Verizon today boosted its upload speeds across its FiOS fiber-to-the-home broadband packages, which leads me to wonder if upload speeds are the new download speeds in a saturated market for broadband. Om and I both have complained about anemic upload speeds, which are becoming more of a handicap in today’s world of video uploads and online backup. Given Verizon’s history as an innovator in broadband (spending $23 million on fiber is a bold move), and a renewed package of incentives out today to drive subscription rates (you get a netbook or a Flip camcorder with a triple-play subscription), upstream speeds may get more competitive. From a Verizon blog post today touting the changes:

We think broadband isn’t really fast unless it’s two-way fast, and we’re amping up speeds in both directions for our most popular FiOS Internet services. We’re also offering incentives for consumers to switch to FiOS.

We’re raising the speed of our entry-level FiOS Internet service from 10/2 Mbps to 15/5 Mbps, and we’re raising the speed of our flagship, mid-tier offering from 20/5 Mbps to 25/15 Mbps. In downstate New York, FiOS Internet is even faster with a new entry-level speed of 25/15 Mbps and a new mid-tier offering of 35/20 Mbps available in bundles.

Cable providers, because of limited spectrum allocated for upstream, may have difficulty matching such boosts, making upstream speed a prime candidate for differentiation between cable and telecommunications providers — or perhaps merely between those communication providers that offer fiber-to-the-home. Companies, such as AT&T, which provide fiber to the node can offer symmetrical  upstream speeds but both upstream and downstream speeds are limited by how far away a customer’s home may be from the node. For example, AT&T currently offers downstream speeds of 18 Mbps in some areas, but upstream peaks at 1.5 Mbps.

Right now, the vast majority of consumers don’t bump up against upstream limits often, but if service providers really want to get people excited about faster download packages ,they’re going to need to deliver services such as home security applications and video conferencing that require both fast downstream and upstream speeds. Only then will average consumers see the need to upgrade to $100, 50 Mbps broadband packages. But at that point, they’re also going to notice if their provider is sucking up their content with the equivalent of a cocktail straw while delivering downloads with a fire hose. Then Verizon’s upgrades will look prescient, kind of like its investment in fiber-to-the-home does today.

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E-Commerce Times 
June 03, 2009 

There’s only one way to keep data storage costs under control, and that’s to get rid of unnecessary data. That may go against the grain of IT managers who rightly consider backup and preservation as critical to an organization’s health, but when it comes to data storage, there are ways to separate what’s useful from what’s disposable.

It should come as no surprise to any IT manager that your organization’s appetite for data keeps growing every minute. No sooner than a new set of storage tools is deployed, it becomes clear there’s a need for more, and you start planning the next wave of hardware purchases. More hardware means more floor space, power and cooling — it’s a vicious circle.

The total amount of disk storage shipped last year grew 40.5 percent from 2007, according to a recent study by IDC. If you imagine that this appetite for consumption is going to be questioned at some point in the interest of trying to curtail the IT carbon footprint, then you are not alone. Of course, there is no smoking gun, but there are choices you can make to get rid of unwanted data and free up space. That precious space can then be utilized for other purposes, thereby limiting the amount of new storage capacity to be purchased.

Before getting into “slice and dice” mode, it’s important to define what, exactly, is the goal? The goal is to ensure that spinning disk, i.e., online disk storage, is used for storing data that is really valuable to the organization. Any data that is not — and it could be in any shape or form — needs to be appropriately disposed of. Disposal could mean simply deleting it, or it could mean archiving it in another medium, either a magnetic medium such as tape, or an optical medium such as DVD or CD ROM.

Low-Hanging Fruit

What kind of data can be disposed of? Most often, the kind of data that is “time classified” or unstructured …

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A similar survey was conducted by Credant Technologies recently amongst taxi drivers in London and New York and showed that over 12,500 handheld devices such as laptops, iPods, and memory sticks are forgotten at the back of taxis every six months.

Michael Callahan, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Credant Technologies, stated, "Although we conducted this survey in the UK, the idea was to show people everywhere how easy it is to lose data -- even in their local dry cleaners -- and that none of us are infallible. We're convinced if we were to do the same survey in the US we'd get very similar results. If the data is sensitive or valuable then people should protect this information with encryption so no one can access the data at any point, as it could easily end up in the wrong hands."

According to the survey, many mobile devices now have the capacity to store as much as 10,000 documents, 11,000 pictures, 500,000 contact details, or 1.1 million emails, making them an obvious target for identity theft criminals...

Sifting Through Online Backup Service Options
Byteandswitch.com, NY - 1 hour ago

... strategy- possibly remote and branch offices and remote and mobile workers," said Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) . ...

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The Top 7 Online-Backup Tools
IT Management, CA - 1 hour ago

But now, online-backup services are poised for a corporate growth spurt, according to an IDC (International Data Corp.) research report released in January. ...

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In my coverage of business continuity and disaster recovery, I talk to both IT infrastructure and operations professionals as well as IT security professionals and I've found that the term "data protection" means something different to each. This comes as no surprise and I think for a long time it didn't really matter because IT operations and security professionals operated in independent silos. But as silos break down and "data protection" is a shared responsibility across the organization, it's important to be specific and to understand who is responsible for what.

For IT operations professionals, "data protection" means creating a duplicate copy of data for the purposes of restore/recovery in the event data is destroyed due to a total site failure (i.e. flood takes out your data center), system failure, drive failure, accidental deletion etc. You can create a duplicate copy of your data either locally or at a remote location via backup, snapshot, replication etc. You are protecting your data from destruction. This is why backup companies such as CommVault, EMC, IBM Tivoli, HP, and Symantec (the former Veritas) refer to their backup applications and other offerings as "data protection software." The name of HP's backup application is HP Data Protector. Ironically, these "data protection" offerings sometimes make your data less secure because it is backed or replicated to tape or over the Internet to another site in a clear text format. Which is why all these vendors now offer the ability to encrypt the data as it's backed up to tape or replicated.

For IT security professionals, the term "data protection" means ensuring that only authorized individuals have the appropriate level of access to your organization's sensitive data and that all access is tracked for audit. You deploy perimeter security, end-point secruity, data encryption etc. to "protect" your data from breaches, "leakage," crimeware/malware, physical theft etc. Thus we have security vendors and offerings such as McAfee's Total Protection For Data and Mobile Armor's Data Protection Suite.

You could argue that holistic data protection requires both recoverability and security and I would agree. Data storage is one area where IT operations professionals and security professionals need to work more closely together particularly in the area of encryption and secure data erasure. Right now, storage architects and administrators are evaluating new data storage encryption functionality available in tape drives, appliances, storage networks, disk drives, and path failover software. They're also looking at secure data erasure services from the major storage vendors. These are services that ensure the data is wiped clean before an entire storage array or individual disk drive is returned to the vendor or to an asset disposal company and refurbished.

I'd be interested to know whether the term "data protection" has led to any confusion in IT shops and also how well security professionals know about the vulnerabilities in enterprise disk storage and tape and if storage teams are relying on their expertise to solve some of the challenges.

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