became clear that utilization of these resources was extremely low, frequently less than 25% of CPU and memory usage during normal processing periods.

This growing amount of hardware meant energy use was also on the rise, both to power the servers and also to cool the data centers. As clock speeds in chips had increased, so had voltage “leaks” which caused dramatic heating problems. Most data centers could not handle the increased cooling load, and retrofitting costs and energy bills were soaring.

So, enterprises were faced with more hardware than they really needed, consuming more space and energy than they could afford.

–
–

Virtualization as a Building Block

Virtualization can lower hardware and energy costs, provide greater flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions and can reduce overall IT risk.

But successfully managed virtualization also offers the opportunity to help transform IT into a service. By delivering the right resources where they are needed whenever they are needed, CIOs begin a successful path toward cloud computing.

The private cloud model proposes resources, physical and virtual, can be automatically provisioned regardless of environment, OS or type. Applications and the users they serve get the resources that are needed, with limited waste. That has long been a vision, but it is one that can be fulfilled today with appropriately managed virtualization that includes robust solutions that span security, governance and traditional management. 

How Safe is Your Data?

Posted on | October 12, 2009 | No Comments

How safe is your company’s data?
This article recently published by USA Today sheds light on the rapidly growing threat of data theft companies are facing today. If you are worried about the safety of your business data, contact us today or click here to learn more about our data protection plans and how we can ensure your data stays safe.

 

Cyberthieves find workplace networks are easy pickings
By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY

It took only a modicum of skill for a cybergang to steal 94 million credit and debit card payment records from the TJX retail chain — and follow that up by hauling in 130 million records from credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems.Court records reveal that those record-setting break-ins were almost too easy. Even more surprising: The thieves were able to take their sweet time extracting the data, in each case going undetected for more than a year.

What happened to TJX and Heartland was not unusual. And details unveiled in the prosecution of gang members involved in both thefts have shed fresh light on a business truism demanding more scrutiny: Workplace networks have turned out to be much more porous and difficult to defend than anyone ever anticipated.

Overly complex IT systems are producing endless opportunities for cyberthieves, who need only to master simple hacking techniques to get their hands on sensitive data. The result: Data breaches continue to plague companies, hospitals, universities and government agencies — any entity that collects data and conducts business on a digital network.

The vast majority of organizations routinely fail to take simple defensive measures, such as shoring up common website weaknesses or uniformly enforcing the use of strong passwords. “Networks have become a hodgepodge of components stitched together, creating security holes that can easily be taken advantage of,” says Barmak Meftah, senior vice president at applications security firm Fortify Software.

Though companies are loath to publicly disclose data losses, about 656 data breach cases made headlines in 2008, up from 446 in 2007, according to the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center. Through nine months this year, ITRC has archived new stories chronicling 391 data thefts.

With IT staffs stretched thin — and concentrating on adding digital services — data heists are going unreported, or unnoticed, security analysts say. “The problem for any organization is, ‘How do I make sure all the doors and windows are closed, and how do I keep them closed, without stalling my business model?’ ” says Steve Dauber, marketing vice president at security assessment firm RedSeal.

Data thieves, in turn, are having a field day using well-understood hacking techniques to carry out increasingly refined cyberthefts. “They know where the money is,” says Ivan Arce, CTO of security assessment firm Core Security Technologies. “And they’re getting to where the money is faster and with less noise.”

Simple hacks

Federal charges filed against Albert Gonzalez accusing the 28-year-old Miamian of playing key roles in the TJX and Heartland capers illustrate just how easy data thieves have it.

Gonzalez pleaded guilty in August to fraud and conspiracy charges for his part in cracking into TJX, parent of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls discount clothing stores, and seven other national retailers from 2005 through 2006. He faces similar charges for his role in data thefts from Heartland and four big retailers from late 2007 through 2008.

In the attacks against the retailers, court records show, Gonzalez and several cohorts used a technique called war driving. Despite its name, war driving is considered an innocuous pastime of hobbyists who cruise neighborhoods with a laptop and inexpensive antennas to map out Wi-Fi signals — wireless Internet connections — being broadcast from homes and businesses.

However, retailers have come to depend on password-protected Wi-Fi systems to transmit data from cash registers and price-checking scanners to a central computer server, because Wi-Fi eliminates the hassles and expense of laying cables. By war driving, thieves can readily pinpoint retailers’ Wi-Fi systems. Tapping in is “exceedingly simple,” says Andy Bokor, COO of security assessment Trustwave. Crooks can use free password-breaking programs widely available on the Internet.

