Do Social Collaboration Work in Enterprise?

[Guest Post]

Social networking has become almost indispensable for us. It is not only Twitter or Facebook, but, there are other services that are becoming really popular with users.

On the personal front, social networking has become an easy way of sharing personal information with near and dear ones. You can exchange notes, photographs, and even videos. Twitter and Facebook has been used even in emergencies where pleas for help have been broadcast and acted upon.

What about use of social networking in enterprises? What we see now is Unified Communications, Video Conferencing and such. The use of social collaboration in enterprise never really took off and business owners and leaders have always been skeptical about their proper usage and impact. Leaders and business owners need to realize that enterprise social media collaboration is a completely different ballgame and both the strategy as well as the execution needs to be at a different level.

The Enterprise Social Idea

Enterprise social, as an idea, caught the fancy of many (obviously for a very short period of time) as it helped to revolutionize some business operations. There are instances of many Enterprise social networking platforms businesses like OurCrowd and Kickstarter. Many such platforms have used crowd sourcing to fill their funding requirements. They were not required to go to banks and fill up long loan applications or pitch their business ideas to the VCs. There were also many companies that used Twitter to get feedbacks from the customers and even take care of the support issues. Internet marketers used Facebook (FB) pages to generate likes for the business and even execute their marketing campaigns to create the right buzz about their products and services. LinkedIn too was put to good use by many headhunting firms who recruited people by using that professional networking platform.

What Users Want?

Now, the expectation from the enterprises for social collaboration is pretty high as business owners and leaders expect the collaboration to yield high revenue and other results for the organization. Unfortunately, enterprise social collaboration never really matched the industry expectations and, as a result, business leaders started to shift their attention to other marketing gigs. The primary reason behind the dismal performance of social business software is that the CIOs found it really difficult to distinguish one product from another and they took really long to evaluate the solutions and the tools. Thus, the unexpected delay popped up new challenges for everyone and the results could never really match the expectations of the enterprise users.

The personal model for social media interactions cannot be extended to the enterprise as the goals are different for each. Enterprise social media interactions are not made to share birthday wishes or announcing dinner dates - they are all about collaboration and working of diverse teams. The social media tools should facilitate easy collaboration and execution of tasks and projects.

A Mixture of Asana and Facebook?

Social collaboration in an enterprise should be aimed at getting work done efficiently, faster and within set budgets. The executives and the CIOs should be able to differentiate between communication and broadcast tools, and the ones that facilitate results based on collaboration. Thus, a solution to this should be the software that allows external as well as the internal team members to collaborate, communicate and come up with innovations and ideas. The same tool can then be used to execute and deliver.

Enterprises are looking at social collaboration software that starts with the social aspect but then ropes in execution along the line somewhere. The users should be able to set up the groups around any project or initiative. The groups should further have the option of changing their conversations into actionable items. They should be able to set deadlines for the work to be completed. A few of the tasks need to convert into projects that not only require resources but should also have milestones, budget and even deliverables. The ultimate goal should be to convert social interactions into business results.

We have yet to see a combination of Facebook and Asana that does this in an integrated fashion. What do you think? Share your views in the comment section.

About The Author

Michelle Patterson is excited with the new technologies that are threatening to change the way we stay in touch and communicate, particular in business. She works with companies that are introducing these technologies to make understanding them easy for regular people.

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6 Benefits of Deploying IP Surveillance System

IP-based surveillance has a lot of advantages and is gaining popularity all over. Some of the major advantages are listed below:

Optional Info. An IP based surveillance requires an IP Camera. Wikipedia defines An Internet protocol camera, or IP camera, is a type of digital video camera commonly employed for surveillance, and which unlike analog closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras can send and receive data via a computer network and the Internet. Although most cameras that do this are webcams, the term "IP camera" or "netcam" is usually applied only to those used for surveillance.

Remote accessibility

As the surveillance system is installed over an IP network, it can be configured to provide remote access. IP-based surveillance system facilitates remote access by which a user can log into an authorized system without being physically present at the location. Remote access is very handy when it comes to a third party monitoring and also for personal access and monitoring when the person is away.

Users can also login to a server remotely by using a web-based interface in order to view real time video footage on PCs as well as mobile phones. The captured video can be stored at remote locations for convenience as well as security purpose, and the data can be transmitted over the optical fiber or LAN cable or Internet. Also, remote support and end user training is also possible in an IP surveillance system.

High Image quality

Image quality has always been considered as one of the most important features for a surveillance system. Normally an analog camera is about 0.5 mega pixel, whereas, an IP camera can range from 2 mega pixels to some 20 mega pixels. With a high quality camera, you get crisp images, and it becomes easier to view and identify any individual or event, which is the prime purpose of the surveillance system. In IP surveillance system, images and videos captured from camera are digitized and these can be shared over a secured network. There is no loss in quality of the images or videos even when they are transmitted over long distances.

Easy, future-proof integration

In an IP system, there is no limitation as to where an IP camera can be installed. Additionally, they can provide higher level of integration with other equipment, which helps in the continuous development of the system. An integrated IP system enables multiple applications simultaneously such as access control, point of sales system etc. Moreover, further installation of security cameras with the existing system is also possible whenever necessary. IP surveillance system provides open interface for easy integration with other applications and systems.

