The Technology Life

← Getting Ready for the RSA Conference

Key Takeaways from RSA

March 8th, 2010 · No Comments

I’m back and recovered from a hectic week at RSA. I had the chance to exchange ideas with a number of attendees and attend a few sessions as well as meet with several clients. Here are my key takeaways from the week.

What was “hot”? No doubt, discussions of the Cloud and security dominated the show. Sessions on Cloud security were typically full and people turned away (the vigilant room monitors don’t allow standing in the room due to the fire code). My biggest takeaway: The Cloud isn’t one thing, so securing the Cloud can’t be a single thing either. The vendors sense the need and opportunity and are starting to deliver many more innovative solutions here (such as encryption services). Many are using the term “Cloud” to generate interest, but once you get past the hype, real solutions are emerging.

Application whitelisting remains a topic of interest and several vendors were demonstrating their next-generation of manageable application control/whitelising solutions. Key takeaway: The enforcement of an application whitelist is a commodity (Windows, Linux and Mac can do this in the OS). It’s the ongoing management of the list and how exceptions are handled that will make or break an application control implementation.

Virtualization and security was hot again this year. Multiple vendors are demonstrating innovative solutions based on introspection using VMsafe. Altor Networks won the Innovation Sandbox with their virtual firewall solution. Key takeaway: The point solution vendors are innovating rapidly, but the slumbering (lumbering?) giants are taking notice.

A couple of key quotes that really resonated with me:

From a lawyer on the “Big Brother” panel in regards to helping customers easily and transparently use technology more safely: “The vendors should focus less on the dashboard and more on what’s under the hood” – something like that – essentially saying that we as an industry don’t think enough about how to bake safety into computing versus rely on competent users to understand what is going on and make the right decision.

And from the CEO of Qualys: “The Cloud is doing to the IT industry and information security what the Internet did to publishing”. Yup. Our industry is being massively disrupted. As customers of these vendors, this is a good thing. More competition, reducing switching costs and lower costs are all a direct outcome. Exciting times!

Share:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Tags: Cloud · Information Security · Virtualization Security

0 responses so far ↓

• There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.

Leave a Comment

Thanks Neil for your interesting insights heading out of RSA 2010.

iPhone Apps on the iPad

Monday, 8 March 2010

Brian X. Chen at Wired, on the default iPhone apps that aren’t present on the iPad:

But if you recall, the iPhone ships with some apps that appear to be left out from the iPad: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. What gives?

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but I’m willing to guess Apple will just stick those apps in the App Store for a free download, and they’ll be the same apps as they were on the iPhone. After all, it’s unlikely there’s much to do with those particular apps to make them visually special for the iPad.

Actually, it’s sort of the opposite problem. It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.

(There is, alas, no secret “widget” mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)

Some (maybe even most?) iPhone games will work well as-is, on the iPad. Not just technically, but in terms of being fun and feeling right. But non-game iPhone apps that are just upscaled on the iPad are going to feel weird. And the run the app in a little iPhone-sized rectangle in the middle of an otherwise black screen mode is even weirder, I think. A 3.5-inch screen is just totally different than a 10-inch screen.

On the whole, it’s actually rather un-Apple-like that they’re even allowing iPhone apps to run unmodified on the iPad. It’s a huge compatibility win, of course: an instant market of thousands and thousands of titles. Given the runaway success of the App Store and the fundamental technical similarities between the iPhone and iPad, it’s the sort of decision that most companies wouldn’t even think twice about. But it’s undeniably a sub-optimal user experience. iPhone apps on the iPad are a “good enough” thing, not an “exactly right” thing. Most companies — the ones that wouldn’t even see it as a tough decision whether to allow iPhone apps to run on the iPad — settle for “good enough” all the time. Apple, on the other hand, usually goes for “exactly right”.

I’ll go so far as to predict that by the time Monday April 5 rolls around, it’ll already be an established meme that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps are to the iPad what Classic apps were to Mac OS X — something you’ll make do with “for now” but can’t wait to abandon for the real thing.

I’m not saying it’s a mistake that Apple is allowing the iPad to run iPhone apps. I’m just saying that the iPad is not a big iPhone.

Previous:

Attention Is the Real Resource

I so can not wait...

Today in insane, hilarious push polls: Apple iPhone addiction among college students. Conducted by Stanford University researchers, this poll actually asked whether respondents feel that their iPods are jealous of their iPhones. However, it missed a golden opportunity to ask if the students felt that their iPhones are jealous of their 30-racks of Natty Light (my estimate: 13.2% say yes).

