Tag Archive for BYOD

| September 3, 2013
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802.11ac Wi-Fi Clears the Way for Collaboration

802.11ac Wi-Fi Clears the Way for CollaborationThe emerging gigabit 802.11ac, Wi-Fi standard is the current darling of the hype machine. The standard will be finalized in February 2014. However, that has not stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac routers, access points, and mobile devices. Shortel (SHOR) recently provided their opinion on what this means for your business.

IEEE 802.11acThe article points out that more people are using mobile apps and devices. Shortel calculates that a typical worker may have three IP addresses, while digital natives may have up to six IP addresses. These stats suggest that mobility has become a must-have and the author claims that 802.11ac can meet the needs of increasing mobility because 802.11ac is faster, more reliable, and delivers more Wi-Fi capacity. 802.11ac is:

  • Faster – 802.11ac is three times faster than 802.11n Wi-Fi. 802.11ac will deliver up to 1.3 Gbps, which is about three times faster than 802.11n. This capacity will be ideal for real-time applications, such as IP voice and streaming video. Faster data throughput means better battery life for mobile devices, too.
  • More reliable – 802.11ac is more reliable with less interference. 802.11ac operates at 5 GHz, which is far less crowded than the 2.4 GHz band that by 802.11b/g/n access points — as well as cordless phones, automatic garage door openers, and other home appliances. That means that there’s less interference from other Wi-Fi-enabled devices, which will result in a better user experience.
  • Improved throughput. 802.11ac uses multiple antennas for transmitting and receiving RF signals, and that means better data throughput. More specifically, MIMO, or Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output, is key to providing wireless performance that is more switch-like, compared to the shared media nature of 802.11n.

W-Fi Alliance logoShortel believes that Gigabit Wi-Fi can be a real asset for unified communications, streaming media, and other bandwidth-hungry apps. They plan to use the greater capacity of 802.11ac to support more devices and more apps. In the workplace, teams want to engage and share without hassle using modern collaboration tools with the devices of their choice creating the need for BYOD.

The newest generation of workers are digital natives, who are more inclined to use videoconferencing for quick chats or to share ideas. In addition, many people use tablets to stream media, and more organizations are turning to streaming media over Wi-Fi for digital signage, training, company meetings, and customer support. And those bandwidth-hungry applications will love the new gigabit Wi-Fi.

Wave 1 802.11ac only offers incremental benefits over 802.11nShoretel reassures those that have deployed an 802.11n WLAN recently, you don’t need to be in a hurry to move to 802.11ac. You can be confident in the investment that you made, as the first-generation 802.11ac will offer only incremental benefits over 802.11n. But if you are replacing old Wi-Fi or expanding your wireless LAN or looking to downsize your wired network in favor of wireless, you should weigh the options between 802.11n and the new 802.11ac.

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802.11ac will only get faster, the theoretical max speed of 802.11ac is just shy of 7Gbps, which you will never see in the wild, but don’t be surprised to see link speeds of 2Gbps or more in the next few years. At 2Gbps, you’ll get a transfer rate of 256MB/sec.

To reach such Wi-Fi speeds, chipset and device makers will have to figure out how to make second-generation chipsets with four or more 802.11ac streams in software and hardware. The engineers at Broadcom (BRCM), Qualcomm (QCOM), Marvell (MRVL), and Intel (INTC) are already working on ways to implementing four and eight-stream 802.11ac solutions. A lot of work will need to be done by the chipset and device makers to make sure that advanced features, such as beamforming, comply with the standard and are interoperable with other 802.11ac devices.

In general, then, you can certainly expect some impressive speeds from 802.11ac in situations where you don’t need the performance and reliability of wired GigE. But I do not believe that 802.11ac will replace a wired Gigabit Ethernet network just yet.

What do you think?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| August 8, 2013
Comments Off on Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?

Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?

Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?New research from Harvard implies that consumerization and BYOD can have an impact on how staff behaves. Carmen Nobel at HBS Working Knowledge wrote about research from post-doctoral research fellow Maarten Bos and Associate Professor Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School. They claim Your iPhone is Turning You Into a Wimp.

Your iPhone Turning You Into a WimpThe research says that in an experiment, people who had been using smartphone-sized iPod Touch devices were 47% less likely than desktop users to get up to try to find out why a researcher hadn’t come back after leaving the room to fetch paperwork so that participants could be paid. And of those who did take action, the iPod Touch users took 44% longer than desktop users to get up and look for the researcher. The research suggests that your hunched posture as you use a smartphone-sized device for just a few minutes makes you less likely to engage in power-related behaviors than people who have been using desktop computers.

Back painThe researchers claim that body posture inherent in operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back but your demeanor. A new study entitled iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects Our Behavior. It turns out that working on a larger machine causes users to act more assertively than working on a small one (like an iPad).