Scalable and Flexible

IP based systems provide applications and products to be shared through wired or wireless network for communication of data. Video, audio, I/O commands, power as well as data can be transmitted over the same cable and a large number of surveillance equipment can be added to the existing system. IP based surveillance cameras can be placed anywhere as per the user’s requirement.

Cost Effective

In IP based surveillance system, infrastructure requirement is very less. Also, and IP camera can be installed using the existing network infrastructure. This reduces implementation costs significantly. Again these systems can operate irrespective of the size of network and it is only necessary to purchase as many cameras as you need. These systems are based on open standards and use standard PC and server hardware. This, in turn, reduces the management, maintenance and equipment cost, especially for large systems where storage and servers form a major chunk of the total cost of implementation.

Event management and intelligent video

Video data can be easily accessed and viewed as many times as wanted. Any real time data or recorded data can be viewed from any location. Whenever there is large volume of data to be reviewed, intelligent software with built-in analytics is available. The intelligent system responds to pre-programmed commands like motion detection, tampering alarms, audio detection as well as event management. Specific event can be programmed for which the system will respond. All the data can be recorded and organized in a very efficient and effective manner.

About The Author

Michelle Patterson is an avid technology blogger and writes extensively about IP/VoIP and Unified Communication. She works with some leading companies to understand the trends of these modern communication technologies.

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Why Consider Hosted Email Security?

When it comes to email security an organization has the option of going for two different approaches. It can either go for an off-the-shelf solution, which it implements on its own infrastructure, or it can decide to employ a cloud based solution. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages, however in this article we will focus on the advantages a hosted email security solution provides in terms of security.

The first clear advantage of a hosted email security system is that your business will not require security expertise to protect your mail infrastructure. When buying an email security product to deploy on your server, you need to ensure that it is then installed in a secure manner and configured correctly for it to be fully effective. Although most modern products are easy to configure, you will still need an administrator that has a good grasp of the security concepts involved to ensure that no combination of events will lead to a security break down. Systems administrators trained in security can be hard to find and cost the company a good amount of money. Hosted email security solutions offload this burden leaving you with a peace of mind knowing that the email security infrastructure is well deployed and properly configured by professionals who have the necessary skills and work for a reputable hosted email security service.

When using a hosted email security service, any malware sent by email to your organization will be filtered at your service provider – this means that practically no malware will ever reach your organization. This has some clear advantages over having no email security at all because in such a case the malware will find itself in your users’ mailboxes; which is a high risk for the organization because someone might run the malware and infect the entire network. As for running your own mail security, there are also some small advantages here. In the event of a mis-configured solution, or even a solution lacking some features which requires additional modules to be purchased, there might be a small risk of malware getting through your organization’s defenses and even if your security solution would block and quarantine such malware, the administrator may execute the file by mistake while investigating the malware – human error that could prove cost. The risk is quite low but still it is a risk which a hosted email security solution would eliminate or, at the very least, reduce further.

Most hosted email security solutions operate as a gateway between the internet and your infrastructure in terms of email service. This means that one will still need to run his/her own mail server infrastructure. That being said however, when using a hosted email security solution, one can configure the firewall or the mail server itself to only allow connections from your service provider. This will protect your infrastructure from attacks by malicious hackers or spammers looking for servers to exploit for their spam distribution. Your server will be protected against these individuals because they will not have any access to your mail server, whereas if you were running your own infrastructure you would not be able to restrict access to any specific IP.

Email security, like other systems, needs to be kept up-to-date to be fully effective. You would need to run regular patching and upgrading to new versions as they are released by the vendor. This is not always feasible as it can be both expensive to buy the latest versions or to pay for maintenance agreements and because of resistance to change from the administrators and management. Both parties can resist upgrades for the same reasons; mainly a fear that upgrading can cause issues with a perfectly working system that could lead to downtime and financial or reputation losses.

There are various techniques email security systems use to protect your email. Some of these depend on training the system on contemporary spam and malware. Hosted email security solutions have a distinct advantage in this area in that they can get access to a wider variety of malware samples and spam to keep their systems up to date in terms of training than any other single organization ever can.

Although in this article we have gone through the different advantages a hosted solution would offer in terms of email security, there is no single solution that fits everyone’s needs. It is entirely up to you to decide what email security model you want to employ, depending on your budget and business requirements.

This guest post was provided by Emmanuel Carabott on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. More information on GFI hosted email security.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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How To Deal With Backing Up Multiple Operating Systems

 Guest Article by Patrick Jobin.                             

As Apple’s popularity continues to grow, there will also be an increased chance that any given company might have to manage multiple operating systems within their network. And when diversity increases, so does complexity and maintenance.

• A typical organization today might have the following:

• Windows laptops for travelling employees
• Mac systems for marketing and graphic design
• Robust, secure IBM iSeries servers to process transactions and manage inventory
• NAS boxes, File Servers or Web Servers running Linux

From an operational standpoint, this is great since each function is hosted on a machine that’s well-designed for its intended purpose. But from an IT perspective, it can cause a lot of problems.

