Minneapolis-based advertising agency Preston Kelly boasts a client list that larger firms in Los Angeles and New York might envy, including Roundy’s Supermarkets, Taco John’s, Physicians Mutual, Health-Partners, STAGG Chili, Hormel Foods, and the Minnesota Zoo, among others.

In December 2008, the agency introduced a new holiday game for its partners and clients, an online version of the White Elephant game that lasted for a week. Clients could virtually steal and resteal one of three-dozen mostly gag gifts as many times as they could during the time period in the hopes of getting a Wii Fit or an iPod. Those who won canned goods had their gifts turned into a cash donation to feed the hungry.

However, the agency ran into a problem as the week wrapped up. “We had traditional hosting, [where] we had to pay for it based on what our average traffic is. Our average traffic is fairly low, but during those last 10 minutes, people were hitting the servers so hot and heavy that the game didn’t fail, but the servers were so slow that it didn’t register that you had actually clicked to steal a gift until the game was ended,” says Melody Lentsch, director of interactive at Preston Kelly.

Despite the glitch, the game was a success with Preston Kelly’s clients, and the agency decided to bring it back the following holiday season. But the agency didn’t want to pay $10,000 for 10 minutes of traditional hosting. During its search for a solution, the agency came across ReliaCloud (www.reliacloud.com), an Eden Prairie, Minn.,-based cloud provider with a hosting solution that was just going into beta.

“We told [ReliaCloud] our dilemma, and they said that because of the way cloud computing works, we could pay for a model that would meet the needs of our game,” Lentsch says.

Ultimately, Preston Kelly decided to take a chance on ReliaCloud, and according to Lentsch, the agency was thrilled with the results. “Sure enough, our game did not fail. We had thousands of hits to the server every second during the last 10 minutes of trading, and the game functioned at about 100% during that entire time,” she says.

Complete Article: On-Demand Cloud Hosting: ReliaCloud Offers Ad Agency A Burst Of Affordable, Reliable Computing Power

Given the plethora of companies out there that sell security, encryption, and communications networking products for the SME, the average data center manager must find it daunting to choose the right solutions that integrate well with his network; provide secure, seamless, and fault-tolerant access to confidential information; and are able to do so at an affordable price.

However, Somerset, N.J.,-based AEP Networks (www.aepnetworks.com) offers its customers a level of security and reliability so impressive that its products are used worldwide by financial, government, and other enterprises that require top-notch security and communications capabilities and appreciate the modular approach that the company takes with its solutions.

Complete Article: Enterprise-Grade Security: AEP Networks Offers Network Security Solutions That Are Fault-Tolerant & Affordable

From its beginnings in 2001, Austin, Texas,-based network security provider TippingPoint, now a part of HP, has focused on network security. At the time of its inception, most network security solutions were reactive in nature. “You’d look at your network traffic, and you’d see that you had some malicious traffic come through last week, and someone was able to take such and such,” says Michael Callahan, senior director of worldwide security product marketing for HP TippingPoint. “Our team [felt] there had to be a better way of monitoring network traffic.”

The engineers at TippingPoint (www.tippingpoint.com) subsequently developed an appliance that could be dropped inline into a network without requiring any network downtime, while at the same time providing a high accuracy rate of stopping malicious traffic before it could do any damage with almost zero false positives. This strategy of providing real-time network protection before it was common to do so led to its purchase in 2004 by network infrastructure giant 3Com. In April, HP completed its acquisition of 3Com and has since integrated TippingPoint into its network solutions division.

Complete Article: Inline Threat Prevention: TippingPoint Focuses Its Attention On Effective, Easy-To-Use Intrusion Prevention Systems

Storage solutions provider Thecus likes to define NAS as “next-generation advanced storage.” The Taiwan-based company (with U.S. offices in Milpitas, Calif.) offers more than 30 different NAS solutions that range from low-priced home and consumer solutions to enterprise-class designs that offer VMware, eSATA, and iSCSI compatibility as standard features and can handle 10GbE connections, among many other features.

Thecus (www.thecus.com) was founded in 2004. Through its global sales channels, the company distributes its products in more than 30 countries and territories worldwide.

According to Thecus’ General Manager Florence Shih, Thecus strives to be a pioneer in data storage integration no matter the environment. “Our design philosophy focuses on not only how NAS can improve the working productivity process but also how globally networked systems can meet changes in an organization’s environment,” Shih says.

