IT Support Dublin Blog

I have just returned from the Cloud Expo Europe conference and exhibition last week held in London. And as you have probably guessed from the title the subject was all about the cloud computing. Some excellent presentations and cases studies about how the cloud is transforming the I.T. function of businesses. The Cloud is no longer a woolly I.T. abstraction for most businesses. The Cloud is becoming a reality. Businesses are finally feeling confident enough that cloud computing can be successfully implemented to help run their operations.

The worldwide recession seems to have been a major catalyst in the changing of attitudes. Why incur the expense of file servers, Exchange servers, email servers, switches, hubs and gateways when they can all be relegated to the Cloud? For example, one speaker gave the example how a certain UK healthcare company was spending over £30,000 a year for the running and maintenance of a file server. They are now using Dropbox and have not looked back. The recession is a catalyst for cloud computing in the same way oil prices are driving up the interest and uptake of more sustainable energy models.

One of Spain’s Largest Banks moving over to Google Docs

One recent example of this change in attitudes touted a lot during the conference was the historic decision of BBVA, one of Spain’s largest banks, to desert Microsoft Office and Exchange and move over nearly 110,000 of their employees to Google Docs and Gmail for Business. Who would have thought, even five years ago, a business in a staid and conservative (traditionally at least) sector such as banking would be using Google for the drawing up of load agreements?

Marks and Spencer UK is another company leveraging the cloud. Simon Ellis of Box-It, explained how previously M&S human resources staff would have had rows and rows of filing cabinets in each branch for filing staff records. Now, using a solution from Box-It document management they just scan the forms to a centralised private cloud and where HR records can be quickly and easily retrieved.

The Cloud and Small and Medium Sized Business

It was not just the benefits of the Cloud for large enterprise which was discussed at this year’s Cloud Expo Europe but also the advantages for small business. Small business and consumer-level I.T. have always been the trailblazers for the Cloud computing revolution. (Before I.T. innovations used to trickle down from corporate level to consumer level)

Geoff Newman, CEO of Recruitment Genius gave specific examples how cloud computing helps him run his multi-million pound turnover recruitment business.
From selecting freelancers to collaboration, Newman described how the cloud has helped him grow his business. Using sites like Elance for hiring, Basecamp for collaboration, Gmail for Email and Vimeo for Video. Newman has built a truly scalable and flexible business thanks to the Cloud. This has not been without its hiccups though. Newman advised the delegates on the importance of having a secure cloud infrastructure. For example, he mentioned an incident where he started noticing his hosting bills getting bigger and bigger each month. Then it was discovered a couple of gamers where cyber-squatting on some of their virtual servers. His I.T. team evicted the squatters and secured the servers using the PFSense firewall on Apache.

Ray Baxter, an Antrim based accountant shared his experiences on how a small to medium sized business can benefit from the Cloud. Baxter stressed the flexibility which the Cloud gives to owners and employees. Using applications like Xero, Liquid Books or Quickbooks Online an employee armed with only an iPad or laptop can create and send invoices on-the-go. “Two years ago, I would’nt of recommended to any of my clients to use cloud based accounting systems, that has changed now” he said.

Bin-men with Smartphones

Kamel Uddin from Lewisham Council in London told attendees in his presentation how they are leveraging the cloud to have cleaner streets in their borough. They are asking residents in the area who spot litter or graffiti to use the Council’s downloadable app to upload a geo-tagged picture from their smartphones to their website. Their bin-men or cleaning operatives can then use their smartphones to retrieve the information and hone in on the area in need of cleaning, saving the council time and money.

Case Study -From old-style I.T. infrastructure to the Cloud – The Experience of Honda UK

“You can either say we are going to embrace cloud computing in our infrastructure and use it to move the company forward or you can simply choose to ignore it and you will find it will probably sneak into your company anyway. But that’s out of control and in a fairly random fashion” was the opinion of Mervyn Eyles, Customer Support Manager at Honda UK, warning delegates of the perils of ignoring cloud computing or adopting it in an ad-hoc fashion.

