Pandor prioritises telco funding | ITWeb

Pandor prioritises telco funding
By Leigh-Ann Francis

Johannesburg, 6 Sep 2010

Closer partnerships between the Department of Science and Technology and the private sector need to be created, says science and technology minister, Naledi Pandor.
Public investment in the telecommunications industry is a priority for the Department of Science and Technology (DST), as the network industry promises to provide the backbone of all the country's economic, industrial and innovative advances.

This is according to science and technology minister, Naledi Pandor, speaking today at the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference, being hosted at the Spier Wine Estate, in the Western Cape.

However, Pandor argued that partnerships between the public and private sector are still inadequate.

She pointed to the SA innovation survey of 2005, which revealed the proportion of local companies engaging in innovative technologies compared favourably with the EU. Therefore, SA is a very innovative country, stated Pandor. However, the report indicated that not much of the research going into innovation is publicly funded.

Private companies do not always seek out public funding for innovation research, because the innovation is based on competition rather than a development imperative, she explained.

Government's role

An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development survey suggests current public funding for programmes in innovation must be intensified in SA.

“We should publicise our achievement and we should do more at establishing trusting relationships between funders and performers of innovation,” offered Pandor.

“I have just received a report around investment in technology innovation in SA, which suggests that we could accelerate our innovative ability if we had better partnerships between the Department of Science and Technology and the private sector.”

She argued that government plays a key role in funding the building blocks of innovation, basic research in universities' further training, and provides necessary infrastructure for laboratories and cyber networks.

“Government is also responsible for creating the best regulatory environment for the private sector – we must have a regulatory environment to invest and maintain a competitive market and nurture entrepreneurs,” maintains Pandor.

She stated that government funding must be a catalyst for innovative breakthroughs in national priorities, as these priorities cannot just be left to the market.

Funding targets

Pandor reiterated that public funding for innovation in the ICT sector would be integral.

“We have developed a plan to encourage greater interest in public funding,” she said, pointing to the DST's 10-year innovation plan, developed in 2008.

“One target was to raise the share of research and development spending to 2% of GDP by 2018. Another target is to expand the number of science and engineering graduates to 450 by 2018.

“Innovation and investment in new knowledge have been a strong foundation for economic growth and social change in all countries. The affluence of high interest countries is largely the outcome of ICT technologies.”

Pandor urged leaders in the ICT sector to work closer with the DST in driving ICT and innovation in the country. “I urge the industry's accomplished leaders to use your collective wisdom to come with innovative solutions to ensure that Africa is a continent of the future,” she concluded.

Cheaper telecommunications costs do not result in long-term savings | ITWeb

Cheaper telecommunications costs do not result in long-term savings
Unison

Press release issued by Unison

Johannesburg, 8 Jun 2010

Companies continue to spend billions of rands on voice and data communications; however, they are under a common misconception: that they are getting a reduction in cost from service providers who promise cheaper prices.

This is according to Craig Young, Group MD of Unison Communications, who sites a BMI-T SA IT Market Overview Sizing and Forecast report, which states that corporate and Top 350 Market Telecoms service types spend for 2008 for fixed voice, mobile, LCR (leased cost routing) and bulk SMS was believed to reach R34.8 billion.1

"While cost reduction is certainly on the agenda of decision-makers, what companies don't realise is that short-term communications price reductions don't necessarily reflect long-term," says Young. "In fact, costs actually escalate because communications infrastructure is complex with a myriad of technologies, service providers, data services and interoperability required."

"While we would like communications infrastructure to be easier, cheaper and seamless, it's not. A smorgasbord of incompatible technologies and a number of service providers within their communications environment comes at a high administrative cost," explains Young.

On top of this, Young says costly outsourced specialist skills are required to improve, integrate and extend their infrastructure to service and meet customer demands. "The reality is that this expertise costs," he says.

Young recommends companies take control of their communication infrastructure and acknowledge that their existing environment is complex.

He recommends the following:

1. Analysis: Enterprises don't do enough to get the information they need to make decisions. They need the business intelligence which shows them what kind and how much communication is flowing across their network. Unpacking traffic generated and understanding the impact of how users communicate and interact is critical. It is essential that this information is based on the company's own interpretation and not on the value proposition given by service providers. In addition, they must be able to incorporate information from communications into the financial plan; from there empowered decisions based on business/ financial factors can be made.