Shih points out that the ability to provide critical information efficiently and safely to the right people while keeping costs low is key to an organization’s survival, let alone prosperity. “Businesses need a storage solution that is not only cost-effective and flexible but also has the expandability to be easily upgraded and adapted to new technologies without the need to spend a fortune when replacing an existing storage infrastructure,” she says.

Complete Article: Next-Generation Storage Solutions: Thecus Has What It Takes To Keep Your NAS Systems Up-To-Speed

When Montréal-based email security solutions provider Vircom opened its doors in 1994, it specialized in designing software that let people dial in to and access bulletin board systems. But as the Internet began its ascendancy in the mid-1990s, Vircom switched its sights to email security. “Back in 1997 and 1998, spam started appearing, and our founder, Sylvain Durocher, made us one of the first players to address this security problem,” says Damien Ramé, Vircom’s marketing manager. “Email security defines us to this day.”

Vircom (www.vircom.com) has more than 2,500 customers from a wide range of industries, including Match.com, Remington Arms Company, Goya Foods, Pitney Bowes, and the Philadelphia Phillies. According to a recent case study, more than 70% of Remington’s email traffic consisted of spam, and the company was unable to stop a rash of virus outbreaks. Remington, a classic SME, purchased Vircom’s modusGate appliance with a 1,000-user license. Spam disappeared almost from the moment Vircom’s support engineers implemented and configured the appliance for Remington’s needs.

Complete Article: Comprehensive Email Security: Vircom Covers All The Bases For Protecting Your Company From Email-Borne Malware

About two years ago, [St. Michael’s RC School in London] migrated to Google Apps for its school workflow. In the past, students would complete work on Microsoft Word or Open Office, save it, print it, bring it to school, give it to the teacher, and then wait for the teacher to mark it up. During this process, Kelly points out, too many glitches were possible—students could lose the flash drive carrying the homework, students often had to hold up their progression waiting for teachers’ annotations, and those annotations could get lost in transit.

With Google Apps, students now can seamlessly share their work with teachers and fellow students by accessing it all through the cloud. When a student finishes his or her homework, the teacher is alerted and can respond with the type of flexibility that facilitates learning.

Google Apps, however, had one major flaw that kept it from being a complete solution for the school. “It had only one level of access—one password—and then you were straight in,” Kelly says. It couldn’t handle confidential information, such as that of a student’s learning disability, so that the student’s teacher could be informed of it in a confidential fashion. “We needed to find an easy way to add another layer that would be simple for the school to use without the complexity of having additional servers in the school or having to pay for the expertise to set it up,” he says.

After looking at several potential solutions, Kelly came across myOneLogin by online identity services provider TriCipher (www.myonelogin.com). “The biggest thing with myOneLogin is its simplicity,” says Kelly. “It takes a click of a button to integrate into Google Apps, and then it just physically works.”

Complete Article: A Single Point Of Entry: TriCipher’s myOneLogin Lets Students Log In To Google Apps Privately & Securely

If you go back to about 1994 or 1995, when Netscape 1.0 became available and the Web started taking off, the network performance needs of the average data center were fairly modest and targeted. Today, keeping networks up and running is not a major concern because connection technologies such as Ethernet are so stable, says Ted Ho, CEO of Gigamon. In addition, the Internet itself is largely resistant to failure, says Jim Melvin, CEO of Apparent Networks. “IP networking is so dynamic that regardless of what happens, it maintains connectivity—one of its greatest features,” Melvin says.

Although basic network connectivity can be described as durable, making sure that the network runs efficiently with a minimum of bottlenecks and outages is a knottier task. Motti Tal, executive vice president of marketing and business development at OpTier (www.optier.com), says that it’s pretty much a given that IT environments have become increasingly complex over the years. “A data center today is composed of so many different moving parts, technologies, and technology expertise areas that [it’s important] to assure that transactions flow smoothly within applications and the infrastructure [in order] to improve compatibility and the end-user experience while reducing costs,” says Tal.

According to Ho at Gigamon (www.gigamon.com), network monitoring and performance analysis in the data center are too often an afterthought. Most network tools purchased over the past decade do not have the capacity to monitor 2010-era networks, many of which employ virtualization, cloud computing, distributed computing, and high-speed connectivity. Given that networks have become so much more complex, how do you analyze network performance effectively? Here are some tips to keep in mind.

