TECHNOLOGY

Reputation based cyber security vital:

286 million malicious software detected in 2010 - Symantec

by Omar Rajarathnam

The threat landscape of cyber security has changed drastically and software companies the world over are devising strategies to mitigate this threat, Managing Director for India and SAARC region of Symantec Ajay Goel told the Sunday Observer. Symantec is the fourth largest software company in the world.

Managing Director of Symantec for India and SAARC region Ajay Goel at the ESPP presentation.

“Sri Lanka is undergoing rapid development and the role of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in steering these developments are immense. Therefore, it is imperative that users are subject to reputation based cyber security”, he said.

Ajay Goel was in the country to introduce the Enhanced Symantec Partner Program (ESPP) which would enable Symantec’s Sri Lankan partner South Asian Technologies (Pvt) Limited (sat) to have access to Symantec’s product and solution content and be provided marketing support aiming at increasing sat’s technical and operational efficiency and service excellence.

The dawn of this millennium was threatened by the Y2K virus and this marked Sri Lankan users being more alert about computer bugs.

However, times have changed and cyber attacks now target specific information aiming at calculated gains.

“The value of information stolen in 2009 was estimated to be USD one trillion caused mostly by employees who had resigned.

There is a crucial need for information, identity and security management because the world has moved away from being system centric and is becoming information driven and we must acknowledge that Sri Lankan users have made steady progress in becoming aware of these threats and have proactively mitigated the risk of being exploited”, Goel said.

“Symantec has developed its own Global Intelligence Network with thousands of experts who monitor online conduct of users, combined technology to protect information through our software such as Norton anti-virus which has approximately 120 million subscribers and encouraged the introduction of policy and governance in industries thereby getting them involved in counter attacking these threats”. “These policies are a necessity in ensuring information security,” he said.

Almost every organisation in the world offers mobile phones, laptops and creating the need for mobile consumerisation of Information technology (IT), but failure to regulate these tasks through policies is the foundation to compromising on security.

Ensuring authentication avenues on these devices are not sufficient but monitoring compliance with them is every organisation’s responsibility”, he said.

Ceylinco Life upgrades to Kastle Treasury

By Sapumali Galagoda

Ceylinco Life will be upgraded to the latest version of 3i Infotech’s Kastle Treasury Solution, it was announced last week.

3i Infotech is a global provider of IT solutions and one of India’s largest software product developers.

MD/CEO Ceylinco Insurance R. Renganathan and Regional Head South Asia 3i infotech V. Narayan. Pic: Chinthaka Kumarasinghe

Kastle Treasury is an integrated treasury management solution for foreign exchange, money, equity, and their related derivative instruments.

3i Infotech is a leading provider of technology solutions to the banking, financial services,insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, telecom, retail and the government.

The company is one of the top three indian software product companies.

Ceylinco Life decided to upgrade its product to the latest version of kastle Treasury to meet the demands of its investment department and to manage the financial assets in various funds, said R. Renganathan. Significant features of the product is its inherent compliance with the Sri Lankan regulatory requirements which facilitates Ceylinco to go-to-market strategy giving it a competitive edge.

3i Infotech is present in 14 countries - USA, UK, India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kazakhastan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia and China. The company has a revenue of $550 Mn. Revenue for the company segment wise 72 per cent from IT solutions and 28 per cent from transaction services and Geography wise 56 per cent from developed markets and 44 percent from emerging markets.

The company offers solutions for IP, IT services such as Business intelligence and data warehousing, E-commerce, Enterprise Application Integration, Enterprise Document Management Systems, Enterprise Applications, Testing Services, application development and maintenance services, infrastructure Management Services and for Business Process Outsourcing/ IT Enabled Services.

3i Infotech gives rich domain and technology expertise, proficiency in handling large and complex projects, scalability and flexibility in operations, long term sustainability and financial stability, resource skills and certifications, ability to deliver globally with cost arbitrage, best people and process practices.

ITI’s ETL awarded ISO 17025 certification

by Omar Rajarathnam

The Electro Technology Laboratory (ETL) of the Industrial Training Institute (ITI) has been awarded the ISO/TEC 17025:2005 accreditation for its noise related Services. “This is the first time a Sri Lankan laboratory engaged in noise related services and field testing has been granted this certification” Head of Electro technology Laboratory of ITI, A.S Pannila told the Sunday Observer.

Legislation requires all players in the manufacturing industry and certain sectors of the hospitality sector obtain an Environment Protection Licence prior to setting up operations.

One of the main parameters of assessment is the measurement of noise pollution caused by the applicants’ industry and this is where ETL’s noise related services are sought

“This is a highly defined scope of accreditation with strict guidelines.

We have received the accreditation for ‘environment noise level measurement’ which involves outdoor noise measurement and “industrial noise level survey” which measures the occupational noise hazard in-house.

The certification also covers our process of ‘performance test for sound level meter’, ‘monitoring of background noise levels and existing noise levels’ and ‘performance test for vibration level metre’, said Pannila.