Honda UK really woke up to importance of Cloud Computing after the launch of their new Accord model in 2009. Their advertising campaign (The Cog – an entertaining commercial still viewable on YouTube) was more successful than anticipated. This resulted in an unprecedented number of people visiting their website. “Our website got more than 1 months traffic in the first 24 hours” said Eyles. “Our existing architecture could not cope” he continued. “We sort of got away with it because everyone was so flushed with the success of the advert. We still thought we should actually do better.” Their initial response was perhaps the normal I.T. response, with plans to increase bandwidth, upgrade the servers and add more memory. But the I.T. team at Honda started to think that having the infrastructure in-house was probably not the right model to follow. Yes, they could a certain amount of it in-house provisioning but it was going to be very expensive. So instead of acquiring more I.T. hardware and more bandwidth for their broadband, Honda UK decided to look upwards to the Cloud.

As a company they had a number of boxes to tick for their I.T. system. Firstly, they wanted scalable bandwidth. With their existing broadband supplier they had to define the bandwidth each time. With a hosted provider this could be variable. They wanted a business continuity facility. Honda being a Japanese company that is used to the risks of tsunamis and earthquakes were very keen to have an infrastructure to keep going no-matter what. And ultimately, they wanted a lower cost than internal provisioning.

Honda finally went to tender and opted for a private cloud infrastructure. This gave them an active and standby configuration. An active configuration in Slough and a standby site in London. The result – “It very much worked for us” said Eyles.

This Honda case study really shows us the beauty of the Cloud. The flexibility of being able scale up or scale down your I.T. infrastructure at short notice. Moreover, it demonstrates the cost-savings and the peace of mind of having a backup of your data and I.T. system configuration stored securely in another location.

Accessing the Power of a Super Computer with your Credit Card

A number of speakers brought up the topic of Amazon’s EC2 cloud. While Amazon is still known to a lot of people as the site you go to for the latest Harry Potter books. Amazon Web Services is becoming a global heavyweight of the cloud computing world. Their EC2 Cloud has still not pervaded the pages of mainstream media in the same way Facebook or YouTube has. Yet, the EC2 cloud is like something that you might have only read about in science fiction novels twenty years ago. To explain the EC2 cloud in detail goes beyond the scope of a blog post. But imagine having access to one of the most powerful computers in the world from the comfort of your office? Imagine having the compute power which was previously only used by NASA or multinational oil companies for geological modelling scenarios. With the EC2 cloud, this computing power is available to small or large business with just a credit card. One speaker gave the example how an American newspaper company was able to convert years of content into PDF format in just 24 hours with the help of EC2. Previously, this project would have taken weeks if not months to complete. Going to the Amazon EC2 Case Study page on their website and reading some of the case studies of how small and large businesses have leveraged EC2 makes for some interesting reading. It shows how a revolutionary I.T. concept of having a “supercomputer” in the Cloud is no longer the stuff of science fiction or no longer a pipe dream of computer scientists cloistered away in the basement of a university. With so many successful small and large businesses built around EC2 infrastructure it just shows us how inextricably linked information technology has become to modern business.

Businesspeople have good reason to be sceptical of the promises of the I.T. industry. In the 1960’s computer salespeople told them that the mainframe computer would boost productivity by helping them centralise decision making. It did’nt.

In the 1970’s and early 1980’s computer salespeople said that mini and microcomputers would boost productivity by helping them decentralise decision making. They did’nt. By the mid-1980’s, the marketing departments of large I.T. companies claimed that computers would boost productivity by eliminating human decision-making altogether. And pigs will fly.

Now, in the dawn of the cloud computing era, businesspeople are being told that the cloud will change everything. The promise that “the Cloud” will be a computing utopia where all the I.T. woes that can afflict an average business can be relegated to the “the cloud” seems too good to be true. Even the term “cloud computing” sounds ethereal and utopian.