Complete Article: Know Your Network Performance: Put A Finger On The Pulse Of Your Data Center’s Flow Of Information

Networking security solutions provider Imperva has an impeccable pedigree for its specialty. Its founder and CEO Shlomo Kramer has been an integral part of the network security space since he co-founded Check Point Software Technologies back in 1993. After helping to create numerous network security solutions at Check Point, he went in his own direction and founded Imperva in 2002.

Brian Contos, chief security strategist at Imperva (www.imperva.com), says that even though there were plenty of network security solutions available, Kramer noticed that none of these solutions specifically addressed application and data security. “He wanted to put a specific focus on data security for protecting Web applications and databases,” Contos says.

Eight years later, Imperva now has customers from a wide range of verticals, including three of the top five U.S. commercial banks; more than 60 state, local, and federal government agencies or departments; and top healthcare providers, grocery stores, and utilities, in addition to more than 100 SMEs in various fields. Accor North America, GoDaddy.com, Agilent, and Vonage are among the many companies that have all deployed Imperva solutions.

“We have a global reach right now with thousands of customers worldwide, and we want to continue growing that into both midsized businesses as well as large enterprises and service providers,” Contos says.

Complete Article: Advanced Network Security: Imperva Offers New & Innovative Ways To Protect Your Network From Breaches

Since its founding in 1963, Donatos Pizzeria has grown from a single restaurant in Ohio to about 200 of them across six states. Of these restaurants, about 60% are company owned, while the other 40% are franchises; however, as the chain continues to grow, more of these new restaurants will be franchised.

Donatos’ COBOL-based PoS (point of sale) solution increasingly was becoming both dated and expensive, explains Mike Born, senior systems engineer at Donatos Pizzeria (www.donatos.com). “We were looking primarily at the fact that we were getting ready to do some significant growth, and the product we were using . . . was going to be cost-prohibitive to grow out and had issues in terms of some of the new functionality that we were adding,” Born says. “The traditional system has been just a text-based thing, and we have modified that to use a touch front end by using Web services in the back end. The old COBOL didn’t help us get there, basically.”

Born searched the Internet and trade publications to find a replacement for Donatos’ current system. Most of the COBOL-based solutions he evaluated were either too expensive, posed compatibility issues, or both. Fortunately, there was one exception: isCOBOL Application Platform Suite by Veryant (www.veryant.com). “The isCOBOL was by far the easiest in terms of taking our code base and making relatively few minor tweaks and getting the product up and running,” Born says.

Complete Article: Joining COBOL & Java: Veryant’s isCOBOL Helps Pizzeria Deliver Updated Point-Of-Sale Systems

Green IT as a buzzword has been around for several years, but as a concept it has become almost a distraction, at least when used in context of IT equipment disposal. “More often than not, companies have started to be green because they recognize it can help the bottom line in a lot of different ways,” says Josh Goldowitz, professor and program chair for Environmental Sustainability Health & Safety at Rochester Institute of Technology. “Improper disposal leaves a company open to all sorts of liability issues.”

Many of these liability issues revolve around data protection. Environmentally, however, failure to properly get rid of your old and obsolete IT assets can also lead to criminal and civil litigation. “If [company X] disposes of its equipment using an unscrupulous recycler—someone who takes their money and says, ‘Yes, we’re going to dispose of this in a proper way’ and then ends up dumping that equipment someplace—company X is criminally responsible,” Goldowitz says.

Given that ignorance and gullibility are, at best, ineffective legal arguments, what strategy should the average SME take when it’s time to discard outdated equipment in a safe and environmentally friendly manner? Here are some tips to get you started.

Complete Article: Eco-Friendly Equipment Disposal: Whether It’s Being Repurposed Or Recycled, Make Sure Your Old Equipment Is Handled Responsibly

While on sabbatical in 2001, Harvard professor Mike Smith wanted to solve the problem of how to protect information no matter where it traveled. “Protecting information that falls under industry or government regulations or information that is core to your business, including trade secrets, were the two main drivers [that led to the] founding of Liquid Machines,” says Ed Gaudet, senior vice president of corporate development and marketing at Liquid Machines. “In effect, Mike wanted to create the equivalent of having a security guard travel with the data.”

