Uri Unplugged

I recently received a letter from my bank informing me that some of my personal information had been breached. While they did offer a one-year free subscription to Experian’s credit report monitoring system, they offered no explanation in regards to the type of breach, what specific information was stolen, and by whom.

I can’t say that I was very pleased with this outcome, and couldn’t help but feel resentful that my bank hadn’t taken any real measures to protect my sensitive information BEFORE it fell into the wrong hands.

I did a little research on this topic, and didn’t have to look very hard to find an alarming number of similar breaches (and these are just a few examples of the published ones!). They include:

1. July 2007 – A DBA contractor for a subsidiary of Fidelity Information Services was caught selling 2.3 million customer records, including credit card and bank account details.

2. July 2007 – An employee of a credit card processing company servicing the Disney Movie Club was caught by federal agents trying to sell credit card information.

3. December 2006 – Hackers gained access to a UCLA database containing personal information on 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff, financial aid applicants and their parents (including those who did not even attend!). In this case, the university set up a dedicated website to help those affected by possible identity theft following the breach.

The good news is that there are now solutions that can prevent (or at least significantly reduce) this type of database security risk. In fact, we at RADirect are currently reselling a software offering from Sentrigo – the Hedgehog Oracle database security system (support for more databases coming soon). You can download a free 14-day eval license for the enterprise version.

If your business owns or maintains a database of personal information, please take real measures to protect it. It is the responsible thing to do, and represents a solid business practice.

Posted by Uri Zilberman at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So now that low cost, high bandwidth Ethernet services are offered by most major carriers and cable MSOs, enterprises are looking for the best ways to take advantage of it.

For example, why not migrate legacy applications (including T1s, T3s, ATM, Frame Relay and voice) to Ethernet? It can reduce your operating costs and simplify network management. Although any applications that use TDM, analog or low-speed data formats are not compatible with Ethernet, they can be emulated across the Ethernet connection using pseudowire technologies like TDMoIP (TDM over IP). Migrating legacy traffic to lower-cost Ethernet links with a psuedowire solution allows you to protect your investments in reliable, functional CPE, and preserve TDM-quality voice.

RAD Data Communications (RADirect's parent company) is the industry leader in this with their IPmux and Vmux families of pseudowire gateways.

As long as you have SLAs (service level agreements) in place to guarantee latency levels and bandwidth, you should feel comfortable carrying all traffic over the same infrastructure. Think of all those expensive T1s you can eliminate!

By the way, according to the Metro Ethernet Forum, sectors with the most potential to benefit from Carrier Ethernet include healthcare, finance, education and government.

Posted by Uri Zilberman at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)