Having standard and accurate instrumentation, having trained staff to operate those instruments and international calibration traceability were the three imperatives were essential to be considered for this accreditation.

“We have calibrations with laboratories in South Korea and Denmark and hence it eased off the international traceability factor. Most of our laboratories have world-class equipment and we have committed staff working flexible shifts at various times that noise exists at sites thus earning us this accreditation.”

“We have invested heavily on the equipment and, therefore, we endeavour to optimise our investment by conforming to global standards of testing where possible.”

The stringent legislation has caused many industries to appoint safety officers strategising reductions in pollution”, he said.

“We also recommend affordable solutions to customers depending on the scale of the industry helping us achieve the objective of ensuring minimal harm to the public from noise pollution.

This would help the economy grow and ensure that industrial workers and the wider population do not suffer adverse effects of noise or any other environmental pollution”, Pannila said.

Storage maps, the future of digital data

by Ahsen Javed

The one consistent theme in the digital world is that growth is a constant. It is estimated that from 2009 to 2020, the size of the digital universe will have increased 44 fold; a 41 percent increase in capacity every year. Storing, locating and extracting value from high volumes of data will become increasingly complex.

As the digitally-enabled business world evolves, the mix of data and its anticipated usages are going to change as well.

Already, there is an increased diversity of data types with 80 percent of today’s data being unstructured and the reuse of data is shrinking, with 80 percent of data never being used after 90 days.

However, regulation and compliancy dictates that data is adequately archived for long periods of time, sometimes up to triple digits in number of years.

The fall out of the way data storage is currently handled is massive - the impact on the environment is one of these factors. Storage already consumes 40 percent of datacentre power and it is predicted that within 10 years the total energy consumed by storage solutions could increase to more than six times what it is today.

Based on these predictions, storage could represent over 75 percent of the energy consumed within the datacentre and if you consider that 80 percent of data is never looked at again after three months, storage is a major IT trigger for energy burn out.

Another fallout is cost and the added expense of managing growing volumes of data.

The business critical nature of data is driving up storage management costs by 25 percent per year, so in the long term it will become the number one cost within many datacentres.

Therefore, it’s becoming increasingly more important to align the value of data with the capabilities and cost of the storage it is stored on.

Looking forward, the future of storage management must be simple, easily accessible, cost efficient, environmentally friendly and streamlined, so organisations can function and perform quicker and better.

Striving for nirvana

There are three essential elements that must be considered when formulating a storage strategy to meet growing data demands - the evolving function of the datacentre, business drivers, and the ‘nirvana’ storage solution.

Today’s typical datacentre is migrating from a physical, static, and heterogeneous set-up, to a grid-based virtualised infrastructure to a cloud computing environment that enables self service, policy-based resource management, and capacity planning.

Along the way, the storage solution must be able to support this style of datacentre, so it is critical that the storage system is dynamic enough to support the difficult to predict demands of these application environments through a tiered approach.

Reducing cost was at the top of the CIO’s agenda yesterday, now business growth and profitability is.

The storage strategy must fall in line with these objectives. So, regardless of an organisation’s size, the storage solution must be able to scale to solve the larger, more complex business problems and it has to perform in real-time so organisations can react and make business decisions immediately.

Likewise, the infrastructure has to be efficient so complex business problems can be effectively solved at a reduced cost and improved speed, and there must be data integrity built in to meet long-term business and regulatory compliancy. Finally, there is the liberating act of creating a ‘storage nirvana’, should cost and incumbent infrastructure not be an object.

For a CIO, this would probably include on-demand secure data access, application aware storage optimisation, unlimited capacity, scalable performance, appliance-like rapid deployment, and integrated application, system and storage management.

Although, this nirvana is a distance away, these ideas must be taken into consideration to guide organisations onto a path of accelerated performance, profitability and lower IT costs.

A pyramid strategy

To make the strategy a reality, companies must shift away from the traditional approach of managing islands of storage and move to an automated, tiered and unified storage infrastructure.

By adopting a formula whereby certain data to be stored is assigned to certain storage pools, organisations will improve the price, performance, capacity and functionality of their storage infrastructure.

A typical tiered storage model has four tiers. Newly emerged, tier 0 uses flash memory storage, is extremely high performing and stores high value information that needs to be captured, analyzed and presented at high speed.

Primary storage, classified as tier 1, is based on fiber channel disk systems and should have high performance, high availability with near zero-downtime and fast recovery to support customer-facing and revenue-based applications.

Tier 2 storage should be managed on low cost high capacity disks, with the capability to manage broad business applications such as databases, backup, email, and file systems. Finally, tier 3, which is based on the more cost effective, energy efficient tape technology serves the purpose to store high volume archival data for regulatory purposes and doesn’t require immediate access.

To optimise the tiered storage architecture, companies must classify and value the data of the business, then map and assign it to the best-fit tier.

Data can be classified into four categories with I/O intensive data, being assigned to tier 0 storage; mission critical data, such as revenue and customer based applications to tier 1; vital data that doesn’t require immediate recovery for the business to continue operating to tier 2; and archival data with low activity, long term retention periods to tier 3.