Let’s take data protection as an example.

In a Windows-only environment, you would only have to back up one set of computers every day using a single process. But now, you need to create a separate backup process for each system, so your daily backups could end up taking 4 times longer.

And there’s another danger. When it comes time to recover your company-wide systems in an emergency, the recovery process will also be 4 times more complicated, with 4 times the chances that a mistake could occur.

This gets even more complex as other databases and enterprise systems get added to the mix. (SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Oracle, etc...)

If your company is dealing with many diversified operating systems within the same network, you can simplify your IT management through 2 simple steps.

Step 1: Consolidate Expertise

The general tendency within organizations is to allow employees to create “knowledge silos”. One person might be a MAC expert, the other an IBM expert, and a third would be a Windows expert.

Instead, you should train your employees to be specialists across all systems... within certain fields. Using the data protection example, you would have one employee who is well trained in backup and recovery for each of the 4 operating systems listed above.

This way, when it comes time to recover the data, you don’t have to round up and coordinate a team of 4 people. Just a single person can do the job.

Step 2: Automate

Once you’ve consolidated all of the backup knowledge to a single employee, they’ll be better equipped to back up all 4 systems more effectively by eliminating wasteful processes and duplicate work. (This is much more difficult when expertise is “siloed”)

Automation also eliminates much of the human error that can occur when minor details get overlooked. This becomes more important as your systems continue to diversify.

By dealing with a single expert - and automating your backup process – your company can continue to ensure optimal data safety as its IT infrastructure grows in complexity. And this 2-step approach can also be applied to just about any functional area of IT.

About the Author: Patrick Jobin’s company has been offering online backup software for IBM iSeries, Linux, Mac and more.

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Sync.in Review - Real-time Collaboration in Cloud

Summary

Sync.in ?	Web based word processor for collaboration in real-time
A product of	Cynapse, Mumbai, India
Useful for	Brainstorming, meeting notes, project planning, training
User Interface	Slick & intuitive
Base Technology	Etherpad
USP	Fast & responsive
Limitation	Drawing tools, subscript, superscript, image
Conclusion	Recommended

Detailed Review

Sync.in is a real-time collaboration tool. Users can simultaneously edit and all changes are seen live by users connected to the note/document. It synchronizes everyone’s edit & merges them all in real-time. Multiple people can simultaneously edit the same document, any changes reflect on everyone’s screen instantly.

I tested Sync.in (Public) with a team of 4 members (collaborators), simultaneously & randomly writing on the pad. There’s a Paid version as well - Sync.in (Pro).

The most impressive feature was its real-time synchronization capability. I was curious to know the time lag in syncronization i.e. the difference in time of typing the letter & appearing of that letter at the other end. To calculate this we accessed the same note (document) from two systems placed besides each other (so that we can view both the monitor screen). Interestingly, we could see each & every letter typed by other collaborators/members at our screen as if it was being typed from the keyboard attached to the local system. Practically, there was no perceivable lag at all.

We did a similar test with Google Docs - document, in the same environment. But its synchronization ability proved to be slower compared to Sync.in. In Google docs document, chunks of words appeared suddenly after a significant lag of say 12 seconds.

Noteworthy features

• Interface is quite intuitive. No learning curve.
• Chat window - collaborators can communicate while they're editing.
• The color coded (8 colors) text background indicates the contributions done by different users. Users can change their colors or completely turn this functionality off.
• Color highlight trail for each author: quickly know who contributed what.
• Infinite undo history..all changes are saved to the server and can be undone any time…
• One click, easy sharing - invite collaborators easily by sharing the note link over e-Mail, Facebook, twitter, Linkedin & other social networks.
• Travel back in Time using Time Slider.
• Mark & find important versions in a click
• Chat history is saved foreve, along with the note.
• Export your note as html, plaintext, bookmark file.

Limitations

• Export to Plain Text NOT maintaining formatting…of no practical use.
• No drawing tool
• No subscript, superscript support
• No formulae support (e.g. sharing equations etc)
• No image support…
• Font styles not supported.
• Very limited formatting tools.
• Connection with server lost frequently

Conclusion

Recommended.

Also note that, Sync.in Public notes can be accessed by anyone. For a private & secured note, companies can opt for Sync.in Pro which has enhanced security features for Private Notes viz.  Password, SSL (https) etc.

Optional Info

A few other similar services powered by ether-pad technology.

• http://meetingwords.com
• http://piratepad.net
• http://openetherpad.org
• http://ietherpad.com

Find out more at http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html

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Google vs. Bing: An Interesting Comparison

Bing Is Not Google. This may be un/official full-form of BING. But contextually it is true. This is more pronounced after the improved Google's algorithm of identifying and highlighting synonyms. Google is introducing a bit of artificial intelligence to make itself as intelligent as at least a 7 year old child. Now it can understand that pictures & photos mean the same. It can also relate the popular abbreviations & highlight its full-form.

