Last week, my 8-year-old handed me his iPod and said, “Dad, can you enter the password so I can install BloodnGuns?” No way. He went through three or four reasons that he thought he needed the game, and I just went about my business. A couple of minutes later, he hands me the iPod again and says, “Dad, can you enter the password so I can install Temple Run?” Being a much tamer game, I said I would, but (knowing my son) I followed that up by saying, “Just remember: Anything you install goes to my iPhone, too.” If I entered the password for him for Temple Run, he would be authenticated and could then get BloodnGuns, so I just wanted to remind him that I was born at night, not last night.

The sneaky little guy looked up to me and grinned, “Oh yea, ‘cuz of that cloudamajigger thing.”

Once I finished laughing, I asked him what he meant by Cloudamajigger, and before he could answer, I told him to wait … I wanted to document how he would describe “The Cloud.” With two other kids at home, I thought it might be an interesting focus group of the way kids are learning about technology, so I made it a family project.

I asked each of them three questions and told them to email their answers to me”

1. What is “The Cloud?”
2. Where does “The Cloud” live?
3. What is SoftLayer?

Here are the responses:

The 6-year-old

1. The cloud shoots out a ball and the cloud is awesome!
2. In the sky. It is made out of water.
3. Where dad works, I think he makes monitors.

The 8-year-old

1. It’s a cloud in the sky and they shot a satellite in it. And they could see all the things you need to see on the internet.
2. See number 1 (Yes, he really typed that).
3. Where dad works, he works to make the Internet, and the Internet makes him work.

The 11-year-old

1. It is a group of people where when you post something everyone will be able to see it.
2. I don’t know.
3. A company.

You can see that the 11-year-old is darn close to those wonderful teenage years with that loquacious participation … Wish me luck!

I ask these same questions of people at conferences I attend and get generally the same answers as above. We can write reams of descriptions of the cloud, but in my world, it’s simply “The Cloudamajigger Thing.”

How would you answer those three questions?

-@Skinman454

Have you ever seen those image-based logic puzzles where you’re given a series of images and challenged to put them in order to create a story? Here’s an example:

What story are those pictures trying to tell? A boy [6] grabs a fishing pole [4], and finds a fishing hole [5]. He baits his hook [3] and waits for the catfish to quit posing [2] and bite the hook! He takes his catch home, and his mom fries it up [1]. MMMM Good [7]!

You could probably interpret it a different way and “choose your own adventure” where the anthropomorphized fish deep fried the boy … Depends on how far outside the box you think. The answer the question was meant to have is the one above. Now that you see how it works, I have a logic puzzle for you to try and figure out about what happened during my week last week.

All ten of the pictures below were taken in the span of 56 hours … If you can come up with the correct story, I’ll send you a prize (detailed below). If you can come up with a creative story that isn’t correct, I can probably find something to send you as well. Without further ado, here are the pieces of the story [Click for Larger Version]:

If you’ve been to the SoftLayer Blog this week, you know that we have a “Kids Meal” kind of special going right now where for the next few months if you buy a server and email us, you can get an official SoftLayer Bobblehead! To piggyback on that giveaway, the first person who posts a comment with the correct order of the photos to answer the puzzle (or the funniest answer if no correct answers are posted), will get my personal FULL SET of official SLobbleheads. Yes, the full set! You won’t have to wait to place your server orders in the next month to complete your bobblehead collection (though I hope you still keep ordering servers).

So what are you waiting for? Tell me the story!

-@SKinman454

What is there not to like about two-factor identification?

That question is one of the biggest issues I’ve run into as we continue pursuing compliance and best practices in security … We can turn on two-factor authentication everywhere – the portal, the vpn, the PoPs, internal servers, desktops, wireless devices – and make the entire SoftLayer IS team hate us, or we can tell all the admins, auditors and security chiefs of the world to harden their infrastructure without it.

Regardless of which direction we go, someone isn’t going to like me when this decision is made.

There are definite pros and cons of implementing and requiring two-factor authentication everywhere, so I started a running list that I’ve copied below. At the end of this post, I’d love for you to weigh in with your thoughts on this subject. Any ideas and perspective you can provide as a customer will help us make informed decisions as we move forward.

Pros

• It’s secure. Really secure.
• It is a great deterrent. Why even try to hack an account when you know a secondary token is going to be needed (and only good for a few seconds)?
• It can keep you or your company from being in the news for all the wrong reasons!

