A hard disk failure puts critical business information at risk

12/04/08

I had an interesting discussion recently with DriveSavers, one of the leading hard disk recovery firms in North America. We talk a lot about messaging, collaboration and unified messaging systems holding most of the critical business records that we need to do our work, but in reality it is the hard disks themselves that actually contain these records. We all rely heavily on hard disk drive technology, but much of the data we store simply cannot be backed up all the time - data on laptops generated between connections to the corporate network or data stored on employees' home computers.

Moving on from Network World

12/02/08

I have been writing for Network World newsletters since late 1999 when I was vice-president of market research for Creative Networks, one of the leading market research and consulting firms in the messaging space at that time. After starting Osterman Research in 2001, Network World was gracious to allow me to continue writing my newsletter for them. However, Network World is now discontinuing the Unified Communications newsletter. My last newsletter for Network World will mail Dec. 16. That said, Osterman Research continues full steam ahead and then some.

Managing processes more effectively

11/25/08

E-mail is a fantastic tool for communicating with others, sending and receiving files (albeit with limitations) and managing personal tasks. E-mail is less useful for things like managing projects, particularly when multiple people are involved and responsibilities are shared among them. ActionBase has been designed to correct these limitations. The venture-funded developer of the same name is based in Israel.

Unified communications and the economic slowdown

11/20/08

An economic slowdown is an interesting phenomenon. While there are some structural elements of a slowdown that are real, much of a slowdown is a self-fulfilling prophecy: people are afraid of their economic future so they slow spending, which actually creates much of the recession they fear will happen. A similar phenomenon occurred during the first energy crisis in the 1970s: prior to the crisis, the average car had roughly 3.5 gallons of gasoline in its tank at any given time; during the crisis, that figure was more than 14 gallons. That extra 100 million gallons or so driving around did not cause the crisis, but it certainly contributed to it.

The spam problem was mostly solved last Tuesday

11/18/08

Well, not really. But spam volumes dropped dramatically on Nov. 11 as a result of McColo being taken offline by its two primary ISPs, Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing. IronPort, for example, reported that monthly spam volumes in September and October averaged 190 billion messages per day worldwide. On Nov. 11, there were 153 billion spams sent, although this included the sudden dropoff at 1:30 p.m. Pacific as McColo was taken offline. On Nov. 13, worldwide spam volume was 64.1 billion messages.

Would you pay $1 million for an archiving system?

11/13/08

The mayor of Detroit resigned his position in September, his chief of staff resigned in January and the mayor will be spending four months in jail. Part of what precipitated these events was a wrongful termination lawsuit brought by three police officers against the city. Although the chief of staff claimed that one of the officers was not fired by the city, the officers were able to prove, through archives of text messages, that at least one of them had been fired. Collectively, the officers won $8 million.

CMIS promises easier information sharing

11/11/08

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) has been proposed as a standard by IBM, Microsoft and EMC as a way of using Web services for sharing content between a variety of content repositories. While the process of turning CMIS into a standard has just started with the submission of CMIS to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, it holds promise as a means of increasing the adoption of unified communications.

Internet censorship effort raises big questions

11/06/08

The Australian federal government has announced that it will establish compulsory censorship of Internet traffic, with trials starting by the end of the year. The censorship proposal originally included an opt-out provision that would have allowed individuals to arrange not to have their Internet traffic blocked by the government, but permission to opt-out has been scratched from the current proposal.

Corporate governance is in your future

11/04/08

Given the interesting financial times in which we have found ourselves over the past couple of months, it's a sure bet that governance will be one of those terms that IT and business alike will have on their short list of concerns over the next few years in the context of messaging, collaboration and data management. One company addressing these concerns is Thru.

How much do you use e-mail?

10/30/08

We have just published the results of a survey that we funded internally to find out how people use e-mail and instant messaging. The survey was conducted with 340 individuals in mid-October. Here's a summary of what we found:

Notes in the cloud

10/28/08

Last week, IBM announced the availability of Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, joining Microsoft and a growing number of other vendors that are offering cloud-based messaging services.