The researchers surveyed 200 iPhone-owning students, 70% of whom have owned their iPhones less than one year, on their oft-inappropriate relationships with the gadget. Some of the most important (read: funniest) findings:

• 75% admit to falling asleep with their iPhones. 0% would admit what happened when the lights went off.
• 30% of the respondents checked the box reading "I consider my iPhone to be a 'doorway to the world,'" which allows the researchers to say "30% of respondents consider their iPhone to be a 'doorway to the world,'" even though nobody actually says that.
• Under the question "Losing my iPhone would be...", 41% checked "a tragedy." Write-in responses included "Betty White."
• 8% admitted that they at some point have thought "My iPod is jealous of my iPhone." 100% of those respondents giggled while telling their friends about that response.

The survey is framed like a serious inquisition into the possibility of iPhone addiction having disastrous social effects, but those involved are reluctant to actually brand iPhone addiction a medical problem on par with alcoholism or drug addiction. In fact, Tanya Luhrmann, who oversaw the survey, said, "I don't think it is really unhealthy. I think they really like their iPhone."

There's also the little problem of whether the choice of smartphone really matters--modern smartphones, be it a Motorola Droid, Palm Pre, Google Nexus One, or BlackBerry Curve, pretty much all do the same stuff, and their owners have essentially the same relationship with them as iPhone owners have with their smartphone of choice. But until we have a survey that details how many Droid owners "pat" their phones, we'll have to just defer to these results.

[Via LiveScience]

Related Stories: Can the iPhone Be an Enterprise Tool? Apple iPhone, Beloved by Bears The Gross Inconvenience of the New iPod Shuffle

Topics: Technology, Magazine, surveys, iphone, Apple, addiction, Science and Technology, Technology, Apple iPhone, Consumer Electronics, Electronics

As an Iphone user, I know this to be totally true. After using blackberry's for over a decade, the user experience has caused me to use my smart phone in a fundamentally different way. It's tough to explain the why...

March 7th, 2010

The Insecurity of Secure Clouds

Posted by Dave Greenfield @ 5:18 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, Security, Uncategorized

Tags: Data Center, Data Centers, Storage, Security, Hardware..., Data Management, Dave Greenfield

TalkBack

• Print
• Email
• Thumbs UpThumbs Down
• +0
  0

In light of the recent Google hacking, businesses might reconsider their cloud-based strategies. Ostensibly cloud-based services can offer business a better security profile at a lower price point than would be possible if companies built the services themselves. Take data centers, for example. Building a modern data center can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with security measures constituting a hefty price tag encompassing, but not limited to, security cards, biometrics, dry contact sensors, IP-based camera surveillance, security guards, fire suppression systems, and power generators.

Joining a large group let’s you distribute those costs, but it also has an adverse effect of clustering  those accounts under one big- usually very well known- name.  When it comes to safety, there has always been an unwritten rule that says anonymity presents fewer dangers.  When one runs his own data center, then typically, far fewer people are going to be aware of its existence than would be aware of Google (App Engine) or Amazon (EC2)- to mention a couple or for that matter the names of the other clients sharing that datacenter.

The better known name coupled with the far greater resources makes them much bigger targets for hackers and thieves looking to steal information and capital.  You can be sure, there is going to be no consideration spared when the big target it hit, either.  There, it seems that investing ones resources on a cloud-based app only serves to increase risk, in contrary to popular belief.

So is it safer to maintain the low profile that comes with a self-run center or is the hype true?  Are clouds the safer way to build your company’s IT strategy? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

David Greenfield is the principal in STAnalytics. a global technology-marketing consultancy where he advises enterprises on emerging technologies. See David Greenfield's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Email David Greenfield

Subscribe to Team Think via Email alerts or RSS.

Google for the past three years has been trying to upend the enterprise market’s leading software suite, Microsoft Office, with its cloud-based Google Apps. With cloud services now being widely adopted in the enterprise, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s offering is starting to pull ahead.

Google currently claims some 2 million entities as Google Apps users, from small businesses to large corporations such as Motorola and Genentech to cities such as Los Angeles and educational institutions such as Yale University. “Google Apps are growing quite rapidly, especially in the educational sector,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, told me. The number of people actively using Google Apps now tops 20 million.

The primary driver of Google Apps is no doubt Google Mail. Based on the extremely popular and excellent Gmail service, Google Mail is gaining popularity because it works with established products such as Microsoft Outlook and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. When I asked Sheth if Google was going to announce Google Buzz for the enterprise, he said: “We are planning to roll it out for businesses but with requisite policy and privacy controls.” Though when that’s likely to happen he wouldn’t say.

