Newsletters Welcome, Guest Log In | Register
Blogs:

Carl Weinschenk

Data and Telecom

Companies’ communications strategies must be agile in a rapidly evolving market

About this Blogger RSS

Subscribe

Sign up now and get the best business technology insights direct to your inbox.

  • Daily Edge
  • Business Tools & Templates
  • Aligning IT & Business Goals
  • Maximizing IT Investments
  • IT Careers

June 30, 2008

The Web Confronts Its Identity Crisis

The rapid adoption of the Internet as a conduit of vital information -- for e-commerce and in business-to-business uses -- has created a big problem that the industry has been grappling with for a fe... More >

'Anything to Declare' Has Ominous Overtones in the Modern Era

Security staffs have a couple of reasons to pay attention to a Congressional hearing on the rights of officials to search laptops of citizens returning to the States through customs. CSOs and their... More >

June 27, 2008

The Tough World of Ruggedized Devices

A not-so-small minority of mobile computing devices are used by people who work at construction sites, in the military and other harsh environments. I haven't seen Bear Grylls walking through Siber... More >

June 26, 2008

Fiber Growth Shifts, but Trend Remains Upward

  Earlier this week, I wrote a blog based on reports that the cable industry is in the process of expanding its already substantial use of fiber. The basic idea is that cable's hybrid fiber-co... More >

Spam: Still a Big Problem

The one certainty when it comes to Internet security is that there always will be surprises. This week, for instance, Marshal's TRACE team detected that the Srizbi botnet -- which this press releas... More >

June 25, 2008

When Push Comes to Shove, Cable Starts Pushing Fiber

A common mistake is to assume an industry is married to a particular technology. While it may favor one approach to the point of being identified with it, what it really is married to is the revenue ... More >

Nokia's Symbian Move Further Roils the Smartphone Landscape

As posted by IT Business Edge and at many places around the Net, Nokia made a major move this week when it agreed to pay $410 million to buy the 52 percent of the Symbian operating system that it do... More >

June 24, 2008

Patch Management, Now More than Ever

As the time lag between news of a new vulnerability and hackers' ability to exploit it shrinks, patch management becomes a more vital tool for enterprises.   InformationWeek's look at five produ... More >

June 23, 2008

Confusion, Ambivalence Mar FMC Adoption Cycle

No matter how good a concept fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is, it won't gain traction unless the business objectives of the suppliers, vendors and other members of the ecosystem align. There is fuzz... More >

June 20, 2008

Three on a Bad Match: The Inside, Inside/Outside and Outside Threats

For the past couple of years, there has been an increasing awareness that insider threats are at least as big a problem as crackers seeking to evade or defeat security from the outside. Cyber-Ark thi... More >

Despite Upgrades, iPhone Still Having Problems at the Office

It's difficult to assess how seriously Apple really takes the iPhone as a business device. After all, if it thought it would unseat -- or even get a seat close to -- Research in Motion's BlackBerry, ... More >

June 19, 2008

Stealing Wi-Fi: Is It a Victimless Crime? Is It a Crime?

This Time.com commentary suggests several things , all of which are food for thought for corporate IT security people. The writer confesses to the theft of Wi-Fi signals in his apartment. Though he a... More >

The Philadelphia Story, Part II

  The Philadelphia municipal Wi-Fi was the highest-profile project undertaken by the sector. It failed, but is trying to rise from the ashes. Again, The City of Brotherly (But Not Necessarily Wi... More >

June 18, 2008

Stay Tuned for a Massive Enterprise Video Deluge

  Earlier this week, I blogged on the growth in Internet traffic . The experts are throwing around numbers that are so exotic that Jeopardy could use them as a category. ("I'll take bizarre-sou... More >

June 17, 2008

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You -- When it's on Your Laptop

In what sounds like a frightening modern update of a Franz Kafka novel -- albeit with a different and marginally happier ending -- child pornography charges were dropped against a Massachusetts man... More >

Is Wireless Working on Its Dream Ticket?

