This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

When you hear the term ‘social enterprise’, you could be forgiven for thinking we’re talking about businesses doing good or giving back in a philanthropic sense. Indeed, this is a term that’s grown, particularly in the UK, in recent years.

But increasingly, the phrase ‘social enterprise’ has another meaning: it represents the way organizations are becoming increasingly social and collaborative in how they operate internally, but also in terms of the way employees engage with clients and customers externally. With consumers spending an increasing amount of time online and communicating through social networks, and the rise of cloud computing enabling new modes of working, it’s only natural that businesses should follow suit. Now though, some are beginning to evolve sophisticated techniques to enthuse staff to market, service and sell to a more social audience.

Going social

There’s an old joke in IT that goes like this:
“What’s the difference between a car salesman and an IT salesman?“

The punchline is:
“The car salesman knows when he’s lying.”

Change IT to “Cloud” and you have a new twist on an old joke.
Unfortunately, the joke is on you, the customer.

I’ve been thinking lately about how abused, misused and confused the term “The Cloud” has become recently. As a cloud services provider, I get a ton of spam from vendors who want me to offer their products and services. I recently heard from a vendor of a micro server that plugs into a wall outlet and lets you connect a USB hard drive, creating a small storage server from a device the size of a standard wall wart.

While the small form factor may be interesting for cost reasons, the main benefit touted by the vendor of this product, is that your USB drive becomes “cloud storage” accessible securely from anywhere. As a cloud architect, I may be a tad snobbish on what does and doesn’t constitute “cloud storage”. But just because you hang a cheap and fragile USB drive off a $199 power brick sized server that you can access from the Internet – DOESN’T MEAN IT’S CLOUD STORAGE!!!

It’s hype like this that convinced me that most people don’t have the foggiest notion of what  “The Cloud” really is.

I believe “The Cloud” is not really an IT term, it’s a marketing term – and it’s a poor one at that.. not just an IT term poorly marketed. I evangelize cloud services for a living and I’m amazed that my industry speaks in acronyms, but it can’t deliver a concise 60 second pitch on what the cloud is, what business problem it solves, specifically for whom, and how to buy it and leverage the benefit. The end user and business community has a poor understanding of what the cloud is today – and the industry has done very little to cut through the noise.

Such poor understanding breeds confusion – which breeds mistrust – which breeds inaction. Real prospects end up sitting on the sidelines waiting for a simple explanation of the rules of the game by someone who doesn’t make them feel stupid.

To get beyond the alphabet soup of acronymity, I tell clients to just think of the cloud as 21st century time sharing, with systems and resources more powerful and reliable than any mainframe of the past. Whether they need a development server, a Disaster Recovery target or an production application server, those old enough to remember the 70′s & 80’s get it instantly, without me explaining PaaS, IaaS or SaaS or feeding them alphabet soup.

Our younger clients ask a variant of the question “isn’t the cloud just another term for Internet hosting”? My answer is “sort of, except on steroids”. I hosted web servers for 15 years before starting Virtual Density to focus on “the cloud”. The main difference between hosting in the traditional sense and today’s cloud services, is that hosting is still mostly done using inexpensive dedicated servers with direct attached storage. So hosting providers may seem like cloud resources when marketed to a unsuspecting buyer who doesn’t know better. But each of those servers is a low-availability point of risk and a show stopper when they go down.

By my definition, true cloud resources must be elastic, resilient and designed for 100% uptime. While we can quibble about uptime stats and what constitutes system availability  some other time, the overarching design goal is resilience, fault tolerance and high availability. That of course requires virtualization, but virtualization done right. Not just some VM’s spread on a dedicated hosting server.

Doing it right requires scalable infrastructure to support elasticity and spot demand. This means VM’s properly clustered using VMotion or an equivalent migration component, with load balancing, resource shifting, RAID or dispersal-based storage on SAN, preferably replicated across redundant stacks in multiple, geographically separated data centers.

True cloud computing puts the greatest point of failure at the user’s end of the Internet connection. And it delivers platforms, development environments, storage or software 24/7/365 with little margin for error, excuse or apology other than what happens at the OS or application layer. Bad apps will be bad apps, whether they’re run on internal servers, dedicated internet servers or the cloud. But a “real cloud” provider should be able to deliver access to that bad app reliably, unless the customer’s broadband fails.