Google has seen a marked change in people’s attitudes towards cloud-based services such as Google Apps, which has resulted in it signing on dozens of large companies as customers in the last year alone. “Three years ago people said no way, and now more and more organizations see the benefits of cloud-based services,” said Ben Lutch, director of engineering for Google Apps. As he and Sheth explained, Google Apps’ biggest advantages are its availability and its disaster recovery features, the result of its ability to do “synchronous replication” very quickly and very cheaply.

All Google Apps are written on top of the Google File System, which gives the company the unique ability to not only write data to multiple locations insider a specific data center, but also across the multiple data center locations that make up the global Google infrastructure. Since these globally dispersed locations are connected to each other with very high-speed fiber connections, Google can literally save bits of your information across the globe. (Related: Google’s Infrastructure Is Its Strategic Advantage.)

“Because we are using a vertically integrated set of hardware and software, that essentially frees us from being dependent on third parties, where as other companies are dependent on these third parties,” Lutch said. “We do this to ensure that we are front and center of our infrastructure needs and we don’t have to wait for others to really help us.” Google has developed its own hardware — both computing- and communications-oriented — to work with its own software, which is essentially the Google File System.

“Software is our secret sauce,” boasted Lutch. “Our infrastructure is built on the assumption that there is and will be a failure somewhere so we have put an emphasis on working around those failures. We have done so by focusing primarily on software.”

A post on the Google Enterprise Blog offers additional detail:

In larger businesses, companies will add a storage area network (SAN), which is a consolidated place for all storage. SANs are expensive, and even then, you’re out of luck if your data center goes down. So the largest enterprises will build an entirely new data center somewhere else…..But if, heaven forbid, disaster strikes both your data centers, you’re toast. How do you know if your disaster recovery solution is as strong as you need it to be? It’s usually measured in two ways: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is how much data you’re willing to lose when things go wrong, and RTO is how long you’re willing to go without service after a disaster. Enterprises without SANs may be literally trucking tapes back and forth between data centers, so as you can imagine their RPOs and RTOs can stretch into days. As for small businesses, often they just have to start over….For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant failover. To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that’s per employee. That doesn’t even include the cost of the applications. The exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. We also replicate all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: (subscription required, free trial available)

• Report: Social Media in the Enterprise
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Threats Loom Large for Microsoft’s Email and Collaboration Platforms
• Google Buzz’s True Home Is in the Enterprise

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user OmarCaf, in-post image courtesy of Flickr user Andy Ciordia

As the feature set with Google Apps continues to grow, the customers kicking its tires will also continue to grow. The pressure on Microsoft's license revenue is ratcheting up...The next two years will prove to be a wild ride for both companies as the shift to the cloud intensifies.

TripIt, the handy travel tool, has raised $7 million in a third round of funding led by Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We were on a track to get profitable with that [previous] round but we’re just increasingly feeling like we’re scratching the service of the opportunity here,” CEO Gregg Brockway told us today. (TripIt has now raised $13.1 million, including its last round circa April 2008.)

The new TripItgroups feature shows corporate users when their employees will be in certain cities.

TripIt aims to help users organize and access their travel information, and derives its revenue from a paid product ($69/year for alerts and alternate flights), advertising and licensing deals with travel agents. The basic service formats all your reservations to be readable from mobile apps (including offline) through the simple mechanism of forwarding emails to plans@tripit.com.  This week the San Francisco-based company ventured into the enterprise market, with a new product that enables users to contribute their itineraries to a company group. That’s currently offered for free, but Brockway said more premium options are on the way.

Brockway prefers to talk about TripIt’s growth by number of trips planned per month by its users: up to 230,000 in January of this year vs. 70,000 in January 2009. He said he aims to use the funding to make hires in mobile, business development, sales and marketing to add to TripIt’s 27-person, engineering-focused team.

While the idea of forwarding travel reservations to an email account is so simple it seems hard to justify $13 million in funding, the charm and promise is in TripIt’s integrations with accounts, services and devices, both internally developed and through its API. For instance, I’d love to see all the upcoming trips of my colleagues automatically plotted on our internal Google Apps calendar.

“Really the magic starts to happen when you aggregate information,” Brockway said. “When we take all the information we know about you and all the information we know about what’s going on in the world and give you actionable travel intelligence back.” TripIt competitors include WorldMate and Kayak.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

I was an early Worldmate user but found TripIT to be more useful. The ability to track all my airline and hotel points in a single dashboard was a tippingpoint for me. Check it out! They also recently added groups which lets companies share employee travel plans.