Cons

• It’s slow and cumbersome … Let’s do some math, 700 employees, 6 logins per day on average means 4200 logins per day. Assume 4 seconds per two-factor login, and you’re looking at 16,800 extra seconds (4.66 hours) a day shifted from productivity to simply logging into your systems.
• Users have to “have” their “something you have” all the time … Whether that’s an iPhone, a keyfob or a credit card-sized token card.
• RSA SecureID was HACKED! I know of at least one financial firm that had to turn off two-factor authentication after this came up.
• People don’t like the extra typing.
• System Administrators hate the overhead on their systems and the extra points of failure.

As you can start to see, the volume of cons out weigh out the pros, but the comparison isn’t necessarily quantitative. If one point is qualitatively more significant than two hundred contrasting points, which do you pay attention to? If you say “the significant point,” then the question becomes how we quantify the qualitativeness … if that makes any sense.

I had been a long-time hater of two-factor authentication because of my history as a Windows sysadmin, but as I’ve progressed in my career, I hate to admit that I became a solid member of Team Two-Factor and support its merits. I think the qualitative significance of the pros out weigh the quantitative advantage the cons have, so as much as it hurts, I now get to try to sway our senior systems managers to the dark side as well.

If you support my push for further two-factor authentication implementation, wish me luck (’cause I will need it). If you’re on Team Anti-Two-Factor, let me know what they key points are when you’ve decided against it.

-@skinman454

One of the best examples of an organization that does amazing things for communities and people who deserve a little extra love is the TV show, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” I’ve always loved the show, and I’m only quasi-embarrassed that I’ve shed a tear or two when the crowd shouts, “Move that bus!” and the homeowners see their brand new home. If you aren’t familiar with the show, the EM:HE team finds deserving families who, for one reason or another, need a new home, and over the course of one week, the EM:HE crew and a slew of local volunteers set to work to rebuild or remodel the home.

You can imagine the amount of supplies, coordination and man-hours that go into building a new home or completely remodeling it in just one week. That’s where the community and local businesses get involved: Supplies are donated by companies, and the work force is made up of show employees, people from the sponsoring companies, and an average of 2,500 volunteers every episode.

With that generous involvement, the challenge becomes coordinating the massive amount of work, people and projects to get everything done in a short period of time. That’s where the Internet comes in. How can the show maintain an online presence for vendors, sponsors and fans of the show? Each of them plays an important part in the show’s success, so they need to be kept “in the know” with the most up-to-date information. And that’s where we come in.

This philanthropic show definitely meets the requirements of SoftLayer’s Charity Committee, and when the show was nominated as a prospective organization to support, we immediately set plans in motion to figure out how we could help support the show and the deserving families getting new homes.

We’ve donated $25,000 in free hosting services this season to support the show’s online presence. We’ll be providing a place for vendors who donate to gain some visibility and a place for fans to watch videos and keep up with the show … And that’s no small task: The site receives about 6.8 million monthly impressions.

As Summer mentioned in her post, this is just one of the many ways we’re reaching out to support organizations that are doing great work. Let us know what charities matter the most to you, and we’ll get them on our radar. We’re always looking for ways to get involved, and the first step is learning about who’s doing this kind of amazing work for such a great cause.

-@skinman454

The Growing Small Business Example
You run a small Internet business, and you’ve been slowly growing over the years until suddenly you get your product/service mix just right and a wave of customers are beating down the door … or in your case, they’re beating down your website. The excitement of the surge in business is quickly replaced by panic, and you find yourself searching for cheap web servers that can be provisioned quickly. You find one that looks legit and you buy a dozen new dedicated servers and some cloud storage.

You alert your customers of the maintenance window and spend the weekend migrating and your now-valuable site to the new infrastructure. On Monday, you get the new site tuned and ready, and you hit the “go” button. Your customers are back, flocking to the site again, and all is golden. As the site gains more traffic over the next couple of weeks, you start to see some network lag and some interesting issues with hardware. You see a thread or two in the social media world about your new shiny site becoming slow and cumbersome, and you look at the network graphs where you notice there are some capacity issues with your provider.

Frustrated, you do a little “homework,” and you find out that the cheap service provider you chose has a sketchy history and many complaints about the quality of their network. As a result, you go on a new search for a hosting provider with good reviews, and you have to hang another maintenance sign while you do all the hard work behind the scenes once again. Not doing your homework before making the switch in this case probably cost you a good amount of sleep, some valuable business, and the quality of service you wanted to provide your customers.

The Compliance-Focused Example
I still live, eat, and breathe compliance for SoftLayer, and we had an eye-opening experience when sorting through the many compliance differences. As you probably recall (Skinson 1634AR15), I feel like everyone should agree to an all-inclusive compliance model and stick to just that one, but that feeling hasn’t caught on anywhere outside of our office.