People generally don’t care if the power that lights their office was generated with coal, natural gas or nuclear energy. Cloud computing will have truly arrived when apps and storage “show up” on the endpoint as a utility, rented without capex, and without regard for where the app is hosted or a thought about reliability. Done right, it’s 21st century time sharing on steroids. If you’d like to discuss how to leverage Cloud technology or virtualization in your business, contact our CTO Chris Furey for a personal consultation.

Scholars, priests, historians, and followers of the da Vinci Files can now look toward the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (the Vatican library) with anticipation.

In a five-year joint project with the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, the Vatican Library is working to digitize and post online some 1.5 million pages from Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books (incunabula), Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books.

Many of the manuscripts to be digitized have a striking beauty as well as historic and cultural importance, as in the 1476 Natural History of Venice. Incunabula would include the Gutenberg Bible and the Nuremberg Chronicle, although these may not be among the examples digitized. Greek manuscripts will include works by Homer, Plato, and the early Church Fathers. The Hebrew works include a ninth century copy of the Sifra, the Halakic Midrash to Leviticus (Midrash is a Talmudic teaching tool which leads the student to a deeper understanding of the text of the Torah) as well as a complete Bible from the 12th-century.

The initiative has been made possible by a £2 million (US$3.2 million) award from the Polonsky Foundation, whose founder, Dr. Leonard Polonsky, has a long standing passion and commitment to democratize access to information. Another recent major project made possible by contributions from the Polonsky Foundation is the digitization of the Bodleian’s exceptional collection of over 25,000 Cairo Genizah fragments, which can now be browsed and read online.

Perhaps the most exciting part of this project is that, being online, these remarkable (and physically beautiful) historical and philosophical volumes will be available to everyone with internet access – a far cry from the days of guarding ancient texts against damage even from scholars.

“Twenty-first century technology provides the opportunity for collaborations between cultural institutions in the way they manage, disseminate and make available for research the information, knowledge and expertise they hold,” said Dr. Polonosky. “I am pleased to support this exciting new project where the Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana will make important collections accessible to scholars and the general public worldwide.” The date when materials from this project will first be available has not yet been announced.

Technology has advanced at a rapid pace over the past 30 years, with many devices moving from physical systems to digital or virtual versions. This includes one of the most useful: the telephone. While the use of landlines is still prevalent among the majority of businesses, many have started to turn to the digital version, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

VoIP has become the main backbone of voice communication for a growing majority of companies. It offers numerous benefits including potentially large cost savings and decreased maintenance costs. When it was first introduced, the technology needed to run a VoIP system was expensive, limiting it to large organizations. However over the past few years, the technology has come down in price and is now available for next to nothing, allowing small and mid-sized businesses to make the switch to VoIP. If your company is thinking of making the change, there are some minimum requirements you should meet before you migrate.

The Foundation: A solid foundation is the key to reliability and satisfaction with VoIP. Without a good foundation you’ll find that network speed and call quality are poor during heavy use. Most small offices aim for a VoIP system that can handle around 10 employees on the phone at any given time. Before you start the integration, you should track your current call volume by keeping a note of the number of calls in and out, while paying close attention to call volume during peak hours and days.

You should also investigate the speed and stability of your current Internet connection. While a fast DSL or cable connection is good for browsing the web, it may not be robust enough to handle VoIP communications, which need a connection that is both quick and stable. Look at your downstream (traffic into your network) and upstream (traffic out of your network) connection speed during a time when the network is experiencing heavy data use. Anything over 1.5 Mbps in both directions should be enough to handle the majority of VoIP systems. Most Internet service providers offer a connection speed well above that, but it’s important to check it out first to be sure.

The Framing: Once you have a solid foundation that will support your needs, the next step is building the frame for VoIP. You should determine exactly what’s required from your new system. Some good questions to ask include: Am I going to need to make international calls? How many VoIP connections am I going to need? Am I going to want to make video calls? What’s my budget? What features do I require?

Once you’ve determined your needs you can move on to picking equipment. If you’re a business that typically sticks to local, and some long distance calls, you shouldn’t require much in the way of equipment. The vast majority of companies use inexpensive desk phones, or a device called a media gateway that allows normal phones to interface with an Internet connection – essentially turning a regular phone into a VoIP phone. If you’re a business that would like to take advantage of the more advanced features of VoIP, like portability, you’ll need more flexible VoIP service provider.

