Stories by Robert L. Scheier

The Agile Infrastructure

Companies looking for more agile data centers are increasingly turning to public (external) or private (internal) clouds with virtualized servers, storage and networks. Getting the lowest cost and the best speed and flexibility from those systems requires assessing everything from performance to control and interoperability. And the larger your organization is, the more planning it takes to create an "enterprise grade" cloud that meets your performance, security and compliance needs.

Why social tech's real value is inside the business

Although companies have been urged to adopt "Web 2.0" and social technologies for years now, the truth is that relatively few have done so internally in any serious way -- and use inside the business is where the most value can be gained. Instead, the corporate focus on social technologies has been in marketing organizations that use it to monitor what customers are saying about the company and to try to influence customer views -- what's called reputation management -- by adding Twitter, Facebook, and so on to the traditional advertising and marketing channels. (And individual employees use social networking technology to build business relationships for their own benefit, of course.)

The cloud security checklist

Whether you're a small business relying on Google Docs for document sharing or an enterprise moving your global ERP system to the cloud, you should demand that some common security and compliance requirements are met by vendors providing applications and services over the Web. These requirements involve who can access your applications and data, as well as the systems hosting them; where the data is stored; and whether the data is hosted on dedicated, rather than on shared, hardware. They also ensure that you get detailed logs of who has accessed your data and applications so that you meet corporate and regulatory standards, and they verify that data is properly encrypted -- a factor that's more critical outside the corporate firewall.

How to get tough with your tech vendors

Planning a purchase from a major IT vendor? In this still-tough economy, negotiating pros recommend being aggressive and creative, as well as analyzing your requirements first so that you don't buy more than you need and know where you can compromise.

5 ways to cut your storage footprint

With the economy still shaky and the need for storage exploding, almost every storage vendor claims it can reduce the amount of data you must store. Trimming your data footprint not only cuts costs for hardware, software, power and data center space, but also eases the strain on networks and backup windows.

Can Google really hack it in business?

After conquering the search world, Google is now pushing hard to be a major provider of business software, tackling longtime dominator Microsoft over productivity and collaboration apps. But does this company, most famous for free consumer-oriented offerings like search and basic apps, have what it takes to be taken seriously by business? Can you really rely on Google Apps?

Busting the nine myths of cloud computing

Wherever you turn, someone's ready to tell (or sell) you something related to cloud computing. Cutting through the myths is essential to deciding whether, when, and how the cloud is right for you. Here's our top list of myths; we welcome your suggestions and feedback in our cloud myths discussion area**URL TK**:

What to do if your cloud provider disappears

Software developer Christopher Shockey saw the first signs of trouble in late 2008. A sales rep who had always represented Web application development provider Coghead was now calling on behalf of Coghead's much larger rival Salesforce.com.

Not all USB drives are created equal

Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same.

Your next data center

About 15 miles from its medical center in downtown San Antonio, Christus Health is building a US$23 million data center to house a flood of digital information ranging from patient insurance records to CT scans.

Encryption key management worries loom

As long as IT managers encrypt data using only one vendor's products, the keys used to decrypt that data can be relatively easy to manage. But it will likely become much more complicated as more vendors build encryption into more and different types of storage devices, each with their own key management system, and as users need to move encrypted data among devices for disaster recovery, legal discovery or simply everyday business communications.

How reliable are the top turnkey SANs?

Jeff Pieper's marketing design business runs on data, and he doesn't mind swapping out a server or fiddling with cabling here and there.

Study: Disk drive failures 13 times what vendors say

Customers are replacing disk drives at rates far higher than those suggested by the estimated mean time between failure (MTBF) supplied by drive vendors, according to a study of about 100,000 drives conducted by Carnegie Mellon University.

The 64-bit evolution

Eric Foote is considering 64-bit Windows servers for his growing base of 4,500 users. But he's in no big rush to make the shift from 32-bit computing. His first target application is Presentation Server 4.0 from Citrix Systems, thin-client software that performs most application processing on the server, sending only changes in the user interface to the client's PC.

Building up database defenses

Chief Security Officer Barak Engel doesn't store many customer credit card numbers at San Francisco-based Loyalty Lab, which runs customer loyalty programs for retailers. But he protects those numbers fiercely.