In 2011, SoftLayer ramped up some of our compliance efforts and started planning for 2012. With all the differences in how compliance processes for things like FISMA, HIPAA, PCI Level 1 – 4, SSAE16, SOC 1 and SOC2 are measured, it was tough to work on one without affecting another. We were working with a few different vendors, if we flipped “Switch A,” Auditor #1 was happy. When we told Auditor #2 that we flipped “Switch A,” they hated it so much they almost started crying. It started to become the good ol’ “our way is not just the better way, it’s the only way” scenario.

So what did we do? Homework! We spent the last six months looking at all the compliances and mapping them against each other. Surprisingly enough, we started noticing a lot of similarities. From there, we started interviewing auditing and compliance firms and finally found one that was ahead of us in the similarity game and already had a matrix of similarities and best practices that affect most (if not all) of the compliances we wanted to focus on.

Not only did a little homework save us a ton of cash in the long run, it saved the small trees and bushes under the offices of our compliance department from the bodies that would inevitably crash down on them when we all scampered away from the chaos and confusion seemingly inherent in pursuing multiple difference compliances at the same time.

The moral of the story: Kiddos, do your homework. It really is good for something, we promise.

-@Skinman454

To those of you who love the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” you may not want to play the video below. To those who want to rubberneck at our goofiness and join us in a little fun … play away:

If you want to sing along at home (because who wouldn’t?), here are the lyrics for your karaoke pleasure:

Shout-outs go to all the SLayers who indulged us in this little song. We hope it’s less embarrassing than you expected … And if it’s more embarrassing, we hope it’s as terrible and catchy as “Friday.”

Tip: If the song is stuck in your head now, one great way to distract yourself from it is to go and order a server in Singapore!

-@SKinman454

After last night’s “4th quarter of doom” that probably led to crazy nightmares for my sleeping kids (I may have been yelling loudly and often), I decided to open Twitter to see what everyone in the world thought about the game. I have to admit I was a little shocked at how many Cowboy haters are out in the wild. Of course the game was trending, and the conversation was … diverse: You had your die-hard Cowboy fans that were saying, “Shake it off, you weren’t supposed to win anyway.” You had your fair weather fans that were saying, “Great, another season opener loss, I guess I’ll follow the Texans instead.” You had the fans of other teams that were saying, “Haha, the Cowboys lost again – Go (Insert your team here)!” And, of course you had the pure Cowboy haters who were saying, “#$%^#$%^#$ the Cowboys they #$%#$% and #$%# and then #$%#$%. Eat it!” I would say most were Cowboy haters, and most of the tweets were not even close to being rated PG-13.

Stay with me now … I’m finally onto the real topic.

Social Media
What I saw on Twitter last night was real Social Media to me. It was current, real time, opinionated, cool and sad all at the same time. It encapsulated the thoughts and reactions of the public to something that was happening or just happened. Why is social media cool? A couple of weeks ago when the earthquake struck the northeast, people were saying that they received tweet updates of the ground shaking and notifications that an earthquake hit seconds before they felt the tremors in their area. Think about that and how many possible uses that has in lots of different industries. X happens, Y needs to know about it right away, Z tweets it or posts it on Facebook (or any of the 2000 other social apps out there), and like magic you have the information almost before you are supposed to. That’s viral social media.

Social Marketing
Social Marketing isn’t nearly as sexy. It’s only and exactly what it sounds like. We do it at SoftLayer: You see tweets from us talking about press releases, new products, our new website, our new international locations and some of the other value we provide to customers because we know how easy it is to miss some of the best stuff in the noisy social sphere. It helps us build our brand and helps with awareness by getting our name in front of people who may not have seen it otherwise. It drives traffic to our website and straight to our order form. It is significant to our bottom line.

The challenge with this kind of engagement is that the volume of content can seem overwhelming to some. Some customers only want to hear the viral social media kind of stuff with up to the minute news (which is our vision for @SoftLayerNotify), but it’s tough to abandon the social marketing piece because it’s been so measurably successful for us.

With that being said, we want to hear from you about what you like and don’t like about our social engagement. What you would like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Do you like it? Do you hate it? We’re definitely listening … Well as long as we’re not busy getting ready for the next flash mob.

-@skinman454

Dallas — In a world where auditor to auditor reports are out of control and we have a mountain of complex compliances to worry about, one competent compliancy controlled certification of compliance finally comes forth (and not a minute too soon).

“This new groundbreaking idea will change the lives of many competing auditing firms, law firms, accounting firms and so on,” says Steve Kinman. “I spend countless hours reading controls for one report and different controls for another report, and the only difference is the verbiage and format.”

The new Skinson 1634AR15 Certification combines your SAS70, SSAE16, ROC, VOC, SOC, NIST, SARBOX, PCI, OMB, ACART, CFDA, HIPAA and SAFE HARBOR compliance into a single report using a set framework that automorphs based upon which auditor is touching the report or viewing it in the state of the art Skinson Portal.