Savvy and experienced businesspeople have heard these similar claims before and are rightly sceptical. Promises that the Cloud will totally remove the need for the management and support of the I.T. function are not only misleading but false. Sure, the adoption of the cloud will lead to the demise of the server room with racks of dusty switches and routers. Having a server room for a small to medium sized business in twenty years time will seem as archaic as a factory having a water wheel attached to its side in order to generate its own power.  The cloud will create an explosion of cloud-based apps in the marketplace over the next few years, these apps will not be self-configuring or self-fixing. These cloud-based applications will still have to be synced and configured to talk to their virtualisation platform or simply to talk to other apps. The platforms from where all of these apps will be managed will need to be managed themselves. This still requires the human element.  Just like today, even with avalanches of information available, business people still have to make decisions themselves and still need the help of professionals.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose, as they say in France.

Just back from an interesting and informative trip to the IP Expo Conference in London. Keynote speaker was Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

He built at the age of twenty-five, the first personal computer for the use of people without engineering or programming skills. To appreciate the importance of Wozniak’s accomplishment, we must remember that the computers preceding it were machines the size of refrigerators and had to be kept in special air-conditioned rooms.

His “desktop” sized computer was a revelation.

Here are a couple of selected quotes from his speech;

“Oh, it’s a toy, it can’t do the big jobs because it has pictures”

Commenting on the initial response of business users to the Apple I. At the time, most computer users would have only been used to command line interfaces. The concept of clickable icons was virtually unheard by most programmers and engineers.

“What is innovation? Is it doing something different? Well artists can come out and do something different but if it doesn’t come down to earth, have feet on the ground, have some practical reality, it never really gets recognised for it’s creativity or innovation”

Wozniak commenting on the need for innovation that is useful and not just innovative for the sake of being innovative.

“How should innovation be done? Don’t look at the way something has always been done before. How is the best way to do it for the final users? It takes a lot of guts to do stand by that and usually it does’nt work well if you’ve got a committee deciding things.”

Wozniak was quite vehement in the need for a single-minded vision for successful innovation without the intervention of a committee.

“You are’nt reading someone else’s book telling you how to do things. You are writing the book yourself.”

Innovation is a unique process and cannot be easily emulated.

“Science fiction writers probably saw it [the rise of the smartphone] because they were not bound by what we think we can do with chips….Did we think we would have these mobile devices? The most incredible computer that could have ever existed in the world when I was in school in such a tiny size? And have all the senses of a human being? Its got sight, it’s got hearing, its got movement detection and even knows where it is in the world…where we’ve gotten to even astounds us”

Wozniak commenting on the power and intelligence of the smartphone.

“I wanted them to build this computer [the first Mac] but HP turned me down five times”.

Hewlett-Packard’s refusal to build the first incarnation of the Apple Mac.

“They will pay thousands and thousands of dollars for you to go to Stanford or Berkeley and various other universities but this is much better education, let someone build something of their own design, they are going to work so hard and develop their mental approaches to design in other products, it will be of benefit to the company much more than education in a university”

Wozniak commenting on approaches to innovation via formal education versus practice based innovation in large companies.

“Please don’t ask about Steve Jobs and his death, I’m getting enough of that and the world is getting enough of that”

Pre-empting any questions about the recent demise of Steve Jobs.

I was with a client during the week who was struggling to get to grips with Sage Line 50’s interface. “When Sage first came out, it was brilliant” she lamented. “It was quick and easy to use”, she continued.

Now Sage, like so many other “once great” software packages out there is bloated with extra features and has developed a ravenous appetite for RAM. It has been a victim of the dreaded “feature creep”. Feature creep occurs in the software world when a piece of software becomes imbued with so many features it becomes  over-complicated or slower to use than previous versions of the same package.

Feature creep is caused by a number of factors, namely users who are not sure of what they want from a software package, lazy programmers and over-zealous marketing departments.

Let’s start with users who don’t know what they want. When a software company (or any company for that matter) takes its existing or potential customers into a room and asks what they want in a product, invariably the subjects will tell the researchers they want every useful feature available. It is only when they get back to their office or home and start using the software this multitude of features becomes an annoyance to them. This does not get recorded by the researchers though.

