The OpenDNS Domain Tagging system represents the best of people-powered security: Community members from around the world work together to efficiently and accurately categorize the Internet’s content so OpenDNS users can easily allow the sites they want on their networks, and block the ones they don’t.

Join the tens of thousands of security researchers, academics, concerned parents and netizens in the OpenDNS community and get involved this month. With 2011 marking the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, we’re inspired to bury our own Golden Tickets.

Here’s how the contest works: Vote on a domain in August and you could be lucky enough to uncover one of the 56 Golden Tickets planted in the Domain Tagging system. There’s no limit to the number of domains you vote on, so the more you vote the better your chances of finding a winner. The best part about this contest — the more domains you help categorize, the safer you’re making the Internet for millions of families, schools and businesses around the world.

Prizes include one grand prize of an OpenDNS hoodie, five awesome OpenDNS t-shirts and 50 OpenDNS coozies (the kind that are designed to keep your drink of choice cold).

The fine print: Each Golden Ticket can be discovered only once, by one person. Winners will be notified via email after August 31, 2011 once the contest is finished.  The Golden Ticket contest starts today and ends officially on August 31. You have to be logged into your account to vote and win.

Good luck to all!  I hope you win one!  And make sure you keep all won prizes away from that mean old Mr. Slugworth.

It’s SysAdmin Appreciation Day and we’re celebrating by crowning our 2011 SysAdmin of the Year and worthy winners in six other categories. The nominations poured in and we challenged a talented panel of OpenDNS engineers and SysAdmins to determine the winners. After an arduous deliberation process (involving multiple energy drinks and trips to the snack room) our team chose John Cannon, lone IT pro for a rapidly expanding group of BMW and Mercedes dealerships, as the 2011 SysAdmin of the Year! John was nominated for the Neat Freak category but his before and after pictures told of a patient and organized SysAdmin simultaneously managing IT for five locations while implementing a massive and challenging overhaul.

John joins an elite group of winners who raised the bar for each of the categories below:

Best Disaster Response Award
After Hurricane Ike struck, Hart Energy’s servers were trapped in an area without power and nearly impossible to access through the debris and downed power lines. Mark Chiles wins the Disaster Response Award for his heroic actions to save the servers, including blindly descending ten flights of stairs in pitch-black darkness and using his own body to save a server after nearly falling down the staircase!

Shoestring Budget Award
James Gamble and Brian Albury might work at a children’s museum but when it comes to saving money, they’re not kidding around. They receive this year’s Shoestring Budget Award for their uncompromising commitment to saving the non-profit museum hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by repurposing old machines, using open source and free software, and standardizing company practices, all while leveraging a limited budget that is funded by grants and donations.

Flying Solo Award
Eric Szymczyk is a one-man IT show at a large public relations firm in Boston. Eric spent two highly-caffeinated days moving his entire firm into new offices, including the deployment of new laptops for all employees! He singlehandedly moved the servers, racks, cables, phone system, scanners, printers and more while somehow managing to save the company thousands in the process. We’re in awe of this work, but we still think he humbly tells it best: “I have been a light bulb replacer, a surge protector switcher-on guy, a virus fixer, a heavy box delivery man, a server installer, an iPhone troubleshooter, a network architect and more… my name is Eric, I am IT, and I fly solo.”

Large-Scale Deployment Award
Ryan Pierce was the stand-out winner for the large-scale deployment award because faced the difficult challenge of implementing a system-wide upgrade across dozens of healthcare facilities throughout California. He did so with limited support resources, an executive team that didn’t see value in an IT department, and the responsibility of simultaneously handling all IT tickets for the organization! Now, he boasts the trust and support of the executive team, HIPAA compliance, and the successful completion of a $1.5M upgrade.

DevOps Award
This was an easy one. Elite SysAdmin and engineer Richard Crowley cut his teeth at OpenDNS, where he learned a massive amount about operations and systems. We couldn’t be more proud of his new tool and venture, blueprint, and Richard couldn’t be more deserving of this award. Blueprint allows users to reverse-engineer running servers, output a blueprint, and recreate the server. The tool has already helped numerous SysAdmins quickly take existing machines and add them to automation frameworks. Plus, it’s completely open source, free, and available at Github.com, where more than 800 people are following its progress. A perfect fit for the DevOps award.

Neat Freak Award
If this year’s nominations are any indication of industry standards, it appears that the freakishly neat are multiplying! From the countless nominations we received there was one clear standout. Thanks to David Korté’s painstaking network diagramming, his server racks look like a work of art.

