Baseline Strominator column: The disposable laptop

Here’s how you can stop worrying about your expensive laptop going obsolete: Go cheap and use online storage. In my current column for Baseline magazine, I talk about the coming age of the disposable laptop.

Channel chat podcast: David Goodman, IT Manager

My next podcast for Ziff’s ITLink community is with David Goodman, the Chief Technology Officer of the International Rescue Committee in New York City. We talk about the unique challenges of supporting third world IT shops and mention some of his experiences, which he blogs here. 

You can download the podcast here. 

Channel chat Podcast: Robert Packer, Presidio Network Solutions

Robert Packer, Security Practice Manager for Presidio Networked Solutions in New York City, talking about the key threats for small business security and ways that VARs can become smarter about the SMB space.

You can listen to the podcast, for Ziff’s IT Link site, here. 

Baseline Strominator column: Learning from the viral video experts

In my column for Baseline magazine this week, I provide some of the lessons that corporate marketeers can learn from the viral video experts.

You can read it here.

Selling presence-aware apps in the channel (eWeek)

The next step in voice and data convergence is to develop real-time applications. Selling a voice-over-IP system is often just the beginning of a long-lasting and profitable solution for many VARs and systems integrators. One of the next steps in that process entails understanding how to develop real-time applications that can take advantage of voice and data convergence.

These often go by the term “presence-aware,” meaning that the application understands what users are actually doing, including when they are busy on a phone call or away from their desks.

You can read the entire article for eWeek’s Strategic Partner issue here.

Network security is a lot like tough love

For those of you that are parents, have you ever considered how keeping our networks secure is a lot like trying to provide tough love to our children? When we are raising our kids, knowing when to say no is one of the hardest things we have to do. We also have to let our kids make their own mistakes, and when they do how they have to face the consequences. Finally, blended families through remarriage have their own special issues. (My thanks to my friend Carol for the original idea.)

Now, let’s consider what this means for us as network and IT professionals. Learning how to say no is understanding how to block the wrong kinds of traffic entering our networks, such as malware and viruses. And today’s threats are also coming over Instant Messaging and peer-to-peer connections, so there is that to consider. It is always tough to say no to your kids, and your users, and even harder when your users always want to hear yes when we are saying no, too.

Learning from our users mistakes is also particularly difficult. We have to review our firewall and access logs and make sure that network exploits haven’t happened on our watch. Part of this is also understanding when we don’t have sufficient resources for this kind of monitoring and being able to make a case to outsource this function so that we can spend our time elsewhere.

Part of tough love parenting is teaching our kids how to face consequences of their actions, and part of our jobs as networking professionals is showing our management the consequences of their actions too. If our firewalls and other protective gear is outdated, that decision will have certain consequences. If our desktops are more than five years old and haven’t been patched with the latest protection, that will have consequences too. If we have deployed virtualization without careful analysis, that will ripple across the data center when there are problems.

Finally, there are the special issues that blended families and step-children bring to the table, and that has its analogs with how mergers and acquisitions play out in the corporate world. What if my newly acquired subsidiary is running Juniper and I am a Cisco shop? Or if they outsource all their Web servers and I still run them inside my data center? Or if I have been using a smaller vendor that is now bought by HP or Cisco or Oracle, just to name a few companies that have been on buying binges as of late?

How does this translate for our daily interactions with our users? Part of being a great parent is being able to listen to the subtext, and understand what your kids are really saying to you when they ask you questions. The same can be said for our users. I remember one of mine from the middle 1980s who didn’t like any of my suggestions for how to use his PC. What he really was telling me is that he wanted to make his own mistakes, and learn from the experience. Of course, he formatted his disk and wiped out his data along the way to learning how not to do that, and I had to hold my tongue.

Another facet of IT-by-parenting is understanding that security-by-obscurity is not going to work. On the Internet, especially today’s Facebook-Twitter-always-in-your-face Web 2.0 version, everyone knows your business, and even your personal life too. You need a plan, and you need to protect your networks accordingly.

Yes, being able to provide tough love is, well, tough. If you want to hear more about this, it coincidentally is the topic of a speech that I am giving on Thursday at the Sonicwall sales conference in San Francisco. If you can’t make it, I can bring this talk to your meeting and customize it for your audience, too.

Creating successful mashups and rich Internet apps

Today’s businesses are all about quickly adapting to changing conditions. Employees want prompt access to their data. They also want the ability to analyze and act upon changing situations and evolving markets, so they can seize strategic advantages and exploit opportunities. To make business more agile, IT itself must become agile—quick, resourceful, and adaptable. Today that means being able to create applications for the moment, what are often called agile applications.

In a white paper I wrote for SnapLogic, I talk about some of the challenges and opportunities for creating Web mashups and rich Internet applications, and how the company’s data tools can be helpful for corporate developers.

You can register and download the paper here.

State Government UTM progress report

An article I wrote for StateTech interviews several state government IT managers who have had experiences with unified threat management security products. These devices are useful tools that can combine firewalls, intrusion prevention, and antivirus screens into a single box, and save money and support time.Here is the link to the article.

Testing your HTML code

If you develop Web sites for fun or profit, check out the various online page-viewing testing services that are cataloged by WebWorkerDaily here. These services will run your pages through various browser versions and OSs so you can see what they look like so you can fix something that breaks.

How to cheat on a test, c2008

Back when I was in school, we did things the old-fashioned way of writing stuff on the palm of our hands, and I don’t mean the PDA kind. Of course, you have to wonder with the time spent doing all this prep might be better used with some actual studying. But that would make for as interesting a video concept.