Archive for January, 2010

An article published this week by InformationWeek talks about how Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said last month that it is examining the privacy and data security implications of cloud computing for consumers. I personally don’t think that the FTC is going far enough as it is my opinion that creating gigantic repositories of electronic data, whether it is personal, business or consumer data is becoming an attractive target for data mining.

A lot of companies are thinking about scaling out their Exchange environment through ‘cheaper’ DAS storage and giving end users basically an unlimited mailbox.  Whilst I can’t deny that scalability has grown since the first days I started to work with Exchange 4.0 back in the mid 1990s, the reality of being able to give someone an unlimited mailbox has a few snags in it.

Those that understand storage well have a good idea on IOPs.  IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) is a common benchmark for harddisks and other computer storage media. Like with any benchmark, IOPS numbers published by drive and SAN vendors are often misleading and do not guarantee real-world application performance.  The specific number of IOPS possible in any server configuration will vary greatly depending upon the variables the tester enters into the program, including the balance of read and write operations, the mix of random or sequential access patterns, the number of worker threads and queue depth, as well as the data block sizes.

A corporate strategy of proactively archiving and managing employee email with well documented email use policies and an audit program can help insure that employee wrong-doing is stopped before it becomes an outside legal action.

1. Create a easy to understand employee use policy which clearly calls out what can be done in the corporate email system and what can’t. An example would be to not allow personal communications using the corporate email system.

In a recent article in Law Technology News written by Anthony E. Davis titled “More Privilege Issues With Employee Email”, an interesting issue was posed: Should an employee expect that emails between themselves and their attorney be privileged when using the company’s email system?

Mimosa Systems announced during the month of December 2009 that it collected its 1,000th customer.   Reaching 1,000 customers is a major milestone for any company and let me explain. 

When a new company begins, you can expect that its first ten customers basically received the product for ‘free’.  This is the customary practice to gain references.