Our amazing list of winners will receive a bounty of gifts fit for a SysAdmin. Their prize package includes caffeinated treats from ThinkGeek, OpenDNS swag, and perhaps most importantly, bragging rights to their friends and colleagues.

Thank you to everyone who entered and raised the bar for the 2011 OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards.

Five years of OpenDNS. We’ve come so far and have much to be thankful for.

In 2005, before launching OpenDNS, I went to talk with some of the leading DNS experts to get feedback — and the feedback I received was consistent. They didn’t think what I wanted to do was even possible, and if it was possible, they didn’t think anybody would want it. Smart guys, but wrong on both counts.

Today, we are the largest DNS service in the world with more than 30,000,000 users. 30,000,000! And we’ve never had a global outage. If we were an ISP, we’d be one of the largest in the world.

We compete against Google, which launched a service following ours in 2009. And we’re winning. We compete against Symantec, a $14 billion dollar company that has watched us build market-share with consumer and enterprise customers who prefer OpenDNS as a security solution. And we make the Internet safer, faster and more reliable for more than 1% of the world’s Internet users.

We’ve done this with your help, your feedback, your evangelism, and your encouragement. And that’s why we thank you, and make sure to put you first with everything we do.

Some Major Milestones:

• In July 2006, we opened our doors and let in the first packets, within a month, we handled a total of over 1 billion DNS queries. Today we handle over 30 billion a day.
• In April of 2009, not quite 3 years after our launch, we handled 10 billion queries in a single day. We are supersonic at this point!
• In the summer of 2009 — skipping our vacation — we pushed our mission of a safer, faster Internet for everyone forward with our good friends at NETGEAR to deliver Live Parental Controls and OpenDNS across millions of households.
• 2009 ended with the launch of OpenDNS Enterprise, our service to deliver a safer Internet to businesses small and large around the world. Today we have some of the largest companies in the world on our enterprise platform.
• In June of 2010 we discovered that 1 out of 3 public schools in the US was using OpenDNS to provide a safer and faster Internet to students across America. Today, we see over 40,000 schools around the world!
• July 2011 welcomes our fifth birthday and our announcement that we now have more than 30,000,000 people using OpenDNS every day. And based on our numbers, the countdown to 40,000,000 isn’t far away.

The Road Ahead

We’re a startup and we move fast. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when you’re heads-down, focused on an immediate product launch or set of features. In order to make sure we stay on course, we have a few perspectives shaping the decisions we make.

• Speed and reliability matter more than ever. The number of people connected to the Internet around the world continues to grow at an astounding rate and the desire to access content quickly, safely and securely has only increased.
• We look at the major security companies like Symantec, Websense, Blue Coat and others and see major gaps in their offerings and we think there is a better way to secure the myriad devices connecting to our customers’ networks.
• We know that despite tons of various malware solutions in the market, they all stink for one reason or another.
• We know that people care about privacy, but if you ask 100 people to explain what privacy means you will get 100 different answers.
• We know there are a lot of different devices connecting to the Internet now and having custom software deployed for each version of Android, iOS, Windows or Mac is unmanageable.
• We believe in defense in depth as the only sound security strategy and we want to help our customers practice it. We are sympathetic to the CIO who doesn’t want ten different security solutions on his or her network, but history has shown that the magical security appliance that does everything will let you down every time.

Thank You

OpenDNS is poised for even more stratospheric growth in the next five years. As a company, we are becoming more mature in our thinking, and our goals continue to expand. With each hill we climb, the horizon of our potential positive impact continues to broaden.

As an engineering-driven company, we’re lucky to have assembled such an amazing engineering organization that delivers our non-stop service. We have consistently recruited amazing people, and managed to raise the already-high bar with every new hire.

I speak for everyone on the team here when I say: Thank you for using OpenDNS!

PS, we’re running an amazing infographic of OpenDNS statistics on our homepage for a couple days, but here’s a link to it in case you miss it.

I received two emails this week asking me if OpenDNS would work with Mac OS X 10.7 (aka Lion). Whenever a new version of a major operating system comes out, I get a couple questions like this. Of course, the answer is yes. OpenDNS works great with Mac OS X 10.7. Lion even has improved IPv6 support, which makes using our IPv6 Sandbox even easier.

The entire point of OpenDNS is to give you the power to protect all the devices you manage — at home, at work, or on the road. Any device, anywhere, any time.

