David Strom

This week I seem to be surrounded by dysfunctional electronics, and I am not a happy camper. Or maybe they just are attracted to me, or I to them. My oven is on its third electronic control panel in as many months. It has very fancy touch-pad controls, and when we first got it everything […]

With all the talk of billions for this program or that in Washington, I thought I would put together my own stimulus package that can help your network run smoother. I don’t know whether $10 billion to buy steel (domestic preferred) for new bridges or $9 billion to put up new rural DSL lines will […]

What with Toyota posting its first quarterly loss last month and our new Community-Organizer-in-Chief looking to retool the auto industry, the only good news is that gas is not $4 a gallon anymore. But these items remind me that it is time for different kind of transportation tune up, mainly our data transportation networks. Most […]

I was at a meeting this week that drove home the big generational divide in online and offline media consumption. At the podium was a 20-something CEO of a new venture that is trying to work with new college grads. In the audience were people mostly captains of industry twice his age. The young CEO […]

Accompanying the announcement that more than 150 million people are active on Facebook last week (and even more amazing, that half of them login daily) is a new series of security and legal issues surrounding its use. When exactly is your account compromised by a piece of software that may not be acting in your […]

As computers have permeated our society, it was only a matter of time before the lawyers started getting involved. And it seems that lately there are more laws on the books and pending regulations that influence how IT managers will run their computing infrastructure and manage their desktops. While some of these legal matters originate […]

With Apple’s sexy MacBook Air thrusting them into the limelight, laptops with built-in solid state drives (SSDs) are suddenly all the rage. Now they are also available from a variety of Windows OEMs including Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell. While the drives can offer higher performance than conventional rotating storage, they also add about $500- $800 […]

Also see: VMware vs Microsoft vs Xen: 2009 What a difference a year makes with the whirlwind of the server virtualization world. New cross-platform management tools, embedded hypervisors, wider acceptance of open source methods, protocols, standards, and simplified pricing have all made virtualization much more popular with IT managers. While the market is growing, it […]

Enterprise networks have gotten so complex that that any single person rarely knows exactly what is connected to them. That could become an issue, particularly if someone introduces an infected PC or if disaster strikes and a portion of the network goes south. The solution is a variety of network discovery tools and techniques, some […]

The notion of combining the various security devices to protect your network isn’t new, but lately the market has become more competitive with the entry of CheckPoint Software’s UTM-1 product. UTM stands for unified threat management, and the idea has a lot of appeal – combine firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, and virtual private networks […]