Archive for June, 2010
2010
06.29
Tags: anti-phishing, anti-spam, anti-spoofing, Barracuda, firewall, image analysis, IP reputation, rate controll, scoring, spam, virus
Posted in EXCHANGE, FIREWALL, INFRASTRUCTURE, LINUX, Management, Network, Security | No Comments »
Managing and protecting spam & virus of mail is very tough job for administrator. Day by day the treat is increasing. New methods of delivering spam mails. If you use any mail server or any size we required a spam & virus firewall solution. In market you receive different products; some of them are very difficult to administer, others slow down you mail transport, commercials of product (per mail box / per domain charges), lack of spam scoring, etc.
The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall is an integrated hardware and software solution for complete protection of your email server. It provides a powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solution to eliminating spam and viruses from your organization by providing the following protection:
• Anti-spam
• Anti-virus
• Anti-spoofing
• Anti-phishing
• Anti-spyware (Attachments)
• Denial of Service
The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall protects your email server with twelve defense lawyers:
• Network Denial of Service Protection
• Rate Control
• IP Reputation Analysis
• Sender Authentication
• Recipient Verification
• Virus Scanning
• Policy (User-specified rules)
• Spam Fingerprint Check
• Intent Analysis
• Image Analysis
• Bayesian Analysis
• Rule-based Scoring
Read More:-
Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall
2010
06.28
Tags: Document Library, Integration, LIFERAY, MS Office, Polls, Portal, Search, Wikis
Posted in INFRASTRUCTURE, Management, PROJECT | No Comments »
Collaboration and integration is one of the primary requirements of every organisation now. It increases the productivity, single platform for communication and interaction. Employees interact in three primary ways: conversations, transactions, and collaborations. Understanding their differences is necessary to ensure the appropriate software technology is employed to meet your needs. Conversational interaction is an exchange of information and transactional interaction is an exchange of transaction entity between two or more participants, while collaborative interaction is meant for a change of collaboration entity, ex.: achievement of a shared goal.
Collaborative software is software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals. Collaboration software transform the way documents and rich media are shared in order to enable more effective team collaboration.
Benefits of Collaboration:-
• Provide access to all documents and tasks securely via intranet to internal team members, based upon their roles or individual permissions
• Maintain common and individual to do lists, projects and schedules to simplify the management of group activities
• Make tasks assignments and status visible and transparent by automatically sending and receiving appropriate notifications
• Build and work a visible action plan to achieve assigned goals and objectives, helping the organization be more strategic, less reactive in overall performance
• Organize and coordinate work effort, with reduced slip-ups, mistakes, errors due to miss-communication or verbal direction
Different products available in the market in collaboration segment. LIFERAY is one of the open source portal & collaboration solution. LIFERAY delivers open source enterprise solutions for portals, publishing, content and collaboration. Some high level features:-
1. Wikis
2. Message Boards
3. Blogs
4. Activity tracking
5. Instant Message
6. E-Mail
7. Shared Calendar
8. Announcements & Alerts
9. Polls
10. Document Library & Image Gallery
11. Integration with Microsoft office
12. Search & Tagging
Read More:- LIFERAY
2010
06.24
Tags: ADFS, Authentication, SSO, Token
Posted in INFRASTRUCTURE, Network, Security, WINDOWS | No Comments »
Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is standards based Web Single Sign-On (SSO) service that enables federated identity by implementing claims based authentication across forests. It is part of Windows Server 2003 R2 and later releases of Microsoft’s server Operating System as a server role.
Claims based authentication is the process of authenticating a user based on a set of claims about its identity contained in a trusted token. Such a token is often issued and signed by an entity that is able to authenticate the user by other means, and that is trusted by the entity doing the claims based authentication.
In ADFS, identity federation is established between two organizations by establishing trust between two security realms. A federation server on one side (the Accounts side) authenticates the user through the standard means in Active Directory Domain Services and then issues a token containing a series of claims about the user, including its identity. On the other side, the Resources side, another federation server validates the token and issues another token for the local servers to accept the claimed identity. This allows a system to provide controlled access to its resources or services to a user that belongs to another security realm without requiring the user to authenticate directly to the system and without the two systems sharing a database of user identities or passwords.
