It’s almost Halloween and another large company has decided they prefer the treat in the cloud to the trick of on-premise software.  Virgin America took the leap into the cloud by moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Gmail.  The company is in the process of switching and was motivated by saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Virgin America joins other large organizations, like The City of Los Angles, who decided that it was less costly and better for them to stop using on-premise software and move to a cloud-based service.

Virgin America currently runs Exchange 2003 and wanted to upgrade to Exchange 2007.  Ravi Simhambhatla, Virgin America’s CIO, started looking into the cost to upgrade and didn’t like what he found.  He determined that it cost him about $160,000 a year to run Exchange – that was just the hard costs.   Moving to Exchange 2007 would cost about $660,000, which included new servers and storage capacity.  Of course that didn’t include administrator migration time.

According to Simhambhatla the annual cost of Gmail would be about $100,000, which is 1/3 less than running Exchange.  The cost to migrate will cost about $330,000, which is 1/2 the cost of upgrading to the new version of Exchange.  That’s a big deal for any business. 

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Creating large files today is very easy to do.  If you use a digital video camera to create a 2 minute video, the file size can easily grow to over 100MB.  The file size of your basic 10MP point and shoot camera is typically 2MB or greater.  An Adobe Photoshop or AutoCAD file could be 50MB or more.

Most people don’t think much about file sizes except when trying to send them electronically.  Data storage devices are so inexpensive that no one thinks twice about them.  A typical laptop or server today comes with 500GB of storage.  I can buy a 1TB disk drive for under $100.  Cloud storage services, like Amazon’s S3, charge $.15 per GB of storage. 

Storing them is cheap, but moving them around securely and quickly becomes a challenge.  If you are creating a marketing brochure and need to collaborate with external partners, how do you do it?  How about if you need to send a drawing of your newest product to a manufacturer?  Most email systems have limitations on file sizes, so you can’t email a large Quark or Adobe Illustrator file.  The old way was to burn the files to a CD or DVD and send them FedEx or UPS.  Some people still do that, but if you have deadlines or have partners in all parts of the world, that becomes a burden.

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Today the blogosphere has been going wild about a new FireFox extension that makes it easy to capture login credentials and hack into systems on an open network.  Eric Butler, a freelance web application and software developer from Seattle, WA, created Firesheep to showcase this vulnerability in websites.  I am not sure if Eric is doing a great service by highlighting a vulnerability or just being reckless and giving people an easy way to hack.  According to Security Week, this is something that people have been able to do for awhile, but this makes it easier.

According to Eric, it’s very common for websites to encrypt a username and password during the login process, but uncommon to encrypt communication after that.  After you login, most websites send a cookie to your computer so that your browser can interact with the website without having to constantly login to every page.  The cookie is broadcast through the air on open Wi-Fi hotspots, so there is a chance that anyone could grab it and access your information.  This process is known as HTTP session hijacking or sidejacking. 

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I read an interesting article recently about India’s plans to build a new computer operating system.  Their main goal is to enhance the security of their computer systems – they want to deter and prevent hacking.  The Defence Research & Development Organization (DRDO) is developing the new operating.  India’s current dispute with Research In Motion for greater access to communications for BlackBerrys is an example of their security concerns.

This got me to thinking about how many commercial operating systems exist and if they are secure.  We have Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and numerous flavors of Linux for desktops and laptops.  For servers, we have Microsoft Windows Server, Mac OS X Server, Oracle Solaris, and all the UNIX and Linux variants out there by IBM, HP, Novell, RedHat and a hundred other companies.  Then we have the mobile operating systems – Apple iOS, Blackberry OS, Android, Windows Phone OS, Symbian, Palm OS and the list goes on.

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If you are planning to attend the InfoTrends Solutions Summit 2010 in Chicago, IL on November 10 – 11, 2010, make sure you say hi to Bill Blake, President and COO of eDocument Sciences.  Bill is speaking about security in the office and how it affects you, your customers and partners.  The title of Bill’s session is Security 360.

The Solutions Summit is an invitation-only event that includes keynote presentations, one-on-one meetings, educational sessions and networking opportunities focused on next generation office document strategies, services and technologies.

The Summit pairs VIPs from office product dealers with leading technology vendors, software providers, supplies vendors and wholesalers to discuss opportunities and strategies for streamlining the office workplace.

Bill’s session will cover these topics:

• Security in the office is one of the hottest areas for investment when it comes to IT initiatives
• Understand the security risks and requirements for the print and IT infrastructure
• Determine how to provide a detailed security assessment that looks at the entire (360) infrastructure

If you plan to be there, send Bill an email so you can meet.