Of late it has started understanding the context of a search query. It’s a small but remarkable step towards making the web intelligent. A significant step leading to the innovative contextual search from today's keyword search. I must confess I am impressed by the quality of Google’s new synonym search. I did a comparative study of Bing & Google with the following search queries. Undoubtedly the Google search quality has set a new benchmark for Bing and others. Perhaps that’s the reason very few web users think of Google vs. Bing as there’s no such comparison, Google is far ahead of BING.

Google vs. Bing Based on same Search Queries:

1. s/w update bb

Any human being with an average intelligence can understand that the query s/w update bb means software updates Blackberry. Following was the search result of BING. Here out of 10 results displayed at first page only one was a bit relevant.

 Observe the following screen-shot to see how Google Synonym & contextual search is working together for the above query. 10 out of 10 results are relevant.

It has identified (highlighted) software for s/w.
It has identified Blackberry for BB
This is how Google synonyms is working. How the contextual search is working? BB can mean Blackberry but sometimes few fitness freaks use it for Bodybuilding as well. Google has intelligently analyzed the word BB with s/w to understand that by BB the user means Blackberry and not Bodybuilding.

Now type the following keywords:

2. BB fitness tip

Check it & you’ll find that the same word BB has been understood by Google as Bodybuilding and has been highlighted. Artificial intelligence at work!

 Few other search queries you may find interesting:

• Song words (Lyrics is highlighted as a synonym of words)
• Bank a/c (Account is highlighted)
• Cool a/c (Air conditioning is highlighted)
• Cloud s/w (Software is highlighted)
• PM India (Prime Minister is highlighted)

You may think it only identifies popular and traditional acronyms. You may be wrong as I was surprised to find the following informal word:-

LOL: Laughing Out Loud is highlighted.

Currently you may not find synonyms at work for every query. Moreover you may find some poor (quality) synonym as well. It depends on many factors.
Google's official blog put it as "Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts."

Trivia: Updated on July 25 2014                 Try to search the following in Google: do a barrel roll tilt zerg rush recursion Google in 1998 Google backwards

Definitely BING and other search engines has miles to go before they can catch up with Google’s intelligent search algorithm. Share your experience of the latest synonym search.

Let us call it, The beginning of intelligent search. Perhaps not the end of Google vs. Bing. The innovation continues…

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Best & Free Cloud Computing Applications

The Cloud Computing buzz is growing every day with a growing number of businesses and government establishments opting for cloud computing based services. On December 14, 2009, the City of Los Angeles (United States) switched to cloud computing. It equipped 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for eMail and collaboration in the cloud. The other U.S. cities already on Google Apps cloud are Washington D.C. and Orlando.

There is no dearth of Cloud Computing based services if you are ready to pay. But we all love free stuff on the Internet, and free stuff is often just as useful as the stuff you pay for. In fact, perhaps the best Internet innovation ever is absolutely free. If you guessed Google search, then you guessed correctly! I stumbled upon some excellent free software and services, though you can always debate on what makes them cloud based. Cloud Computing is still fuzzy and everyone has her or his own definition.

Update: Cloud Computing definition is no longer fuzzy. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce) has come up with standard guidelines & is now widely accepted in the industry. I’ve simplified them briefly in the following post: 5 Essential Characteristics or Attributes of a Cloud Service

The Best Cloud Storage Service

Dropbox: In my opinion, this is the simplest and most efficient storage service in the cloud – think simplicity, think Dropbox. Apart from storage it offers synchronization, web sharing of files and client software for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry).

With Dropbox installed at my office and home computers I no longer carry USB flash drive. As your files are auto-synchronized on every computer/device - no emailing and downloading of files to different computers/devices – i.e. no headache of getting messed up with multiple file versions. On a new computer (or device) you can always use web interface to access your files (photos, videos, docs etc).

Web sharing of folders/files to non Dropbox user is possible through Get link feature - instant preview (and download link) of shared file/folder through browser. It offers 2GB of Free space which can be increased up to 16GB through referral bonus. Paid accounts of 50 or 100GB are available. Dropbox for Teams offers 1TB or more of storage space. Wikipedia says: "In October 2011, Forbes published that Dropbox had 50 million users, of which 96% were using a free account”.

On a broadband connection, it should not take more than a couple of minutes to sign-up, install and get started.

Sign-up for Dropbox

It competes with Google Drive, Box.net, SkyDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive and many other similar services.

The Best Cloud Application to Manage your Money in the Cloud

Mint: A Cloud based personal finance tool to manage your money. Launched in September 2007, in just 2+ years of existence it has received 30+ prestigious web awards from the likes of CNN Money, Time, Business Week, PC Mag etc. Just create an account and access all your balances and transactions together on the web or on your iPhone. I think it’s a simple but innovative concept: All your money related accounts viz. bank accounts, credit card, loans, stock brokerage and other investments in one place.

I created an account but unfortunately none of my India based banks are supported by Mint. Interestingly, although the FAQ page at Mint explicitly mentions that currently it supports only US-based financial institutions, I found State Bank Of India (credit card account) supported at Mint (But I don’t have an account with State Bank of India). Barclays, ABN Amro and few Europe based banks are also supported but you must check at Mint for the specific details, because I did find ABN Amro but could not find my ABN Amro India Bank on their list.

