Outsourcing Spam/Virus Service - Why It Makes Sense

Next to users visiting sites that one executive coined "objectionable" (exec-speak for a poisoned combination of adult, music/file-sharing and social engineered sites) the next greatest productivity sieve for IT to deal with is the cacophony that arises via "objectionable e-mail" (AKA spam).

You can see worldwide spam has been trending up over the past decade - costing billions in bandwidth and software/hardware trying to stem the tide:

At my last company users received an average of 150 spam messages a day... if you're spending 5 seconds looking at each to flesh out the false positives each day that rounds out to around 50 hours per user a year - that number becomes staggering when one considers the lost productivity, not to mention its dual function as useless info medium and virus front door. While there was a Barracuda in place it simply did not do the job.

While many software vendors offer desktop and enterprise solutions they share a weakness (in my opinion): the "solution" resides behind your mail gateway. Half the battle in network intrusion detection/prevention is not allowing the data to even make it to your WAN. What's a beleaguered IT lead to do?

The good news is there are many solutions being offered - the best-of-breed happen to be hosted... The Big Two in this space are Google (weaseled their way into the space by absorbing Postini) and MessageLabs (in turn gobbled up by Symantec recently).

Both services employ a similar model - instead of having your e-mail delivered from the Internet straight to you it's routed through their datacenter, where it's content is scrubbed and sent on its way. While there are a couple of extra "hops" from point-to-point both have Grade-A datacenters with superfast 'Net connections so you'll never notice.

The main reason to outsource spam/virus filtering is services like MessageLabs & Postini is this - they do it right, blocking 99.9% or better and practically ALL virus/malware. After implementing ML at my last gig 1.9 million messages were blocked - that averages to around 6,000 spams that users didn't have to bother with. And the service also did a super job blocking viruses and accounting for "false positives." Finally, the cost is not prohibitive - check out the links and you'll get pricing (besides, can you afford NOT to address this)?

Sometimes outsourcing is a necessary evil - that could not be further from the truth in this case... stick with the players in this instance and you'll get an ovation at your Annual Meeting :-)

Is The Corporate Voicemail On Life Support - And Willl Google Voice Pull The Plug?

Telecommunications is an expensive proposition - companies spend tens of billions every year to upgrade, maintain or migrate to the latest and greatest in phone services. In the past decade VOIP has helped consolidate and simplify this, but the dollars attached to the cost of equipment, connectivity and staff to keep things running is still pretty pricey.

Is anyone listening?

Google is. In their inimitable style the folks in Mountain View have once again done the impossible and rooked the competition with Voice. What are the implications of this latest Google gizmo?

Small to mid-sized companies can consider doing away with their voicemail systems.... yeah, that's a pretty bold pronouncement, but consider the following.

• Voice can help consolidate all your phone lines into a "hunt group," meaning if someone dials your office your cell and home phone will ring.
• Voicemail is accessible online and can also be converted into text that can be e-mailed to you (which means you can forward the content)!
• WIth a Google number you can hold conference calls.
• And it's all gratis - freeing up the $$$ you're now spending on your telco.
• Refer to Google's collateral and videos for more information.

Windows 7: Leading Edge vs. Bleeding Edge?

MSFT just released their newest OS offering - Windows 7 - just a week ago. Initial feedback from the tech community has been favorable (depending on whether you're getting your news from Redmond or Cupertino) - the big question for all those unfortunate souls who rolled out Vista is this: when do I make the move to 7?

Many companies who've gotten their hands on the beta are certainly putting their migration project into motion. Others will sit tight and keep their existing install base as the status quo. And others will not do a damned thing and let the decision slip to the 11th hour when Vista (or worse, XP) support comes to a close... check out this link as it summarizes Microsoft's product lifecyles.

And herein lies the ultimate IT quandary - is your IT leader sitting on the leading edge, bleeding edge or on the fence?

In my opinion, you can settle into the "leading edge" and satisfy both your yen for new technology and keeping the troops happy. In other words, I would very strongly urge you commence a thorough scrub of the OS immediately (in a virtualized manner, of course) and get a few volunteers from your user community. And do not under any circumstances make the move now.

As much as Ballmer will hate reading this - as if that will ever happen - moving to a new OS before a service pack is released is committing tech-seppuku. There is a universe of pain awaiting you in the executive suite if you rush in blindly and deploy before an SP wends its way into your hands. With virtual desktop doing an unhurried, reasoned evaluation is money; make sure your project plan has covered every possible device and application in your company. The Redmond Cult has published docs on doing a deployment and would be a worthwhile read.... another useful resource is the indispensable Petri Forums, which I've been using for years.

Have fun replacing the most successful OS in history!

Virtual Desktops Are Your Friend...

With my "idle time" I have tried to occupy myself with some career-related (and some non-career-related) activities. On the business side of things I picked up some Linux experience.... but with only a Dell Inspiron netbook at my disposal how do I get this moving?

The answer is a thank you to VMWare, which provides free downloads for VMWare Server and in my case Player. With this delightful install it becomes a snap to evaluate/learn all manner of operating systems. In an afternoon I was able to download and configure Ubuntu, Fedora, Puppy and Windows 2008 (though the need for a more powerful CPU is in fact required for '08).

Visit this link for the steps to turn your PC into an eval machine!

Can IT Pros Market Themselves?