What do entrepreneurs do? They find an itch that needs to be scratched and go at it. After the devastating hurricane of 2005, New Orleans definitely had a lot of itches.

Years of effort to attract entrepreneurs and encourage locals to start something as an alternative to the corporate jobs that were lost are paying off. The city now boasts entrepreneurial enclaves like Entrepreneur's Row, Idea Village and Entergy Innovation Center, all of which is basically real estate housing startup efforts. And the Big Easy also counts several groups and events that have sparked a vibrant community, such as Net2NO, BarCamp, Social Media Club, Startup School, WordCamp, and TribeCon. Though New Orleans lacks an abundance of local capital, the state helps out with a 25% tax break for digital media companies, plus 10% on human capital costs.

It's still early days for this nascent hub, but one startup may put it on the map: Receivables Exchange. Started by a transplanted New Yorker, the company's product is a market for companies' receivable accounts. It recently closed a $17 million Series C round from Bain Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Prism Ventureworks.

Chris Schultz, president of Internet firm Voodoo Ventures, spoke with Fastcompany.com about what makes New Orleans' startup scene unique.

What makes New Orleans a great place for startups?

Well, I think New Orleans is a fantastic place for startups, and the city as you know has reinvented itself post Katrina, but some incredible things have happened and that starts with the people that have moved to New Orleans since Katrina. We have this incredible influx of young people, energetic people, people that wanted to be here and want to kind of be part of the recovery. And a lot of folks realized that the best way to do that was through creating jobs by starting companies, so a lot of interesting entrepreneurs moved down. The community in general I think became a lot more open.

More specifically, I'd say the bullet points would be it's the type of place that I think is right for our times right now from a cultural standpoint. It's an incredibly creative and historic city with a rich quality of life.

But why should anyone choose New Orleans?

Startups can be anywhere and obviously we recognize that we're not Silicon Valley or New York, but I think that the virtualization of business as a whole is really benefiting us down here. And so, people can choose to be here because of the quality of life and, significantly, the lower cost of living.

You can build a business for much less down here. So that's an important factor too. Finally, I'd say that one of the things that has been very significant down here is the organizational and governmental support for the startup community. The state government has a number of tax credit programs. They're geared at digital media and specifically modeled after one in the film industry. Six years ago they launched this, a 25% tax credit on money you spend in Louisiana. It vaulted Louisiana to the third largest production in the country after New York and California.

And they've just done the same thing with digital media--the same tax credit, up to 35% of what you spend on building a tech company. So they're very curious about it and providing credible support.

Are there particular types of startups that do better in New Orleans than others?

I think that we're honing in on our identity as a community. One thing we are seeing is purpose-driven companies. I don't want to give the impression [that it's] non-profits or purely cause-driven companies. But companies that, you know, sort of the triple bottom line. The idea of doing well while doing good. We're seeing a lot of those companies down here and I think that that really [matters to] the people that moved here after Katrina, wanting to build companies that are kind of purpose driven.

How would you say that New Orleans is better or different for entrepreneurs than other cities?

Well, that's a good question. I moved here from L.A. in 2002, above all for the quality of life and I mean by that, the people that are here. I was searching for authenticity and, you know, soulful people and people with character and strong character and that's a lot of what you find down here.

And I think that's sort of what attracts a lot of people here. In October, we did the first Tribe Conference, which is a conference about leveraging power of community to create change. And three of the speakers that came to the conference--one is from L.A., another from Virginia, and another guy--all moved down here after that conference. Literally, moved to New Orleans because of the connections they've made, and the power and the spirit of community down here.

12next ›last »

Judging from the audience’s positive reaction, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse hit the nail on the head Monday when he presented on wireless technology in the health care industry. He couldn’t have chosen a riper industry. Even beyond all the political noise, this is an industry in transformation. Pressure? You got it–cost cutting and a huge push to increase the quality of care for starters.

Hesse says one key to all of this is wireless. He delivered his keynote address to the HIMSS (Health Information and Management Systems Society) annual conference in Atlanta.

The ways that healthcare providers are using wireless to increase efficiency and better manage costs, Hesse told his audience, are achieving “some truly remarkable, transformative advancements in delivering faster, better patient care.”

He pointed to a slew of specific examples and noted caregivers are using smartphones equipped with medical applications, secure access to lab results, x-rays, vital signs, drug-to-drug interactions, and other important medical records. He said the trends point to a rising use of wireless data transactions and a growing dependence on the capacity that 4G technology delivers.

