Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Curbing Rising Inflation

Now this blog is about the current situation in India that is inflation which has been rising up the ladder week by week.

      By hiking the cash reserve ratio (CRR) of banks while leaving repo and reverse repo rates unchanged, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken an easy way out of confronting inflation. While the government needs to battle inflation, which touched 7.33 per cent last week, hiking interest rates now would slow down the economy at a time when growth expectations are being downgraded across the world. The RBI has wisely refrained from doing so, sending the Sensex up by 362 points.
       

       Hiking the CRR by 25 basis points, which comes on top of a hike of 50 basis points barely 12 days back, will leave banks with less money to lend. These measures are being seen as sucking excess liquidity from the system. If banks now hike their interest rates to make up for a shortfall in cash available for lending, the onus of raising interest rates can be passed on to them. For a government that is concerned with fighting inflation in an economy caught in election mode, while maintaining growth on an even keel, increasing CRR rates isn’t the best way out. But the markets like it, because on the face of it interest rates haven’t been raised.
       

        By allowing the rupee to become a bit stronger against the dollar, the RBI could help bring down the prices of imported commodities as well as capital goods for industry. It could help reduce the price of fuel at a time when the import content of India’s oil needs have risen sharply, along with the price of crude. Inflationary pressure has been stoked by high food and fuel costs. Exporters’ lobbies may scream if the RBI doesn’t artificially depress the value of the rupee by buying up dollars, but the move would benefit inflation-hit consumers as well as industries that rely on imported inputs. There is something to be said for allowing the rupee to float up. The government could also cut levies on petroleum products. That would help reduce inflationary pressure.

         I thought whatever our very own Mrs. Shobha bhave was teaching was worthless but now i see the relation in all the CRR and inflation thing. When we increase the CRR, banks have more money in reserve so less money to lend. This in turn will suck out the money from market and will help in curbing the inflation. Wheeew.

Posted by sandipsingh at 08:19:57 | Permalink | No Comments »

Monday, April 7, 2008

Data Deduplication

This blog is about Data Deduplication, which is the new buzzword in data storage companies.
In storage technology, deduplication essentially refers to the elimination of redundant data. In the deduplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored. However, indexing of all data is still retained should that data ever be required. Deduplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored.
In storage technology, deduplication essentially refers to the elimination of redundant data. In the deduplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored. However, indexing of all data is still retained should that data ever be required. Deduplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored. For example, a typical email system might contain 100 instances of the same one megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requiring 100 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100 MB storage demand could be reduced to only one MB.
Data Deduplication Methods:
  • String Comparison
  • Phonemic name comparison
  • Non phonetic fuzzy matching
  • Linguistic name analysis
  • Specialized numeric comparisons
  • User defined rules
Now the important question is how do business benefit from data-deduplication
  • The business benefits from data de-duplication start with increasing overall data integrity and end with reducing overall data protection costs. Data de-duplication lets users reduce the amount of disk they need for backup by 90 percent or more.
  • With reduced acquisition costs—and reduced power, space, and cooling requirements—disk becomes suitable for first stage backup and restore and for retention that can easily extend to months.
  • With data on disk, restore service levels are higher, media handling errors are reduced, and more recovery points are available on fast recovery media.
  • Data deduplication also reduces the data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication, and disaster recovery. What all of that really means is that data protection is improved, service is faster, and costs are reduced.
Posted by sandipsingh at 16:04:16 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Vulnerability of VoIP

Let me give you a brief overview of VoIP for those who don’t know what it is.

          Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an IP telephony term for a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice information over the Internet. VoIP has become popular largely because of the cost advantages to consumers over traditional telepone networks. VoIP calls can be placed across the Internet. Most Internet connections are charged using a flat monthly fee structure. Using the Internet connection for both data traffic and voice calls can allow consumers to get rid of one monthly payment. In addition, VoIP plans do not charge a per-minute fee for long distance.

          But in addition to these advantages, there are certain security threats too. For instance, two protocols widely used in VoIP-H.323 and Inter Asterisk eXchange-have been shown to be vulnerable to sniffing during authentication, which can reveal passwords that later can be used to compromise the voice network. Implementations of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) can leave VoIP networks open to unauthorized transport of data.

          In addition, tools that can help find vulnerable deployments have been published online by a VoIPSA, an industry group dedicated to securing VoIP. The VoIPSA tools are intended to help businesses test and secure their networks, but these and other online tools can be used to probe for weaknesses as well.

          Still, there have been few exploits so far and none that have been widespread or crippling to businesses. “We are not hearing about attacks. We don’t think they are happening,” said Lawrence Orans, an analyst with Gartner.

          Part of the reason may be that the largest VoIP vendors use proprietary protocols, such as Cisco’s Skinny, Nortel’s Unistim and Avaya’s variant of H.323, Orans said. That makes them difficult to obtain and study for potential security cracks.

          SIP, which is gaining popularity, is a mixed bag, Orans said, because it is readily available to those who might want to exploit it. “I would say that SIP is a good-news, bad-news story. It’s easy to get your hands on, and that includes the bad guys. The good news is there are more options to protect SIP,” he said. These options include firewalls and intrusion-prevention systems that support SIP.

          Another reason for the lack of broad exploits is that there isn’t enough ROI for attackers’ development time. Meanwhile, not everybody agrees with the assessment that VoIP will remain unbreakable in 2008.

Posted by sandipsingh at 15:56:00 | Permalink | No Comments »

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Introduction

            Let me introduce myself to everybody. I am Sandip Singh doing MBA from SCIT (Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology), Pune. I guess most of the bloggers might have heard about it. I like to make new friends and doing adventure, a passion that i got from birth because my father is in Air Force, so we keep on travelling from one place to other frequently.

            Anyways the reason of writing first blog as introduction is that what i have personally felt is you can not familiarize with the person unless you know a little bit about him/her. And at the same time it gives a attachment with that person.

            So, this rhetoric Smile blog will compel me to write more and at the same time meet new intellectual people Smile. Enjoy

Posted by sandipsingh at 12:57:34 | Permalink | No Comments »