Court records show the Wi-Fi system of a Marshalls store in Miami was initially compromised in July 2005. In September 2005, the intruders began downloading data from TJX headquarters in Framingham, Mass. By May 2006, they were able to establish a virtual private network connection to TJX’s servers, enabling them to install custom-built “sniffer” programs.

Sniffers are also widely available for free. Generic ones log all of the traffic moving across a network. To keep from getting swamped with data, the thieves installed sniffers specifically designed to recognize and capture data from the magnetic stripes on the backs of credit and debit cards.

“The interception of data is not technically difficult,” says Matt Marshall, vice president of engineering at security assessment firm Redspin. “You just have to be at the right place at the right time.”

Data thieves today are hustling to position sniffers inside retailers, financial firms and health care companies, in particular. “Anyone who keeps sensitive information on their networks is actively being targeted,” says Marshall.

Going undetected

Penetrating Heartland’s network presented a fresh challenge. Heartland has no Wi-Fi-equipped storefronts, and its hard-wired, central network sits securely behind company walls in Princeton, N.J. However, like many corporations, Heartland has come to rely on a public website to interact with its clients: 250,000 restaurants and smaller retailers across the U.S.

Court records reveal that the thieves used a technique called SQL injection to break in and subsequently embed sniffer programs similar to those used in the TJX attack. In an SQL injection attack, the intruder simply types random characters into a Web page input box, such as those on a log-in page. A determined hacker can often break the connection between the Web page and the underlying database, gaining a foothold to go deeper.

“The attackers did not create any new techniques,” says Alex Horan, director of product management at Core Security. “They simply combined existing techniques in a new way.”

Companies, understandably, rarely discuss data breaches. However, proof that data thieves are targeting hundreds of organizations using similar approaches to breach networks comes from Verizon Business, a division of Verizon Communications that sells consulting services to other corporations. Since 2004, Verizon has dispatched forensic specialists to conduct CSI-like probes of nearly 600 cases of corporate data theft.

In the vast majority of those cases, investigators discovered thieves routinely took days after initially penetrating a network to locate and break into valuable databases. And most often, the intruders spent weeks to years extracting data before being discovered.

“It’s one of the more shocking statistics we’ve run across,” says Verizon principal researcher Wade Baker. “The length of time it takes an organization to discover that data is leaving is often five to six months” after the initial breach.

That pattern suggests “many organizations right now have breaches they don’t know about and won’t discover for some time to come,” says Baker.

Deeper attacks

Meanwhile, data thieves are increasingly seeking out other valuable forms of business data, besides credit card records. The attack of PayChoice, a leading supplier of online payroll services, is a recent case in point.

Attackers used an SQL injection hack to compromise PayChoice’s public Web page but showed little interest in flushing out any credit card account data. Instead, they took e-mail addresses of workers who get paid via PayChoice’s Web portal — and the names of their respective companies.

This put the attackers in position to send e-mails purporting to come from PayChoice addressed to individual people.

“This was a two-stage attack with the first stage being a minor attack to get relatively benign information that could be used in a more sophisticated second stage,” says Matt Moynahan, CEO of applications security firm Veracode.

Upon discovering the breach on Sept. 23, PayChoice shut down its website temporarily to “institute fresh security measures” before starting up again, says PayChoice CEO Robert Digby.

By then bogus e-mails had arrived at an undisclosed number of companies, including security monitoring firm Damballa, a onetime PayChoice client. Damballa was no longer a PayChoice customer when the hack occurred. Even so, several Damballa employees received e-mails asking them to click on a Web link to download a plug-in needed to continue accessing onlinemployer.com, PayChoice’s online portal.

Clicking on the link actually downloaded a version of the ZeuS banking Trojan, a malicious program widely used to break into online bank accounts. In recent months, a rash of malicious banking Trojans have taken aim at the online banking accounts of small businesses.

Tripp Cox, Damballa’s vice president of engineering, says he would not be surprised if the attackers’ ultimate goal was to access Damballa’s business accounts in order to execute wire transfers to money mules, accomplices recruited via work-at-home ads to set up bank accounts to receive stolen funds.

“The end game of this scam is unclear, but the selection of the ZeuS Trojan indicates that the criminals were hoping to get banking account log-in credentials from all of their victims,” says Cox. “One can imagine that they would next check balances of the pilfered accounts and go for the deep pockets.”

In a similar, ongoing attack, a Chinese hacking group continues to send corrupted e-mails addressed to specific employees at targeted companies, says Joe Stewart, senior researcher at security firm SecureWorks, who has examined intercepted samples.

