Monthly Archives: April 2012

Business Processes, Document Management, Doxo, Government

12 State and County Governments Join doxo

Image representing Doxo as depicted in CrunchBase

doxo, the all-in-one digital file cabinet and payment provider, today announced that a dozen state and local government agencies have joined doxo. doxo enables these government agencies to send bills, tax statements and other notices directly into the doxo filing cabinets of their residential and commercial customers. In turn, their customers can now go paperfree, receive documents and bills, and set-up one time and recurring payments, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – using doxoPAY and doxo Mobile.

When governments connect with residential and commercial customers on doxo, they eliminate the costs associated with printing and postage, shorten payment collection cycles for treasuries, and provide their customers with a convenient free tool to receive statements, pay bills, and store important documents.

“Like many government entities, we have been evaluating opportunities to improve service and cut costs by leveraging cloud-based technologies. In just the first 60 days since we launched on doxo, more than a thousand of our residents have already connected with us to go paperfree, receive their tax statements directly to their doxo file cabinet, and make their tax payments,” said Doug Lasher, Treasurer, Clark County Washington. “Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Making sure property taxes are paid on time is a breeze with doxo and free for the taxpayer. doxo is the wave of the future.”

In addition to the State of Washington, the county agencies now on doxo include Benton County, Chelan County, Clallam County, Clark County, Franklin County, Island County, Lincoln County, Pend Oreille County, Stevens County, Thurston County and Walla Walla County. Collectively, these government entities serve millions of residents and deliver tens of millions of documents per year.

In addition to receiving documents, bills, and tax statements from their participating government entity, customers can use doxo as a free online file cabinet to store documents and manage critical account information. Each time a customer connects to a service provider, paper mail is turned off completely, and documents are thereafter delivered directly to their digital file cabinet. Documents can be filed, printed, or downloaded at any time, and are securely stored without time limits.

“doxo makes it easy for state and county governments to reduce the expense of paper mail, eliminate environmental waste, and speed collection of payments,” said Steve Shivers, co-founder and CEO of doxo. “With very little IT hassle, government agencies and other providers can join doxo, and start improving service for residents and cutting costs in a matter of weeks. It’s extremely gratifying to already see both the magnitude of savings and the positive response from both residents and organizations alike.”

doxo empowers businesses and government organizations of all sizes to lower operating expenses and dramatically increase paperless adoption. As a cloud-based service doxo requires no software, installed infrastructure, or IT services for providers to join the network. More information for governments and other organizations looking to connect with their customers on doxo is available at www.doxoconnect.com.


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Dome9 Introduces 1-Click Cloud Server Secure Access

“Our new instant access app for Google Chrome makes it unbelievably easy to get secure access to any server, on-the-fly,” said Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO of Dome9 Security, which announced on Wednesday the availability of Dome9 Instant Access for Google Chrome, a new browser-based application enabling one-click secure access to any server and any cloud for Google Chrome users.
Today there are more than 30 million cloud and virtual private servers in use, and most are vulnerable to attack because their built-in security stacks such as the host firewall are too difficult to manage. Dome9 makes cloud server security manageable by delivering a GUI-based firewall management service to secure an unlimited number of Windows and Linux servers in any virtual private, cloud, collocated, and hosted environment.

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Are Your Cloud Computing Platforms Obsolete?

Every cloud computing platform that is being sold today will be obsolete prematurely unless they can retrofit them with a single-source timing device. If cloud computing is going to be as pervasive tomorrow as some sales executives have hyped them, the need for a more sophisticated platform has to be fulfilled today.
It’s not enough to tweak some components or put some functions like I/O on the chip. That will definitely help performance, but we are not looking at just shaving off some latency when it comes to financial and other mission-critical applications. Clocking needs to be totally synchronous and that means getting it from one source.
The importance of cloud computing is being “amped up” because manufacturers have to have some battle cry to boost sales of servers as well as next-generation chips. Would you buy this year’s car model if they only had eight-track tape systems in them? Half of you probably don’t even know what an eight-track tape is. The short answer is “No.” You would wait until they made the car with the proper instrumentation.

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VDI and Cloud Infrastructure – Together at Last

This year, virtual desktop and cloud storage initiatives are at the top of many IT organization’s wish lists. But what is not obvious is how tightly intertwined these two initiatives have become as users embrace the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. This new BYOD model forces IT groups to provide both secure user applications (VDI) and secure user data (cloud storage).
Although cloud storage services have experienced success in the enterprise, users still have concerns about the security of their information and other problems related to control over data in the cloud. Because of this, VDI will not go away as cloud computing expands, as many have predicted, but instead be used to complement the cloud. According to experts, VDI adoption is predicted to spike – with Gartner estimating that 60 percent of enterprises will deploy some form of VDI by the end of this year.

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Smart Grid as a Service at Cloud Expo New York

The complexity of Smart Grid and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) implementations present a challenge for most of the nation’s electric utilities. From skilled resource availability to the operational complexities of installing and maintaining these systems, utilities have often struggled with achieving success. SAIC’s cloud-based Smart Grid as a Service (SGS) solution was developed to address these complexities and ease the implementation of Smart Grid technology.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Tim Crowell, Assistant Vice President and Chief Architect for SAIC’s Smart Grid division, will present SAIC’s SGS solution with specific focus given to how SAIC addressed the challenges of utility integration into their cloud-based infrastructure.

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Who’s Responsible for Protecting Data Stored in the Cloud?