The researchers then write up a report for the marketing department of the software company stating that users want all the bells and whistles. The marketing department reads this report and then issues a diktat to the geeks in the programming section of the company that all extra features are to be included. The programmers get busy to work adding in all the features their marketing department “think” the users want. If the programmers are lazy and assume everybody uses powerful hyper-threading i7 machines, they will code the program in such a way whereby it devours RAM and CPU cycles. Once the programmers have finished their work, the usability testers get called in to give the new version a road test. Another report is produced recommending changes. But, at this stage of the software development process, it is usually too late and only small incremental changes can be made.

When the final product is released, the software company’s management “thinks” it has a great new version. The people in the marketing department think its great and the geeks in the programming department, most of whom have never even met an end-user of their products in their lives share similar feelings. The only people that don’t think its great are the poor users who have to wait for the program to start-up and then wade though a multitude of options, advanced options and preferences in the program that make it look like a tax return form. Not what users want on a Monday morning.

How should software companies prevent feature creep happening in the first place?

First of all, a program can’t be everything to everybody. If a software company is trying to cater for a couple of different segments of the market with just one product, more often than not, their end product is going to be bloated.  Secondly, software companies should not overly rely on what consumers say they want. Users will sometimes purport to want features that, in practice they don’t really want especially if it starts to over-complicate the use of the software. Software companies should be savvy to this.

Programmers should not labour under the misconception that their users are like them. Programmers make too main mistakes when they design their programs. They value control from than ease of use, concentrating on making complex things possible instead of making things simple. And they expect users to learn and understand the internal workings of their programs, instead of the other way around. Programmers should write code that is suitable for the specification of an average PC. Not every user is using Windows 7 powered by an i7 quad-core processor accompanied by 4GB of RAM. Truly great software companies such as Intuit and Apple employ programmers who write code that maximises usability but minimizes superfluous memory and CPU usage.

Lastly, the usability testers should be brought in at the start of a software design project, not the end when it is usually too late.

No, I’m not talking about some new app for the iPhone or the some new and “fantastic Cloud solution” that is being sold by men in shiny suits. I’m not talking about some ghee-whiz-bang gizmo that was released last month at some obscure I.T. trade show in the American Mid-West and claims to increase personal productivity by 80 per cent.

I am talking about the humble screen. The problem with the current personal computer, whether Windows or Mac is that, even with resizable windows, shuffling between open windows for most users is time consuming and quite frankly is a pain. The “one operating system and one monitor” setup was fine back in the days of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. But now with most users having a multitude of programs open simultaneously, with everything from the usual suspects such as Word, Excel, Sage to custom software, media players, instant messaging apps and Farmville, one monitor is still sufficient but for optimal productivity two monitors is becoming a must. Using just one monitor it is like trying to do a tax return on an airline fold-down table in economy class. There is just not enough “real estate” to easily work off more than one file at once. Thankfully, there is a nice simple cure to this problem – use a second monitor. Yes, the humble LCD monitor when twinned with another monitor can genuinely increase your productivity.

So what to look for? Any standard monitor 21” monitor that is not “widescreen” should fit the bill. (Widescreen monitors are great for movies but not optimal for office applications) From our experience, monitors from Samsung and NEC give the sharpest picture and best longevity. If you want an extra-high resolution monitor as used by air-traffic controllers, molecular scientists and meteorologists you could get the Rolls-Royce of monitors – one from the Eizo Flexscan range.

So what about setup with a PC? All you need is a video card with a VGA and DVI port. If you are using a docking station, most docking stations, such as the Dell E-Dock have both VGA and DVI ports as standard.

With two displays, you can comfortably work off two files at the same time. No more switching, no more minimizing – just a smoother and quicker way of working. Try it for yourself – you will be pleasantly surprised.

The first time I ever saw a Blackberry was back in 1999. The strange looking device resembled a hybrid of a mobile phone and a PDA fused together. The device would make little ping noises every so often as a new message would arrive. Back then, it was the epitome of on-the-go productivity.

To my surprise, ten years on in 2009 it was still a mainstay of the business world. I was surprised because its unusual for a company in the highly competitive mobile devices market to be a market leader for so long.

Enter the iPhone

Something had to come along to knock the Blackberry off it’s pedestal.

When the iPhone came on the scene in 2007 it became the personal mobile communication device of a few early adopters and within the space of 3 years everyone wanted one. Its adoption rates were nothing short of breathtaking.