So next time a new version of an operating system comes out, or some cool new network-connected device is unveiled, chances are that someone is already running OpenDNS on it; connecting with confidence.

Have a wonderful Friday, no matter what operating system you’re reading this on.

At OpenDNS, we think the SysAdmins and IT pros are the real unsung heroes. Even though you spend every day quietly averting disaster and keeping the network up and running, it’s not often you get the recognition you deserve. As you’ve probably learned from recent blog posts, the OpenDNS offices have been buzzing with projects meant to help us, and people around the world, celebrate SysAdmins.

We’re making it our priority for the entire month of July to celebrate SysAdmins everywhere! That’s why we’re not only throwing an epic bash in downtown San Francisco to celebrate SysAdmins, we’re also reminding bosses that come July 29 you deserve some special (and preferably caffeinated) recognition.

How the OpenDNS Boss Reminder Service works: Sending your boss a reminder is easy and they’ll never know you were the one who tipped us off. Simply fill out the form with your details and your boss’ name and email* and we’ll take care of the rest. A few days before the July 29 holiday your boss will receive an email that looks like this:

*Don’t worry. We won’t email you or your boss for anything except the friendly reminder service.

I talk to our customers often, and lately I’ve been hearing that they are seeing more and more diversity in the types of devices connecting to their network. More importantly, these devices are not being provisioned by the IT folks, but are being brought in by the employees. iPads, iPhones, Droids, Tablets and others are connecting into the enterprise network. Unlike a decade ago where IT could easily say no to an unmanaged device, it’s harder today when everyone wants to use one, including your CEO.

As the IT guy or gal, it’s your job to both protect the network and make it accessible, two roles often at odds. I’ve discovered that many of you are using OpenDNS to provide malware and botnet protection, along with all our other services, to help protect these devices. Since our service lives in the network, it doesn’t require any on-device client software and we don’t care if you’re running iOS 4.3 or 5.0 — or Android Froyo or Gingerbread. Our protection is device agnostic.

It turns out though, we aren’t the only ones seeing this trend. Analyst firm IDC published a study this week on this exact topic, the consumerization of IT. They note that employees are increasingly using laptops, smartphones and tablets to get work done.

In addition, increasingly those employees are working in coffee shops, on airplanes, even while traveling in cars (as passengers, of course). Traditional security appliances and services weren’t designed for this. It’s an IT problem for companies, which means it becomes a problem for network admins, everywhere.

I am interested in these kinds of studies because I know that OpenDNS is a solution.

For those new to our service, OpenDNS provides a simple malware blocking service that’s more powerful than anything else available. By simply pointing to our IPs and configuring your settings in our web-based dashboard, you can immediately protect your network.

Back to the study. Some impactful, but not altogether surprising, stats:

• 83% of IT people called “Security Concerns” the greatest barrier to actually enabling employees to use mobile devices for work. (Even though they’re clearly already using them.)
• 40% of devices used to access business applications are personally owned in 2011, up from 30% in 2010.
• Only 50% of employees reported their desktop PC as the most critical business device in 2010. But even less, only 35% expect it to be in 2012.
• 74% of IT people consider employee-provided tablets as a security threat.
• 80% of IT people described security as an “Urgent” concern.

Lastly, Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOm, published a neat infographic of the major stats from this study. If you are the IT hero in your office, it makes for some sobering reading, and if you aren’t, you might want to point your IT staff over to take a look.

What do you think?

Join our free webinar, focused exclusively on our rock-solid, best-in-class malware protection this Thursday, July 14th, at 11am PT, and learn how OpenDNS can secure your network from malware and botnets once and for all.

Two weeks ago, we unveiled major improvements to our malware blocking.  In addition to blocking malicious hostnames, we now block hostnames that resolve to known malicious IP addresses. That’s a big step forward, and an industry first.

Hear from the expert: David Ulevitch, our founder and CEO, will spend a snappy thirty minutes detailing, first, the threat malware presents to organizations, and, second, how our improved malware protection can cut malware off at the knees and block command and control communication. Effectively, this renders malware harmless to your network, and secures every device, from laptops to smartphones to tablets, used by your employees. Have specific questions about how our malware protection works? This is your opportunity to get answers.

Date: Thursday, July 14

Time: 11 AM PDT to 11:30 AM PDT

Don’t miss out. Sign up now, and don’t forget to invite your colleagues.

We look forward to seeing you there!