Schools need to retain their e-mail

10/23/08

Last week, Waterford Technologies released the results of a survey it conducted on e-mail archiving in elementary and secondary schools. The survey, conducted with administrators of K-12 schools, teachers and parents, offered some interesting findings.

Would you like to stop using e-mail?

10/21/08

Given the costs, risks and administration time required to manage e-mail, would you eliminate e-mail in your organization if it was feasible to do so? That's the question we asked of e-mail administrators, security managers, IT directors and other messaging- and security-related professionals in a survey that we did for Proofpoint in September.

The upside of the financial crisis

10/16/08

We live in interesting financial times. OK, now it's your turn to make a gross understatement.

The double value of DLP

10/14/08

Data leak prevention (DLP) systems are an increasingly important part of a set of best practice-technologies aimed at protecting corporate data and other sensitive information from being accidentally sent through e-mail and other communication and information transport channels. While DLP systems typically won't be nearly as useful in protecting against malicious data leaks, they are effective at stopping inadvertent ones, such as when an employee attempts to send confidential data through e-mail in clear text.

You need to encrypt your e-mail

10/09/08

On Oct. 1, a new Nevada law went into effect that requires organizations operating in the state to encrypt personal information sent outside of the organization. A similar, but more restrictive, law will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2009 in Massachusetts. What this means is that if you operate a business in either state, you will have to encrypt certain types of sensitive information if you send it past your corporate firewall or else face legal consequences.

Younger workers and the demise of e-mail

10/07/08

We've heard for some time that young people don't use e-mail, but instead use Facebook, MySpace, instant messaging and other social networking and real-time communications tools, and that they just don't use e-mail anymore. Further, we're told that young people entering the workforce just won't use e-mail, and that real-time communications will become the workplace norm as a result.

Mailbag: Is spamming a constitutional right?

10/02/08

My recent article on the Virginia Supreme Court's decision to turn over the state's antispam law drew some interesting comments:

Cisco buys Jabber

09/30/08

Cisco's latest acquisition is Jabber, a leading developer of enterprise-grade presence-enablement capabilities. Jabber's offerings include its Extensible Communications Platform, JabberNow (an enterprise instant messaging appliance), and instant messaging clients (a thick client for Windows, a browser-based client and mobile clients). Jabber has, for years, been a leading proponent of the XMPP protocol for presence-enabled applications.

Organizing content by context

09/25/08

As users of e-mail, desktop productivity applications, collaboration tools and other information generation and management capabilities, we create lots of content and we have lots of difficulty finding it when we need it. A key part of that difficulty is based on the fact that we use different silos of information that often maintain separate data stores, different interfaces and the like. More importantly, however, many tools are not designed to present data in the way that we need it.

Is spamming a constitutional right?

09/23/08

In 2004, Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison for violating Virginia's fairly restrictive antispam law. Earlier this year, he appealed to Virginia's Supreme Court and his conviction was upheld. He appealed again and week before last his conviction was overturned. The Court ruled that the Virginia law was too broad because it did not provide an exemption for religious and political spam messages. The Court, in rendering its decision, agreed that spammers have the right to express their political or religious beliefs even if they forge their identity.

Loss of mobile access can have serious consequences

09/18/08

A study we recently completed with end users of mobile messaging devices in organizations of various sizes revealed just how critical mobile e-mail really is.

Moving beyond the e-mail paradigm

09/16/08

E-mail is a very useful tool for transmitting information and files, managing content of various types, setting up appointments, managing tasks and, in many cases, e-mail is used as a sort of real-time communications tool. Most of us use e-mail for these tasks and have come to rely on it as our primary communications medium for roughly three-quarters of the information we send during a typical workday.

The negative spiral of false-postitves identified by e-mail filters

09/11/08

A study on messaging and Web security we conducted earlier this year asked messaging-oriented decision makers about changes in their spam filter false-positive ratios over time. While we found that one-third of midsized and large organizations reported their false positive ratios were improving, 53% said they were staying the same and 14% reported they were actually getting worse.

Web-based attacks: What's the worst that could happen?

09/09/08

We are seeing a renewed level of interest in various types of external threats owing largely to some really clever techniques employed by spammers, hackers and others, who are using technologies including Flash and SQL to lure unsuspecting victims. Here are some considerations:

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Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.