There are still loads of die-hard Blackberry fans out there who swear it’s the best email device ever. But these are in the minority now. Last week, I was speaking to a former Blackberry fan, he was always one to sing the praises of the Blackberry.  But then he realised he was missing out on the Apple and Android party. There were great apps being released all the time all of which he could not use on his Blackberry. He changed to an iPhone and informed me he has not looked back.

“It’s the Platform Stupid”

Blackberry can never be accused of complacency. Their R&D budget being 6.78% of total revenue compared to Apple’s 2.73 %. But the trend Research in Motion (owners of the Blackberry) really missed, like so many other hardware producers, it that it not about the hardware. It is about the platform or more importantly it’s about the apps. James Carville, a former advisor to Bill Clinton during the 1992 electoral campaign always used to remind the American electorate “it’s the economy stupid”. I wish somebody in the world of I.T. hardware would remind manufacturers, “It’s the Platform, stupid”. RIM focused all their time and effort adding bells and whistles, making touch screen versions and enhancing their devices. But no matter how many enhancements you make to a horse and carriage, its still not a car.  RIM failed to enthuse and nurture a whole army of app in the same way Apple does.

Okay, so Research in Motion have consumerised the Blackberry now, they have brought it to the masses. It is no longer in the glass case of your main street mobile phone shop. They even have Blackberry on pay-as-you go price plans now.

Could Blackberry buck the current trends and bounce back? That is not outside the realm of possibility.  It only takes one high profile security breach of iPhones or Android phones to cause CTOs and CEOs to rethink what devices they equip their increasingly mobile workforce with.

If Blackberry is not to suffer the same fate as Palm (another producer of mobile productivity hardware) it has to devise a leapfrog strategy. It has to stay relevant. Incremental changes won’t suffice anymore. Otherwise, in another 10 years time the device will only be seen in a glass case in the The Tech Museum in Silicon Valley.

Customers are asking us lately what tweaks can be made to Windows 7 to make it more secure. Here are a couple of simple ones you can apply quickly and easily.

1)     Disable UPnP. In theory, UPnP makes it easier for network devices to announce their presence on your network. In reality, it’s a backdoor for malware. To disable UPnP, open Services, (services.msc) and then find the SSDP Discovery Service and click on “stop”.

2)     Turn off Remote Desktop. Again, remote desktop sounds great in theory. It means you can remotely login to your computer when you’re not physically in front of it. But, Remote Desktop left switched on all the time is a threat. Go to Control Panel > System> Remote Settings > In Remote Tab > turn off Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer.

3)     Ensure you have the latest versions of Adobe Flash Player and your Adobe Reader – these are becoming notorious loopholes for malware and hackers.

4)     Use a browser other than Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer can be a backdoor for viruses, malware, rootkits and other threats. Consider moving to Firefox or Chrome. If you are really fond of Internet Explorer. Use the latest version with is compatible with your operating system. For XP, that is IE 8 and for Vista and 7 users that is IE 9.

5)     Use SiteAdvisor, a nice (free) computer security browser plugin from McAfee which warns you of potentially dangerous sites before you even open them. A good compliment to any anti-virus application.

A Year in Review 2010

During 2010, there were several interesting tech trends in the land of small business I.T. Let’s take a look at some.

Always-On Connectivity with your Smartphone

Only two years ago the de facto communication device for most small businesses was usually a grey coloured Nokia 6000 series phone. Sure, there are still lots of Nokia’s about, but this year we have seen an unprecedented uptake in smartphones. These include devices from HTC, Samsung, Blackberry and of course Apple’s iPhone. The days of always-on connectivity have arrived. No longer do small business people have the excuse of the having to get back to the office to read or send an email!