One of the biggest challenges an IT department can face comes when identities need to cross company boundaries. When your organization enters a relationship with another organization and anyone from one side needs access to resources on the other side, you need a way to establish a secure, trusted relationship. For Administrators this creates a dilemma. They don’t want to be giving administrative rights to people outside their organization, but at the same time they also do not want the additional burden of the extra identity management tasks for those, external people. But you do want to be able to use your current, Active Directory environment to provide single sign on.
Read More:-
1. Cross Organization Single Sign-on Made Real With ADFS
2. Simplify Single Sign-on Using ADFS
2010
06.22
Posted in DISASTER, FIREWALL, INFRASTRUCTURE, IT Policy, Management, Network, RECOVERY, Security | No Comments »
The increasing importance of mobile workers in today’s businesses has been acknowledged. The mobile worker population is split into three main segments, home-based mobile workers, office-based mobile workers and non-office-based mobile workers.
Organisations should develop a proactive policy and strategy that embraces new ideas and methods to create a secure mobile workplace. “Secure mobility” is typically defined as the ability to provide employees and customers with secure “anytime, anywhere, any device” access to the corporate network.
One typical security problem that remote users may encounter is the transfer of viruses or other malware via memory cards or sync connections from infected mobile devices to laptops. Then, when infected laptops plug into a corporate network, there is the potential of further infection of internal corporate resources, possibly causing substantial damage to valuable and sensitive information. However, this is not the only security problem affecting mobile devices. The loss of data privacy that can result from a misplaced, stolen, or improperly used phone can also severely compromise corporate information.
Educate employees to use only devices that are provided by company. There are technologies to prevent unauthorised access to the network. For example, Network Admission Control (NAC) enforces policy for remote devices connecting to the corporate network, and Wireless detection devices Install wireless detection technology on your wireless networks to monitor unauthorised wireless users and the deployment of rogue access points.
There are technologies to prevent compromise of the endpoint: Client Security Software’s, Host-based Intrusion Detection/Prevention Software (IDS/IPS), and Anti-Spywares. There are technologies to prevent information loss or data loss or exposure to information: Data Encryption, and Information/Data Leak Prevention (ILP / DLP) software’s. Monitor compliance with your organisation’s mobile policy
Benefits of Mobile workers:-
1. Improved employee productivity.
2. Eliminating traditional work boundaries and creating a more flexible workspace.
3. Improved client interactions.
2010
06.20
Posted in DISASTER, INFRASTRUCTURE, Management, RECOVERY, Security | No Comments »
Considering the physical security, most organisations keep a surveillance camera, security guard and door access control. This we seen normal in physical security side. But physical security is more extended considering its threat. Threats to physical security come in many forms including natural disasters, emergency situations, and man-made threats. All possible threats must be identified in order to perform a complete and thorough risk analysis and to develop an appropriate and effective control strategy.
Some of the more common threats to physical security include:-
1. Fire
2. Water
3. Earthquakes
4. Severe weather
5. Electricity
6. Lightning strikes
7. Sabotage/terrorism/war/theft/vandalism
8. Equipment failure
9. Loss of communications and utilities
10. Personnel loss
Organisation need to build proper and adequate mechanism to protect information from these security threats.
2010
06.15
Tags: Calendar, Chat, Collaboration, Docs, Gmail, Google Apps, Gtalk, Messenger
Posted in EXCHANGE, INFRASTRUCTURE, ITIL, Network, Security, ServiceDesk | No Comments »
All the business organisations looking to reduce the investment and expenditure. Try to cut the capx and opx. Here more focus is opx. There are technologies solutions to help business to reduce the cost and get best breed solutions. One in this category is Google apps for business. Google Apps offers an interesting way to reduce the costs of a business.
What Google Apps Are Offered?
• Gmail
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Google Talk and Many More.
Advantages of Google Apps
1. Accessible everywhere – No longer will you be tied down to a particular computer. Any computer that has the internet can access your documents.
2. Doesn’t require installation – If you frequently bounce between different computers, you may soon grow tired of installing the same applications over and over on each computer. Since these apps are online, all you need is a web browser.
3. Collaboration – If two people want to work on the same document, traditionally they have to email it back and forth. After 10 rounds of back and forth, they may have a finished product. Google Apps allow people to edit the documents simultaneously and save changes as different revisions.
4. Many more features.
To Know More:-
a) your company goes Google
b) Reliable, secure web-based office tools for any size business
c) Rajen Sheth Demonstrates Google Apps
d) Switch from Microsoft® Exchange
2010
06.13
Tags: LAN Virtualization, Network Vitualization
Posted in FIREWALL, INFRASTRUCTURE, Management, Network, Security, Virtualization | No Comments »
One of the major areas in networking is network virtualization. More and more appliances / brands coming with virtualization capability. It’s helpful for the organisation different ways. Reducing capital expenditure, operational expenditure, scalability, and availability.