“The Skinson portal is mind-blowing,” says Val Stinson. “The automorph feature is something straight out of the movies. It knows who is reading and can change the wording on the fly. This keeps auditors from scratching their heads when the words in the report don’t match the words their instruction book.”

The introductory price for full Skinson 1634AR15 Compliance Certification is $1,000,000 USD. This is all-inclusive and will sufficiently cover all of your compliance needs.

Contact:
Steve Kinman
skinman@softlayer.com

About Skinson
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Skinson is a fictional company that likes to poke fun at the difficult job of compliance in the world. While we find that it can be overwhelming at times, we understand that compliance is a necessary evil. We would like to note that something like we dream about above would be very nice and would save the world a ton of work and cut down on our carbon footprint considerably. If you are in a position of control and can make the above happen please help us!!

On a side note, SoftLayer will do everything we can to help you with any compliance you need. Just ask your local sales team for help, and they will find the right person and get you in contact.

-@skinman454

P.S. The actual reason for this blog post is that we just announced that the control procedures and compliance for our 11 data centers have been verified in a Service Organization Control Report (SOC 1) prepared under the terms of the Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16 (SSAE 16) by independent auditing firm Weaver.

After rummaging through the topics bouncing around in my head, I figure it’s time for another Social Media blog. I’ve been tasked with defining the ROI for our social media strategy. Sounds easy, right? You’d be surprised.

Sure, our social media work is well planned out. Our team includes one full time ninja and a few other utility players that span other departments. Our strategy includes all kinds of tactics which we use to let the world (or our corner of it) know about speaking engagements, conferences, new product releases, updated product releases, changes to our website and portal, maintenance windows, outages, etc. (I’d get into more specifics about the tactics, but they are so classified that even I don’t know many of them).

So with something so defined and so well thought out, it must be really simple to see if we are #Winning, right? Well not really. Just the other day at the IDC Directions 2011 in Boston @erintraudt, used a great quote from Einstein to explain exactly how difficult it can be to quantify your results: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” Every good marketing boss would love to be able to say, “We tweet this, we Facebook that, and we get this and that out of it every time,” but as you know, it just doesn’t work that way.

I will say that after listening to the panels and hearing how the big companies are attacking social media, I think we are years ahead of them in the game. The big ideas they are coming up with are things we tried two years ago, and we already know the pros and cons of those approaches.

I might not be able to hand you a spreadsheet with exactly how many sales and a given social campaign will have on our brand, but we’re starting to use a lot of pretty cool tools (some from our customers) to start figuring it all out. Maybe the ninja should be put on the case too.

What do you use to measure social media impact of your campaigns? Do you have a product or service we can check out?

What I can tell you is this: Our first concerted twitter campaign went much better than expected, and while I’m not at liberty to share many details, we think reaching a lot of relevant people who engaged with our content is a distinct measure of success. Even better: We paid less than $2.00 to do so!

I’ll take those kinds of results any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

-Skinman

SoftLayer customers were given two internal tickets notifying them if they were to be affected, and when those tickets were created, the ticket system would have then sent an email to the admin user on that account. Additionally, our portal notification system was updated to show details about the window, and we created new threads in our customer forums to provide regular, centralized updates. We went as far as taking a few calls and meetings with customers to talk about their concerns with the maintenance timing and length because we know that any downtime is bad downtime in the world of hosting.

Saturday night, we had extra support on staff online, and our social media ninja was awake and letting the world know step by step what we were doing with real time status alerts. We wanted to be extremely transparent during the entire process. This was not a maintenance we could avoid, and we tried to roll as many different things that needed work into this maintenance without making a roll back impossible.

The maintenance itself went well, and as planned, most items that were taken down were back online well before the window ended. We ran into a few snags in bringing all of the CloudLayer CCIs back online, but even with those delays for a few customers, the work was completed by the time we committed to.

Now for the customer experience aspect. From reading various tweets from our customers, it seems like we should/could have done a few things even better: Been more proactive, sent standard email, attempted phone calls, etc.

While some of these options may be considered, not all are feasible. If you are one of the customers that tweeted, has blogged, is planning on tweeting, is planning on blogging or believes we’re being anything less than genuine and transparent on our social media platforms, I want to hear from you.

Please comment on this blog, tweet me @skinman454, email me skinman@softlayer.com, call me at 214.442.0592, come by our office and visit.

Whatever it takes, just contact me. I can’t put myself in your shoes and feel your pain on things like this unless we have a chance to talk about it. I look forward to our conversation.

-Skinman