Among the projects I am working on recently, one of them is deploying video conference solutions in Intel. Video conference has been gaining a lot of attention recently here. When I was talking to the CIO of a large organization in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, video conference was also a topics that came up in the conversation.

From what I have heard and seen, there seems to be a increase interest in this subject. There are three factors I believe are driving this. One is the impact of the current economy, which drives down travel budget. Video conference is a lower cost alternative to meet people when one cannot be physically there. The second factor is the increased focus in sustainability. By replacing travel will video conference, one can reduce the carbon footprint of the organization. The third factor is probably the advance of video conference technology. The systems have been getting better in terms of performance and cost. Many of them have gotten much more user friendly and Support more usage models. Some of them also work reasonably well on a laptop PC.

In Intel IT, we have a program that is trying to make video conference capabilities pervasive to our employees. We have deployed some high end solutions in a number of large sites during last year. We are going to deploy some middle tier and lower tier solutions during the rest of this year. We see these video solutions will bring benefits in areas of travel reduction, sustainability, employee productivity, enablement of new business models, and enhancing collaboration.

A simple survey for the pilot users of a table top solution confirmed that the video conference capability had increased team collaboration comparing to audio only meetings and increased engagement from remote participants. The survey also revealed that some tips and tricks needed to be advertised to use the solution effectively, although the system might appear intuitive to use.

How are you using video conference solutions in your organization? Do you have any experience and best know methods to share?

I'm Omer Ben-Shalom and I am a principal engineer with Intel information technology (IT) focusing on mobility and client platforms. I have had the pleasure of working with the Intel development teams on the vPro AMT system defense and decided to share my experiences via a three part video series showing how system defense can help in active response to infected PCs.

There are many threats to the environment. the 'classical' threats originate from the outside and it is the job of the perimeter defenses such as firewalls, IPS and others to block them but the more problematic ones are those that originate from inside the perimeter, these type of attacks are mostly conducted from legitimate machines owned by the business and are quite often carried inside the perimeter unknowingly by employees especially when using mobile platforms such as notebooks which are carried outside the business and back in.

Detecting infected PCs and other malicious activity is done with the help of the various intrusion detections systems and the alerts generated can be collected and aggregated to provide a very good picture of the existing threats. A much more difficult task is the ability to quarantine the hosts carrying out the malicious activity and perform remediation. there are solutions involving both host software and network side blocking but with the host possibly compromised and the network location of the offending host subject to change with mobile platforms effective quarantine and remediation is very complex.

This is where the Intel vPro system defense capabilities come into play by allowing selective network access restrictions on a host, these restrictions can allow only the connectivity necessary to fix the problem and being implemented on the host platform itself cannot be escaped just by changing the network location.

This week we are publishing the first of a three part video series on how to use system defense for this purpose both manually and via integration to existing AMT management. I hope you will all take the time to view the introduction video below. any comments are welcome. I would love to hear your views about the problem as well as the solution.

I hope you enjoyed this video, parts two and three should post by next week, stay tuned