With cloud comes the notion of liberation. Cloud is the natural evolution of the data center. It’s easy to deploy, infinitely scalable, and highly redundant. It is the shiny new component inside the storage controller and is making it possible for an old dog to learn some very impressive new tricks. But with the cloud, comes responsibility.
An article recently appeared over at BusinessWeek explaining how many businesses now operate under the assumption that once their data is sent offsite they need not be concerned with protecting it. In a perfect world, this is how it should work. One of the main selling points of outsourcing infrastructure is the idea that there is now one less thing for IT to worry about. However, before any business can trust a third party to protect their invaluable corporate IP, some due diligence must be conducted.

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SoftLayer and RightScale Partner

SoftLayer Technologies and RightScale have partnered to provide unmatched scalability and automation solutions that allow Internet-centric companies to speed their time-to-market. Companies such as social gaming developer Broken Bulb Game Studios are able to use SoftLayer’s public and private cloud infrastructure with RightScale cloud management to easily deploy, automate and manage their computing workloads across the globe.
“Customers, such as Broken Bulb, are now experiencing the advantages of working with two leading cloud solutions providers,” said Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer of SoftLayer. The partnership between RightScale and SoftLayer offers a solution that is ideal for all types of web savvy companies that need to easily scale IT resources to meet the toughest workloads or steepest Internet traffic demands. This helps enable users to rapidly rollout new web-based services, applications and games through a flexible consumptive monthly billing cycle.

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Adobe, Looking to Stay Relevant, Goes Cloud

Adobe launched Creative Suite 6 Monday, the latest version of its flagship software kit for designers and web developers, and made it subscription-based, part of the company’s Creative Cloud.
Pricing starts at $50 a month for a year’s commitment or $75 a month with no contract. Existing users may qualify for a $30-a-month promotion for the first year and there’s a version for business teams that’ll cost $70 a month that won’t be out for a while.
Users can download Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, After Effects, InDesign and any of the also separately priced other programs in the bundle to a PC or Mac, share files and store work online in a 20GB locker.

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IT Architecture, IT Management

The Taxonomy of IT Part 5 – Genus and Species

As the last (do I hear applause?) installment in this five part series on the Taxonomy of IT, we have a bit of cleanup to do.  There are two remaining “levels” of classification (Genus and Species), but there is also a need to summarize this whole extravaganza into some meaningful summary.

Genus classifications allow us to subdivide the Family of IT into subcultures based on their commonality to each other, while the Species definition enables us to highlight sometimes subtle differences, such as color, range or specific habits.   Therefore, in order to round out our Taxonomy, Genus will refer to how IT is physically architected, while Species will expose what that architecture may hide.

The physical architecture of an IT environment used to fall into only a couple of categories.  Most organizations built their platforms to address immediate needs, distributing systems based on the location of their primary users.  An inventory database would be housed at the warehouse facility, while financials would sit on systems at corporate.  This required the building and maintenance of complex links, both at the physical transport layer and also at the data level.  Because of the limits of access technology, people traveled to where the “data” was kept.

Twenty years ago, we began the transition of moving the data to where the users can consume it.  A new Genus evolved that enabled data to be moved to where it could be consumed.  It’s vastly more efficient to ship a 5MB spreadsheet halfway across the country than it is to ship a 170lb accountant.  In this architecture, the enablers were increases in available bandwidth, more efficient protocols, and better end-node processing power.

As we move forward in time, we are continuing to push the efficiency envelope.  Now, we don’t even have to move that spreadsheet, we just have to move an image of that spreadsheet.  And we don’t care where it needs to go, or even what route it takes to get there.  We are all about lowest cost routing of information from storage to consumption and back.

So, Genus is a way for us to gauge how far down that arc of advancement our customers have traveled.  Think in terms of a timeline of alignment with industry trends and capabilities.

Species, on the other hand, can be used to uncover the “gaps” between where in the timeline the customer is and what they have missed (intentionally or not) in terms of best practices.  Did they advance their security in line with their technology?  Have they established usage policies?  Can their storage sustain the transition?  What have they sacrificed to get where they are today, and what lies beneath the surface?

Using Genus and Species classifications, we can round out the taxonomy of any particular IT environment.  The combination of factors from each of the seven layers completes a picture that will allow us to guide our customers through the turbulent waters of today’s IT world.

To recap the seven layers:

Kingdom: How IT is viewed by the business

Phylum: IT’s general operating philosophy

Class: How IT is managed on a daily basis

Order: How IT is consumed, and why

Family: The structure of data flow within IT systems

Genus: How IT is physically architected

Species: What that architecture may hide

It would be quite the undertaking to build out individual groupings in each of these categories.  That is not what is important (although I did enjoy creating the pseudo-Latin neologisms in earlier parts of the series).  What is key is that we consider all of these categories when creating an overall approach for our customers.  It’s not all about the physical architecture, nor all about management.  It’s about how the collection of characteristics that flow from the top level all the way down to the bottom converge into a single picture.

In my opinion, it is a fatal mistake to apply technology and solutions across any of these levels with impunity.  Assuming that because a customer fits into a specific category they “have” to leverage a specific technology or solution is to blind yourself (and ultimately your customer) to what may be more appropriate to their specific situation.

Each environment is as unique as our own strands of DNA, and as such even those that make it to the Species with commonality will branch onto different future paths.  Perhaps there should be an eighth level, one that trumps all above it.  It could be called “Individuality.”