The final issue you need to address is security. On its own, VoIP is not the most secure of connections, as it’s open to all the same types of security breaches that computers and networks can fall prey to. To combat this, many good VoIP service providers will have security measures in place to protect VoIP calls on their network. On your end, it also helps to keep your Internet security up-to-date and conduct regular system scans.

Once you’ve addressed the internal requirements it’s time to start looking for a VoIP service provider. Take your time, shop around, ask competitors and other businesses what service they use. One question to ask a prospective provider is if they will be able to migrate your current number onto their system? While most can switch over your existing numbers, it can take a while, depending on your location and local legislation. So be sure to check if the provider can migrate your numbers and how long it will take.

From there, you should be ready to switch over to VoIP. If you’re still unsure of the process, we have consultants available who can help with the preparation, selection and integration. Good luck, and if you need more information about VoIP, remember that the Virtual Density team is here to help you.

Yesterday Microsoft officially kicked off what it called a “two-year countdown” to the death of Windows XP, its longest-lived operating system. According to a company spokeswoman, Windows XP and the business productivity suite Office 2003 both exit all support on April 8, 2014. On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for XP and Office 2003. XP went on sale in October 2001 and Office 2003 was launched in October 2003.

“Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases for their time, but the technology environment has shifted,” argued Stella Chernyak, a Microsoft marketing director.

When Microsoft finally pulls the plug on XP, it will have maintained the OS for 12 years and 5 months, or about two-and-a-half years longer than its usual practice and a year longer than the previous record holder, Windows NT, which was supported for 11 years and 5 months. This wasn’t the first time that Microsoft has urged XP users to dump the operating system — and perhaps their PCs too — for newer tools.

In June 2011, a Microsoft manager said it was “time to move on” from Windows XP, while earlier that year an executive on the Internet Explorer team belittled XP as “lowest common denominator” when he explained why the OS wouldn’t run the then-new IE9.

The company has not yet turned it’s back on Windows XP the way it did on the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). For more than two and a half years, Microsoft has been urging users to give up IE6, going so far in March 2011 to launch a deathwatch website that tracks IE6′s dwindling usage share.

In the last 12 months, XP has lost nearly 10 percentage points of market share, or 14% of what it had as of April 1, 2011, according to Internet measurement company Net Applications. If XP continues to shed share at that pace — the OS would have just 17.1% in April 2014.

Yet as is always the case with lazy or cheap PC owners, you can bet that some PCs will still be running Windows XP when Microsoft retires the operating system.

“Our recent Symposium survey in October had respondents telling us they’d have 96% of their PCs migrated off XP by end of support,” said Gartner analyst Michael Silver in an email reply to questions Monday. “But 16.5% of organizations say they will have more than 5% of their users still on XP after support ends.”

Not surprisingly, Microsoft wants XP users to upgrade to Windows 7 now, perhaps figuring money in the hand with Windows 7 is better than dollars from the bush that’s the unfinished Windows 8.

“We don’t recommend waiting [for the next editions of Windows or Office], said Microsoft’s Chernyak. “Not only is it important for companies to complete deployment before support runs out, but … by upgrading to Windows 7 and Office 2010 today they can gain substantial results while laying the foundation for future versions.”

On Microsoft’s website, the company was blunt about XP’s ticking clock. “If your organization has not started the migration to a modern PC, you are late,” Microsoft said, citing data that claimed OS migration programs in large businesses can take between 18 and 32 months to complete.

We all know someone in our lives who shoots from the lip. You know the type. That person who blurts startling stuff without any care for consequence. You may even do it yourself. Although we all have moments when we really want to tell someone off, most of us have a mental control mechanism that acts like an automatic trigger safety that helps to zip our lip. Self control can save your career or at least an important relationship you might regret losing. If only we had such a safety catch on our mouse trigger.

So why is it that the stuff we’d never say out loud, is sometimes almost irresistible when we sit down to write an email message? Perhaps it’s because “the pen” is truly “mightier than the sword”. People naturally feel removed from direct physical confrontation when they message, and so they’re much more likely to “let you have it” with relative impunity. This can lead to saying things that can never be taken back. Because unlike an unrecorded verbal encounter, email messages leave a slimy trail that can easily follow you forever.

