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  • Dropbox Spam Attack Underlines Possible Security Issues with Cloud Storage

    Dropbox is currently one of the industry leaders in cloud storage, alongside products like RapidShare, Google Drive and MediaFire. But when Dropbox became the target of a fairly major spam attack, even those that promote cloud computing had to admit that cloud storage poses a real security issue for IT professionals.

    The spam attack that Dropbox users experienced was traced back to the source, specifically one particular user who didn’t follow the basic rules of password security. A hacker snagged several users’ log-in information off a wide range of site, including the info of a current Dropbox employee, and discovered that employee used the same password and login for his Dropbox account as he did on the other sites. He accessed the employee Dropbox account and discovered a document filed with email addresses for other users. The result was tons of spam messages pushing Dropbox users to gambling sites.

    Although this problem was fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, it underlines the larger problem. Something much more sinister could have been introduced to the system, or the hacker could have figured out how to access some of the data stored on the Dropbox cloud. It starts with the individual’s misuse of passwords, but it also suggests that cloud storage employees may not be taking their responsibilities as seriously as they should.

    This time it was a list of emails, and that list was included without an additional password or any sort of encryption. Next time it could be government paperwork, or banking and medical records. Dropbox responded strongly to the issue, declaring they will instantly be incorporating security changes.

    Those changes will include an additional piece of identity proof during the sign-in authentication process, automated checks through the system searching out suspicious actions, a way for users to review their log-in history, and frequent requests to change passwords.

    It’s never going to be foolproof, but it is a solid step in the right direction. IT administrators will need to take a lesson from the Dropbox fiasco, and remind their coworkers about the need for heightened security. With billions of files now stored on the cloud, there’s simply too much data at risk to stand idly by.

  • Storage Management Priorities: the Need of the Hour


    Most industries acknowledge that increasing IT Storage needs is a fact of life even in the face of economic downturn.

    Newer and more efficient ways of optimizing existing storage facilities are being explored as budgets are tight and capital outlay has been squeezed, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, says: "In this economy, it will be important for IT professionals to stick to the fundamentals and focus on ROA and the ability to break even quickly."

    Major Storage investment priorities for IT Professionals in 2009 have been identified and listed unequivocally.

    Virtualized Storage services already in place require optimization. The direction of thinking seems to be virtualization of external storage and combining it with lower cost tiers of storage and thin provisioning.

    The stress is on curtailing data growth, while maximizing current investments, to get quick returns.

    The drive is to exploit the 70-80 per cent capacity that remains largely unused in existing storage.

    Unstructured data growth remains a persistent problem.

    Data storage optimization would require dealing with unstructured data on a war footing.

    The imperative is to archive unstructured data and map resources back to the bottom line of information needs.

    Tiered and priority ordering of information is identified as an essential activity that will help identify data that can be moved and archived without affecting critical data access.

    Consequently, the archiving solutions features being sought include simple process management, reduction in TCO and mitigation of risk.

    Active archiving solutions that are being put in place, have been recognized as integral to organization management initiatives and two tier storage systems are being moved to archival tier.

    Closely associated with the above processes is the data de-duplication process. Market conditions rule that duplicate data comes at a cost and de-duplication will save costs and improve productivity.

    Additionally, data compression and reduction in number of data backups are seen as methods to save costs.

    It is expected that as the year 2009 advances more and more companies will turn their attention from optimization and archiving needs towards Risk Mitigation and savings that can be had form power and cooling costs.

    Green, clean data centers will be seen as a real and urgent requirement.

    The need to stay ahead of energy issues will be dictated by upcoming regulations of EMEA and increasing purchasing requirements in the USA.

  • Back Office Software is "Bottleneck" Preventing Telecom Service Providers From Competing


    Telecom service providers are competing in saturated markets and many are experiencing flat or declining margins in the economic downturn.

    That’s the opinion of Jim Messer, CEO of Transverse, who said legacy back office software is often what keeps them from being agile in the marketplace.

    He was speaking after Transverse was named in the "Cool Vendors in Telecom Operations Management (TOM) 2009" report by Gartner.

