The term cloud computing has been bandied around for a number of years but unless your server needs were very high you simply would not have begun to look at scaling up your server resources.

More and more businesses however are relying increasingly heavily on web based applications both for client contact and transactions, the downside however is that the infrastructure becomes more hungry, and costs scale up dramatically using traditional expansion methods, and quite often there is then a compromise between functionality and client satisfaction.

Cloud computing gives businesses a entirely more cost effective solution to satisfy both the companies internal server needs and the external ebb and flow of customer based web traffic, which often will have peaks and troughs that can be costly both in monetary terms and lost revenue due to user dissatisfaction.

Cloud computing is also very useful in the CAD industry too. If you look at a typical architectural practice for example they will have good workstations and cad computers for the design phase but often when they need to render a digital image or video presentation and the computing requirements for this are immense and can take weeks to produce the end results.

Some cloud computing systems will allow short term rental of resource so you could in this scenario use cloud computing to render a scene or movie in double quick time.

For an easy explanation of cloud computing have a look at the video which gets the concept across in nice easy to understand language.

With so many computer hackers, viruses and of course the scammers destroying the enjoyment of the Internet, consideration should be given to a computer firewall. Data that is entering your computer should be challenged by a firewall. It stops your computer being prone to dangerous attacks that can negatively impact upon you.

The firewalls available vary widely and you must determine which type is suitable for your computer. Chances are that your firewall is already set up and ready to be used if you have a computer that came installed with the Microsoft XP or Vista operating system. You must check that it is turned on and working properly. If you do not have one of these later operating systems, then you need to purchase your own software. Owners of Microsoft XP may still want to purchase separate firewall software as the XP version doesn’t get great reviews.

You can either visit a store that sells computer software or download a Computer Firewall product through the Internet - the most popular products available are Norton, AVG and McAfee. The price of software varies depending on how sophisticated it is but there are also plenty of low cost versions available, even from the big name companies. Once in hand and prior to installing your firewall, you need to take a few things into consideration. The program must be configured to permit the functions that you need, such as file and printing sharing. The information supplied gives you all the settings you need to be able to configure the software during installation or at a later date.

Firewalls can limit access to certain parts of the Internet. Awareness of how you connect is important as if you use a local area network or a router, this could happen. Accessing secured networks when you have installed a firewall is difficult. A pc linked to a company network may require a specific settings configuration to allow you to connect a firewall to them and the company’s IT department should be able to advise you with this.

Even though there seems to be allot to know when installing a computer firewall the benefits far outweigh the work required to configure the firewall to work correctly on your pc. The risk of a malicious infection or a computer intruder is far worse than having to read software documentation to have your stand alone firewall work correctly.

Reference: Firewall

Botnets are networks of computers that hackers have infected and grouped together under their control to propagate viruses, send illegal spam, and carry out attacks that cause web sites to crash.

What makes botnets exceedingly bad is the difficulty in tracing them back to their creators as well as the ever-increasing use of them in extortion schemes. How are they used in extortion schemes? Imagine someone sending you messages to either pay up or see your web site crash. This scenario is starting to replay itself over and over again.

Botnets can consist of thousands of compromised machines. With such a large network, botnets can use Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) as a method to cause mayhem and chaos. For example a small botnet with only 500 bots can bring corporate web sites to there knees by using the combined bandwidth of all the computers to overwhelm corporate systems and thereby cause the web site to appear offline.

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service on January 19, 2006, quotes Kevin Hogan, senior manager for Symantec Security Response, in his article “Botnets shrinking in size, harder to trace”, Hogan says “extortion schemes have emerged backed by the muscle of botnets, and hackers are also renting the use of armadas of computers for illegal purposes through advertisements on the Web.”

One well-known technique to combat botnets is a honeypot. Honeypots help discover how attackers infiltrate systems. A Honeypot is essentially a set of resources that one intends to be compromised in order to study how the hackers break the system. Unpatched Windows 2000 or XP machines make great honeypots given the ease with which one can take over such systems.