2. Longevity through interoperability: By knowing the future requirements for further convergence within their networks business can make decisions based on solutions that would yield the best ROI over the long term rather than cheap fixes that produce immediate results but end up costing more in the long run.

3. Planning: Bring in more information to the plan including true financial modeling of infrastructure and scenario planning. Identify key communication priorities based on business outcomes requirements and not technology requirements can be made though accurate planning.

According to Young, key for any corporate communications environment is to remember that interfacing between the users and client communication on an external and internal level needs to be at a standard where the course of business is fully supported and not hampered. Even if companies avoid an expensive upgrade system, integration still has to take place as seamlessly as possible.

By unpacking the traffic flowing across their network enterprises need to interpret this data. There is great potential for cost resolution, however businesses have to take charge of their environment and not simply purchase technology for technology's sake or because it is cheaper.

Use of mobile communications in government needs to be managed to curb unnecessary expenditure

Press release issued by Unison

Johannesburg, 25 Aug 2010

The latest research by Unison Communications reveals that between 47%-63% of government communication budgets are spent on cellphone communication. On average, mobile rates are 50% more expensive than fixed-line rates, which leaves the South African taxpayer footing the bill for expensive mobile calls.

"When taxpayers are footing the bill, government needs to be aware that there are high levels of mobile communications within their departments that cater for staff's personal use only," says Craig Young, Group Managing Director of Unison Communications.

"Our research reveals that as much as 63% of all mobile communications budgets go to private calls. Mobile communication is more popular and many government departments are forced to spend more on mobile contracts for employees, because they are issued by the departments themselves. Without established standards and policy on the correct use of mobile communications, departments could see usage go completely unmanaged and mobile usage in government is on average 20% higher than the private sector," he explains.

Young adds: "The complication is that proper usage of these phones is not effectively managed or monitored. Mobile billings are in many instances regarded as an HR expense and are removed from regular financial or technical costs. The fault here is that true amounts spent on private usage cannot be accurately determined."

According to Young, the challenges facing government are:

* Service providers are not going to willingly limit their services.
* Cap restrictions are ineffective and often lead to complicated HR challenges where the legwork involved to recover the money from employees is too time-consuming. In extreme instances, Unison's research has revealed that employees may owe as much as 80% of their annual salary in outstanding amounts.
* Mobile communications has increased communications costs as much as 60% despite departments adopting convergence strategies.
* There is a clear lack of accountability among government employees regarding their behaviour.

Without access to clearly presented and informative reporting solutions, department heads will not be able to effectively manage their mobile communication expenditure. By giving managers the right information and reallocating mobile communication costs and an IT or financial cost to the department, tighter controls can be established.

Y-generation demands mobile freedom | ITWeb

Remote users are on the increase worldwide but companies are not fully investing on security, says Sean Wainer Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies.
There is a worldwide increase in remote workers and SA is no exception as the new Y-generation gets into the workforce demanding flexibility

This is according to Sean Wainer, country manager of Check Point Software Technologies Southern Africa, commenting on the findings of the ITWeb/Check Point Mobile Office Survey.

The survey asked respondents to reveal the number of remote workers in their organisations and discovered 21% have more than half of their employees working away from the office.

Of the respondents, 19% said mobile workers constitute 25 to 50% of their workforce; while 38% revealed that such employees make up 10%. Only 1% said remote workers are non-existent in their organisations.

Furthermore, the research determined that 79% of the respondents expect the number of network users in their organisations to increase. 17% said they will remain static while 4% foresee a decline.

Constant growth

Says Wainer: “Clearly, we are seeing a constant growth in IT users worldwide though remote users are growing substantially.”

This is a worldwide phenomenon, he says: “We are seeing not only a user demand for more flexibility, but a realisation from organisations that remote workers cost less in overheads”.

Another factor, says Wainer, is the growing understanding that remote workers are more efficient and generally more productive. He argues that there is no office space, power and consumables required for remote users.

On a scale of one to five, the survey also asked the respondents to rate their software application preferences. E-mail and collaboration, proved to be the most popular with 62% of the respondents saying it is very important for the mobile office.