When it comes to “sending the wrong message”, there are many ways to do that. Not all of them coming from a poison pen. We’ve all fired off a quick tirade when we’re angry or forwarded a questionably humorous or even tasteless email to colleagues or clients that we probably shouldn’t have. And while you may think your employees have the common sense to know what’s inappropriate to include in a business email message, it never hurts to remind them by reinforcing the value of thoughtful behavior. This is even more important if you work in a regulated industry where email message archiving is mandated, because any email message may be requested to be produced down the road during eDiscovery in litigation or by the authorities.

So you can’t really go wrong if you encourage your employees to follow these basic rules of business messaging:

1. Do Unto Others: Never send an email message that you’d regret seeing in print, in court, or have read by your grandma. If you find yourself typing phrases like the ones below, there are much bigger issues to be addressed and you should not do that in an email message:

• “I shouldn’t be telling you this”
• “don’t tell anyone this”
• “just between us”
• “make sure you delete this email”
• “is this legal?”
• “confidentially…”

2. Don’t Play the Blame Game: Difficult conversations are best had face-to-face. If you ever have to discuss something that’s gone wrong with a project or want to hash out who’s at fault, it’s always better to do that in person. Any blatant admission of blame, or even a hint that you or a coworker may be to blame for something in a business email message, could create legal troubles for you or your company some time in the future.

3. Don’t Hit “Send” When You’re Pissed: NEVER send emails when you’re angry. Resist this at all costs. Take some cool down time (a few minutes or even overnight) to think things through logically before you say something in writing that you can never take back. If you can’t meet face to face, just pick up the phone and talk through it. There may be a simple explanation. And if you talk it out, there will be no written record of the matter.

4. Keep Your Political Rants, Religious Beliefs and Questionably Funny Emails to Yourself: Statistically, you’re lucky if even half the world shares your views. So why risk upsetting the other half in your professional life? What you may think is harmless, fun or insightful, may be offensive, make others uncomfortable, or even be considered harassment by your coworkers or clients.

To learn more about how Virtual Density can help you monitor inappropriate use of company email, or help you meet email compliance regulations through message archiving, please visit our website at www.virtualdensity.com or call us at 203-648-9906 Option 2.

Have you hit the wall and feel burned out by the social networking craze? Do you have a nagging feeling like you may be overexposed with too much personal information “out there” on sites you don’t even use anymore? Just think for a moment about all the web sites that asked you to register before they’d share content with you.

Most of us don’t give it a second thought, but once you register as a user on a site, you begin to leave a trail. And you leave behind valuable personal information that you really should clean up now and then. The best way to clean up and limit your exposure, is to delete yourself from those sites and opt out for good.

Registration based sites often ask you to provide answers to secret questions. If you’ve noticed that those questions look familiar, it’s because they are. Many sites use the same method of using those secret answers to allow you access to your password if you forget it or to let you change it. So anyone who hacks those answers in one place, is certainly free try to use them against you someplace else.

When Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked, it was publicly available biographical answers (like “what was your high school mascot?”) to secret password questions on other sites that let the hacker guess the answers to her challenge questions, change her Yahoo mail password and take over her account. Smart play if you’re a hacker because we all use the same true answers for these questions. And it’s that very truth that makes you vulnerable. Personally, I instruct my clients to do as I do and use lies and misinformation that I’ve invented for just such use.

So what should YOU do? Well whether you want to opt out because you’re done with a site or service, or just want to limit your online risk, the process of removing yourself is the same. It starts by deleting your unwanted account and all the personal information that it contains.

Every site you register for gives you a method to remove yourself. But the steps you take will differ from site to site. Luckily, there’s a neat site called DeleteYourAccount that shows you step by step, in advance, exactly what you’ll need to do to remove yourself from many online sites.

DeleteYourAccount makes it easy to take control and delete unwanted accounts yourself. It has a large database of websites that require accounts. You can search for your name and locate accounts you’ve probably forgotten you created. You’ll get a direct link to that site’s account deactivation page. And instructions are provided if any special steps are required. More websites are being added to the database all the time. Check it out for yourself at http://www.deleteyouraccount.com

A new report just published by M86 Labs says malicious spam now accounts for about 25% of the total spam volume in the mail stream. So increasingly spam is not just a nuisance, it’s becoming an threat with 1 out of 4 messages containing malicious badware designed to harm you.

