Bill Lunam 22 August 2011
Recently I attended a technology briefing given by a local distributor. They covered a number of products with a theme around protection and recovery.
The first product was Shadow Protect which is one of a number of data imaging products that can be used to reduce the recovery time in an outage. The presentation covered the existing product with which I’m already familiar. However they did mention that the next release is due out in 4, 6 or 8 weeks (the time frame varied during the presentation!) and will have improvements around offsite replication. They did not say what those were, but they did say that this will better suit the NZ market place (focussed on internet backups over ADSL and ADSL 2 internet connections).
To me, that mention of ADSL was the real theme of the continuing move into “The Cloud”. Automated offsite backup replication over the Internet is a hot topic and one which I sincerely hope will be simplified with fibre-to-the-door. The internet has been available in NZ for almost 20 years. Most businesses still have the same internet access technology (ADSL) as they used in the year 2000. We also tend to use it for the same things as we did back then. The Cloud and cheaper (I hope) fibre access will change the landscape, by this I don’t mean just speed. I mean what we do with the internet is changing, for the first time in a decade.
The Cloud theme then continued with presentations around products by Sunbelt, WebRoot and GFI. Again, what stood was the move into the 'cloud'. Rhys Kerrigan mentions in his article “The changing world of security threats” - that "Trend AV" are moving their AntiVirus scanning into the cloud. WebRoot are doing the same. It means that the program on the PC will be only a small part of the application. The virus signatures will be held on the web rather than locally and the application will compare activity against the web based signatures. I’m not sure how this will work if you don’t have internet access! But again it does indicate that better internet connections will be needed.
There was a similar cloud factor in discussions around archiving e-mail. There can be lots of reasons for archiving e-mail, reducing mailbox sizes for faster searching and backup being one. Another very important one is for protection of information. During the briefing a number of different E-mail archiving applications were presented. Most hooked into an Exchange Server and moved mail out of Exchange into the archive. One works with almost any mail server by using "SMTP Envelope Journaling". A mail server (like MDaemon) uses this to forward a copy of all email to the cloud based archive. This does not reduce the size of the local mail. But it does mean that there is a separate secure copy of all email and its all backed up. Now you can go to the web and retrieve an email which was deleted by a staff member that left a year ago!
As a result of attending I was given an Android tablet to test. The Viewsonic tablet looks and feels like an I-pad. It is much faster than the Windows based tablets I have seen but it has not proven to be as useful. Android is an Open Source Operating System so each manufacturer can change it to suit there needs. That also means that not all Android applications will run on all versions of Android. This tablet did allow me to hook easily into our Exchange email. But the email client is very feature poor, in fact it has less features than the client on my Windows phone.
Android was written for phones so it is fast and light. The trade off seems to be less features out of the box, this table did not come with an application for writing notes. I downloaded and install one for reading and editing word documents, but it’s not working with the attachments on the email client. I’m unable to download useful Google Android applications (like Google maps) because they will only run on Google Android phones. I also found that a lot of applications that I could download and install would not work. Because they needed non compatible applications like Google maps before they would work. On the whole the experience has been disappointing. The devices feels and looks fantastic. But when push comes to shove, it’s not allowing me to work faster or smarter. All this comes down to the divided market place in open source applications. Google Android has become the standard in this space, at the time of writing the ViewSonic tablet is not using a certified Google version and so is locked out of accessing many of the cool Android features. There is a Windows 7 version of this tablet and I’m keen to try that.
To end on a lighter note, when looking for useful applications I came across a Windows widget for the Vista/Windows 7 side bar. The “Unit Convertor” is easy to use and offers more choices than any I have seen before. What tickled me with this one is that under energy you can convert to and from standard measures such as joules, Newton meters, Foot pounds and Big Mac’s.
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=bd024972-1abe-441c-b7b8-283cd1b1be79&bt=1&pl=1