Security is continuity! No, data protection! No, policy!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Security on
Well, it depends where you sit. If you’re in IT, you know security is a process rather than a single policy and you know that Trojans and spam are still a big problem. If you’re in the finance department you’re fretting about the number of high-profile data loss fiascos this year, you look at the new Companies Act and all the other regulations protecting personal data, you don’t know exactly how many unprotected confidential files are sitting on the network or how many USB sticks are lying around on desks, plus you’ve heard all the security companies talking about DLP recently. So once you figured out they weren’t talking about data leak protection, they were saying the tools were finally here to secure business data the way we’ve always wanted to, data leak prevention became a priority for 45% of you (based on the responses from finance departments in the Vanson Bourne survey for Sophos).
IT says ‘whatever’; only 10% of IT teams said DLP was a priority.
If you’re in IT you know not everyone follows policy - usually because they’re just trying to get their job done; so only 15% of you think an IT security policy is vital. From the viewpoint of the finance department, having a policy is much more important (50%) because if you don’t have one then it looks very bad to the regulators for your industry.
If you’re in IT, you know that business continuity is more than backup and that doing it right is expensive and you’re probably confident that you have backup in hand and can cope with most problems. If you’re in the finance team you know exactly how much it would cost the company to be out of business for a day and that means 60% of finance departments say business continuity is the most important business issue. And when the survey says only 20% of IT departments agree, that doesn’t just say they’re being pragmatic. That says IT may not know the business priorities and we’re back to the failure to speak each other’s language that hampers many companies.
Coleman Parkes did a similar survey of CIOs and business heads this year and Ian Parkes told me that business side leaders have learned a lot about IT and the value of a data centre. “They see that it really is very, very important. I don’t think we would have got those figures from business units heads three years ago and certainly not five years ago.” But he agrees that the IT team hasn’t wised up about business in the same way. “There are too few business-focused CIOs. They are too focused on keeping the plumbing going and not seeing the bigger picture.”
And I can’t think of any excuse for only 11% IT departments believing that securing an online operation is necessary; the 38% of finance departments who think it matters are barely any better. The bank my company has its account with hasn’t yet bothered to buy a validated SSL certificate (what gives you that reassuring green bar in your browser) and doesn’t even has case-sensitive passwords for the online banking site. Fraud detection software and refunding customers for fraudulent charges cost more than that
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We have 7,000 servers. No wait, 13,000. What do they all do again?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Power, Enterprise, Business, Server, Hardware, HP on
Server sprawl. It’s only human nature. I mean, not everything in my freezer is labeled because how could I possibly mistake frozen sliced pineapple for frozen sliced mango or frozen sliced polenta? And it’s obvious that KINGEX is the Exchange server for the Kingston branch and KINGXEX is the Exchange server from the Kings Cross branch and SERVER 111 is either the 111th server we put in or the server we put in on either the eleventh of January or the first of November
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Well, that’s about it for Windows Mobile then
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Mobile, Microsoft on
There’s a new kind of spin out there. Make a big splash announcement in a blog entry, and then follow it up (after an appreciative pile-in of positive comments) with a comment full of caveats and gotchas. It manages the bad news, and keeps people from finding out what you’re really doing.
Microsoft recently made a big splash about the much-awaited release of IE6 for Windows Mobile, and then went and hid the bad news in a blog comment. You might still think that all recent WinMo devices will be upgraded with the new browser, but you’d be wrong. After all, that’s what Microsoft implied when it first announced the new browser project over 18 months ago at the last MEDC in Las Vegas, when it indicated that there’d finally be some respite from the much disliked browser that ships with its mobile operating system.
But what the blog promises, the comments taketh away.
It turns out that the new browser, which was Windows Mobile’s main hope in the battle with the latest WebKit-powered phones, will only run on new hardware.
As the comment said:
Regarding making IE Mobile available as a separate download or update, the rich media experiences that IE Mobile 6 enables require more powerful, advanced devices. That is why it will not be available as an upgrade or direct download for current phones, but rather will be made available on new phones.
It’s not that new phones are necessarily going to be more powerful than the phones already on the market. I suspect a Samsung Omina or HTC Touch Pro user is going to be quite offended by the thought that their top-of-the-range device with the latest processors will be consider inferior to a budget ARM-powered device that just happens to ship after Microsoft releases WinMo 6.1.4.
If you’ve got a current phone, then sorry, thanks for all the support, you’re going to be left behind. Sure, there’s the promise of Mozilla’s Fennec next year sometime, or the pay-for Opera Mobile today, but that’s not the same as a first class integral browser. Is it any wonder HTC are making Opera the default browser on their latest devices?