Second on the list was productivity, eg word processing, garnering 39%, while PDF viewers came third with 23%.

De-facto standard for business communication

“Many people live and die by e-mail these days. It is the de-facto standard for business communication. It is a lightweight application, prevalent and demanded. It is also the single app that improves productivity the most,” says Wainer.

However, he says e-mail's popularity is also most open to abuse or attack.

The survey also found out that 27% of the remote employees have e-mail on the smarthones or PDAs.

“I think that this is the nature of the modern workforce. With mobile technology improving, being low cost and relatively efficient, this makes sense. However, this is also the weakest link in the security chain.

“The more advanced these units are becoming, the more data they store – not only mail, but attachments. Millions of mobile phones are lost around the world. Not many of them are password protected or encrypted. A lost or stolen phone often contains a wealth of private or proprietary information,” notes Wainer.

Prioritising security

On the security note, the survey also asked the respondents to rate, on a scale of one to five, how they view security. Generally, it was found many of the organisations prioritise security issues.

A high of 59% said they view securing remote employees access to corporate network as very important while 21% asserted that it's not important at all.

On the ability to securely access corporate from anywhere, 57% of the respondents said they regard it as very important while 19% think otherwise.

Interesting figures popped up regarding laptop data protection, with 43% of respondents saying it is very vital; 19% said it's not important at all while the remaining 40% were in-between.

Securing mobile data on USB drives had 53% of respondents rating it very important to important. 15% rate this averagely, giving it three out of five, while the remaining 32% gave it either four or five.

Data loss

On the other hand, Wainer believes that organisations are not investing enough on security. “There is a lot of education that is required. Both on the end-user side and within organisations.

“The primary security concern is the loss of data. One survey puts an average middle manager in the US's laptop at a value of over $50 000. This is not the hardware, or licensed software, but the value of the data contained therein.

“First, is the data that resides on the device – ensure the data on the machine is encrypted, ensure that users cannot easily remove information.

“Since these units are being used in 'rogue' environments like open WiFi networks, strong anti virus and network access control should be on the unit too. Further, a personal firewall on the units is always a smart move,” says Wainer.

He adds that the other concern is contact with the office while “out in the wild”. “You need to utilise a VPN solution that is secure, efficient and easy to use. Generally, the simpler the security, the better the end-user buy-in is and this is critical”.

Telkom faces fixed-line flop | ITWeb

Telkom is losing fixed-line customers at a faster rate in comparison to previous years, according to Business Monitor International's (BMI) latest report on SA's telecommunications sector.

In its fourth quarter report on the local telecoms market, industrial research group BMI envisages a total decline of 3% in landline usage. The research group says SA incumbent Telkom, in its results for the financial year ending 31 March, reported a decline in demand for prepaid PSTN lines.

According to BMI, this had been an important growth area for the operator.

Cellular takeover

Telkom spokesperson Pynee Chetty says the decline is “simply because of the uptake of mobile phones”.

Pieter Kok, a senior research analyst at IDC, agrees, saying Telkom will continue to experience a decline in the number of landline users, primarily due to people becoming more used to making their voice calls from a mobile phone rather than a fixed line.

“I see the trend being irreversible because of the dramatic increase in cellphone usage over the years”, says Kok.

He adds that the perception people have about Telkom is the other reason why customers are shunning the fixed-line operator. “Generally, the public has this perception of Telkom as being expensive while offering poor service to the clients. It is going to be a mammoth task for the fixed-line provider to change the public's view of it.”

Stiff competition

From a broadband point of view, Kok says there are more attractive mobile broadband options than Telkom's ADSL. “I can't really say the fixed line will soon be obsolete, but people are becoming less and less dependent on it.”

Cell C said this week it will unveil faster broadband in the form of '4Gs', which is an improvement on 3G, although not full 4G, as the standard hasn't been clearly defined by industry. Kok says he doesn't see Telkom fixed-line competing with this.

Telkom recently upgraded its network and now offers customers ADSL speeds of up to 10Mbps.