    In the report Transverse is identified by Gartner as one of four TOM vendors worldwide who they consider to be at the cutting edge of telecom business support systems and operations support systems.

    The report features an analysis of the company and its Business Support Solutions (BSS) solution blee(p).

    It introduces a new way to deploy and manage back office functions and is aimed at helping service providers reduce the financial risks associated with rolling out new business models by aligning back office infrastructure with business goals.

    Messer said a technology refresh of legacy, back-office systems was long overdue for many service providers.

    He said Transverse’s state-of-the-art open source approach made it easier and more cost effective for service providers to take advantage of new business models.

    "We’re pleased that Gartner has identified Transverse as a Cool Vendor. We’re a company that can uniquely have an impact in addressing this industry-wide problem," he said.

  • Seagate Targeting Datacenter Power Consumption


    Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, according to the company’s CEO Steve Luczo.

    While not going into detail, he told InfoWorld that the disk drive maker has a competitive advantage in that field.

    Steve Luczo, CEO Seagate

    Luczo also said the storage market will bounce back from the global economic downturn sooner than other sectors because of the growing requirement for storage at both the business and consumer levels.

    He said that while IT departments could make storage efficiencies in the short-term they would eventually run out of options and have to look at new solutions.

    This could be within the next two to three quarters.

  • How Is The Economy Affecting the US Storage Sector?


    Despite the global economic downturn it appears the US storage sector will continue to remain as busy as ever.

    The need to store increasing volumes of digital files – and to provide continuous access to them – seems to be keeping the industry buzzing with activity, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    Most organizations are poor editors of digital information.

    The tendency is to retain everything and add to storage rather than spend the time and effort in weeding out and disposing of digital information that is irrelevant or redundant.

    Moreover, finding time and human resources for such second tier jobs is difficult.

    There is also the latent conviction that the new US federal court rules and other state and national regulations may require a business to produce the data at some future date.

    So, enterprises are more likely to retain the data for legal reasons than they were in the past.

    Benjamin Woo, of IDC Storage, takes an optimistic view of the outlook for the storage industry.

    "Despite the downturn in the macroeconomic conditions, our consensus is that in the short to medium-term, storage is the most resistant to macroeconomic changes," he said.

    "While there is no doubt that there will be some form of pull-back on storage investment, many of the large financial institutions, especially JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America – but also Wells Fargo and Barclays – will need to commit, or in the case of Chase, maintain, substantial IT and storage investment in the next six to 12 months, for integration of their acquired banks."

    Woo said that, while most companies will go into a capital conservation mode in the long term, they too must consider subscription storage models that are offered by online storage providers.

    The indications are that the slowing down of the economy will have its impact on the storage market initially but it will rally over time.

    The optimistic assessment in the industry is that IT organizations will move from building infrastructure to modifying infrastructure and efficiency improvement.

    This, in turn, will revitalize the storage market.

    Moreover, as companies struggle to survive, the cross currents of legal actions will tend to increase, and storage products that cater to legal discovery will drive the growth in the storage market.

    Greg Schulz, founder and Senior analyst of the StorageIO Group, said the focus will be on storage technologies "that can do more in a smaller footprint – that footprint being power, cooling, floor-space, and time in a given density.

    "This means servers [will be needed] that can do more work in a smaller space, storage for active data that can do more IOPS or bandwidth or files or e-mails or videos streamed per watt in a given footprint.

    "Or, for inactive and idle data, more capacity in a given footprint and cost point [will be desirable]."

    What will really happen, will be decided in the womb of time.

    However, there appears to be a general conviction that the storage industry’s optimism is not misplaced.

  • ParaScale CEO Says 2009 To Be Year Cloud Storage Breaks Out


    Cloud computing – including cloud storage – will transform the industry and become the predominant way in which IT is consumed.

    That’s the prediction of Sajai Krishnan, CEO of Silicon Valley start-up ParaScale.

    He said there has been a rapid heightening of interest recently in all things cloud – applications, computing and storage.

    As a result enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud storage as a way to enable flexible computing power over the Internet, according to Krishnan.

    "We believe the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed as we move forward," he said.

