Tag Archive for Cloud computing

| May 21, 2013
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Hotmail is Dead

Hotmail is DeadHotmail is dead. Microsoft (MSFT) has completed the transition from Hotmail to the new Outlook.com. The Hotmail replacement has more than 400 million accounts. According to a blog entry at Office.com most Hotmail users will not notice much difference. They can continue to use those accounts as long as they choose and can claim an Outlook email address whenever they like.

HotmailWriting in the company blog, Dick Craddock, Outlook.com’s group program manager said that Hotmail had more than 300 million active accounts that had to be moved. MSFT completed the epic live upgrade in only six weeks. The upgrade from Hotmail to Outlook.com required communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes and making sure they preserved  every email, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences.

The new Outlook email client has several different features from Hotmail, such as two-factor authentication, an updated calendar and app as well as integration with cloud service Skydrive and Skype. it allowed users to connect easily with Facebook (FB), Twitter and LinkedIn (LNKD).

Outlook.comGigaOm reports that MSFT will even allow collaboration with Google users. They report that:

... if you’re reading an email from a Gmail user, you can reply with a 
chat icon from your Outlook.com inbox. Or, if you and your 
Google-oriented buddy are collaborating on a document in Microsoft
Skydrive (as opposed to, say, Google Drive), you can send an instant
message to your Google contact with the click of a button. Microsoft
is also rolling out Google Chat integration.

All of these new features haven’t thrilled everyone, Mr. Craddock is quoted in the IBT, “Of course, whenever a widely used consumer service makes any substantial change, there will always be some folks that don’t like it, and that shows up in the feedback…”

Microsoft logoHotmail was one of the first web-based email services. Founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith it was launched on July 4 1996 as “HoTMaiL”. Microsoft bought the web email service in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and it was rebranded as “MSN Hotmail”.

Outlook.com was launched in February 2013.  It’s based around Microsoft’s Metro design language, and closely mimics the user interface of Microsoft Outlook.

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For anyone who has ever had to be involved in a hot email upgrade you should recognize the technical feat moving Hotmail to Outlook.com really was despite occasional problems. During most email system upgrades, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. There will be power or network issues that will interrupt the mailbox transfer across the wire, there will be Confusedusers with 32 Gb of email messages, there will be people who file their active messages in the trash can (yes, I’ve seen it) there will be strange shared calendars and accounts that just won’t transfer unless you move them item by item to find the corruption.

Kudos to MSFT for migrating Hotmail to Outlook.com, lets see if it matters in the face of Google’s (GOOG) Gmail and Doc’s.

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Category: Cloud computing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| April 18, 2013
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Enterprise Resisting Office 365

Enterprise Resisting Office 365Microsoft has bet big on Microsoft Office 365 but CITEworld says so far, the big enterprises that make up the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue haven’t jumped on board. Microsoft channel boss Jon Roskill told Redmond Channel Partner that “90 percent” of Office 365 customers are from businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and explained “small business is at the core of this product customer base.” Mr. Roskill also said that Office 365 “penetration is still in the low single digits” in other words, less than 5%.

Microsoft Office 365Office 365 was originally introduced in June 2011, and the first focus was on Microsoft-hosted versions of servers like Exchange and SharePoint. But enterprise customers tend to have multi-year license agreements called Enterprise Agreements that cover perpetual licenses for thousands of copies of Office and user licenses for servers like Exchange and SharePoint. So far, it seems that these enterprises are sticking with the old model.

That’s a challenge for Microsoft because the company has to convince customers to renew their EAs at the end of each period usually three years. If customers don’t think Microsoft’s latest offerings are worth an upgrade, they might skip a renewal and keep the old versions, for which they’d still retain full rights.

Is Cloud-Based Anti-Virus Ready?Microsoft is trying to get more enterprises to adopt the new model by offering richer incentives for channel partners to sell Office 365 to enterprises — according to The Register, large channel partners who sell the product on an EA get up to $45 per seat under a special incentive that runs through June.

A recent article at Computerworld says that Microsoft’s Office 365 has accounted for about 25% of all Office retail unit sales in the U.S. since its introduction two months ago, but the new “rent-not-own” strategy has not boosted overall sales.

Steve BallmerStephen Baker of the NPD Group, a research firm that regularly surveys U.S. retailers for software sales figures, noted the sales split between Office 2013 and Office 365. Mr. Baker told Computerworld, “Office 365 has accounted for about 25% of the [unit] volume … Office 2013 has had about three-fourths of the retail business.”

Office 2013 is the traditional kind of software customers have bought for decades, a “perpetual license” that is paid for once, but then gives the buyer the right to run the software for as long as he or she wants.

subscription softwareOffice 365, however, is a line of subscription plans that Microsoft expanded this year, and for the first time offered to consumers. Under the Office 365 model, customers can buy a one-year subscription at retail, but after that, must pay to Microsoft when that year’s up if they want to keep running the software.