The iPad

The iPad was a huge success for Apple this year, both among their consumer market and their newly recruited business users. Okay, while Apple was always used by businesses like the media and other creative industries, in 2010 a tipping point was reached. Large corporations like multi-national banks, pharmaceutical companies and small businesses started buying iPads in their droves. Peter Oppenheimer, chief financial officer for Apple claimed this month that 65% of Fortune 100 companies have piloted the iPad. Why is this? The reasons are it’s success so far in the mainstream business market is multifaceted, but my guess is that Apple have created a product that is easy-to-use, does the basics well but also can be customised to perform industry specific tasks well also. The iPad is one of the first mass-market Apple devices with an operating system custom-built for touchscreen use. This has made Apple’s already easy-to-use software even easier. While the iPad can be used as a device for performing basic business functions like internet access, email and so forth, it can also be used or customised for specific functions. For example, for a healthcare company it can be used by ambulant staff checking medical records and for a logistics company it can be used for consignment tracking applications. So the beauty of the iPad is ability to fuse basic functionality, portability and more advanced customizable industry specific functions well. Previous Tablet-based PC’s, like incarnations from the HP stable could do neither well. Already, companies such as New Zealand’s Diligent have designed apps for employees to access the latest company information from their iPads. As for the small business users, we have configured iPads for several of our clients. One is a small business which manufactures food for supermarkets and convenience stores. Their sales representatives use the iPad as they can access information on the go via WiFi or 3G but also use it as an effective demonstration tool. Before, they had to wait 3-4 minutes while their laptops fully booted-up and various Windows processes get started. They would then have to get the angle of the laptop perfect so the client could see pictures of their products. With the Ipad, it can boot up in less than 30 seconds and there is none of the usual “can you see that alright?” routine they had to endure with their Windows-based laptops. Ditto, for one of our clients who run a kitchen installation company. All images of kitchen materials and designs etc can be stored on the iPad and called upon quickly during interactions with their clients.

The MacBook

It’s not only in the smartphone and tablet PC arena where Apple’s products are becoming more ubiquitous. Three years ago if you asked a small business person, what they thought of the Mac you always got a response like “There’re meant to be good, I might treat myself sometime”. Then Windows Vista came along and horror stories of this beast of an operating system began to circulate, so a large number of users steered clear. They stuck with Windows XP. But in the meantime, some users were getting a little bit fed up with XP so they went out and bought themselves that Macbook they were always promising themselves. And guess what happened? They discovered it had keyboard, just like a “normal” laptop, it had a screen, just like a normal laptop, but it didn’t incessantly crash, didn’t get pop-ups, didn’t get persistent virus problems and didn’t slow down after 3 months of usage. They then discovered that Microsoft Office could be installed on a Mac along with other trusty office programs they were accustomed to like Quickbooks and Sage. They then spread the word and since then the love affair between mainstream business and the Apple Corporation has started. The Mac is being finally being seen as serious business tool.

Google – Changing the Rules of Business

The dream of the marketer has always been to get the vendor and buyer in perfect alignment with each other. Google has facilitated this – to almost – perfection. Whether you are selling umbrellas, professional services or industrial components Google is the ideal, targeted and measurable platform to promote your goods or services. The year 2010, like 2009, saw a further rise in the number of B2B and B2C buyers using the internet as a research tool and of course a buying tool. General trade directories such as the Goldenpages and specialist trade directories worldwide have seen huge downturns in their readership. Every Google event for small business in Dublin this year was an absolute sell-out. The penny is finally beginning to drop with small business that the rules of selling and marketing have changed forever. With the current downtown in the Irish economy and the export market becoming more important than ever, there has never been a better time to have a strong presence on Google. Cloud Computing All the other business computing revolutions were led by the IBM’s and the Microsoft’s of this world. With the “Cloud Computing” revolution upon us, it is small businesses who are leading the charge. The reason is simple. The big corporations have massive sunk costs with their legacy I.T. systems of mainframes and networks that span the globe. With a small business, there is significantly less I.T. baggage to carry around. Therefore, making the transition to cloud based services has never been easier. You can now get acquire a sophisticated online customer database such as Salesforce or SugarCRM for less than €1000 per user, per year. This sort of costing for a sophisticated database 10 years ago would have been unthinkable. Another, area where the trend to cloud computing is being manifested in the small business world is that of online backup. With Cloud computing, all your data can be backed up automatically to a remote server. The days of stacks of tapes and Zip drives in the server closet are finally coming to an end. We would like to wish all our customers and readers of this blog a pleasant 2011. During 2010, there were several interesting tech trends in the land of small business I.T. Let’s take a look at some. Going Mobile with a Smartphone Only two years ago the de facto communication device for most small businesses was usually a grey coloured Nokia 6000 series phone. Sure, there are still lots of Nokia’s about, but this year we have seen an unprecedented uptake in smartphones. These include devices from HTC, Samsung, Blackberry and of course Apple’s iPhone. The days of always-on connectivity have arrived. No longer do small business people have the excuse of the having to get back to the office to read or send an email!