Presenting its financial results for the year ending 31 March, Telkom said the continued competitive pressure in the voice market had resulted in the decline in traffic revenue streams. “This is as a result of our drive to offer significant value through annuity products, managed network services and virtual private networks, which shifts traffic revenue into other revenue streams”.

The fixed line operator added that market penetration, which was at 9.1% in March 2009, had dropped to 8.7% after a year.

Growth spurt

BMI says SA's broadband penetration rate had seen an increase from the close of 2009 to the fourth quarter in 2010. “Subscriber base was around 1.12 million at the end of 2009. This is equivalent to a penetration rate of 4.3%”.

The firm adds that during 2009, the SA broadband subscriber base expanded by over 185%, and attributes much of this growth to the rapid increase in the number of mobile broadband customers.

“By the end of the year, mobile broadband customers accounted for 70% of the total market,” says the report.

For 2010, BMI also anticipates SA's broadband development to experience 50% growth, enabling the penetration rate to reach 6.4% by the end of the year.

Focusing on the 3G subscriber base in SA, BMI forecasts the mobile market on the whole to remain static during the last quarter of 2010.

This trend, notes the report, will partly be a reflection of moves by the operators to deduct inactive prepaid customers from their reported totals.

A disturbance in the force | TechCentral

[By Nathaniel Borenstein]

The Internet is quietly being replumbed. That shouldn’t surprise anyone involved with it; the Internet is always being replumbed. But you might be more surprised to learn that the next few years will bring an unusual burst of changes in that plumbing, some with great potential consequences for anyone who relies on the Net.

By its plumbing, I’m refer to the protocols and software that make the core features of the Internet work. These have been evolving steadily since 1969, but I don’t think any period since the early 1980s has experienced as much change as we’ll see over the next few years.

Like anything new, these changes will bring both threats and opportunities, but in this case probably more threats than opportunities. Each critical part of your infrastructure is potentially at risk from any fundamental change in the infrastructure, and we are looking at several such changes in succession.

The next big things;

DNSSEC — For years experts have warned that the domain name system, one of the most important subsystems on the Internet, is at risk from malicious actors. All sorts of schemes are possible if you can hijack someone else’s domain name. DNSSEC makes domain hijacking much harder and, as a result, makes it more reasonable to trust the identities of Internet sites. It is the foundation for a more trusted Internet.

After years of work, a milestone was reached this year when the root domain was signed with DNSSEC. Over the next few years, more and more sites will try to protect their identities and reputations with DNSSEC. The potential for breaking older or unusual DNS implementations can’t be ignored, but any organisation that has a lot invested in its domain name should consider using DNSSEC to protect it from hijacking, and to reassure end users.

IPv6 — The Internets protocols were designed to facilitate what almost everyone thought was an absurdly big network — over 4bn computers. Less than 30 years later, we all know (as I said in 1983, mostly to dismissive laughter) that the 4bn addresses enabled by IP version 4 (IPv4) are not enough. To keep the net from fragmenting, to facilitate universal communication, and to avoid having the Internet’s growth stop dead in its tracks, it is essential that the world convert to IPv6.

Adoption of IPv6 has been slow, but there’s a good reason to expect that to change: halfway through 2011, the supply of IPv4 addresses will simply run out. There are all sorts of half-measures and hacks that can postpone things a bit further, but by now it’s clear that the future of the Internet requires IPv6. Despite the many person-centuries of work that have gone into IPv6, the transition is highly unlikely to be smooth and painless for everyone.

International e-mail addresses — For as long as there has been Internet e-mail, addresses have been limited to the ASCII character set. Spanish speakers can’t use the letter “ñ” even if it’s part of their name, and Germans similarly have to do without their “ö”. They’ve been remarkably patient with what is, from their perspective, a gross inadequacy in e-mail standards. But the people who have it worst, of course, are the Asians, all of whose characters are forbidden in traditional e-mail addresses.

After many years of wishing, arguing and working, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is closing in on a solution. Internationalised domain names (the right-hand side of the e-mail address) have been a reality for a little while now, and the IETF has been tackling the final bit, the left-hand side. This turns out to be much harder than it sounds because of the problem of backward compatibility with the old standards and all the old mailers in the world.

