Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Surprise Audits Around the Corner for Financial Advisers?

It appears as if the Madoff fallout has only just begun for financial advisers. InvestmentNews reported this week that the SEC's proposal to have certain advisers (those deducting fees from client accounts) conduct annual surprise audits is being challenged by the Financial Planning Association (FPA). While the SEC estimates these audits would run $8,000 apiece, the FPA claims they could cost up to $24,000 each.

In addition, the FPA feels that the SEC's proposal is "inappropriate." They are urging the SEC to hold off on any rule changes until the inspector general finishes its report on the Madoff case and Congress passes reform measures. The FPA is also recommending that the authority of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) be strengthened "to oversee audits of firms that hold physical custody of assets."

However, in order for the PCAOB to have such authority, new legislation is required. And, in fact has already been introduced by House Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa. If passed, it would allow the PCAOB to regulate accounting firms that audit all brokers.

Yet, another interesting development to watch as the Madoff fallout continues ...

Email Users Unwittingly Become Hackers’ Accomplices

It's 2 a.m. on a Thursday - do you know where your email is? You better be sure, because a hacker may have hijacked it without you knowing. That's exactly what happened to Fox and Friends Weekend Co-host, Dave Briggs.

Hackers were able to guess Briggs' password or the answer to his security question and took over his Hotmail account. They blocked him from accessing his email by changing his identifying information and then spammed all of his contacts in a fraudulent ploy for money.

Briggs is not alone. Salma Hayek, Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin have also had their email accounts compromised. Even Twitter isn't immune to the efforts of hackers.

So what can we do to avoid this happening to us? First, it's important to create a strong password. At the very least, it should include upper and lowercase letters as well as numerals. Many of us tend to choose simple passwords that are easy for us to remember, but if they are easy for us, they are probably just as easy for hackers.

Internet Security Expert Robert Siciliano recommends choosing a security question with an answer that is based on opinion rather than fact. It's also important to make sure you aren't using anything that can be found on your social networking page or in other web-based environments, like ancestry.com. And just a reminder, using consecutive numbers, pet names or names of family members or friends is a bad idea and puts you at risk.

In the end, a little effort goes a long way. We have to be vigilant and avoid becoming targets. Once your information is compromised, it can - and often does - lead to identity theft, which is very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to undo once the damage has been done.  So take charge, and beat the hackers at their own game.

Tweet-a-boo, I see you!

I've got a story, but you need to promise not to tell anyone. My mother-in-law caught me. Yeah, that's right. One day, she snuck up on me as I was scanning through a friend's Twitter profile and she promptly smacked me in the back of the head with a newspaper. She screamed, "Can't you kids call one another anymore? It seems that all you do is talk on the Internet now. LOL this, j/k that. It's ridiculous! Pick up the phone. Write a letter. Get off of the computer!"

It took some time for me to digest what she was saying. Admittedly, it seemed pretty ridiculous to me at the time. Is this her generation's way of telling us that they walked back and forth to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, and without the benefit of shoes? Perhaps it is. Either way, it got me thinking about the direction that we are heading.

Remember when email became all the rage, and everyone worried that the day of the handwritten letter had come and gone? I don't know the statistics, but I'm sure the United States Post Office has seen a drastic decline of letters passing through their hands. Is that the end of the world? Not at all. Writing an email is more convenient, is generally cost-free and ultimately has exactly the same effect.

The question is whether or not face-to-face communication is going the way of the handwritten letter. In many cases, participating in communities through social media allows individuals many of the same types of interaction as a face-to-face encounter would. You can communicate and collaborate freely, play games together for hours on end and even work together as you see fit. Point being, many of us are finding that social media is often more convenient, is also generally cost-free, and still can have exactly the same effect.

I suspect that social media has lessened the need for people to meet in person for some good old fashioned eye contact. It hasn't replaced it all together (nor will it), but I'd gather that we've seen a reduction. But, do me a favor. Don't tell my mother-in-law. She'd be upset, and she's armed with a newspaper.

