Aplos Software has released Aplos Accounting 3.0, the latest version of their Cloud-based fund accounting software for nonprofits and churches. Here’s a short video intro:
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Survey Infographic: Customer Relying on Virtualization Vendors For Security
BeyondTrust has released a survey, Virtual Insecurity, that reveals organizations are relying heavily on virtualization vendors for security if for any security at all. Key survey takeaways from the 346 respondents that participated include:
- 42 percent do not use security tools regularly as part of their virtual systems administration
- 34 percent lean heavily on antivirus protection as a primary security tool
- 57 percent often use existing image templates for new virtual images
- Nearly 3 out of every 4 respondents say that up to a quarter of virtual guests are offline at any given time
- 64 percent have no security controls in place that require a security sign off prior to releasing a new virtual image or template
Here’s an infographic based on these results:
Talari’s Adaptive Private Networking Nabs Best of Interop Nod
Talari Networks has won the Best of Interop 2013 Award in the “Performance Optimization & Testing” category for its new Adaptive Private Networking (APN) 3.0 operating software, which we reported on earlier this week. The Best of Interop 2013 Awards were announced on May 7 at the Interop Las Vegas conference. For more information, visit: http://www.networkcomputing.
The Best of Interop Awards’ Judging Committee, comprised of 16-award-winning IT editors and analysts, reviewed nearly 150 entries and selected winners based on products with significant technical impact and the most potential to advance the business technology market. Talari is showcasing its patented and dynamic APN 3.0 operating software to support its family of Mercury WAN appliances this week at Interop booth #2450, May 7-9, 2013, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
“The Best of Interop Awards showcases IT vendors pushing the boundaries of technology,” said Andrew Conry-Murray, editor of Network Computing. “Talari and each category winner demonstrates a commitment to innovation and has a compelling offering deserving of recognition.”
TWD & Associates, IP Data Solutions Partner For Compliant Cloud-based eDiscovery
TWD & Associates, Inc. (TWD), a communication and collaboration solutions provider for the public sector, today announced it has partnered with IP Data Solutions (IPDS), a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, to provide electronic discovery (eDiscovery) solutions for archived content systems. Archived content, including legacy email and data files, are migrated to a secure, cloud-based environment with sophisticated, integrated software search tools, allowing users to quickly and easily locate documentation for litigation, research, Inspector General (IG),General Counsel, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) requests.
“Government agencies must comply with data retention and email archival legislation to ensure information is available and accessible,” said Larry Besterman, President and CEO, TWD. “A normal eDiscovery process could require weeks to cull through existing archives. Our solution allows a search to be performed in seconds.”
The eDiscovery solution works with customers’ current cloud strategies and is compliant with all federal mandates. By placing archived email and files in the cloud, users have infinite scalability, allowing their data to grow or reduce in accordance with their retention policies. It also has synergy with existing discovery systems, if current systems are in place across an organization. The solution requires no hardware or software and is provided as a managed service, improving efficiencies, increasing cost savings and allowing accessibility from any location by an authorized user. It allows agencies to integrate their storage, archiving and eDiscovery needs into one solution, reducing the requirements for duplicative data storage.
“Electronic discovery has traditionally been a very expensive and reactive activity,” said Gary Thompson, President, IPDS. “Given these times of intense budgetary constraints, a solution like ours is valuable because it helps clients implement a more proactive, cost-effective and efficient approach to what is normally a complicated process.”
The cloud-based infrastructure is Statement on Accounting Standards (SAS) 70 Type II, PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Level 1, International Organization of Standards (ISO) 27001 and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant. Additionally all client data resides within the continental United States (CONUS).
To learn more about the joint TWD and IPDS eDiscovery solution, call IPDS at (301) 519-8015.
AvePoint Releases SharePoint Meeting Organizer App
AvePoint today announced the launch of AvePoint Meetings, the latest addition to its line of Productivity Apps in the SharePoint 2013 App Store.
AvePoint Meetings, a free interactive SharePoint 2013 app, brings order and efficiency to an organization’s meetings by allowing business users to track notes, actions, and decisions made in meetings against agenda items. While conventional meeting tracking generally involves hand-written notes that must then be typed up and emailed to be shared, AvePoint Meetings enforces a more structured information tracking process that ensures all meeting information is readily available and organized for those that need it. AvePoint Meetings utilizes the “My Task” feature of SharePoint 2013 by creating “Actions” as SharePoint Tasks so your organization can discover all assignments, tasks and relevant statuses within SharePoint or Microsoft Outlook 2013.
AvePoint Meetings allows business users to collaborate with one another in real-time before, during, and after meetings by:
- Creating single or reoccurring meetings
- Allowing meeting attendees to adjust and update meeting agendas as well as discussion topics
- Capturing meeting information and notes with multi-user support
- Tracking meeting minutes with full auditing, allowing for historical search capabilities
- Assigning, aggregating, and synchronizing tasks and actions
Talari Networks Upgrades Adaptive Private Networking for Mercury WAN Appliances
Talari Networks today announced APN 3.0, an upgrade to its APN (Adaptive Private Networking) operating software to support its family of Mercury WAN appliances. Talari is demonstrating APN 3.0 for the first time at Interop Las Vegas this week, Booth #2450.