The solution is going to be ugly, but functional. New encodings map ugly strings like “xn--bcher-kva.ch” onto desired internationalised forms such as “Bücher.ch”. Ideally users will never see the ugly forms, which are designed to be backwards compatible, but inevitably they sometimes will. Worse still, sometimes it may be impossible for a user of older software to reply to e-mail from someone with an internationalised address.

The bottom line: we’ll be going through a period during which e-mail will probably not be quite as universal, or as stable, as we’re accustomed to it being. Anyone with responsibility for software that processes e-mail addresses will need to make sure that their software doesn’t do horrible things when these new forms of addresses are encountered.

DKIM — The fight against spam is unlikely ever to end because the miracle of Moore’s Law — the same miracle that gives us ever smaller and more powerful computing devices operates in favor of the spammers. Every time we get twice as good at detecting spam, they are able to generate twice as much spam for the same price, which means that the good guys are running on a treadmill, needing to work continuously just to avoid falling behind.

One manifestation of that hard work is the DKIM standard (for “Domain Keys Identified Mail”), which specifies a procedure by which organisations can publish cryptographic keys, and sign all their outgoing mail, thus making it somewhat easier to be sure where some messages really originate.
It’s far from a cure-all, but it has the potential — particularly when paired with as-yet-undefined reputation systems — to make it easier to detect spam with forged sender information, the issue at the heart of the “phishing” problem.

DKIM has been in development for several years now, and is now progressing well through the standards process.

It should be mostly invisible to end users, but it will keep mail system administrators busy for a while. As they learn to configure their outgoing mail for signatures, and to check their incoming mail for signatures, there is a strong potential for destabilising the e-mail environment in general. The most likely symptom will be mail that just doesn’t reach its intended recipient.

Reputation services — High on nearly everyone’s list in the wake of technologies like DKIM are reputation services — trusted parties that can tell you if a message is signed as being from Joe.com and whether Joe.com is known for sending spam or other bad things over the Internet.

Though there are no standards for reputation services yet — and though they are undeniably needed — we can already see the risks and benefits by looking at the non-standardised reputation services in use today, notably blacklists of e-mail senders. These are incredibly useful, but there is a never-ending stream of problems with organisations that get added to such lists inappropriately and the administrative difficulties of getting them removed promptly.

Similar considerations will surely apply to the standardised reputation services of the future — no such service can be any better than the support organisation that deals with exceptions and problems. Any progress with reputation standards should be expected to be accompanied by transitional pains as the reputation service bureaus mature and develop good or bad reputations themselves.

What can customers do?

Make no mistake: the coming improvements to the Internet’s plumbing are a very good thing. But the implementation of each of them brings with it the potential for destabilising various aspects of the Internet infrastructure, despite the heroic efforts of the IETF to minimise that risk. Vendors can increase or reduce the risk through their quality of implementation. What can customers do?

Paradoxically, the answer is to do more by doing less. The biggest risks are inevitably found in the least professionally administered software and servers. The big cloud providers with the staff of crack programmers and administrators are at the least risk because they understand the risks well enough to take steps far in advance.

But that specialised application that your predecessor commissioned 10 years ago, and is now running more or less autonomously on an ancient server in your headquarters, could represent a huge risk.

Basically, the risk is highest where the least attention is being paid. So the best thing that most organisations can do in preparation for the coming instabilities is to use them as an excuse to clean house a bit: decommission old applications that aren’t being maintained, outsource anything you can plausibly outsource to a bigger IT shop, and allocate a few programming resources to pay attention to the ones you can’t decommission or outsource.
Of course, it can’t hurt to ask your cloud provider or outsourcer what they’re doing to prepare for the coming changes, but if they act surprised by any of them, it may be time to consider a new provider.

Ideally, the coming Internet disturbances should be viewed as an opportunity to streamline some of your oldest, least maintained, most idiosyncratic infrastructure. In a world where there are professionals who can run most of your applications for you, locally or in the cloud, it’s probably time for your organisation to move beyond worrying about these kinds of changes.

Decommission the old stuff, outsource whatever you can, and the coming problems will largely be problems for someone else, not you. And that’s about the best you can hope for as the Internet endures these growing pains.

Nathaniel Borenstein is the chief scientist for Mimecast. Previously, he was a distinguished engineer for IBM Lotus Division