Cloud Computing – Let the Magic Carpet Ride Begin

The days of Doogie Howser's blue IBM PS/2 screen with the ever-so-subtle blinking cursor are long gone. Today, we've got desktop computers with multi-core processors, several gigabytes of RAM, hard drives in excess of a terabyte and fiber optic connections in our homes that can symmetrically transfer data at more than 15 megabits per second. And, how we're using these technologies and huge Internet pipelines would blow even Mr. Howser's genius mind.

Then, Doogie was rockin' an 8 MHz processor; today we're conceptualizing entire operating systems in the cloud. With Google's Chrome OS announcement, the "cloud computing" phrase is going to buzz even more. I get it - Google's omnipresent, but short of a locally-installed application here and there, that presence has almost always been strictly in the cloud. We all expected that Google's next big project would be a cloud-based operating system - it was simply the next logical step.

Creating even more cloud buzz, Microsoft recently announced that they will release a free, cloud-based version of their Office software. Up until now, Microsoft has been best known for their on-premise solutions. However, this announcement makes it clear that Microsoft has officially recognized the cloud as a viable vehicle for application delivery. But most importantly, this is the confirmation evangelists like us have known would one day come - the cloud is going mainstream.

The question is no longer whether or not cloud computing is here to stay; it's only a question as to which giant is going to win the race. So, who is it going to be? Google or Microsoft?

Who Can Get Away with a Five-Year Beta Testing Cycle? Google’s Gmail Can!

Remember when Gmail was released as an invitation-only beta service in 2004? I do - I was one of the early adopters. Even then, the service didn't behave as if it were a beta. With little to no down-time and mailbox size limits that were (at the time) much bigger than any competitors, the service just worked. And it worked well. Best of all, it was, and still remains, free. The only entirely new concept that users had to put up with was a series of unobtrusive sponsored links from within the email platform. I use the phrase "put up with" fairly loosely, as there have been dozens of times that, because of the abilities of Google's search engine to produce relevant results, I was actually interested in the link I was being asked to click.

While Google's renowned for many things, they'll never be known as an organization that has short beta cycles. Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesperson, attributes their extraordinarily long testing cycles to ensuring that their products meet their high standards. I have a hard time disagreeing with that. Just about every software company could learn a thing or two from their off-the-charts utility.

Utility aside, we all know that Gmail hasn't truly been a beta for roughly four-and-a-half years. Comparatively speaking, I'd say that the vast majority of "final" products released by software companies have been infinitely more bug-ridden than Gmail was on the day of its release. But, as they ramp up their efforts to offer a more compelling enterprise story, I understand their need to shed the beta label.

I'm in the process of starting a pool to determine how long Google Wave will be in beta for ;-). Let me know if you want in.

Who You Gonna Call? Email Busters!

According to a recent AP story, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is missing emails - and lots of them.

Christopher Reade, a partner in a tech firm who assisted the Louisiana Technology Council in efforts to recover data for the mayor's office, said the mailbox was removed between June 2008 and May 2009. He said 22 gigabytes of data vanished from a defunct server on May 5 - the day of a conference call with the city on the work the outside technology experts would do - but he did not know if the mailbox was among that data.

The city of New Orleans has blamed the missing messages on a faulty server, but Reade's investigation has concluded that the loss of emails "could not be attributed to server damage that the city says occurred in June 2008." In fact, out of all the mailboxes of City Hall employees, Nagin's was the only one missing.

It has now turned into a He Said/He Said with Reade concluding that it would take a "technically competent human action" to remove the mailbox. However, the city's technology chief, M. Harrison Boyd, maintains that the mailbox was not intentionally removed by anyone on the staff.

Now, even Mayor Nagin himself is weighing in and declaring that all the missing messages have been found. Meanwhile, a Times-Picayune blog post is going so far as to call for a criminal investigation into the actions that led to the disappearance of the mayor's mailbox (and all of his email messages since he took office in 2002).

Should be interesting to watch this one play out ... I think I saw a proton pack for sale on eBay in case anyone's looking for one ...