There are two forms of network virtualization, external and internal. External virtualization generally combines multiple networks — or parts of networks — into a single virtual entity. Internal virtualization provides system-wide sharing and other network functionality to the software containers, which act as hosting environments for the software components of the network, on a single physical system. The external variety is the most commonly used method to create virtual networks. Vendors that distribute these virtualization tools generally offer either one form or another
Cisco Network Virtualization Solutions
2010
06.10
Tags: Database Administrator, Exchange Administrator, Network Administrator, Security Administrator, System Administrator, Utilities
Posted in EXCHANGE, FIREWALL, INFRASTRUCTURE, LINUX, Management, Network, SOLARIS, Security, UNIX, WINDOWS | No Comments »
LANguard Network Scanner – LANguard network scanner is a freeware security scanner to audit your network security. It scans entire networks and provides NETBIOS information for each computer such as hostname, shares, logged on user name. It does OS detection, tests password strength, detects registry issues and much more. Reports are outputted in HTML.
HotFix Control – Tells you what hotfixes and service pack you have applied, neat utility. (163K)
Disk Investigator Disk Investigator is a program that allows you to see everything on your computer’s hard disk, undelete previously deleted files, and recover lost data
PRTG Network Monitor Full featured and easy to use network monitoring software for bandwidth, usage, and availability monitoring. Freeware supports up to 10 sensors. Learn more about PRTG Network Monitor. (The most popular of our free network monitoring tools)
PRTG Traffic Grapher Small footprint MRTG-like network tool for bandwidth monitoring. Also known as “MRTG for Windows”. Freeware supports up to 10 Sensors. Learn More about PRTG Traffic Grapher. (The second most popular from our free network monitoring tools)
Card Packet Counter Shows short term statistics about the network data packets passing a local network card using PRTG.
Local IP Lister Local IP Lister shows the list of IP addresses that are configured on your PC.
Process Explorer Freeware process viewer for Windows, which displays much more information on each running process than the built-in Windows task manager.
DNS Tools Resolve/reverse lookup, whois (domain name), whois (ip owner), check port, ping.
More Resources – AdminFavorites
2010
06.06
Tags: Knowledge base, Solutions
Posted in ITIL, ServiceDesk | No Comments »
Knowledge base or solutions play a good role in IT support operations. Each support engineers providing solutions different ways, also they will be spending more time to build solutions. If we able to build a strong knowledge base, it help in different ways. It acts as one of the key of support operation.
1. All the technicians providing solutions in same flow.
2. It reduces the time to provide solutions.
3. Solutions should be searchable.
4. Solutions should be accurate.
5. Possible to categorise the solutions.
6. Make it PDF documents / audio / video tutorials.
7. New technician can start support easily.
8. End user gets good feel / comfort of solution.
9. It will be easy to share with users.
10. Improve the quality and build more and more solutions.
2010
06.01
Tags: Handheld devices, Knowledge Workers, Mobile, Smart Phones
Posted in INFRASTRUCTURE, IT Policy, Management, Network, Security | No Comments »
Mobile devices use increasing day by day in corporate world. Handhelds and high-end smart phones carrying corporate information. The trend is increasing, and the future will be that.
In particular, smart phones are becoming increasingly popular with knowledge workers. Number of companies providing devices to mobile workers and executives for use both inside and outside the offices. Companies are supporting connectivity to devices the individuals buy for their own uses.
Initially companies use mobile devices to use is e-mail access, increasing number of organizations are taking next step, extending access to data in core corporate applications such as ERP, CRM and Banking.
Steps to Secure Mobile Devices:-
1. Educate users on the importance of secure mobile device and ways to avoid the loss of device. Keep device open to access anyone or un attended.
2. Ensure mobile devices are set password.
3. Install mobile management system to enforce data security and policies.
4. Control over data download and access in different network.
5. Encrypt corporate data depends on its sensitivity.
6. Virus protection in mobile devices.
7. Enable lockdown, if the device lost and automatically wipe the data stored in its memory.
8. Log the sensitive information access.
9. Proper register of devices allocated to employees and access.
10. Periodic audit of mobile devices access.
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