On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill that would effectively legalize online poker and other nonsports betting, overturning a 2006 federal ban that critics say merely drove Web-based casinos offshore. The bill would direct the Treasury Department to license and regulate Internet gambling operations, while a companion measure, pending before another committee, would allow the Internal Revenue Service to tax such businesses.

via Congress Is Rethinking Its Ban on Internet Gambling – NYTimes.com.

Semantics can be tricky when it comes to technology, too. Take the concept of “carrier Ethernet.” We think we know what it means: Ethernet services provided by carriers. But it’s not that obvious. There are three distinct offerings, all with specific characteristics, under the broad umbrella of carrier Ethernet.

Learn the differences: The many flavors of carrier Ethernet (Network World).

Google says that this is the first multi-tenant cloud application suite that has received FISMA certification at a FISMA-Moderate level, which gives it the ability to store and serve sensitive (but not classified) information. Google’s Matthew Glotzbach says this encompasses 80-90% of all government information.

Read more: Google Launches Apps for Government, with Servers on US Soil

“It was time for something completely different, something decentralized, something more like.. BitTorrent.. running inside of our datacenter to quickly copy files around,” Twitter engineer Larry Gadea explains.

The new BitTorrent-powered system “turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds.”

Read more: BitTorrent Makes Twitter’s Server Deployment 75x Faster | TorrentFreak.

Though fiber penetration is up slightly, 77% of U.S. commercial buildings still do not have fiber-optic connectivity.

From the report:

Detailed findings show that while most large enterprise locations in the U.S. and Europe are fiber-connected, small and medium business (SMB) sites are underserved with fiber from any service provider (i.e., incumbent carrier, competitive provider, Cable MSO, PTT, etc.)…

“The challenge ahead is to extend fiber connectivity to remote business locations. For the U.S. plus countries throughout Europe, this fiber gap exceeds more than one million sites,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group.

• Cloud Computing in Plain English

Read more at CNET.

Telephony Online has a great article on the topic: SIP Trunking—Savior during a Recession?

Read the Los Angeles Times article.

Google posted a great article on cloud computing on their Enterprise Blog, including discussion of the advantages of using cloud computing and some information on the design of their data centers.

Key Quotes:

There’s quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a “private cloud” with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. 

How much do you spend on maintenance?

According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don’t gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don’t have to.

The opposite of virtualization:

In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we’re not paying for components that we don’t need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren’t needed in this environment.

Still running an Exchange server?

There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don’t get additional scale. You’d also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster. 

“Through 2012, the WAN bandwidth requirements of most enterprises in developed countries will increase at least 35% per year, while those with heavy increases in video usage may see annual bandwidth growth of 60% to 100% or more.”

—Gartner

In their new report “Should Your E-mail Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis,” Forrester research does a cost analysis of self-hosted and off-site, cloud-based email services. The result?

“The overall conclusion is that any company with an employee count of under 15,000 would probably benefit from using off-site services.”
– Ars Technica

The two cloud-based services, Microsoft Exchange Online and Google Apps, were significantly less than all the self-hosted systems with Google Apps far and away the winner. In fact,Google Apps was significantly less costly than self-hosting for all size companies.

How much does your company spend on email? The report found that IT workers are largely unaware of the costs of running their own email systems. Many of those surveyed gave guesses from $2 to $11 per user, although a detailed accounting showed that the costs were often several times that (Forrester came up with $25.18 per month, compared with $8.47 for Google Apps).

Read more at Ars Technica