The news started hitting California early Saturday morning with an SMS alarm on my mobile phone - a major earthquake struck Chile, and there was a potential of tsunami activity in California and Hawaii (as well as the rest of the Pacific). First stop - CNN. The news source was right on the story, with real time information flowing into the newsroom from, not on-scene journalists, but through Twitter and Facebook updates.

Another SMS message hits the phone letting me know there was a Twitter list at #hitsunami, and the discussion would include all the most current news related to tsunami preparations in Hawaii. Also gave a link to a web page that was broadcasting a live feed from KHON in Honolulu until the station integrated their feed on the KHON home page.

Back to CNN, cell phone videos began pouring in from Santiago and Concepcion. CNN began broadcasting directly from Chile - not from a CNN journalist, but from a Chilean citizen streaming video through a Skype connection. KHON also began streaming video and audio from a private citizen through BJPENN.COM in Hilo, as KHON also did not have a real time video feed of their own, or a journalist on site that could provide adequate real time information from the city.

How does a small or medium business ensure it can meet the basic needs for disaster recovery and business continuity? Whether it be Internet-facing applications, or Enterprise-facing applications and data, one of the most important issues faced by small companies is the potential loss of information and applications needed to run their operations.

Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites - it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.

Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company's data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.

CA and 3tera have announced CA's acquisition of the innovative cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service vendor. This is a great thing for Computer Associates, and perhaps a bit sad for the cloud community in general. Why? It is hard to fit the energy and enthusiasm felt when walking into 3Tera's Aliso Veijo office into words. A tight group of committed entrepreneurs and innovators, with a bit of cockiness due to the unique stature they held in the cloud computing community.

Not that Computer Associates is a bad company. In fact, they have always been one of the best kept secrets in business and enterprise software. Rock solid systems, professional sales and engineering - just not as well known to the broader community as other large enterprise systems vendors.

AppLogic brought the cloud community many firsts. The first to integrate IPv6 into their provisioning system. The first to really simplify the drag and drop provisioning process. Perhaps the first to really test and prove the concept of globally distributed processing and disaster recovery models. And they are really great guys.

What is the common verbiage of Hawaii's broadband initiatives set in senate and house bills SB895, HB984, and HB1077?

Easy, "Carried over to 2010 Regular Session."

• SB895 - 2/10/2009 Establishes the Hawaii Communications Commission (HCC), The committee(s) recommends that the measure be deferred. Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.
• HB984 - 5/11/2009 Implements key recommendations of the Hawaii broadband task force by establishing the Hawaii broadband commissioner (HBC). Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.
• HB1077 - 5/11/2009 Establishes the Hawaii Communications Commission (HCC) in the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCCA).
  The committee on EDT-CPN deferred the measure. Carried over to 2010 Regular Session.

The governor last jumped on the media bandwagon with her press conference in Feb 2009 announcing formation of the Hawaii Communications Commission. Yes, the bill listed above (SB895) which is deferred until the 2010 session. There may be budget problems, there may be difficulty understanding the scope of broadband communications in today's society and economy.  But the reality is all broadband bills are deferred, and at this point on hold.

Try a search engine query on "Hawaii CIO," or "Hawaii Chief Information Officer." You might get a couple corporate links pop up, or possibly the University of Hawaii's CIO link, but the only state agency within the first two pages of links is for the Information and Communications Services Division of the Department of Accounting and General Services (DAGS). The first impression, once hitting the Hawaii Information and Communications Services Division (ICSD) landing page on the State of Hawaii's website, is the microwave tower graphic.

The Information and Communication Services Division (ICSD) of the Department of Accounting and General Services is the lead agency for information technology in the Executive Branch. It is responsible for comprehensively managing the information processing and telecommunication systems in order to provide services to all agencies of the State of Hawaii. The ICSD plans, coordinates, organizes, directs, and administers services to insure the efficient and effective development of systems.

In fact, the Hawaii CIO, as appointed by the governor in 2004, acts in this capacity as a part time job, as his "day job" is comptroller of the State. In that role, the only true function managed within the ICSD is oversight of the state's main data center.

This is the third part in an interview series with Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric. In this segment Martin discusses the future of Hurricane Electric, IPv6, bandwidth, and global Internet development.

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Pacific-Tier: Can you cite one defining moment that really makes Hurricane Electric stand out as a company within the Internet industry?

This is part two in a series of interviews with Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric

Hurricane Electric is one of those rare companies that have survived, and grown in the past two years. A private company, Hurricane Electric has become one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the world, and is a leader in IPv6 deployment. In this article Martin Levy shares a few ideas on how Hurricane Electric approaches their business and continued growth.

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I met Martin Levy for the first time in Honolulu at the Pacific Telecommunications Council '2007 conference. After several coffees at the Kalia Tower, and an hour or so discussions on data centers, networks, and IPv6, I knew I had found a true evangelist in the Internet industry. Several more conference coffees in different locations around the world, and I became one of his IPv6 disciples.

As a senior member of the Hurricane Electric team, Martin enthusiastically spreads the IPv6 word to locations around the world including Slovenia, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Taipei, Brussels, and the European Commission - in addition to acting as a consultant to IPv6 developers and global digital government policy groups.

An accomplished speaker and writer, Martin brings a unique talent effectively delivering IPv6 thought leadership and actual IPv6 network deployment experience to the Internet community.

This is part one of a Pacific-Tier Communications Thought Leadership series interview with Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric is a leading Internet backbone and colocation provider specializing in colocation, dedicated servers, direct Internet connections and web hosting.

The headlines are no surprise to those in the Internet business. "Police in Central China have shut down a hacker training operation that openly recruited thousands of members online..." (AP) We've know China, Russia, and several of the former Soviet block countries are the source of sophisticated hacking, and those activities have at least been tolerated, if not directly supported, but the host governments.

The recent dispute between Google and China's government brings another question into the breach - does a national government have the right to censor or control the flow of information in or out of the country? While China may be in the news, citizen journalists in Tehran have been severely punished for attempting to Tweet, email, blog, or transmit cell phone images outside of the country. Under the umbrella of national security do countries like Iran have the right to control that information, or develop teams of professional hackers to go out and look into the accounts of residents and citizens?

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA): To amend title 18, United States Code, to make clear a telecommunications carrier's duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for Law Enforcement purposes, and for other purposes.

DCSNet, an abbreviation for Digital Collection System Network, is the FBI's point-and-click surveillance system that can perform instant wiretaps on almost any communications device in the US (Wikipedia)