I had a client contact me recently about email encryption.  I new already that there were 3 ways to go about this:

1. You can use a service that manages the encryption.
2. Install an encryption gateway at your office.
3. Or install a desktop app that you have to manage public and private keys for.

This is a necessity for many that send sensitive email because once an email leaves your organization it is no longer encrypted. 

Example 1:  You have hotmail account and you email a yahoo account: the email is not encrypted once it leaves hotmail's servers.  and visa versa.

Example 2: You have an Exchange Server in your organization and you email another company out there that has an Exchange server by default these messages are not encrypted either. **

While I was updating my pricing list for different services to recommend, I found a very compelling new service:  http://www.sendinc.com

The service does not store any of your data.  You go to the main page which has the email form on it.  After you type in your email address they require you to register.  You then create your message and choose who you want to send it to.  You can attach as much as 10 Megabytes of attachments.  The message is encrypted and then attached to an email that is emailed to the recipient.  So the message is no longer stored at Sendinc.  When the end user opens the website attachment the data is uploaded to the website and decrypted there.  All data transmissions are RSA SSL encrypted (1024 Bits).  Even if you forward your email to someone else they cannot read it.  It has to be opened from your email.

I give this web app two enthusiastic thumbs up!

**You can create a site to site encryption in Exchange server between different email domains but that is beyond the scope of this post and would be time consuming for managing the certificates between any domain and all the domains that you would want to encrypt your email between.

My definition of CLOUD:  The most over used buzz word of recent times.  Putting that aside, some IT solutions just fit better with someone else hosting and maintaining that part of your business.  Today, I am focusing on email.  

Money: Yes, money talks.  You can host email offsite for as little as $4.17 / month / user and a maximum of $10 / month / user.  This isn't with some fly by night company either.  We are talking about Microsoft and Google.  Let's case study a company with 30 employees needing to upgrade their email server and say that the company replaces equipment precisely every 4 years.  Option 1: Purchase new server and replace.  Cost: Approximately $7500.  (Server + Software + Licensing) .  Option 2: Google apps domain: Yearly cost $1500 and total cost over 4 years is $6000 plus initial setup (man hours). Option 3: Microsoft hosted exchange: Yearly cost of $1800 and total cost over 4 years $7200 plus initial setup (man hours).  Option 4: Microsoft BPOS: Yearly cost of $3600 and total cost over 4 years $14400 plus initial setup (man hours).

With the last 3 options, the best news is that after the first four years, your company is purchasing new equipment.  You continue to pay your monthly fee and upgrades and improvements are added to your hosting solution in the cloud with out any intervention from your IT staff.

Maintenance:  I am in no way saying the cloud is maintenance free, but I am saying that your IT staff will spend much less time maintaining the email hosted in the cloud once the initial setup is done.  Think of this, the burden of backups, uptime, equipment and so on is now rolled up into a nominal fee you are paying.  

Reliability: Service Level Agreement!  What would it cost your company to place a redundant email system to a data center that offered very high speed internet and redundancy.  I have recently priced this and $20k - $30k for hardware alone.  Add on a $500 - $1500 monthly fee for the data center and internet.  All this exercise was to get your SLA up to 99.9%.  Or, when you buy a hosted solution, it comes with that SLA bundled in you low recurring fee. 

Eat our own Dog Food: Not only do we recommend these solutions, but we use them too. Our corporate email is hosted with Microsoft BPOS.  Personally, I have a Google apps domain for my family.  I like both products and they both are reliable and quality products.  

Ready to buy yet?   If this peaked you're interest and you are ready to switch, give Strickland Networks a call.  Not only can well help you chose the right solution, we can help you implement it as well.

With all of the new features of XenServer 5.6, I have been very excited about rolling it out.  There has been one thing though.  OpenManage and XenServer haven't been the best pals.  When we had been trying to rollout any XenServer on a Dell Server, it seems that we had to jump through hoops to make OpenManage work.  Well Dell has really worked on being more XenServer Friendly and released a Supplemental Pack for XenServer. 

A Supplemental Pack is an install package that can be slipstreamed into the install of XenServer.  So if you were installing XenServer you would simply start with the install CD, then use the Linux Templates Supplemental CD, and then use the Dell OpenManage CD when it asks for you to continue the install.  It is great!

I had to call Dell to get a copy of the ISO because it was not yet available on the website.  Here is the link so that you too can enjoy some Dell and Citrix Xen!

http://ftp.dell.com/sysman/OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-LX-6.3.0-2075.XenServer56_A00.10.iso

By the way, Thank You! Johanness Far (Dell Enterprise Technical Support Senior Analyst) for getting me the link. 

It seems that everywhere I go I am being inundated with Cloud Computing.  It's on radio talk shows, magazine advertisements, sitcoms, websites, and billboards.  Much like the marketing phase we all suffered through a couple of years ago where any product could be granted hipness by slapping an "i" or an "e" on the front of it's name, marketing executives seem to think that any product can be transfored into cutting edge or revolutionary by placing the word "cloud" somewhere in the product's name.  But what does this buzz word du jour really mean?  Why do I care if something is in "the cloud?"

At the most basic, cloud computing means that you can access data from your computer or phone where the data is hosted by someone on a server somewhere.  The server is in the cloud.  The beauty of cloud computing is that you don't care who manages the servers, what software runs them or where they're located.  The important part is that you can access your data or application very easily.

We all use the cloud in at least a limited sense.  For instance, Google.com is a cloud based app.  When you type in a search for best cheese curl recipe your query is sent of to banks and banks of servers somewhere.  You may be getting results from a server down the street or across the world.  It doesn't really matter.  As far as we're concerned, who cares what database system is processing my recipe request - as long as the answer to my question comes back fast and is the answer in the ballpark for what I wanted.

Although websites are the most obvious cloud application we run into, they're not the only game in town.  At The Strickland Group, we've been using a cloud based backup product for a couple of years now.  It's a server that sits on a client's network and takes periodic backups throughout the day.  At night - or whenever the client's off-peak internet bandwith hours are - this server compresses the day's backups into one file, encrypts it with AES 256 bit encryption and sends it to a datacenter on the East Coast US.  From there the data is replicated to another datacenter on the West Coast.  This gives the client emergency disaster recovery capabilities if something happens to their server room.  This product has several other killer features such as the ability to create a virtual server from the most recent backups - if your mail server has a hardware issue, this device can build a virtual mail server that your employees can use without any action on their part until you can get the hardware issues repaired.  Really amazing technology.

Another up and coming cloud app is Cloud based antivirus.  This is a new slant on anti-virus software.  Essentially, your files are sent to the AV providers servers where they are scanned.  Your PC is not spending valuable CPU time scanning files because it's all done on a server somewhere in the cloud.  You don't have to keep virus definitions up to date, you don't have to install the latest version, you don't have to keep your computer on certain nights of the week so a scan will run.  All you really need is a very fast internet connection.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the cloud computing trend.  I think it's safe to say that the buzz worthiness of the concept will wear off, but the technology of cloud computing is here to stay.  More and more of our online lives will be in the cloud.