If your Bank or Financial institution is not supported by Mint you can always make a request to add it.

Optional Info: Mint has following information to share about adding your bank: “Due to factors outside our control, including approval of the banks themselves, we cannot guarantee that your bank will be supported, but we will do our best. We add support for more banks and credit unions every week thanks to requests from customers like you”.

You may worry that you have to give Mint the login data for all your accounts. As per Mint:

“Mint provides bank–level data security and industry–leading identity protection. Its security and privacy have been validated by VeriSign and TRUSTe. We never know your identity. You register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log–in information for the online bank, credit union, credit card and investment accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.”

No wonder over 1 million customers have put their faith in Mint.

Free *Cloud based Desktop

*Optional Info: Expert opinions differ as what exactly is a Cloud Desktop / VirtualOS / WebTop / Remote Desktop / Online Desktop / WEB-OS / OOS (Online Operating System) / Virtual Desktop / DDE (Distributed Desktop Environment). I think for the sake of simplicity, all these jargons can be treated as representing almost the same thing, though with a subtle difference.

iCloud CloudMe: I love this application for its slick design. Its punch line: Your friends, files & digital life on any computer, Access, upload and share your files from anywhere, even your phone, truly represents what it does. Online storage, Photos, Music, Movies, Application development, Calendar, Mail, Media Player, Word Processors etc. It has both free and premium signup. It also offers a platform for web developers (Platform as a service, PaaS). The free account provides 3GB of iCloud CloudMe drive storage. Check out the following screen shot, which I created after signing into my free account. Here you can view the wallpaper, desktop icons, Programs (like All Programs of any Windows OS), the user name (and his photograph), Start Menu, Taskbar etc.

Update [June 13, 2011]: iCloud has recently (June 2011) rebranded its services as CloudMe. iCloud domain name was purchased by Apple and now forms the core of Apple’s cloud based music service. As per a Gigaom report the price paid to buy the domain name was $4.5million…The price of Appl’e obsession with the letter i…

Cloudo: A free computer that lives on the Internet, right in your web browser. This means that you can access your documents, photos, music, movies and all other files no matter where you are, from any computer or mobile phone. Cloudo is a hosted service, there is no hardware or software to setup and maintain, and the DDE is fully accessible from any internet connected device. Other advantages of utilizing hosted software include centralizing data backup, updates, and security at the data center as well as the benefits of lower cost which can be associated with the administration of a single global instance of software versus many local instances. Here, I have created the following screen shot after opening the Word program. You can also see the attractive media player(right hand bottom), desktop icons, wallpaper etc.

eyeOS: It describes itself as the Open Source Cloud’s Web Desktop. I found it similar to the iCloud & Cloudo described above. It has a very attractive design, but as this is just an introduction, I am not providing any distinct comparison between these services. You should go and explore: Create an Account at eyeOS to get started with this free Cloud Desktop.

The Best Free Cloud based Antivirus

Panda Cloud Antivirus:

The first free Antivirus from the cloud. It has received many decent reviews. PC Magazine stamped its renowned Editor’s Choice on Panda CloudAV for Best Free AV.

• No need to worry about regular updates.
• Occupies very little system resources.
• Uses collective intelligence servers for fast detection
• Simple interface.

Also protects your PC while offline (not connected to internet) as it uses a local cache of signatures from Collective Intelligence. But please note that the local cache does not maintain a signature of virus/malware which it deems dead or not in circulation.

Best *Free Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Google App Engine: Released (Beta) in April 2008, it’s a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. It virtualizes applications across multiple servers and data centers. Currently, the supported programming languages are Python and Java (and by extension, other JVM languages).

*Google App Engine is free up to a certain level of used resources. Fees are charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or CPU cycles required by the application. When I signed up in my free account, it’s showing I can build and deploy up to 10 applications. Not so sure about it as it says it will reset quotas every 24 hours; I will share about it later.

Following is an excerpt from Google App Engine’s website:

• Google App Engine enables developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power our own applications
• No assembly required. Google App Engine exposes a fully-integrated development environment.
• It's easy to scale. Google App Engine makes it easy to design scalable applications that grow from one to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
• It's free to get started. Every Google App Engine application will have enough CPU, bandwidth, and storage to serve around 5 million monthly page views for free. You can purchase additional resources at competitive prices when you need them and you'll pay only for what you use.

To Sign up for Google App Engine:

• You can sign up using your existing Gmail account.
• You must provide your mobile number as Google will Verify Your Account by SMS.
• You’ll be asked to enter the Google App Engine Code which you receive in your mobile. You’ll only need to verify your account once.
• After SMS verification you’ll enter Application Identifier and Application Title (Choose any relevant name)
• You can also sign in to Google App Engine with your Google Apps account, use the following URL:
  https://appengine.google.com/a/<YOURDOMAIN.COM>/

Force.com Free Edition: It’s a leading cloud platform (PaaS: Platform as a Service) for business applications and websites, an offering from the SaaS (Software as a Service) leader Salesforce.com. But you can build and run only your first application for free. Yet something is better than nothing. Just Sign up and explore.