Don’t Underestimate Technology, or You May Get Burned

As far as technology has come in the past 20 years, I am still amazed that people underestimate its sheer power. But a disgruntled employee in India learned the hard way that destroying company records, i.e., deleting thousands of important emails from one of his pharmaceutical company employer's highly used accounts, could and would be traced back to him. With the help of the company's email service provider, local authorities were able to track down the suspect, using Internet protocol and Internet service provider addresses as well as broadband phone records. While the suspect's fate is yet to be determined, his former employer estimates the loss in the hundreds of thousands of local currency.

Of course if Health Guard Private Limited had an email archiving solution in place, the virtual war their former employee waged against them wouldn't have had such a crippling effect. In addition, they could have quickly and easily recovered their valuable data, which is now gone forever.

Unfortunately, there will probably always be a percentage of folks who think they can shirk the system and get away with something. Perhaps some do, but would you really want to chance it in this day and age? I can answer that right now ... that would be no, no for me.

Governor Schwarzenegger Signs California’s Electronic Discovery Act

A version of the 2006 FRCP amendments regarding electronically stored information (ESI) has made its way to California. While Governor Schwarzenegger previously vetoed another version of California's Electronic Discovery Act for budgetary reasons, last night it appeared that even the state's budget woes were no match for the power of ESI in the courts. The Governor signed the new Act yesterday and it is effective immediately. According to the Act:

The Civil Discovery Act requires any documents produced in response to an inspection demand to be produced as they are kept in the usual course of business, or be organized and labeled to correspond with the categories in the demand. The documents are to be produced on the date described above or as agreed by the parties pursuant to an extension.

To view the Electronic Discovery Act in its entirety, click here. The bottom line is that in this day and age, e-discovery requests in court cases are commonplace. Quite frequently, the "smoking gun" evidence in many corporate cases is found in electronically stored records like emails. Now more than ever, organizations of all sizes need to be prepared to process and produce electronic records in a short amount of time. The message is clear - the federal courts and an increasing number of state courts expect electronic records to be just as accessible and producible as their hard copy ancestors.

So, have you heard the one about the lawyer and the "missing" emails? Me either, but I'm guessing it's coming ...

Are You Risking Compliance in an “Unsecure” Cloud?

Two of the biggest concerns about cloud services are data control and security. While these are both very valid concerns, the security fear is also unsubstantiated (some vendors do have questionable practices about data ownership, but LiveOffice believes that every KB to TB of data belongs to its clients, and they can get it back whenever they want). Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or cloud, providers actually have some of the most advanced equipment and technologies on the market - much more high-end systems and safeguards than the majority of companies can afford on premise. After all, this is their livelihood. If they aren't experts at securing the data they store, they won't be around for very long.

Compliance goes hand in hand with these issues, but data stored on a vendor's servers is vulnerable to the same threats as data stored on your own servers. The important thing to note is that the best service providers are well equipped to deal with these challenges and minimize risk. Ultimately, they can do it more effectively than you can.

While there will always be naysayers, some feel that security is best left to the cloud. "SaaS is tailor made for keeping up with the rapid pace of malware development," says Cody Leser, senior director of channel sales at Trend Micro. "There's no way to push patch files continuously; you have to do it in the cloud."

Todd Fitzwater, principal at Demand Solutions Group, says, "Your data is actually getting taken care of in [service providers'] data center[s] better than in yours. The backup and recovery, disaster recovery and security around the servers is much tighter and higher grade than you would put in your own data center."

As with any major decision, companies need to do their due diligence and ask questions - lots of them. Where is the data being stored? What security measures are in place at each data center? Are the data centers redundant? Are the data centers monitored 24-7-365? What type of encryption is being used to protect data in transit? What type of infrastructure is being used to host the data? What type of spam-and-virus protection is in place? Can the data centers handle a sudden increase in demand? How often is data backed up and where are backups stored? Does the service provider enlist an independent, third-party vendor to conduct periodic security scans and other checks? What happens in the event of downtime or a disaster? What happens if the company decides to move its data elsewhere? What happens if the service provider goes out of business or sells to another company?

In the end, you need to make sure you are comfortable with the answers you receive. If there is any doubt about the security of your data, it's probably time to talk to another service provider.