Matthew Sarrel

Social networking and user-contributed content have taken the Internet by storm as evidenced by the popularity of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Twitter. Earlier this year, we looked at the security risks of social networking on public sites. But that’s not the whole story. There’s a revolution going on in enterprise collaboration software […]

The topic of open-source software has been steeped in debate since the development and licensing took root in the 1980s and picked up steam with the proliferation of the Internet in the decade that followed. As open-source tools and components began to grow more familiar among developers, enterprises approached open-source cautiously, with an eye toward […]

While there’s still plenty of room for growth among enterprises for straight ahead, consolidation-oriented server virtualization projects, many organizations are looking to take their virtualization deployments to the next level. How? By shaping their data centers into elastic and self-service platforms akin to those built by large cloud computing outfits such as Amazon.com and Salesforce.com. […]

More and more IT organizations are embracing virtual server and desktop infrastructure technologies. A December 2009 report from Forrester Research found that 71 percent of the companies it surveyed are using server virtualization and believe that 62 percent of their x86 server OS instances will be virtualized with the next two years. Virtual desktop implementations […]

Zscaler Offers Secure Web Gateway as a Service by Matt Sarrel Dashboard The Zscaler Dashboard greets me after I log in to the administration portal. Traffic amounts overall, traffic by time, traffic by location, traffic by department, and threat information is shown. This screen can be customized. The Favorites drop down in the middle holds […]

Zscaler’s self-named cloud security service provides organizations with security covering integrated Web, instant messaging, peer to peer, Webmail and SMTP-based e-mail, and it does so without any on-premises hardware or software installation requirements. Rather, the Zscaler service spreads its proxy and relay load across the company’s 40 data centers and presents administrators with a rich, […]

Every road warrior needs rugged and encrypted storage. Intellectual property, client lists and contracts could fall into the wrong hands if stored on a removable device that gets lost. It goes without saying that every corporate data asset in the field today should be encrypted at the very least. Earlier in 2010 I reviewed rugged […]

Security challenges for organizations are tougher than ever. Old scourges such as malware are taking on new potency as penetration tools and exploit kits are becoming more of a commercial affair, as attack sophistication is increasing through years of the ever-escalating battle of security researcher versus cyber-criminal and as more employees and customers are interacting […]

Application whitelisting-a security practice in which administrators identify which applications are allowed to run on a system and deny all others-is all the rage these days. In situations where users can’t be trusted, strict whitelisting makes plenty of sense as a part of a more comprehensive endpoint security policy. However, without enough provision for flexibility […]

Everyone knows the biggest thing on the Internet these days is social networking. Businesses and individuals use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Delicious-just to name a few-to build and maintain relationships. The question is, with whom? Friends, colleagues and customers? Or criminals? At the core of the issue are two factors: user identity and user-contributed […]