About two years later, Liquid Machines (www.liquidmachines.com) launched the first version of its signature Document Control ERM (enterprise rights management) solution and has since been expanding and improving its usability with additional components and integration capabilities. “We think about data from cradle to grave and all points in between,” Gaudet says. “We provide policy attributes and controls that give additional granular controls on your data.”

Complete Article: Access Control Made Easy: Managing & Protecting Data Is A Fluid Process With Help From Liquid Machines

Comodo’s mission is to create trust online through several means: authenticating individuals, organizations, Web site content, and content in transit; making information secure, whether it is credit card information stored on an ecommerce Web site or confidential email being sent from a doctor to his patient; and upgrading and maintaining secure PCs and servers that are the lifeblood of any network, public or private. In other words, a trusted Internet, Abdulhayoglu says.

“The goal is the same, but [our mission] has evolved because of new threats,” Abdulhayoglu says. “I would never compare myself to Henry Ford, but when Ford decided to build cars, he wanted to make transportation possible for people to go from A to B. He didn’t say he was going to just build a carburetor or just tires. He had to build everything so that he could provide a vehicle to take people from A to B,” he says.

Abdulhayoglu views the concept of trust as being analogous to the car. “When we started, we had the single goal of building trust online, but that meant we had to do a lot of [development] and be [on top of] new threats,” Abdulhayoglu says.

Complete Article: Protection You Can Rely On: Security Vendor Comodo Aims To Create A Trusting Online Environment

If you decided to rewrite the Superman saga to match up with today’s world, Clark Kent could be a data center manager. Server cabinets would be a reasonable alternative to the now nonexistent phone booth, and who else could juggle the daily chores of running facilities, making sure that BlackBerrys synced properly, and saving the world from bad guys, many of whom now use online methods to propagate evil?

Jill Eckhaus, president of data center managers association AFCOM (www.afcom.com), says that people in the data center resemble superheroes because of the way they have to keep up with everything. “There are ways to do that, but you just have to be highly adaptable to change to succeed in this field,” Eckhaus says.

Adaptability in the data center includes having the ability to continually update and expand your skill sets so that you can handle new technologies and complexities and respond to new threats in a proactive fashion. But even Superman would struggle with keeping up with the latest in data protection technologies while handling his other tasks, even if he didn’t have to save the world on a regular basis.

Complete Article: Knowledge Is Power: Broad Technical Skills & Know-How Are Integral To Strengthening Your Management Skills

Before he founded Annapolis, Md.,-based network management solutions company Netcordia, network consultant Terry Slattery—the first non-Cisco employee to be awarded CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) certification—ran a company that trained network engineers how to set up, maintain, and manage enterprise networks using best practices he had developed.

Then, about 10 years ago, Slattery realized that many daily network tasks could be automated so that these administrators wouldn’t have to become experts in all the subtleties of the network. He developed a product called NetMRI that would incorporate best practices and at the same time be easy to deploy, use, and automate. “From our inception, with [Slattery’s] vision, we’ve always been about the network. We’re one of the few companies reluctant to go into the application side, database side, or server side because we want to be the best at what we do,” says Yama Habibzai, vice president of product marketing at Netcordia (www.netcordia.com).

Netcordia’s focus on the network has garnered notable customers from a range of industries, including consulting, health care, banking and finance, government, and education. And the company has recently been honored with several accolades, including rankings on the Red Herring Global 100, the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and the Inc. 500.

Complete Article: Put Network Processes On Autopilot: Netcordia’s NetMRI Eases The Headaches That Come With Network Management

Often the best technologies are accidents. About 10 years ago, Lancope founder and Georgia Tech professor Dr. John Copeland was researching how flow technologies can increase the speed of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) cells as they move around the network when he stumbled on the fact that he could find patterns of activity in the flows of information across the network to detect malicious network communications, such as worm outbreaks and denial of service attacks.

Copeland shifted research away from ATM cell-switching technology and began focusing his flow research and analysis on the security market, says Adam Powers, CTO at Atlanta, Ga.,-based Lancope (www.lancope.com). Copeland designed a product called StealthWatch and released it in 2002. Since its initial release, Lancope’s StealthWatch has evolved into a family of products that lets enterprises track and analyze their network flows to root out suspicious activity within their network environments.

Complete Article: Go With The Flow: Lancope Helps SMEs Analyze & Monitor Their Network Traffic Flow