If the subscription expires, the Office software, Office 2013 for Windows or Office for Mac 2011 for Apple’s (AAPL) OS X, that’s installed locally drops into a reduced-function mode that allows viewing and printing of existing files, but bars editing or the creation of new documents.

Mictosoft salesNPD’s Baker’s breakdown of Office 2013 and Office 365 was the first sign of how the latter has done since its Jan. 29 debut. Microsoft, for instance, has been mum on sales. In the U.S., Computerworld says the combined Office 2013 and Office 365 retail sales have been comparable to the same period in 2012, as well as to the first two months after the release of Office 2010 in June 2010.

 

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Category: Business | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| February 21, 2013
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Dropbox Warms Up to Corp IT for IPO

Dropbox Wams up to Corp IT for IPOIn preparation for its IPO, Dropbox is warming up to corporate customers reports InfoSecurity. the general consensus about Dropbox within business is that it is an excellent service, but lacks security. Data breaches,a lack of visibility into and control over how stored and shared files are used make the app seem insecure to many corporate users. GigaOM points out that large companies, including IBM (IBM), forbid its use. One of the criticisms, InfoSecurity cites is that employees leaving the company (either through termination or leaving to join a competitor) will automatically take any potentially sensitive files stored in their Dropbox accounts when they leave the company.

DropboxThe new Dropbox Team (the corporate multi-user offering) dashboard seeks to make that more attractive. This paid-for service costs $795 per year for 5 users plus $125 for each additional user. The new dashboard provides the team leader with greater visibility and control over which members can access individual files, and what they can do with those files. In particular, if a team member leaves the company or just the team, access to the stored files can be immediately blocked.

These new features do not prevent an employee opening a separate personal account and using that to exfiltrate sensitive files, but InfoSecurity claims they make it more likely that it would be a planned (and probably illegal) act. However, the greater part of the shadow IT use of Dropbox is likely to occur simply because staff are seeking to make their jobs easier and more efficient. By providing an official Dropbox Team account, the need to do that becomes less pressing – and Dropbox will benefit from increased income while business benefits from increased control.

two-factor authenticationA second new security feature within the new dashboard is the ability for the team leader to insist on and ensure the use of two-factor authentication by the team members. Optional two-factor authentication was announced by Dropbox last July. It followed the breach involving users’ re-used passwords. “Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts,” announced the company at the time. Two-factor authentication can solve this issue, and the team leader can now insist upon it, and ensure that individual team members do not subsequently turn it off.

It is possible that this improvement to the corporate Dropbox may be the start of preparation for a Dropbox IPO. IDC estimates that the enterprise file-sharing market will be worth $20 billion by 2015, and Dropbox is currently valued at around $4 billion.

Begging“Over 2 million businesses have people inside them using Dropbox. It’s already pervasive, we just want to make it easier for IT to say yes to those people asking for Dropbox,” Sujay Jaswa, VP of business development for Dropbox said in an interview with GigaOM.

Among business accounts, GigaOM says Google (GOOG) is getting traction with the Google Apps-Google Drive combo and Microsoft (MSFT) integrates SkyDrive storage with Office and Windows 8. Box, the company most associated with Dropbox-of-the-Enterprise, touts its support of all client devices, but targets larger companies incluing Netflix, Dow Chemical and Procter & Gamble.

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Other competitors in the Dropbox-of-the-Enterprise niche are Accellion’s kitedrive, Egnyte, GroupLogic’s activEcho, SurDoc and ownCloud. Still, it’s hard not to see all these rivals battling it out for the same paying business customers down the road.

At $125 per seat it seems awfully expensive, is it good enough for corporate IT to warm up to Dropbox in time to save its IPO?

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Category: Security | Tags: , , , , ,
| December 4, 2012
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Is Cloud-Based Anti-Virus Ready?

Is Cloud-Based Anti-Virus Ready?Cloud computing technology is one of the most disruptive technologies in recent history. Xath Cruz at CloudTimes argues in a recent article that cloud computing is also disrupting security software such as anti-virus and he asks how effective are cloud-based anti-viruses?

Computer virusThe article, How Effective are Cloud-Based Anti-Viruses? claims the demand for cloud-based anti-virus software has gone up steadily as more cloud dependent computing devices have invaded the market. Cloud dependent computing devices like iPads, Nooks, iPhones and Galaxy’s are as susceptible to malware as their big desktop brethren.

In order to fight the malware threats to cloud dependent computing devices, cloud based anti-virus has evolved.  Cloud based anti-virus works differently than popular cloud-based document editors like Google Docs, where you only need a web browser and internet access. The blog post explains that cloud based anti-virus software can’t function if it’s only in the cloud, since your PC won’t easily give the right kind of administrative access needed by antivirus software to programs hosted remotely, as that would leave your PC at risk of being intruded upon by other programs.

s\Small native app to run on the deviceIn order to protect a PC, tablet or smartphone, a cloud-based anti-virus software requires a small native app to run on the device. When downloaded, the app acts as the anti-virus, with its database and heuristics data being hosted on the cloud. There are also cloud based anti-virus software that use web browser extensions or Active X and Java to gain proper access to your PC.

