Storage: The marriage of Web services and storage as a service was bound to happen. The questions are, “Are you ready for Internet storage? I mean, would you even consider tapping capacity that doesn’t come from a pile of storage devices in your datacenter but instead originates somewhere in the cloud?” So begins Mario Apicella in this Storage Insider episode. Perhaps you’d answer in the negative, at least initially. But certain situations do indeed call for it. Think Amazon S3. More recently, startup Nirvanix announced its SDS, as in Storage Delivery Service. “If Nirvanix delivers on its promise, its SDS system could prove an important first step in getting more organizations to think outside of the storage box,” Apicella writes. From the Test Center: Excel is everywhere. Even still it’s not often treated as the enterprise resource it really is. “Here’s where the SaaS movement fills the gap,” writes Mike Heck. In this case, that means eXpresso, a new hosted application that blends document management with spreadsheet-based workgroups and brings community features, too. “A second major difference between eXpresso and run-of-the-mill document managers emerges when you consider the technology underneath eXpresso, which is an Oracle database,” Heck adds. That’s not to say eXpresso is without gaps, namely workflow, but “overall, eXpresso provides a very satisfying experience.” Read the full review. Security: Question Google. That’s precisely what Roger Grimes does in Continuing the Web server security wars: Is IIS or Apache more secure? Specifically, Grimes wonders about a Google report stating that IIS Web servers are twice as likely as Apache servers to be hosting malware. “I wasn’t refuting the data, but I was questioning the conclusion, given the fact that the report’s authors calculated their statistics using server IP addresses only,” Grimes explains. “Installing a secure Web server is easy; hosting secure applications on top of that secure base is the true challenge.”