Obama and Hillary and the Lakers and Celtics are not the only competitors who recently have spent a long time time vying for extremely valuable prizes. The two major 4G technologies -- Long Term Evol... More >

June 16, 2008

Exabytes and Zettabytes -- in Other Words, a Whole Lot -- of Data

I've posted several times on the issue of Comcast and other cable operators' network monitoring initiatives . The ISPs say the activities are legitimate efforts to manage bandwidth, while critics se... More >

Proponents' Job: Prove Unified Communications Is More Than Cool

Unified communications -- the ability to find anyone anywhere whatever device he or she is toting around and to do deeply collaborative work -- is cool. Really cool.   Buying decisions, however,... More >

June 13, 2008

Endpoint Data Protection: Potentially Helpful, Definitely Confusing

IT executives, CEOs and CIOs should spend some time discussing the definitions given to various security approaches before even thinking about purchases. Some names refer to specific technologies, wh... More >

June 12, 2008

Without Fanfare, the Shift to Targeting SMBs Continues

The undiscovered -- or at least underutilized -- vendor gold mine represented by small businesses has gradually gotten more attention during the past half decade. Big accounts are maxed out, IT and t... More >

Phishing-Related Schemes Grow in Sophistication

Spear phishing is increasing, according to researchers with Verisign's iDefense Rapid Response Team.       Though it shares most of the name, spear phishing and a third variant, whaling, are signific... More >

June 11, 2008

FiOS Is Thriving -- and May Take on AT&T's U-verse

The assumption always has been that it's the cable operators versus the phone companies . In a majority of cases, that's held true. But it isn't a given, since a company's due diligence involves goi... More >

June 10, 2008

iPhone 2.0 or No iPhone 2.0, Device Management Still the Mobile Key

Apple, which certainly knows a good thing when it sees it, is trying to squeeze into the enterprise space with the release of the iPhone 2.0.   This PCWorld.com story says the device supports M... More >

Studies Show that Unfied Communications is Gaining

Unified communications remains among the most challenging of topics in the IT sector. Most of the main applications that users actually employ already exist. UC is the thread that knits them together... More >

June 9, 2008

From a Security Standpoint, Not All IM Platforms are Created Equal

People at work communicate like people at home: They use wired and cellular phones, e-mail and in rare instances the U.S. Postal Service. And they IM.   IM is quite a problem from the security p... More >

June 8, 2008

The Future Calls Alltel and Verizon Wireless

Alltel was long considered the most attractive of the second-tier cellular companies. This makes its acquisition for $28.1 billion by Verizon Wireless something of a milestone. If the deal is consu... More >

June 6, 2008

Mobile Device Management Can Create Order out of Chaos

The burgeoning world of smartphones is a big headache for those charged with managing them. This long feature at InformationWeek maps out the threat and presents what in essence are two interrelate... More >

June 5, 2008

Tools of Destruction

While tremendous attention is paid to lost or stolen laptops, there are other ways in which data seeps out of organizations. One that can be prevented with good policies and enforcement occurs when d... More >

June 4, 2008

FMC Looks to the Future

There is a significant pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for service providers and vendors if fixed mobile convergence (FMC) -- as the name implies, the integration of the wired and wireless netw... More >

Legitimate Network Management, or Something a Bit More Sinister?

The sensitive topic of what cable operators should and shouldn't do to control bandwidth hogs moved forward on a couple of fronts this week.   Comcast, which is the largest cable operator and th... More >

Years After 9-11 and Katrina, Emergency Networks Still Inadequate

It's intensely disheartening to find that this long after September 11, Hurricane Katrina and disasters in other countries -- including, just within the last several weeks, the typhoon in Myanmar and... More >

June 3, 2008

Slowdown Could Mean Hard Times for VoIP -- or Signal Maturity

Could it be that the poster child of the new network, VoIP, is fading? Perhaps not, but it seems that the bloom is at least partially off the rose.   Garrett Smith's post at Smith on VoIP says ... More >

June 2, 2008

For Laptops, Encryption Isn't Everything -- But it's a Fine Start

Though it could have been condensed somewhat -- several of the items seem to overlap -- eWEEK has posted a nice slide show on the problems of laptop security. In this case, "nice" relates to the cl... More >

Data Warehousing

Comprehensive storage solutions for better data access and retrieval, leading to better-informed business decisions.

Business Intelligence for Business People

Practical and timely business information for better decisions and improved organizational performance.

NAS & SAN Storage

Oracle offers a complete portfolio of best-of-breed storage products and business-ready storage solutions that optimize performance, maximize data protection and reduce the total cost of ownership for Oracle databases, applications, and heterogeneous data management.

Server Management

Management tips and product information to leverage the best value from your server investment.