Enjoy the freebies. Do share if you know about other free cloud based applications.

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Compare Google Public DNS, OpenDNS & ISP DNS

2 weeks back Google launched it’s Public DNS. The electronic media in general and the blogosphere in particular were all singing in favor of Google Public DNS. Many users claimed they have noticed significant improvement in their Internet speed after switching to Google Public DNS. Today, Google is undoubtedly the Most Powerful Brand in the world, but does it mean we should blindly follow what ever comes from Google?

Many excited Internet users have already configured their settings to Google Public DNS. Before Google’s launch many users were shifting to OpenDNS from their ISP’s DNS. We always have a doubt on the capability of our local ISP DNS server. The question which keeps up popping in web users mind is:

• Which one is the fastest DNS server, Google Public DNS or OpenDNS or your ISP DNS Server?

Optional Info:  Let me simplify DNS (Domain Name System). Most of the human beings are more comfortable in remembering say for example google.com than 202.12.12.12. The domain name of this blog www.techno-pulse.com is more human friendly, as it helps us to remember it easily. What happens behind the scene when you type www.techno-pulse.com in your browser’s address bar?

• Browser will request the IP address for www.techno-pulse.com
• The above request will go to a DNS server, if you’ve not changed the settings, by default it should be your local ISP’s DNS server.
• The DNS server will check it’s cache for the IP address of www.techno-pulse.com
• If it’s not available in the cache it’ll query root servers for authoritative DNS server of www.techno-pulse.com
• The IP address of www.techno-pulse.com is resolved, your browser will connect to port 80 of destination IP address and will render the requested page.

In plain English we can define a DNS server as a Translator, sort of, from the human readable language to machine readable, i.e. it converts domain names into machine understandable IP address.

Which one is the fastest and the best: Google DNS or OpenDNS or your Local ISP DNS

How fast response comes back from a DNS server may significantly depend on where the server is located. DNS servers are located hierarchically in the network and DNS queries (name resolution) is done from the closest server (if DNS entry is valid). The following factors may affect the performance of a DNS server.

• Response Time,
• Number of hops traversed
• DNS server diversity
• Load-balancing factor
• Time-of-day effects,
• Impact on web-security etc.

Geographical proximity is not essential for better performance always.

CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) and DNS Server

There’s one more important factor to take a note of, especially with the growing trend of Cloud Computing. Every major website (Yahoo, Microsoft etc) have their CDNs or use some CDNs (viz Akamai CDN) nearest server will fulfill the request. If this is the case, Google DNS may route the request to a server which may not be the nearest one. Your ISP will at least be in a better position to provide the exact location & hence request will be routed to the nearest server… Since most CDNs have servers in ISP point of presence, clients’ request can be dynamically forwarded to topologically proximate replicas i.e.

Optional Info: “CDNs attempt to improve web performance by delivering content to end users from multiple, geographically dispersed servers located at the edge of the network. Content providers contract with CDNs to host and distribute their content. Since most CDNs have servers in ISP points of presence, clients’ requests can be dynamically forwarded to topologically proximate replicas. DNS redirection and URL rewriting are two of the commonly used techniques for directing client requests to a particular server”. Akamai CDN is perhaps the biggest CDN provider operating in 69 countries.

---Northwestern University

How to Test or Compare DNS servers speed

There’s a tool and that too from Google which will help you in comparing & benchmarking DNS Servers. The tool is known as NameBench.

How to use the benchmarking tool: Namebench

1. Download Namebench. (Light weight, Approx. 5MB)
2. Run it. It’s very smart and will populate your default DNS server.
3. Even with a dial-up connection, It won’t take more than 30 minutes to render the result.

I got the following results for a test performed in Hyderabad, India on 13 Dec 2009.

It also recommends you 3 fastest + Nearest DNS Servers for your location

Optional Info: With reference to the above screen-shot:

You can uncheck the blue colored encircled check box if you are not interested in other DNS Servers of your region. Moreover, if you are on a slower connection it’s better to uncheck it.

For best results keep the Number of tests (Encircled in Red) to default i.e. 200. But if you are on a slower connection you can run a test for less number of tests i.e. 50 or 100 etc.

Analysis of the Result

Why ultraDNS was faster than Google Public DNS? I explored a bit more about it and I found out that UltraDNS has a DNS server in Noida (India). It also seems that UltraDNS is a paid service. Though Google claims to have DNS Servers hosted world-wide in its data-centers, I am not sure but it seems they are yet to host a DNS server in India. May be the Geographical proximity lead to a faster ultraDNS Server. I am not sure.

Perform your test and find out yourself as which one is the best and fastest DNS server for your location. Let me know.

The debate of GoogleDNS vs. OpenDNS vs. ISP DNS ends here~~~

References

Dhiman Barman

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Cloud Computing: A Basic Introduction - 2

This article is part - 2 of the Cloud Computing Introduction series. To follow this article and understand the scenario based discussion, you are advised to read Cloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction – 1.

At the end of the previous article I had pointed out something very important, briefly discussed below.