Like any technology, cloud-based antivirus software has specific pros and cons when compared to native anti-virus suites, Mr. Cruz lays out some of the pro and cans of cloud based anti-virus:

Advantages

Cloud based anti virus1. No Installation Required – The first advantage of cloud based anti-virus is that there’s no need to install them on your PC. Cloud based anti-virus does not eat up hard disk space, with its storage and memory footprint being a fraction of what local anti-virus need. Additionally, you can get them up and running immediately, and there’s no likelihood of messing up the installation (which usually results in a non-working antivirus or corrupted file volume).

2. No Updating Necessary –  With cloud based anti-virus, there is no need to update data files, since it’s hosted on the cloud, and will automatically be patched or updated by the provider. This will offer the latest in protection when it becomes available.

3. Double Security Layer – With a cloud based anti-virus software, it is possible to run a locally installed anti-malware app and run another different cloud based antivirus without worrying about conflicts or PC slowdown. Different anti-virus software are better able to catch or inoculate different viruses.

Collective Intelligence4. An advantage of cloud based anti-virus software the author missed is collective or community intelligence. SearchSecurity reports that when a  systems identifies malware, it’s able to give feedback to the cloud anti-malware provider, thus providing a wider surface area for rapidly detecting 0-day attacks.

Disadvantages

1. Won’t Run in the Background – Cloud based anti-viruses are not effective against viruses that run on startup. Cloud based anti-viruses are not TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs and only run on an as needed basis.

2. Limited Scan – Cloud based anti-viruses risk missing dormant viruses in unopened or archived files. Windows’ security protocols will prevent some cloud anti viruses from scanning the whole computer. They will only be able scan core windows files and what’s currently loaded in the memory.

Cloud security3. It Requires an Internet Connection – Cloud based anti-virus is useless without access to the Internet. This is a problem for portable device users who can’t be connected 24×7. Without an Internet connection viruses will be free to do whatever they want.

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The author concludes for the best protection your PC can get, you need to use the services of both a locally installed anti-virus software and a cloud based one.

The main concern I have about cloud based anti-virus apps is downtime. Cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Amazon have had issues lately providing their services. Downtime at the upstream ISP on the LAN can also play havoc with cloud based anti-malware apps.

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Category: Security | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| June 7, 2012
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‘Personal Cloud’ to Replace PC by 2014, Says Gartner

Cloud Computing Mike Barton wrote on Wired’s Cloudline that there’s no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner (IT) believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives as soon as 2014.

Gartner LogoSteve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement, “Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices.” He continues, “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

In the article, Mr. Burton writes that Google plans a cloud-centered future with Google (GOOG) Play and Android mobile OS. But the personal computer will also not miss out on the cloud, as Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) are planning to weave the cloud into the next generation of their desktop operating systems, Windows 8, and OS X Mountain Lion.

Cloud manBut a cloud-happy future will not be as easy as that, because Gartner says, “it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.” Gartner sees a number of factors are converging to make for a perfect personal cloud storm by 2014:

Megatrend No. 1: Consumerization— Gartner says what corporate IT has seen so far been a precursor to the major wave that is starting to take hold across all aspects of IT as several key factors come together:

  • Users are more technologically savvy
  • The internet and social media have empowered and emboldenedSteve Ballmer users.
  • The rise of powerful, affordable mobile devices changes the equation for users.
  • Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have similar technology available to them.

Megatrend No. 2: Virtualization — Virtualization has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can set-up client environments.

AppsMegatrend No. 3: “App-ification” — Apps change the way applications are designed, delivered and consumed by users and it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market.

Megatrend No. 4: The Ever-Available Self-Service Cloud – The cloud opens a whole new level of opportunity for self-servicing users. Every user can now have a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do.

MobilityMegatrend No. 5: The Mobility Shift — Wherever and Whenever You Want Today, mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices.

Gartner’s Kleynhans said. “In this new world, the specifics of devices will become less important for the organization to worry about. Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, but no one device will be the primary hub. Rather, the personal cloud will take on that role. Access to the cloud and the content stored or shared in the cloud will be managed and secured, rather than solely focusing on the device itself.”

Ray OzzieWired says that former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie made the same point recently, “People argue about, ‘Are we in a post-PC world?’. Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world.” Ozzie reportedly told a conference,  ”That doesn’t mean the PC dies; that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.”

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Goodie for Gartner, they get paid for codifying the obvious. The consumers are moving to the personal cloud. DVDs vs.Netflix streams. Files on your hard drives vs. some distant datacenter run by Dropbox. Photo albums vs. Flickr. Books vs. Kindles and Nooks.

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