    Sajai Krishnan, CEO ParaScale

    Krishnan said a company could buy cloud storage – where the company builds a private or internal cloud – or rent it – where the company rents by the GB per month from a public cloud storage service provider.

    Regardless of whichever method was chosen, he said the advantages of cloud storage would soon be as mainstream as the architectures that came before it, including 3-tier web applications, client/server and mainframe.

    But like most emerging technology there had been some initial hesitancy towards adopting it.

    Krishnan said that in 2008, many companies were wary of the risks and vulnerabilities of participating in the cloud computing model.

    So despite the buzz around the technology being high, adoption was feathered.

    “This all changes in 2009 – the economic downturn and the addition of private cloud solutions to complement public offerings are creating an environment that enables incremental adoption of cloud storage on a very broad scale," he said.

    Krishnan said discussions with end users had shown that the overwhelming majority indicate they are considering both public and private cloud storage.

    He identifies several considerations driving the adoption of storage clouds. These include:

    • Building storage clouds is becoming as simple as installing a new application on your laptop. This is enabling service providers and the enterprise to embrace this technology with minimal effort.
    • Cloud storage can start small and scale-up as needed. Organizations are no longer over-building to address the potential for rapid growth. Instead the drive is to put in place an architecture that is extremely flexible and that can scale on demand using commodity hardware and standard client access.
    • Clouds are designed to be self-managing and don’t require heavy IT manpower. Storage tiering, provisioning, and data movement are
    • time consuming tasks that are automated in cloud storage.
    • Storage clouds can be tuned for specific uses or applications. For example, clouds can be tuned for archival very cost-effectively, or
    • for streaming media performance.

  • Lenovo Promises Desktop PC Breakthrough


    Lenovo has launched a desktop computing solution that can dramatically help businesses reduce IT costs and security risks by turning off hard drives and storing all data in a non-server remote location.

    Called Secure Managed Client (SMC), the company claims it is the first solution to do all this while still offering users the flexibility and performance of a traditional desktop PC.

    It consists of a client, a hard drive-less ThinkCentre desktop PC Intel vPro technology, a Lenovo co-developed software stack and a centralized Lenovo Storage Array, powered by Intel.

    Peter Schrady, vice president, general manager, software and peripherals Relevant Products/Services, Lenovo, said SMC was the rarest of gems – a breakthrough technology in desktop computing.

    "We’ve all seen the rapid-fire advances in mobile Relevant Products/Services computing such as batteries, connectivity, and the like, but this is the desktop PC’s turn to shine," he said.

    "SMC is an exceptionally engineered innovation designed for better manageability, better security, better performance and a better balance sheet."

    Shrady said SMC offers several significant benefits over current server-based computing options such as blade PCs, thin clients or desktop virtualization Relevant Products/Services.

    Most notably, these include:

    • Preserves PC fidelity — SMC gives the end user a full Windows experience
    • Avoids IT complexity — SMC works with and enhances current IT process and tools
    • Safe and flexible investment — An SMC ThinkCentre can easily be converted back to a traditional desktop PC by re-enabling the hard drives
    • Energy efficient — An SMC ThinkCentre uses less energy Relevant Products/Services than a traditional desktop PC
    • Security — Information from all desktops in an SMC fleet is stored in a safe, single location, significantly reducing the threat of on-site theft of data

    Lenovo said some of its large enterprise customers have already recorded significant results from SMC pilot deployments.

    The company estimates that using the SMC solution can potentially reduce the expense of fully managing a PC from USD $120 per month to as low as $70 per PC.

    This is based on expense estimates for large enterprise customers in North America that take into account such things as deskside IT visits, call center support Relevant Products/Services, and management costs.

    The SMC solution is currently being offered on the ThinkCentre M57p(1) desktop PC, and can also be offered on the ThinkCentre M58p(2 )in early 2009.

  • Internal Cloud Computing Option Avoids Outsourcing Concerns


    Data center software provider, Cassatt Corporation, has announced new service and technology offerings to help companies safely realize "internal cloud computing".

    Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp, said this was an IT approach that delivers the benefits of cloud computing using the resources that organizations already have inside their data centers.