The Scenario

The organization/entity discussed will have a spike in traffic on some particular day or days, i.e., the spike is a bit seasonal in nature. They need a large number of servers to meet that kind of traffic, perhaps 1000 times more than what they would need during normal days, yet it’s not advisable to buy and amass a large number of servers and put them on standby to be used only on those heavy traffic days. This would be a sheer waste of valuable resources. Moreover, only an astrologer can predict when your business will pick up and you’ll need 1000 times more infrastructure/server than you needed in your last quarter! The reverse can also happen, i.e., a recession can strike again and you may need to reduce your infrastructure drastically, because you don’t need it until the government announces a billion $$$ bailout!

In technical terms the competition and economics has lead to a scenario where a business needs the following when it comes to computing as a whole:

● Dynamism

● Abstraction

● Resource sharing

Note: Curious to know how the above concepts are practically implemented? Read:

• 5 Essential Attributes of a Cloud Service
• Is Multi-Tenancy an Essential Attribute of Cloud Computing Service?

Dynamism: It’s quite simple, something like the way you use your mobile phone connection. If you want to talk more, you’ll buy a top-up card (if you are a pre-paid customer like me). If you are a post-paid customer you’ll change your plan to meet your requirement. Your need is dynamic, so should be your infrastructure to support the changing needs.

Abstraction: From an end user’s perspective, they don’t need to care for the OS, the plug-ins, web security or the software platform. Everything should be in place without any worry. The business/consumer should focus more on its core competency rather than worrying about the OS and Software.

Resource Sharing: The whole architecture should be implemented in such a way that provides you the flexibility to share applications as well as other network resources (hardware etc). This will lead to a need based flexible architecture where the resources will expand or contract without any major configuration changes.

The Solution

There’s one model or style of computing (Gartner's phrase) which satisfies the three requirements mentioned above, and is becoming the technology trend of future. It’s known as Cloud Computing. Let me ask you a simple question. Have you ever used Cloud Computing? Most of you will answer in the negative. Maybe you’ve been hearing the Cloud Computing buzz from the last few months, but you don’t think it has anything to do with you.

But if you are reading this page I can assume that you are web savvy enough to have an e-mail account. That’s it. You are already on the cloud. An e-mail (Not all e-mail services are cloud based; a few viz. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail are cloud based) can be the simplest example of an SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS is a subset of Cloud Computing.

There are various definitions of Cloud computing floating on the web. I found the following to the point and simple:

Common, Location-independent, Online Utility that is available on Demand

                                                                                               --- (Chan, 2009)

The following self explanatory figure describes the fundamental elements of Cloud Computing.

Image Credit, Based on Rayport and Heyward (2009, P4).

Need Based, Real Time Scale Up or Scale Down

So, how is Cloud Computing going to help the entities mentioned in our last article’s examples? The simple solution is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The entities (website owners, in our scenario) can simply use the services of a specialist IaaS cloud provider viz.: Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid. This model works just like an electricity subscription, in the old days, or a mobile phone or internet usage subscription in modern times. So it’s subscription based, or Pay-as-you-go. If your demand increases, simply ask your cloud provider to add more infrastructure. Pay-as-you-go ensures you’ll never pay anything extra. This results in a happy customer, or, perhaps more appropriately, a customer who is delighted to be saving money.

Your cloud service provider will provide you cloud servers, cloud storage, reliable network and load-balancers on-demand to build and scale up or down your cloud computing infrastructure in real time. Moreover, I scanned through a few SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and I must say they are simply outstanding.

• GoGrid SLA offers 100% uptime, free 24x7x365 support (at no additional cost)
• Amazon S3 SLA offers at least 99.9% Uptime during any monthly billing cycle

Many of them will also offer free Anti-Virus, managed DNS, Hardware Load-balancer and DoS protection. What else do you want? The cloud war is getting more intense every day, with the entry of tech-giants viz. Microsoft and IBM. Google is already there.

Simply focus on your core business, rest assured and leave everything else to the specialist who knows how to manage it best.

Stay tuned, the journey of Cloud Computing has just begun…

Happy Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse

• Cloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction - 1
• Best & Free Cloud Computing Applications
• Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Providers of 2009
• India Based Cloud Computing Service Providers
• Develop SaaS on OrangeScape PaaS to Run on any Cloud Infrastructure
• Introduction to Cloud Computing - PDF Download
• Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS: Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing Platform Introduction – PaaS
• SaaS Introduction with Example – Cloud Service

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Cloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction - 1

A few days back I posted an article on Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Providers. Many readers asked what is Cloud Computing? Why is there so much buzz about Cloud Computing in the tech-industry? Why is its definition so fuzzy?

I believe we understand better with examples and practical scenarios. These scenarios may help you in understanding what is Cloud Computing and how it may help your business. Also, please note, this is an introduction and cloud computing is indeed much more than what is discussed here in this article series.

 [Updated on Nov 29, 2011]

August 2008, United States of America

At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.