A great site to read up on this topic more is The Honeynet Project (http://project.honeynet.org) which describes its own site’s objective as “To learn the tools, tactics and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and share the lessons learned”.

Ever wonder how a server could benefit your business?

Because you don’t want to lose data if something goes wrong – Any reliable computer technician will tell you that backing up data stored on individual computers is not only impractical, it’s unreliable. Storing all your data on a server and then backing up all of the data on that server is more likely to work properly without interruption and it is also easier to manage. Even if you decide to back-up via an on-line service, backing up one machine is typically easier and less expensive than backing up multiple computers.

Because you want your data secure – Storing sensitive accounting, human resources, or intellectual property information on your workstation or even an auxiliary storage device does not ensure that the data is restricted and protected. Sever security settings can easily and effectively limit data access to just certain people in the office.

The ability to work from home/remotely – In today’s work environment, mobility and accessibility are the name of the game. With a server in your office, you can easily access all of your internal data without incurring the additional monthly cost of a router or remote access program.

Because you are running out of space to store data – Servers offer the flexibility of massive data storage on redundant and fault-tolerant drives. So, even if one of the drives fails, the remaining drives will still contain all of your data.

Because you need/want to use Microsoft Exchange - If you have numerous email addresses and/or you are tired of having to rely on your Email Service Provider to set up or delete email addresses employees come and go, Exchange may save you time and money. Exchange allows you to add, delete, or change all of your own email addresses easily and immediately without any monthly cost to you.

Because you’re concerned about viruses and/or spyware on your network – The two ways to keep your computers protected are either to continually and constantly monitor each workstation or to install virus/spyware protection on a server. By using a server, protection updates are automatically downloaded to the server, which is then responsible for ensuring that every workstation connected to the network has the latest protection installed.

Because you have applications all employees must access – The most common way of sharing applications is to install it on one workstation and “share” it with other users. Unfortunately, this will ultimately slow down that user’s workstation and limited to the abilities of the application’s performance. This can result in poor performance and a great chance of long-term failure.

Because you need to centrally manage all employees/computers – Without a server, each employee can only log onto his/her computer, and when an employee leaves it becomes difficult or impossible to recover the password. With a server, all usernames and passwords are managed from one central location so you can add, delete, and change the access levels and passwords without needing to know the old password.

Because my computers are slow – Two of the most common causes of slow computers are an old processor and insufficient memory. Moving applications to a server can allow a user to take advantage of the improved speed and performance of a server without requiring an upgrade to the workstation. The money saved on workstation upgrades can quickly eclipse the entire cost of a new server.

Because I need a domain – A domain is the way by which a server tells every network computer which devices are supposed to be on the network and which therefore be trusted. All devices that are part of a domain are registered with the server to that it knows to allow access and and from certain domain devices. A domain is often required by many centralized database applications so that the server can properly communicate with each workstation, but it is also another valuable layer of security.

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Credits: computer network, Joel Ray, MCSE, CNE formed LANstar, LLC in 2000.

I’m quite sure that most of you already had account on Yahoo, Google, MSN, AIM, ICQ, or another service provider that offered a lot of features for your social networking activity, especially for instant messaging. They should be already provide you with a client based software to connect on their network. Since you already had more than one protocol instant messaging service provider, you should think about a software that could handle all the connection to your network provider.

On this article, we’ll introduce you with Pidgin. That’s one of the client based software for instant messaging. It can handle most of the instant messaging service provider, such as: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-gadu, ICQ, IRC, Google, MySpaceIM, XMPP, QQ, Simple, SILK, SameTime, and Yahoo. Instead, this software is provided a lot of features such as:

• User friendly instant messaging
• Could run on many different Operating System platform ( windows, linux, mac ).
• Open source and free to use it as you want ( you could get the free version at : Pidgin Portable. Since it’s a portable application, you had nothing to install on the local PC ).
• Easily add portable encryption plugins for secure, encrypted messaging.
• And many more.

We’ll discuss more about how to guide Pidgin instant messaging software for the next article. You should try this awesome software. Cheerss.

article reference : Pidgin Manual