Email Spam – and more specifically the kind with badware links and attachments – is exploding and has reached a new high. This latest trend includes a big spike last Autumn just before the SpamIt operation closed and ceased operation.

In fact, according to M86 Security Labs, spam traffic is about double what it was just a year ago. M86 monitors spam levels across various selected domains, so they have the data to back up their reporting.

“After multiple recent botnet takedowns, cybercriminal groups remain resilient clearly looking to build their botnets and distribute more fake AV in the process,” the company says in its blog. “It seems spammers have returned from a holiday break and are enthusiastically back to work.”

Obviously this is a bad thing and a growing threat to anyone who uses email as a primary communications channel (this includes you). And the new M86 report coincides with a report yesterday from Internet security company Commtouch, which says a most recent spike in email-attached malware has just ended, but that further waves are expected.

M86 says in its blog that most of the spam is generated by the Cutwail botnet, and malicious spam accounted for 13% of the mix over the past week. That’s unusually high, but even that spiked to 24% yesterday.

The report found that much of the malicious spam was couched in phony correspondence from UPS, which concurs with Commtouch’s findings that UPS spam was much of what Cutwail and Festi are sending.

And both reports agree that other bots are sending other forms of malicious attachments. The Asprox botnet, for example, is sending malicious hotel transaction spam with password-stealing and phony antivirus malware attached, M86 says.

Overall the top subjects of the spam were pharmaceuticals, gambling and dating, M86 says.

If your email system seems overloaded with spam, it may be time to switch to a service provider who invests in proactive spam defenses. Virtual Density uses multiple filter layers to keep malicious spam out of our customer’s inbox. We do that even in our least expensive email plans. And in our premium Hosted SmarterMail service, we even subscribe to Commtouch’s realtime spam outbreak monitoring service which does a great job of identifying and arresting the very latest threats.

If you need help understanding the nature of your particular spam problem, or if you just want to have us make the spam go away, contact a cloud services advisor at Virtual Density at 203-648-9906 and pick option 2 for immediate assistance. We promise to listen before we speak and then recommend a spam filtering or hosted email solution that’s right for you.

One of the great things about the internet is the fact that everyday people can share what they know with the entire world, so if they’ve had a particularly good or bad experience with a business or product, they can notify everyone via customer review websites.

The flip-side of that, however, is that business owners can plant fake reviews on those same sites, that either praise their own business or slam their competition. Well, confused consumers can now take heart – researchers from Cornell University have developed software that is able to identify phony reviews with close to 90 percent accuracy.

The Cornell team asked a group of people to deliberately write a total of 400 fraudulent positive reviews of 20 Chicago hotels. These were combined with the same number of genuinely positive reviews, then submitted to a panel of three human judges. When asked to identify which reviews were spam, the judges scored no better than if they had randomly guessed.

According to Myle Ott, a Cornell doctoral candidate in computer science, humans are affected by a “truth bias,” in which they assume that everything they read is true unless presented with evidence to the contrary. When that happens, they then overcompensate, and assume that more of what they read is untrue than is actually the case.

After the human trials, the researchers then applied statistical machine learning algorithms to the reviews, to see what was unique to both the genuine and fraudulent examples. It turns out that the fake ones used a lot of scene-setting language, such as “vacation,” “business” or “my husband.” The genuine ones, on the other hand, tended to focus more on specific words relating to the hotel, such as “bathroom,” “check-in” and “price”.

The two groups of writers also differed in their use of specific keywords and punctuation, and how much they referred to themselves. As had already been found in other studies of imaginative versus informative writing, it was additionally determined that the spam reviews contained more verbs, while the honest ones contained more nouns.

Based on a subset of the 800 reviews, the team created a fake-review-detecting algorithm. When used in a way that combined the analysis of keywords and word combinations, that algorithm was able to identify deceptive reviews in the entire database with 89.8 percent accuracy.

So far, the software is only useful for processing hotel reviews, and Chicago hotel reviews at that. The Cornell team is hoping, however, that similar algorithms could be developed for reviews of a wider range of goods and services.

“Ultimately, cutting down on deception helps everyone,” said Ott. “Customers need to be able to trust the reviews they read, and sellers need feedback on how best to improve their services.”

Thanks to Ben Coxworth via GizMag.com