—Newsweek

Feb. 21, 2011. During ICC Cricket World Cup, India

Furious cricket fans slammed organizers of the World Cup on Monday as the official ticketing website crashed amid a scramble for 1,000 tickets available for the final…

---The Economic Times [Source]

The official ICC partner for online ticket sell, Kyazoonga, posted the following message on its Facebook Fan Page and other social networks.

We are facing absolutely unprecedented amounts of traffic from all over the world, with hundreds of millions of people hitting at once. Some of you may have trouble accessing the site. It seems that cricket fever has surpassed all anticipations and expectations. Please bear with us as our global network team works on bringing you the tickets you all have been waiting for.

--- Kyazoonga FB Page

June 2009, China

A Chinese website set up so people can inform on corrupt officials has been inundated with so many visitors that it crashed shortly after launching.

---BBC

Perhaps this example made you smile, or perhaps you are equally worried as well, regarding the level of corruption! No need to worry, because this also signifies a huge number of proactive citizens willing to report it. Look on the bright side.

Everyday 8:00AM to 9:00AM, Since ? Till Date, Online Ticket Booking - IRCTC, India

…The bookings & enquiry requests are 6-7 times higher during the peak hours than the rest of the day. So while the existing infrastructure is well equipped to handle the daylong traffic, it is the peak hour traffic that clogs servers…

---What IRCTC can Learn from redBus Cloud Implementation?

May 2009, India

The world’s largest democracy, 1 billion+ population, goes to the jumbo general election. The election commission unveiled a brand new website for providing real time results of the mega-poll. It showed off arrangements which indicated it was well prepared to handle 80.64 billion hits in 8 hours (2,800 hits/second). Obviously a decent number by any standard.

Guess what happened?

On the election result day media reported:

300,000 hits/second make Election Commission website crash.

This per second hit rate means 8.64 trillion hits in 8 hours. Is it less than Google’s hit/second? Take a guess.

Similar server crashes were reported across India during the online CAT examination conducted by prestigious IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) in November/December 2009, though they were smartly attributed to a virus and not to the number of hits.

October 2009, France

A website launched by French first lady Carla Bruni has crashed on its first day - overwhelmed by the number of users trying to access it at once.

---BBC

Online mob. Wish I was even half as popular as her!

What inference can we draw from above server crashes/failures?

These examples of server crashes are but a few among the hundreds happening almost everywhere in the world on a regular basis. What does this indicate? Just one conclusion and that is:

The situation can only get worse. Currently, only 25% of world population, i.e., approximately 1.75 billion people have Internet access. Compared to Television and other mass media, it’s still considered an elite medium of communication. If this meager Internet penetration has lead to a significant number of crashes, what will happen when the Internet becomes a mass medium? India and China currently have approximately 15% or less Internet penetration. Even a moderate increase in Internet penetration and usage, say to 50%, will add more than a billion Internet users! Definitely, too many clicks to handle. Going by statistics and backed up by almost double digit GDP growths, they are soon going to add to this number.

What’s the solution to prevent the above scenarios?

Most of you will answer:

● Add more servers to balance the load (load-balancing)

But will adding more servers solve the problem, or compound the problems of companies/organizations that are already on a tight budget?

Moreover, how many servers do you think will be enough to handle that kind of traffic? Take a guess. 100? 1000? …

Before you guess, let me provide some facts to help you make a wise guess.

● Facebook uses 30,000 servers! (as of October, 2009) and it’s adding capacity on a daily basis. Sounds weird.

● An unofficial estimate predicts the number of Google servers to be an incredible 1 million in its world wide data centers!

The websites discussed above are not as big as Facebook or Google but their spike in traffic on that particular day may had beaten these giants! Given these kind of stats, in order to purchase the necessary number of servers, the organizations/entities involved will fork out enough money to make them eligible to file bankruptcy protection.

So, where’s the catch? Even if they are financially sound enough to add huge numbers of servers, just remember the following from our above scenarios/case study:

● The Red Cross will get this exponential surge in the number of hits once in a decade or maybe we don’t know when (i.e., only when there is a natural calamity of larger scale)

● The Indian election commission website will attract visitors only when there’s an election. i.e., ideally once in 5 yrs (forget regional elections, they don’t attract much traffic).

● The Chinese corruption website traffic would have gradually reduced to a normal level in a month or so.

● Carla Bruni’s fans would have mobbed her website only for a week or so.

The above description clearly shows the following trend:

Most of the traffic spikes are predictable and can be planned for. Even the Red Cross traffic surge was predictable, but you’ve got less time to react and plan for it. So adding thousands of servers to handle a few days or seasonal spikes in traffic is a humongous waste of resources.

So, what do you think is the best solution? Do share your views.

Stay tuned to Techno-Pulse for the 2nd part of this article on Cloud Computing Introduction – 2, we’ll analyze further and find the best solution.

Related Cloud Articles

• Cloud Computing Introduction – 2
• Memorable Cloud Computing Quotes
• Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS: Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing Platform Introduction – PaaS
• SaaS Introduction with Example – Cloud Service
• India Based Cloud Computing Service Providers
• Cloud Service Models - SaaS PaaS IaaS - Which One is for You?
• Cloud Deployment Models – Private, Community, Public, Hybrid with Examples

 

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