In the age of Web 2.0 it's become commonplace for job-seekers (including yours truly) to go beyond the usual posted curriculum vitae. Easy-to-use tools are readily available to help one get some separation from the pack. The problem for IT professionals is the fear these tools require expertise in the marketing/public relations realm. This is where some practice using your "soft" skills will come in quite handy.

Some pointers that can help create a non-geeked online profile:

1. Set up a blog - it's mindless. I'm a fan of Blogger but there are many choices.
2. Set up your own website - I set up a free site on OfficeLive.com in a couple of hours (see below).
3. Get business cards. You never know when you'll run into someone who can source a gig for you.
4. Try to keep the color scheme between all of the above identical or as closely as possible.
5. If #4 is an issue you should consult any PR/Marketing folks you know for "staying on message."
6. Be certain to keep your CV updated - every three months is a common interval.
7. Ask any headhunters you're working with to provide samples of different résumés. You can post these on most job boards.

My plan was to set up this blog and also a site for my consulting business. If you'll take note the blog and site have similar coloring, fonts while making judicious use of graphics. I also picked up some business cards for less than $20 that follow the site's scheme. I also incorporated links on both this blog and the site that point to other information sources (LinkedIn). And I posted samples of documentation on the site - the more information you can provide to a prospective employer the better.

The Perfect Datacenter Buildout

As I've done a good bit of data center work over the past decade I'd like to think I have the benefit of perspective on several fronts that affect a buildout - financial, technical and managerial. Each can have a significant positive/negative effect on the outcome*. Here is my take on a reasoned approach to building your own DC:

*note: this assumes you have already investigated the newest flavors of DC, namely, cloud computing and/or virtual hosting. Both are of great interest but the cost/scale is of use only to larger organizations at this time. When the cost to provide services to smaller organizations for soup-to-nuts IT comes into alignment it's something to consider.

Financial:

• Have more than a couple of alternatives prepared. Never present a closed-end proposal - if you leave the door open for someone to say no they will :-)
• Have current pricing attached to any and all purchases required. Consult with a reputable VAR as they've almost certainly done this before.
• Account for all costs. Testing/QA, Fixed/Variable, Initial/Future. You should have an upgrade path ready to rock so everyone understands the DC is an ongoing entity.

Technical:

• Will the infrastructure foundation be virtual, physical or a mix of both? You can make a good case for virtual as it's green, less costly and DR/BCP-friendly.
• What is the upgrade path
• Hardware - servers, networking, backup, NAS/SAN devices, data/power cabling (costs more than you'd think), enclosures, UPS. Virtualization can make filling out the CAPEX much less painful as $$$ will be way less. Set up a spreadsheet that provides for use of existing resources if they pass muster, along with an upgrade path for the servers (every 3 years is considered a sane measure).
• Cabling: data and power can get pricey, especially if you want it done right.
• HVAC - cooling and power requirements based on all of the above; fire retardant systems (can you say HALON?). This need can be readily calculated with knowledge of current/future hardware requirements - many manufacturers have "calculators" that can help.
• Internet & Inter-office connectivity. Cogent's a great choice if you're housing this in an office building.... Verizon Metro Ethernet provided perfect (yes, 100%) uptimes at my last job. Also be keenly aware of the LEAD TIMES associates with ISP service and any unique constraints (do they need to get permits to dig under the sidewalk?). Doing an audit of the bandwidth presently used to see if this is even necessary would be wise - you may already have enough bandwidth to deal with offsite DR/BCP (another topic entirely but there are some hooks into the DC world).
• Technical Considerations can be addressed once you've gotten all the money matters figured out. Construction: Require you be kept updated on the build (power requirements, raised-floor, layout) and have blueprints sent to you. Never trust the engineers are following your directions.

Managerial:

• Need a buy-in from executives? Have someone act as the sponsor (preferably the money people) and champion your project.
• Prepare a project plan with clearly-defined milestones - have alternatives with cost/benefit and risks. And make certain it's in "English" that a 12-year-old could understand.

Yes, this would be an abbreviated plan (as the graphic below can attest)... if you need help source a good consutlancy to lead the project.

Document Management & Why Google Rocks

There comes a time when every organization admits the explosion of information has overwhelmed them. The Digital Age has seen an exponential increase in data retention - remember back in the day when a 270MB hard drive was cutting edge? And with this mountain of data comes a corresponding complexity... how does one maintain a file system where storage is measured in terabytes? And more importantly, how can we IT folks make docs easy and accurate to locate?

There are many DMS (document management system) packages available though many would appear to be overkill - just check out this search and you'll understand. WIth any software comes the inevitable configuration headaches - wouldn't it be great if you could just have Google take care of this for you?

Well, actually, they can. The Google Search Appliance (aka GoogleMini, Google Enterprise, etc) is the coolest search tool for business and is basically mindless to install, configure and maintain. While at Enable I set up a GoogleMini for one of our client's customer-facing websites - it took about an hour to unpack, rack, power on and configure and just like that(!) a search engine that has that familiar GUI for 100,000 docs (this was 2002, you know).

Since then they've come a long way - the GSA enterprise version can scale to billions of docs. And the GSA can interface with SharePoint 2007 in the event you want to keep your users happy (Bing is not an adverb. When I search online I am Googling).

Interested? Check out this link to view some of the success stories.