Why can’t Microsoft leave it up to the operators and the handset manufacturers as to whether they can ship updaters (or heaven forfend that Microsoft use the Windows Update tool in the latest Windows Mobile builds to actually ship an update). By all means profile devices to see if they’re able to run the new browser before opffering a download, but don’t leave users second class citizenson the web.
There is no mobile web. WebKit and the iPhone have given that concept the kick into touch that it so rightly needed. There is only one web, and millions of Windows Mobile users have been given a glimpse of it, before being told that it’s not for them. Is it any wonder they’re deserting the platform for iPhones and BlackBerrys? The next major release is now over a year away, and Microsoft’s main competitors are streaking ahead with new form factors, new devices, and better user interfaces. Windows Mobile 6.5 is a finger in the dyke, but it’s too obviously a stop gap.
Even companies that have built themselves on Windows Mobile are walking away. Why else has HTC started shipping Android-based devices? Microsoft appears to have no faith in its mobile OS, and the industry is responding to its inactions.
I’d like to be wrong, but I don’t think I am. I’ve been a Windows Mobile user for years, but I recently switched to the iPhone 3G. Everything I could do on my Windows Mobile device I can do on the iPhone - even administer my Windows Servers - and I can do it with a 21st century user experience, not something that still feels like a cut-down version of Windows 95. The only thing my HTC Kaiser is left doing is turn-by-turn GPS - and I have a feeling that the iPhone may well be doing that soon, too.
–Simon
Rated: 80% (4 votes)
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The iPhone identity selector Apple won’t care about
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Identity, smartphone, Security, Internet, Microsoft, Mobile, Apple on
On a smartphone, passwords are even more irritating than ever, especially on a soft keyboard that’s so sure it knows what you want to type that the default is to correct what you actually wrote. That’s only a trimester if the phone has as big a vocabulary as you do.
For instance, when I started writing this on my Samsung Blackjack II with xt9, what I typed in the previous sentence was ‘timesaver’ - before xt9 ‘ corrected’ it… xt9 gives you the option to stick with your actual typing as long as you notice the change and the equally aggressive correction on the iPhone does the same (though I’ve never managed it myself), but it’s one more way that passwords are more likely to trip you up than keep you secure. Let alone that the UK now has the worst information theft figures in Europe, even though the French have the least secure passwords.
Switching to information cards where claims like who I am and whether I’m over 18 are encrypted, hashed and sent on demand to replace simple username and password makes logging on simpler and more secure, and makes it possible to add extra authentication. After complaining about Microsoft not issuing secure ‘managed’ cards I’ve been told to wait a few days for a major announcement; it might be the Equifax over-18 I-card service https://equifaxicards.com/imover/overview.do (only for the US at the moment, but it’s the first major public verified information card and it will soon be followed by cards to prove your credit rating, contact details or membership).
So that leaves getting sites and services to accept information cards - and being able to use them on any computer. They’re built into Vista, Windows 7 and any PC with IE7, plus there are open source plugins for Firefox and Safari.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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A quarter of new US PCs are 64-bit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, operating systems, Futures, Hardware, Windows, Microsoft on
When Bill Gates said that there were no more 32-bit operating systems in Microsoft’s future, he was only talking about server operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 will indeed only be 64-bit. Windows 7 will definitely come in 32-bit versions, but consumer PCs in the US are increasingly 64-bit according to Steven Sinofsky.
We asked the director of Microsoft’s hardware ecosystem, Gary Schare, to walk us through the numbers behind that claim. A quarter of all new US PCs connecting to Windows Update in October were running the 64-bit edition of Vista, up from 18% in September and just 1% in January.
This is driven by the falling price of memory and the number of PCs shipping with 4GB of RAM, which are increasingly supplied with 64-bit Vista in the US - Costco only sells 64-bit PCs now. That’s a trend he expects to continue with Windows 7. But as well as persuading hardware manufacturers to develop 64-bit drivers, Schare acknowledges there’s another hurdle: “we need to convince technology enthusiasts that their experience with 64-bit is not what you get when you buy a 64-bit PC from a retailer - it comes with all the drivers and everything works”.
–Mary
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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WinHEC 2008: Offload media for fun and profit.
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Processors, Windows, Microsoft on
Windows 7
Rated: 66.67% (3 votes)
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What do you want to do where today?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Beta, smartphone, operating systems, Web browser, Futures, Google, Windows, Hardware, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on
Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.
This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.
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