Leveraging economic prosperity

Leveraging upon a tiered storage environment has significant economic advantages.

Research has shown that a single tiered storage environment has an average lifetime cost of $15,000 per terabyte; a dual tiered one of $8,000 per terabyte; and a four tiered storage structure, $4,000 per terabyte.

With the majority of the data residing in the archival data tier 3, which is built on tapes, costs will naturally depreciate.

Likewise, an automated systematic data-value mapping and distribution approach requires less administration and maintenance at the low end of the storage pyramid, thus reducing costs and freeing up staff time to focus on the mission critical data.

Such an approach to storage also reduces compliancy risk and improves business continuity as organisations will be able to more easily satisfy legal and audit requirements, which in turn, improves service levels.

Ultimately, organisations will witness their performance improve as upgrades will become easier, stale data will be removed from production resources and there will be less disruption to the production environment.

With growth, performance and profitability high on the C-level agenda, storage management can play a significant role in helping organisations to achieve these objectives.

(The writer is Managing Director, Oracle Pakistan and South Asia Growth Economies, Pakistan)

PCH introduces two Karbonn mobile phones

With the successful introduction of the K25 Karbonn mobile phone, PCH is now offering two new models of the Karbonn brand- K406 and K316. The Karbonn mobile phone is India’s fastest growing brand selling over half a million handsets per month across India.

The Karbonn K406 is a dual SIM music phone equipped with an array of stylish and attractive features.

The phone promises to be a treat for music lovers, with its hi-fi audio output FM as well as MP3 playback and crystal clear loudspeaker feature.

The phone supports MP3 and MIDI formats of music (Midi, MP3, MP2, AAC, AMR-NB, Melody, AMR-WB, AAC+, eAAC).

The dual SIM Karbonn K316 mobile phone’s features include 1.77 inches, TFT 65K colour display screen with 120 x 160 pixel of screen resolution and FM radio with recording facility. The phone allows up to 2GB of external memory along with micro SD/T-Flash memory card slots.

COO, Mobile Handset Division PCH Failan Saleem said,”The Karbonn K406 and K316 are for today’s music lovers who like to carry their music with them.

These phones are powered by hi-fi sound output and a high quality audio experience and is sure to appeal to music enthusiasts as well as a generation of mobile users who depend on quality and product appeal.”

With dual SIM phones are gaining popularity in the rural market, Failan foresees a huge opportunity for these new phones. “ Apart from the benefit of having different numbers for different purposes, especially where a local SIM can take care of outgoing calls and the roaming capability of the other SIM could be used for receiving calls, the phones are backed by a proper warranty,” he said.

Launch of ‘EZY Racing’ limited edition laptop

The EZY Racing limited edition laptop was introduced to the local market recently. EZY Racing (ER), is the racing brand of EZY Motor Racing Corporation (EMRC), a fully owned subsidiary of computer giant EZY Holdings.

Rally Champion Shafraz Junaid displays the EZY Racing limited edition laptop.

The first machine of this special edition laptop [of which only 500 numbers have been manufactured] was presented to EZY racer Shafraz Junaid, the 2010 Rally Championship winner.

“We have launched the EZY Racing limited edition laptop as a tribute to our winning Rally Championship team”, said Hamzadeen of EMRC.

“2010 was a very successful year for EMRC. We were not only successful in winning the Team Rally Championship, but we also won the Driver’s Championship for the 2nd successive year.

This limited edition laptop is our tribute to the dedication and commitment shown by our team and our drivers, and we hope that IT connoisseurs as well as motor enthusiasts will appreciate this product”.

The first of these series of laptops is the ER 3 laptop [named in recognition of the 2010 Drivers Championship winner Shafraz Junaid and his car].

EZY intends launching the ER 6 laptop, named in honour of the 2010 Foxhill Super Cross winner Sajaad Zuhair, and the ER 9 laptop, named after the 2009 Rally Champion, Rizvi Farouk.

The ER3 Laptop which is a mere 10 inches, makes it ultra-portable, is powered by an Intel N450 motherboard with a 1.66 Ghz processor.

The ER 3 provides its users with extra memory by way of a 2GB memory card and a 250GB hard drive and comes packed with Bluetooth, wireless, an external card reader, as well as a 1.3MP camera.

Oma Emirates ties up with Epic Lanka

Oma Emirates LLC, a leading provider of software solutions to the global payment card industry tied up with Sri Lanka’s premier software solutions provider Epic Lanka under an exclusive agreement. This partnership will enable the two companies to share expertise, co-develop solutions and also benefit from marketing opportunities in the new territories.

Oma Emirates LLC offers products to the global payment card industry covering terminal management, EFT POS applications, EMV card personalisation and central issuance systems. In partnership with several global brands of equipment suppliers they dominate the Middle East market where the majority of the banks are their regular clients.

“The partnership will assist the migration process to EMV where personalisation would be done locally.