Cloud Computing  - Where Small Business Leads

All the other business computing revolutions were led by the IBM’s and the Microsoft’s of this world. With the “Cloud Computing” revolution upon us, it is small businesses who are leading the charge. The reason is simple. The big corporations have massive sunk costs with their legacy I.T. systems of mainframes and networks that span the globe. With a small business, there is significantly less I.T. baggage to carry around. Therefore, making the transition to cloud based services has never been easier. You can now get acquire a sophisticated online customer database such as Salesforce or SugarCRM for less than €1000 per user, per year. This sort of costing for a sophisticated database 10 years ago would have been unthinkable. Another, area where the trend to cloud computing is being manifested in the small business world is that of online backup. With Cloud computing, all your data can be backed up automatically to a remote server. The days of stacks of tapes and Zip drives in the server closet are finally coming to an end.

We would like to wish all our customers and readers of this blog a pleasant 2011.

In early November, the European Union conducted a major cyber attack simulation targeting it’s infrastructure. A first for Europe, which is struggling to catch up on it’s cyber defence strategy.

The 27 member countries of the European Union plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland have executed a simulation to test their cyber defence strategy in attempts to cripple their online services. This operation trails behind the United States government who have been simulating cyber attacks on it’s countries I.T. infrastructure for several years now.  The simulation must be followed by other more

Hackers and Virus authors sponsored by the Kremlin?

Why the worry then? What has been the catalyst to these simulations? Well back in 2007, the tiny Baltic state of Estonia was the target of a massive virus attack. Websites of the state’s government, political parties, media and business community (and that includes loads of Estonian small businesses) had to shut down temporarily after being hit by denial-of-service attacks, which swamped sites with external requests, causing them to crash. A similar virus outbreak occurred in Georgia one year later. Taking into account the Russian animosity against these countries, many speculate these attacks were sponsored by the Kremlin.

In these secret wars conducted at international level, the ramifications can be serious. In late September, Iran and China have admitted to being affected by a strange computer virus named Stuxnet whose origin seemed to stem from a well resourced nation state because of the sophistication of it’s design. One commentator from Lumension, the I.T. security firm stated it was “the most refined piece of malware ever discovered … mischief or financial reward wasn’t its purpose, it was aimed right at the heart of a critical infrastructure”. When I.T. security experts examined the code of the virus in closer detail they discovered that it seemed to be specifically written to attack Siemens SCADA software – software used to automate, control and manage water pipelines, nuclear power plants and manufacturing processes. [More at: http://www.automation.siemens.com/mcms/topics/en/simatic/Pages/Default.aspx]

For Europe, therefore, this simulation exercise, Cyber Europe 2010, is not some whim of Euro bureaucrats in Brussels. It is a serious investigation into how well defended member states are protected from cyber-attacks and aims to assess the coordination capacities of member states of the European in face of a serious cyber attack.

Problem: The client acquires two PC systems for their peer-to-peer network. Ever since the addition of these new  systems the whole network seems to slow down when accessing shared folders.

Comment: This a common problem and was caused by a speed mismatch in the network card auto-negotiation settings of the client PCs.

All the existing PC’s were set to half-duplex and the new PCs were set to full-duplex. When there is this mismatch in network card settings, a large number of data packet collisions will occur on the half-duplex side. (Think of half-duplex in terms of a walkie-talkie device, only one user can speak at any given time, if both try to speak at the same time, no message get through.)

Solution: We simply changed the network card settings of the new PC’s to             full-duplex. As soon as these (uniform) settings were applied to all network cards, shared folders could be accessed quickly and without any annoying system freezes.