For a year, some IT security analysts have been warning that treacherous new malware could morph into a mobile nightmare. Now it may be here, and it’s using sex as its lure.
A few months ago, security software vendors identified a piece of early mobile malware known as Sexy View. First found in China, it was the first malware relying on SMS — Short Message Service — in order to proliferate. With it, infected phones could spam everyone on the phone’s contact list and entice them to download porn-related content.
Now it seems Sexy View has spawned Sexy Space. According to IDG, Sexy Space is capable of downloading new SMS templates from a remote server for sending out spam. It also steals network information from the phone and sends it back to a remote server.
The debate occurring now among security analysts is whether Sexy Space qualifies as the first botnet — networks of hacked computers, and one of the Internet’s worst security threats — written for the huge population of mobile devices.
According to several analysts in this NetworkWorld article, “When looking to strike a deal with a service provider, enterprise IT executives need to take a step back from the need to reduce expenses immediately and think about IT needs a year or more from now. Outsourcing in a tight economy can represent a classic case of ‘You get what you pay for’ to enterprise IT executives.”
You know, EasyStreet believes in providing good value for our customers. We recognize that IT budgets are tighter than ever, but after 14 years in this business, we also know what it takes to provide the level of reliability and support our customers require — and don’t want to degrade our best-in-the-business SLA just to get the sale.
After all, the goal is for ALL of us to stay in business, isn’t it?
The article quotes Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner, who says, “Oftentimes, you are going to be disappointed with the level of cost reduction you can achieve in an outsourcing deal, and if that is all you are focused on, inevitably, it will produce a bad deal. Historically customers get lousy quality of service when trying to squeeze an outsourcer. In the short term the deal may help a company’s bottom line, but long term, enterprise companies need high-quality services to better compete.”
The article goes on to say analysts advise enterprise IT decision makers to research service providers’ financials, product road maps, deal flow and turnover. “Outsourcers are not safe from the current economic conditions and may not survive the storm any better than others. There has to be a big focus on vendor risk and vendor viability. The deal may sound great now, but if the vendor goes south in six months, where does that leave you?”
You can read the whole article here. End of lecture.
Okay, this post is blatantly self-serving to EasyStreet. The topic is IT infrastructure consolidation and it contains observations from Riverbed Technology we feel are worth repeating.
First, the positive comment:
“Why consolidate?” a recent Riverside white paper asks. “The reasons to consolidate IT infrastructure, including email, applications, and databases as well as tape libraries, are wide-ranging. While most IT managers really focus on just the cost of the physical IT infrastructure, there are far greater benefits that can be derived from IT consolidation:
1. Reduced IT management overhead.
2. Eased revision control and
3. Ease of implementing data security.
4. The ability to scale systems more quickly.
5. Ease compliance.
6. Reduced server and software costs.
That’s the self-serving part. It actually sounds like a great argument for moving your IT to a Managed Services Provider (MSP) such as EasyStreet. In fact, we make many of those same claims to our prospective customers.
But Riverside Technology — a leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions — wants to sell their own expertise, not EasyStreet’s.
So here’s the negative comment, describing do-it-yourself IT consolidation:
“For most organizations today, the possibility of consolidating IT infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data center is an idea that has been on the table to cut costs and boost productivity. After all, isn’t consolidation supposed to produce these benefits with nothing more than a small one-time effort of some time and money?”
“While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organizations — and by this point you’ve already created the ROI calculations that show a year or less payback period — it will take more than just a Friday afternoon to ensure that your consolidation project is truly successful. As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly-planned consolidation project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place.”
Acclaimed marketing guru Seth Godin, author of a dozen international business best-sellers, says the days of the corporate cubicle farm are drawing to a close. Writing in Time magazine, he says the conventional office set-up no longer makes sense due to technology’s advances.
“More and more, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away,” Godin writes. “It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow. I’d rather send you a file at the end of my day (when you’re in a very different time zone) and have the information returned to my desktop when I wake up tomorrow. We may never meet, but we’re both doing essential work.”
The Internet makes synchronized team efforts possible, he says, even when members are spread in far-flung locations, and bosses will still be watching when you log in, what you type and what you access.
“Some people will embrace this new high-stress, high-speed, high-flexibility way of work,” he believes. “We’ll go from a few days alone at home, maintaining the status quo, to urgent team sessions, sometimes in person, often online. It will make some people yearn for jobs like those in the old days, when we fought traffic, sat in a cube, typed memos, took a long lunch and then sat in traffic again.”
Is Twitter really the major social networking trend we keep hearing about? Researchers from Harvard Business School last week released some surprising data, based on a survey they conducted of 300,000 Twitter users. Among their findings:
- Ten percent of Twitter users generate 90 percent of the tweets. “This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the researchers wrote.
- Over half of the surveyed Twitter users communicated less than once every 74 days.
- The average male user is twice as likely to follow another man rather than a woman. Although men and women follow a similar number of users, men have 15 percent more followers than women.
This last finding was especially unexpected because women are typically more active on social networks. “Similarly, an average woman is 25 percent more likely to follow a man than a woman,” the researchers say. “Finally, an average man is 40 percent more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.”
For more information, check out the researchers’ post, “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets.”
