Evernote Hack: A well a handled Cloud service hack

Being completely up front we love Evernote here at BackChannel, almost everyone uses it.

So it was a bit of a disappointment that a company that relies so heavily on its web infrastructure should fail to learn the lessons about 'crown jewels' security like  Microsoft, RSA, Twitter etc, etc...

As an old security guy I think they did exactly the right thing in in notifying their customers and forcing the password reset and I'm not alone in that opinion.  But as you would expect with 50,000,000 users needing to change their password; there have been numerous gotcha's for people who signed up with now defunct mail addresses, especially those who have recently upgraded and couldn't access their 'local' data as a result.  Checking out the community posts on the relevant Blog posting Evernote seem to be handling it fairly well and hopefully in future they will take more care.

As my Dad said 'Son the most valuable lessons learned are also the most expensive'
Anyhow final thought- If you're moving anything to a Cloud Service make sure you understand what you're buying into; make sure you can get to mission critical data in any circumstances, make sure your provider has a clear and documented policy on service denial, ensure they have a documented process for recovery and proper insurance against service failure & data loss - after all its not their data they're looking after it's yours.

Fragmented market for $1 trillion worth of telecoms business sales

Provision of telecoms services for the world’s biggest companies is remarkably diverse. A survey carried out exclusively for GTB by BackChannel shows that the world’s biggest 500 companies do not concentrate their custom on a few key operators, and the operators themselves work in a highly fragmented market

Read more: BackChannel AT&T Verizon China Telecom France Telecom BT NTT CWW

Nearly 60% of the IP services that AT&T delivers worldwide go to US-based customers. Of the world’s large operators it is one of the most focused on its home market — only one percentage point above China Telecom’s focus on China for the IP services it delivers.
Both companies, this exclusive survey appears to show, have a long way to go to spread their business away from their respective home markets.
By contrast NTT Communications provides slightly more

Article by Alan Burkitt-Gray Editor Global Telecoms Business

Dropbox security breach

As shown by the recent breach of security at 'everyman' Cloud darling Dropbox goes to show no matter what suppliers sell to you, cloud storage is not completely secure.  So todays lesson is that if you're going to trust data to any Cloud service make sure you can take control of the encryption.

South African Hosted Email Security Update

Back in January we reported that Mimecast had taken control of the South African market after having grown at an extraordinary rate for the previous 18 months, We 1st identified Mimecast as a rising star 3 years ago when they 1st came to the notice on the world stage taking market share in Europe, Australia & North America.  

Mimecast has definitely been an organisation to watch over the past two years. We think its continued growth is indicative of both its presence as a growing force within the worldwide cloud-based email security services landscape as well as the uptake in remotely managed product offerings within the South African market

Market penetration for cloud-based email technologies is particularly high in South Africa at 33%. In fact, the country is up there with first world territories such as the US,UK and Scandinavia, all well known for their openness towards new technologies and services.

Six months on the July 2012 BackChannel reports shows that Mimecast's market share growth has continued to accelerate, extending its installed base by 170% over 2 years, a strong performance even against an overall market growth in South Africa of a not-too-shabby 40%.

We think the vendor landscape in South Africa is a microcosm of ICT worldwide in general, showing that focus is almost certainly the key to winning in a technology marketplace. The fact that Mimecast focuses on what it does best. Competitors have fallen to the wayside due to a lack of emphasis on core service offerings; in comparison, Mimecast has continued to offer premium products and services which meet customer needs. That’s why they are the market leaders in South Africa and increasingly on the world stage.

BackChannel Publish 9th Email Security Services Report

At BackChannel we use unique search engine technology to reveal actual Cloud and IP services usage & identify real market trends amongst over 1 million organisations worldwide.  Every 6 months we use this 'hard-numbers' research to report on to produce twenty definitive reports detailing the performance of the world's leading service providers including those delivering e-mail security/unified e-mail management services.   

Who's up, who's down, regional & sector trends, new market entrants, plus the impact of M&A and of the release of new products (Webroot, you know we're watching you.) 

Emerging blinking into the daylight after several weeks of marathon number crunching we're ready to share with you a few of the insights we have gained after publishing this our 9th major survey of the industry.  Over the next few weeks we will be releasing both samples of the data itself and some of our thoughts about this dynamic and growing market.

So, if you're interested in Cloud based services be sure to bookmark this blog now.  If you're interested to know more about the Email Security Services Reports then please contact me directly and one of us will get back to you.

GMail fail should act as Cloud Warning

It was as recently as November 2011 that RIMs Blackberry server farms were unable to supply e-mail services to millions of customers for days, to the great delight of Starbucks customers and commuters worldwide…

Gmails short outage this week has caused quite a long conservation amongst users and the world's press. The system was out for about an hour and seems to affected about 10% of users. In the grand scheme of things this outage is not really significant and I wonder how many users put it down to failures at their ISP or if they were mobile ‘just another coverage failure’.

But once again this minor Gmail failure is a reminder that cloud-based services and applications are out of control of their users.

Distribution of sales of email Hygene Services USA 2008

For the last 5 years we at BackChannel have been tracking the use of email hygiene services by organisations around the world.
We started with Messagelabs - now Symantec.cloud, Frontbridge - now Microsoft, Postini, MXLogic - now McAfee, Blackspider - now Websense in the USA and UK.  Over the intervening years we went on to include new and upcoming players like Google, Mimecast, Trend & zScaler and our range of deeply profiled regions expanded to 17 including France, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Scandinavia.
Today we track the use of 40+ services by over 1 million organisations in upwards of 50 countries.
We are proud to have been able to help many of these companies achieve  sales and business development goals and in some cases to support company valuations and investment rounds.
We will shortly be releasing our January 2012 Analysis of the use of these services and we will post our findings for the Fortune Global 500 companies here on this blog.
In the mean time here is a fun interactive 2008 chart showing state by state distribution of the sales by those key players. Have fun comparing them and pondering on why Messagelabs was strong on the East Coast and Postini in the West.


2008 USA email hygiene service sales, by state.

Those of you who know us well may know that we also profile the use of all major telecoms services including Access, Hosting and CDN services.  So if you are interested in the services used by a customer or competitor, if you are selling into these markets or if your a CIO who wants to know what their company really buys around the globe; why not contact us on +44 (0)1223 968481 and see what an innovative  Cambridge company can add to the mix.