With the introduction of APN 3.0, Talari’s WAN solution dynamically builds fully meshed connections in reaction to application demand across an aggregated virtual WAN consisting of broadband, leased-line and other links. This allows enterprises to have a network that automatically adapts to changing traffic patterns and bandwidth demands to ensure that mission-critical applications receive priority and real-time applications are provided the QoS levels they require to perform optimally. In the past, companies were only able to achieve this dynamic network architecture through a combination of disparate technologies or through an expensive fully meshed MPLS network.
Key new features and benefits of the APN 3.0 software release include:
- Dynamic Conduits ? Allows the automated build up and tear down of a fully meshed network that reacts to changing traffic demands by creating best-path, multi-link tunnels across private or public Internet access links. As traffic from location to location exceeds bandwidth policy reservation thresholds or failures are detected, APN 3.0 builds a dynamic tunnel between those locations in real-time, allowing traffic to bypass some hops to decrease latency. All paths/links are monitored on a sub-second basis for quality, including the new ones, to ensure latency has been decreased. With dynamic conduits, network managers don’t have to anticipate traffic patterns and they can ensure adequate bandwidth exists for critical traffic and no sessions fail.
- Single Point Configuration ? Talari’s WAN appliances communicate with one another to build an image of the network, the possible paths through the network, and the latency, loss and jitter of each path. This alleviates the need to configure each device within the network or to manually anticipate changing network demands.
- Complete Network Visibility ? A new off-board Network Management System (NMS) provides full visibility of the Talari network, devices and all links, allowing network managers to easily visualize traffic patterns, quality issues and network outages.
APN 3.0 is fully compatible with leading network management and reporting tools. The operating software will be generally available in July 2013 and accessible via the Talari Customer Support Portal as a free upgrade for existing customers and the NMS will be sold as an optional add-on product.
Amazon Goes Beyond AWS Training with AWS Certification
You can now go beyond AWS training and take tests to earn AWS Certification. Meant to provide a way for Solution Architects, System Administrators, and Developers to formally certify knowledge of AWS.
The AWS Certifications are credentials that you (as an individual) can earn to certify your expertise (skills and technical knowledge) in the planning, deployment, and management of projects and systems that use AWS. Once you complete the certification requirements, you will receive an AWS Certified logo badge that you can use on your business cards and other professional collateral. This will help you to gain recognition and visibility for your AWS expertise.
The first certification, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level, is available now. Additional certifications for System Administrators and Developers are planned for 2013.
Certification Exams are delivered by Kryterion, in more than 100 countries at over 750 testing locations worldwide. You can register online to take the exam through Kryterion.
Ixia ControlTower Promises Comprehensive Visibility Via Single Interface to Cloud Facilities, Distributed Enterprises
Ixia has introduced its ControlTower architecture to help cloud hosting facilities and large enterprise campuses scale and rapidly deploy multiple segments for centralized, intelligent monitoring. The scalable ControlTower architecture provides a single user interface for comprehensive monitoring of network performance and security tools housed in dispersed racks or geographic locations.
The ControlTower architecture builds on the capabilities of the Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) network monitoring switches, which aggregate, filter, load balance and de-duplicate network traffic to intelligently connect data center and cloud provider networks with monitoring tools. This enables network operators to meet increasing bandwidth demands while retaining critical, packet-level visibility into application performance and security at line rate, all managed via a simple yet powerful central interface.
The ControlTower architecture extends the boundaries of the visible network beyond a single data center with a highly scalable approach that improves monitoring of distributed environments by providing:
- Maximum efficiency: Powered by the Anue NTO’s custom dynamic data traffic filtering capabilities, network monitoring switches filter traffic upon ingress to reduce traffic on the interconnect links and the potential for dropped packets.
- Simple usability and control: Ixia’s user interface presents the entire distributed visibility environment as a single switch, allowing administrators to add new monitored network segments with no added management complexity or overhead — making management of a large number of network segments just as easy as managing one.
- Flexible deployment options: Using Ixia’s ControlTower architecture, network monitoring switches may be easily deployed in a single high-density stack, distributed across the top of multiple racks in a data center or distributed to multiple buildings in a campus environment.
“As businesses continue to expand both their use of and reliance on secure, high-performing IT infrastructures, they are moving toward modular approaches that can include both internal and external cloud resources,” said Jim Frey, Vice President of Research for Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates. “Servers, storage and networking components are more often virtualized and can be activated as needed, and so monitoring strategies need to be flexible and scalable to keep pace. Distributed packet monitoring architectures such as Ixia’s ControlTower are critical for maintaining visibility in the face of dynamic resource provisioning and agile, hybrid environments.”
Ixia will demonstrate the ControlTower products at Booth No.1951 at Interop Las Vegas, May 7-9.
502 Errors, Latency Accessing Gmail
Google reported a problem with Gmail today and not long after said it was resolved:
3:02 AM: We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly.
3:43 AM: The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.
Users were experiencing 502 errors and latency when accessing email.
Video: CloudnShare an Example of Post-PC Sharing
The days of the smartphone being just a mobile accessory to a desktop or laptop are pretty much over, if this how-to video is any indication. Gemalto CloudnShare signup is from the smartphone app, and although sharing via desktop is supported, that’s the platform that has become almost an afterthought.
