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Market Roundup Sun Microsystems Launches New Eco-Focused Community |
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Sun Microsystems Launches New Eco-Focused Community
Sun Microsystems has launched OpenEco.org, a new community to
help organizations calculate, compare, and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions. OpenEco.org is free and open to all organizations; the cost of
participation is the sharing of data, transparently or anonymously, with other
community participants. OpenEco.org is positioned as an organization that can
fill an important need as companies, government institutions, and
non-governmental organizations are facing increasing pressure to set
improvement goals and invest in projects to meet them. To date, GHG analysis
has largely been done with home-grown or proprietary tools that can often
require significant internal resources or expensive consulting services. With
OpenEco.org, carbon accounting data that might ordinarily remain in a company’s
spreadsheet can be easily shared using the site’s unique GHG emissions tool,
which enables organizations of all kinds to benchmark against one another, set
realistic reduction goals, and share best practices to meet them. Ceres, a
coalition of investors and environmental groups, has joined OpenEco.org as an
early participant as has Natural Logic whose Founder and
Sometimes the best thing to do with a drum is to beat it. With this announcement, we see Sun continuing its efforts to highlight eco responsibility, or green initiatives. While the company has done quite a bit with respect to its products and services in order to lower its overall ecological impact, the company is now drawing on its expertise in creating user/industry communities towards other ends. This initiative, similar to the Open Architecture Network that shares blueprints, ideas, and resources for improvement projects in areas affected by hardship, focuses attention on GHG emissions and seeks to bring together expertise from multiple industry experts. From this collective effort it would follow not only that greater awareness of the issue would result, but that actionable data and perhaps best practices can be collectively formed and disseminated to the greater marketplace.
While this initiative is not a silver bullet, it is one of many of what we believe to be essential tools in the quest for improved eco responsibility by IT vendors and end user organizations. The importance of community efforts should not be underestimated as they provide a valuable information resource and information delivery vehicle to help reach many in the market who may not realize the significance of the issues, nor the opportunities that they afford. The first step towards dealing with any issue is being aware that it exists. Information such as that which OpenEco.org plans to collect and disseminate is essential to promoting awareness. It is clear that Sun, as well as all systems vendors, has a vested interest in eco stewardship in the datacenter for without it, the ability of organizations to continue to consume vendors’ products will be stymied. Nevertheless, we believe the leadership that Sun is demonstrating in its ongoing eco responsibility initiatives is worthy of praise and recognition and if it also helps the company sell more products and services, that’s okay too.
New FireEye Appliance Addresses Growing Bot Threat
FireEye, Inc. has announced an integrated anti-botnet solution that couples the global FireEye Botwall Network with its FireEye Botwall appliances. The FireEye anti-botnet solution is built from the ground up to combat the stealthy, targeted malware unleashed via remotely controlled and compromised PCs, also known as bots. The FireEye Botwall Network, which provides unprecedented intelligence on botnet command and control (C&C) as well as detection and analysis of propagation activities, gives organizations a complete view of the botnet threat landscape. FireEye provides anti-botnet protection with the FireEye Botwall 4000 appliance and the FireEye Botwall Network service, a globally deployed botnet discovery and analysis service offering which provides subscribers with the most current botnet intelligence to complement on-premise anti-botnet security appliances. It catalogs and disseminates botnet characteristics derived from malware analyses that are conducted by interconnected networks of FireEye Botwall appliances selectively deployed at service providers around the world.
Enterprise customers using FireEye Botwall appliances can
subscribe to the FireEye Botwall Network to gain visibility into botnet C&C
structures and locations, propagation tactics, and malicious activities. The
service delivers pre-emptive protection with global awareness and local network
analysis to precisely identify, understand, and stop emerging botnet and
malware threats. The FireEye Botwall 4000 Series is a next-generation, locally
deployed security appliance that protects customers by derailing a bot
infiltration attack from preventing the initial breach and downloading the
first bot command payload as well as blocking active communications to known
malicious botnet servers. The FireEye Botwall appliances employ three classes
of anti-botnet technologies: discovery, on-premise botnet propagation analysis
coupled with global botnet C&C data; control, whereby customers can
extinguish botnet propagation activities and unauthorized communications; and
audit, by which botwall appliance analyses, reports, and alerts ensure IT
management stays ahead of botnet infiltration attacks. The patent-pending
FireEye Analysis and Control Technology (
Bots have proven themselves to be a major threat in today’s environment, and will continue to be a significant threat in the next several years because perpetrators have had an easy time of setting up botnets and more importantly have been able to devise a well orchestrated way of monetizing their crimes by renting out these networks to others with nefarious intentions. The trends of financially motivated attacks and more focused targeting by cyber criminals are also sure to continue.
We are pleased by the FireEye combination of intelligence as an accompaniment to the appliance because of the evolving and dynamic nature of the bot threat. By offering alternative means to control and mitigate the botnet threat, FireEye is targeting on what we believe is a key threat vector and may be able to help high-profile target organizations such as financial institutions, government entities, energy companies, and pharmaceutical organizations to reduce their vulnerability to this threat.
Although
Through its offering of local or remote access to equipment
that provides a “safe” test bed for application development, Big Blue can
showcase its technical abilities while at the same time helping to assuage the
concerns of potential new users for its platforms, or to entice established
customers to try an alternative hardware or software platform. Even though this
center is being located in the growing tech market of Dallas, for many organizations
the physical location of the centers is less important than the equipment or
services that they offer. Given the proliferation of affordable high-speed
Internet links, some who avail themselves of