    He said cloud computing offers great promise by having third parties deliver the computing resources needed to run applications as an on-demand service, with a lot of the IT infrastructure invisible to the user.

    "However, at this point most IT professionals are not comfortable outsourcing Relevant Products/Services the mission-critical parts of their sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider," he said.

    "They are concerned about availability, vendor lock-in, not having the control they need, and having to rebuild these applications from scratch with proprietary tools running on provider-specific platforms."

    To directly address these problems, the updated Cassatt offerings help customers implement cloud-style computing environments using their existing systems, inside the firewalls of their data centers without having to modify their current hardware or software.

    Coleman said the resulting "internal cloud" can provide the same operational efficiency, fault tolerance, and energy Relevant Products/Services savings promised by external clouds, but without the worries over security Relevant Products/Services, compliance, lack of control, or the need or delay required to change or replace their current applications.

  • IT Decision Makers Unclear About Unified Storage

    Unified storage has yet to make an impact on IT decision makers, with few even able to define what it stands for and even less aware of the business benefits of implementation, according to a survey.

    The study was conducted by Gartner and ONStor among 1600 IT and business decision makers from four continents and over 37 countries who attended the recent Gartner Data Center Summit and SNW Europe.

    It found that only 58 per cent of those questioned were familiar with the term unified storage.

    Unified storage has been defined as a single integrated storage infrastructure that functions as a unification engine to simultaneously support Fibre Channel, IP Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) data formats.

    Despite this, of the 50 per cent who said they could define it, 43 per cent thought it referred to virtualised storage and 56 per cent believed it was a combination of back up and storage.

    Narayan Venkat, vice president of corporate marketing at ONStor, said more had to be done to ensure IT professional were better briefed about unified storage.

    “What is absolutely clear from these top line survey findings is that the market needs more education on the benefits of unified storage, and that is where the vendor community needs to join forces with analysts to drive this message home," he said.

    Other key findings highlighted:

    • 21 per cent of the same who had heard of unified storage believed it would deliver a lower total cost of ownership

    • A further 21 per cent believed it would provide a more flexible network moving forward

    • The ability to protect the current investment in infrastructure was only cited by 8 per cent and only 6 per cent felt it would reduce operating costs and capital expenditure

  • Digital-data Explosion Requires New Tools


    By 2011, the digital universe will be ten times the size it was in 2006, according to research from IDC.

    This digital-data explosion will require IT organizations to adopt new tools and standards to ensure an efficient information infrastructure.

    The study points out that existing relationships with business units will have to be transformed.

    It will take all competent hands in an organization to deal with information creation, storage, management, security, retention, and disposal.

    Importantly, the researchers said the problem is not just a technical one, but requires organization-wide policies.

    Titled The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011, the report highlights several findings that will affect individuals and business around the world in the years to come, including:

    • At 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes), the digital universe in 2007 was 10 percent bigger than originally estimated.

    • With a compound annual growth rate of almost 60 percent, the digital universe is growing faster and is projected to be nearly 1.8 zettabytes (1,800 exabytes) in 2011, a 10-fold increase over the next five years.

    • Your "digital shadow" — that is, all the digital information generated about the average person on a daily basis — now surpasses the amount of digital information individuals actively create themselves.

    • The digital universe in 2007 was equal to almost 45 gigabytes (GB) of digital information for every person on earth — or the equivalent of more than 17 billion 8 GB iPhones.

    • About 70 percent of the digital universe is created by individuals, yet enterprises are responsible for the security Relevant Products/Services, privacy, reliability, and compliance of 85 percent.

    To deal with this explosion, IDC says IT organizations must:

    • Transform existing relationships with business units. It will take all competent hands in an organization to deal with information creation, storage Relevant Products/Services, management, security, retention, and disposal. It’s not a technical problem alone.

    • Spearhead the development of organization-wide policies for information governance: information security, information retention, data access, and compliance.

    • Rush new tools and standards into the organization, from storage optimization, unstructured data search, and database Relevant Products/Services analytics to resource pooling (virtualization Relevant Products/Services) and management and security tools. All will be required to make the information infrastructure.