Trends
What drives network upgrades?
Today's
network managers are challenged by a myriad
of evolving network requirements. Network
teams have always had the burden of
balancing new technical architectures with
the ongoing responsibility of maintaining
the current infrastructure, but according to
Forrester Research, today's network
operations professionals are facing an
unparalleled rate of change that is
straining the corporate network.
"Today's networks are under siege," says
Forrester's Robert Whiteley. "Infrastructure
and operations teams worry about security
upgrades, application rollouts and new
virtualization architectures that are
stressing networks beyond their capacity.
Network managers that once toiled over the
business case for 10-Gigabit Ethernet now
find the technology deployed throughout
their data centers. However, as they begin
to increase network usage, their gating
factor is not bandwidth-it's latency."
As a result, he says, they will need to
bifurcate network investment and upgrade
both packet delivery and application
delivery equipment.
To better understand these trends,
Forrester surveyed 252 network decision
makers at North American and European
enterprises about their network hardware
purchasing and refresh plans. The survey
found that:
Security and disaster recovery are top
drivers for network change. Regulatory
pressures have network managers scrambling
to deploy better access control and data
protection. Moreover, companies also need to
make sure the network is able to resist
common threats from viruses, worms and other
malicious code. In addition, the network is
now a critical component in failover
procedures needed to ensure that data is
always available in the event of a disaster.
As a result, security and business
continuity are the No. 1 and No. 3 drivers
of network upgrades.
Application requirements spur the
next-largest upgrade needs. A host of
network-centric application
initiatives-including collaboration tools
spurred on by Web 2.0, video-intensive tools
and the need to accelerate traditional
applications like enterprise resource
planning-are creating direct linkages
between the network and the apps that ride
over them. As a result, application-oriented
trends are driving upgrades, with 38 percent
of survey respondents citing new application
upgrades, 33 percent citing voice and
communication upgrades and 27 percent citing
application issues.
Data center modernization projects create
another five reasons to upgrade. IT
infrastructure and operations staffs have
been overwhelmed with data center projects
for two years. Specifically, virtualization
and consolidation are top initiatives that
drive architectural flexibility and costs
savings. Thirty-two percent of poll
respondents cited server virtualization and
consolidation as a key driver. Storage
upgrades, data center relocation, grid
computing and storage virtualization were
also cited.
Mobility and distributed workforces round
out the network to-do list. A younger, more
demanding generation of workers bring a
different set of expectations where mobility
is table stakes, not just an option for a
privileged set of execs. Network engineers
have seen this trend for years as they
explore new wireless architectures, which 27
percent of respondents cited as a key
motivator for network upgrades.
Spam, cybercrime linked (duh!)
In apparently the first experiment of its
kind, McAfee asked 50 people from around the
world to surf the Web unprotected for 30
days. Participants from 10 countries
received more than 104,000 spam e-mails
throughout the course of the experiment,
which the company calls, creatively,
S.P.A.M. (spammed persistently all month).
Each recipient received 2,096 messages each,
on average-the equivalent of approximately
70 messages a day.
Participants were given permission to go
where most Internet users would not dare in
order to discover how much spam they would
attract and what the effects would be.
McAfee researchers confirmed that spammers
are as active as ever, and they are
increasingly using psychological tricks to
lure Internet users to part with their
contact details, identity information and
cash. The experiment shows that spam
continues to evolve, utilizing more local
languages and cultural nuances, as well as
becoming more targeted in a bid to avoid
detection.
Many of the spam messages received were
phishing e-mails, which pose as a
trustworthy source to criminally acquire
sensitive information such as user names,
passwords and bank account details. Other
e-mails carried viruses, and many allowed
malware to be silently installed on the
computers by persuading participants to surf
unsafe Web sites. A number of participants
noted a decrease in their computers'
processing speeds, as well as an increased
number of pop-ups.
"Many of our participants noticed that
their computers were slowing down, which
means that while they were surfing,
unbeknownst to them, Web sites were
installing malware," says Jeff Green, senior
vice president of McAfee Avert Labs.
The results of the experiment reveal a
shift away from mass spam e-mails toward
more targeted campaigns. Foreign-language
and social-engineering spam are two areas in
which participants received a larger than
anticipated number of e-mails, an area
McAfee expects to increase substantially.
Who are those smart phone users?
In
light of all the interest in the new Apple
iPhone, Neilson Mobile recently issued a
report on just who is using smart phones,
what they are paying and who pays the bills.
The research firm says that in the first
quarter of this year, 48 percent of smart
phone users were business people, but of
those, slightly fewer than half said their
companies were paying the bills.
Research in Motion (BlackBerry), HTC and
Palm continue to lead the smart phone
industry in market share, Neilson, says,
with Apple trailing in fourth place. Apple
iPhone users, however, report the highest
overall satisfaction scores among major
smart phone manufacturers.
The average smart phone user paid $205
for the device and $110 on a monthly service
plan (a 10 percent increase from the
previous year). Although men and women spend
nearly the same amount on monthly service,
men tend to spend more for their device than
women ($216 versus $189).
Penetration of smart phones has more than
doubled in the past years, according to
Neilson, going from 4.8 percent in the first
quarter of 2007 to 9.9 percent this year.
The number of female smart phone users went
from 3.4 percent in 2007 to 7.8 percent this
year, while penetration in the male market
doubled from 6.1 percent in 2007.
Neilson says that 59 percent of U.S.
smart phone users are male, while nearly 72
percent range in age from 25 to 54 years
old. In addition, more than a third of smart
phone users have a household income of at
least $100,000 (nearly an 8 percent increase
from the previous year).
Short takes
IP for Youth
Youth Development, New Mexico's
largest social services nonprofit
organization, is using an Avaya
IP telephony system to improve its client
services and better control its
communications costs. YDI decided that Avaya
IP Office fit its tight budget and would
enable the organization to gradually migrate
voice systems to IP, manage the system from
one location, and distribute communications
applications to its employees. "IP Office
gives us the flexibility to meet a broad
range of needs," says
Larry Fortess, chief administrative
officer and vice president, YDI. "We knew we
wanted to move toward IP, but we didn't want
to put an IP PBX at every site, which would
be impractical and expensive."
Switch in time
Scottsdale, Ariz.-based
AmazingMail.com, which provides direct
mail marketing solutions, has deployed
Juniper Networks
EX-series Ethernet switches and Secure
Services Gateway (SSG) firewalls. By
replacing the company's incumbent switching
and security products with the
high-performance network infrastructure,
AmazingMail.com has increased switching
performance tenfold and tripled virtual
private network performance. "We needed to
proactively simplify our network
architecture to align our network to our
rapidly evolving business requirements,"
says Larry Prine, lead systems
administrator for AmazingMail.com.