The messages appear to come from known sources referencing a subject the recipient is likely to be working on, Stewart says. Each message attempts to entice the recipient into clicking on a Web link, or to open an attached Microsoft Office file. Doing so implants a backdoor connection, giving the attacker full control.

However, unlike malicious programs of this type that automatically enlist an infected PC into massive spamming networks, this infection turns control over to an attacker who has gone through a lot of trouble to get a perch inside a specific company. “My guess is that they’re seeking to gain a foothold on the network,” says Stewart.

Such attacks illustrate how opportunistic cybercriminals continue to be in taking advantage of porous networks, says Redspin’s Marshall. “The hackers adapt to the current landscape and really leverage it to their advantage,” he says.

Multitouch Mice On The Horizon

Posted on | October 5, 2009 | No Comments

Originally posted at Engadget

Rather odd timing, given some recent
developments in the Apple camp, but Microsoft Research has just surfaced some of its incredibly wild multitouch mouse prototypes. Each one uses a different touch detection method, and at first glance all five seem to fly in the face of regular ergonomics. The craziest two are probably “Arty,” which has two articulated arms to cradle your thumb and index finger, with each pad housing its own optical sensor for mission-critical pinching gestures, and “Side Mouse” which is button free and actually detects finger touches in the table immediately in front of the palm rest. Of course, there’s plenty of crazy in the FTIR, Orb Mouse and Cap Mouse (pictured), which rely on an internal camera, orb-housed IR camera and capacitive detection, respectively. Of course, there’s no word on when these might actually see the light of day, but it should be quite obvious that Apple’s not the only game in town thinking about this stuff. Check out the utterly enlightening video of these things in action after the break.

Gallery: Microsoft Research shows off multitouch mouse prototypes

 

Microsoft Research shows off multitouch mouse prototypes originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

How Much Is Your Dead Hard Drive Worth?

Posted on | September 21, 2009 | No Comments

Written By: Stuart Crawford, Bulletproof Infotech
Original Article from BulletproofIT.ca

Data loss can be very costly, particularly for organizations in the small and medium business community where the difference between survival and closure can rest on the ability to recover from a disaster. At the very least, critical data loss will have a financial impact on companies of all sizes:

Even The Best Hard Drives Die.  Do You Back Up?
Is your small business taking all steps neccessary to prevent a data disaster?

Businesses of all sizes are witnessing an explosion in the volume of data they hold. Whether it is the result of the Internet, email, or increasingly heavy and media-rich application software, there is a massive growth in the volume of data all around. Conservative estimates place data growth at approximately 80% per year. Data is increasingly being recognized as one of the real assets of a company, and losing this data would cause severe damage to any organization.

Does your small business have a plan to manage this explosion in data growth?

Data type	Time to re-create 20 MB	Cost
Sales and marketing	19 days	$17,000
Accounting	21 days	$19,000
Engineering	42 days	$98,000

K&R’s combination of onsite disk based backup and offsite services provides a complete backup and disaster avoidance solution for small business.  How much are you willing to spend to get all your data back when a low cost, hassle free backup solution from K&R Network Solutions is the right answer.

 

 

What is the cost to your business if one day you arrived a work to find you have lost all your information?

Please protect your business data. Call K&R Network Solutions today to sign up for data protection or learn more. 858-292-5766 or info@krns-inc.com

keep looking »

KRNS Links

• About K&R Network Solutions
• Contact K&R Network Solutions
• San Diego Managed IT Services, IT Consulting, Network Design – K&R Network Solutions
• Services and Solutions by K&R Network Solutions

Post Categories

• FAQs and Tutorials
  • WORST Practices for Windows Servers
• IT Services Industry News
• K&R Network Solutions News and Events
• Uncategorized

Recent Posts

• Google Flexing its Mobile Might
• Text Donations for Haiti Relief
• Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid
• Google Apps in Los Angeles: A Closer Look
• RedEye turns your iPhone and iPod touch into bona fide universal remote (video)

Tags found here:

Computer Consulting Computers Computer Services continuity dental dental software dentrix dentrix image email Event Examples Free Networking gmail Going Green google google apps Green Computing hard drive failure henry schein image image 5.0 Information Technology IT IT Consulting IT Serices K&R Network Solutions KRNS Managed IT Services Managed Service Provider Monitoring MSP Networking open house San Diego San Diego Chamber Of Commerce Server Security Server Virtualization service outage SMART Monitoring software Technology upgrades Virtualization Windows Server 2003 WORST IT Practices