It’s fascinating to consider how wireless, particularly 4G, could transform the healthcare business. Information exchanges are becoming increasingly data-heavy – through applications such as streaming video, virtual office visits, radiologic image transmission, virtual collaboration, and other varied on-demand applications. That’s where 4G comes in; it has the bandwidth to handle the load and make these exchanges happen from almost anywhere.

Hesse described the changes that wireless is bringing and will continue to bring to healthcare as an “historic opportunity,” and it’s true. With the ability to access information easily and quickly, and have it available anywhere, the delivery of healthcare services makes more efficient use of providers’ time and resources, achieving the twin goals of lower costs and the highest-quality care.

The potential is huge. As one example Network World points out, ” A study released last summer by ABI Research projected that there will be approximately 15 million wireless telehealth sensors and devices in use by 2012, or more than double the number of wireless telehealth systems in use today. ABI says that these systems will be used primarily to “monitor and track the status of patients with chronic conditions” so that their providers can detect early warning signs before they become dangerous.

For a full written transcript of Dan Hesse’s keynote, visit HIMSS keynote.

Editor's other blog entries

Email

Bookmark ShareThis

Digg

Tweet This

Subscribe

Tags: 4G, Bandwidth, Dan Hesse, healthcare, HIMSS, telehealth, telemedicine

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:17 pm and is filed under IP networking, News & Event, cloud computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

-->
--> --> --> --> Google (NSDQ:GOOG) and Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) compete vigorously in areas like search, mobile devices, and SaaS applications, but when it comes to the channel, there's no comparing the two companies. This week, as Google celebrates the one-year anniversary of its Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program, the notion of Google becoming as synonymous with the channel as Microsoft is doesn't seem as far-fetched as it used to.

That's not to suggest that Google hasn't encountered difficulties along the way. Solution providers tend to regard vendor newcomers to the channel with the cold, appraising eye of a father sizing up his teenage daughter's first boyfriend. So when Google launched its program last February, many VARs that have built businesses around face-to-face interactions were skeptical. And in some early cases, their suspicions were confirmed.

Some VARs that tried to engage with Google were irked by being unable to reach a human company representative, and didn't appreciate being steered instead to Google's Web-based support. Daniel Duffy, CEO of Valley Network Solutions, a solution provider in Fresno, Calif., says that based on what he's seen from Google thus far, the company isn't quite ready to build meaningful channel relationships.

"Their application process and auto-e-mails don't even provide a phone number. By automating everything and eliminating humans wherever possible, Google doesn't make it easy to engage them at a human level," Duffy said. "You'd think that if they wanted to work with resellers, they'd make themselves a little more accessible."

Nonetheless, there are signs that Google sees building a channel as a learning process to which it's fully committed. Google says it's happy with the momentum of the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program, but it's also acknowledging areas that need improvement and vowing to keep the lines of communication open with channel partners.

"We know we're not doing all things as well as we could, but we're trying to improve. This means listening and making an effort to support and communicate with partners," Stephen Cho, director of Google Apps channels, told Channelweb.com earlier this week.

Google's use of Web-based support reflects the larger industry trend toward more online tools serving the channel community, but that's not the only way the company interacts with partners, Cho said. "In cases when it's possible for partners to be well served through a set of online tools to get problems solved, we're trying to take maximum advantage of that."

Shawn Wilkie, founder of Sheepdog, a Google Apps reseller in Nova Scotia, Canada, and a member of Google's initial group of 30 resellers, says the partnership "hasn't been perfect" but is definitely headed in a channel-friendly direction.

"We've had a lot of care and handling from Google, and they've escalated issues to senior management," said Wilkie. "We're working with Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies on opportunities we wouldn't have seen if we hadn't gone down the SaaS path with Google. Their openness and willingness to attack problems head-on to build a relationship with my company has been incredible."

While many SaaS vendors have built channel programs that bear little similarity to those with which legacy VARs are familiar, the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program is designed with both traditional and cloud-relevant elements, according to Cho. For example, Google is providing partners access to training, online materials, product functions, and best practices. In the future, Google plans to add general certifications to the program to ensure that partners have the appropriate skills, Cho said.

This year, Google plans to boost its channel resources for partner enablement and profitability, giving VARs the tools they need to get up to speed and deliver basic value added services such as implementation, integration, custom application development, and ongoing management, Cho said.

Does Google think it can attain the kind of channel cachet that Microsoft, arguably the IT industry's best large-scale channel program, has built up over the years? For now, Google is sticking to the humble approach and saying that it has much to learn before it can be considered a true channel master.

However, Google appears to have zeroed in on at least one area of Microsoft's channel program that has been a source of irritation for VARs.

Next: The Microsoft BPOS Effect

Just a few classics. Thanks to Guy for sharing!