The study proves the positive effects of adopting expansive body postures – hands on hips, feet on the desk, and the like. According to the article, deliberately positioning the body in a “power pose” for just a few minutes actually affects body chemistry. They increase testosterone levels and decrease cortisol levels. This leads to higher confidence, and more willingness to take risks. According to a 2010 report by Andy Yap, Cuddy, and Dana Carney good posture leads to a greater sense of well-being,

Contractive body posturesContractive body postures like folded arms have the opposite effect.  Contractive body postures decrease testosterone and increasing cortisol. Bos and Cuddy wondered whether there might be behavioral ramifications from using electronic devices. The author says that many of us constrict our necks and hunch our shoulders when we use our phones. And statistics show that we use our phones a lot.

Americans spend an average of 58 minutes per day on their smartphones, according to a recent report from Experian Marketing Services. Talking accounts for only 26 percent of that time. The other 73% is devoted to texting, e-mail, social networking, and web-surfing – in other words, activities spent hunched over a little screen.

assertiveness and risk-taking behavior.Bos and Cuddy hypothesized that interacting with larger devices would lead to more expansive body postures. That in turn would lead to behaviors associated with power—including assertiveness and risk-taking behavior.

To test their hypothesis, Bos and Cuddy paid 75 participants $10 each and randomly assigned them to perform a series of tasks on one of four devices, each successively larger than the next: an iPod Touch, an iPad, a MacBook Pro laptop, or an iMac desktop computer. Each participant sat alone in a room during the experiment, monitored by a research assistant.

ClockWhen the participants were done with the tasks, the researcher pointed to a clock in the room and said, “I will get some forms ready for you to sign so I can pay you and you can leave. If I am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk.” Rather than returning in five minutes, though, the researcher waited a maximum of ten minutes, recording whether and/or when the participant had come out to the front desk.

The article reports that device size substantially affected whether the participant left the room after waiting the requisite five minutes. Of the participants using a desktop computer, 94 percent took the initiative to fetch the experimenter. For those using the iPod Touch, only 50 percent left the room.

And among those who did leave the room, the device size seemed to affect the amount of time they waited to do so. The bigger the device was, the shorter the wait time. On average, desktop users waited 341 seconds before fetching the experimenter, for instance, while iPod Touch users waited an average of 493 seconds.

expansive body postures“The steady increase of waiting time is locked in step with the size of the device,” Harvard’s Bos says. “I have never before in my life seen such a beautiful effect.” The results indicate that expansive body postures lead to power-related behaviors. This happens even in cases where the posture is incidentally induced by the size of the gadget or computer. Mr. Bos concludes that a break from your  mobile phone is needed to be powerful,  “...  you need at least a few minutes of interacting with a device, or, more importantly, of being in a specific posture related to that device, before you find effects.”

In the meantime, the article suggests it may be a good idea to avoid the smartphone immediately before your next big meeting. Texting up until the boss starts speaking may make you look busy, but it may make you act meek. “We won’t tell anyone not to interact with those devices just before doing something that requires any kind of assertiveness,” Bos says. “Mostly because people won’t listen: They will do it anyway...”

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Professor Cuddy’s power poses theory says that certain body stances, such as standing with your legs apart and your hands on your hips, or opening up your chest area, bathe your cortex in testosterone, a hormone associated with assertiveness and the willingness to take risks. Meanwhile, they also reduce cortisol, the stress hormone. On the other hand, low power poses—crossing your arms over your chest, say, or bunching your shoulders—increase neural levels of cortisol and reduce testosterone, resulting in more stress and less confidence.

Does this have implications for BYOD? The evidence seems to indicate that staff seeking advancement will gravitate toward tablets. Offering a larger device to a normally shy worker will make them more assertive.

Look around the office do your observations match the researcher’s implications?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| May 28, 2013
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Can SDN Save IT?

Can SDN Save IT?In a recent article “SDN Spreads Its Wings And Starts To Fly” on No Jitter Bob Emmerson writes that for Software Defined Networks (SDN) to take off and live up to its promise of a new area in ICT, an enterprise based ecosystem with key enterprise players must develop. He does not believe that SDN has made sufficient inroads into the enterprise, he writes, “.. so far most of the emphasis in Software Defined Networks (SDN) has been the virtual network architecture,” he continues, that the potential of SDN requires the enterprise, ” … the emergence of a new ICT era … can only come–via an ecosystem comprising key players in the enterprise space.”

Mr. Emmerson writes that SDN makes the network more valuable to the organization. “No longer is the networking infrastructure viewed as merely providing fast connectivity between users, servers, and storage.”

He explains that in an SDN-enabled network features are applications that run as individual processes and software packages on Ethernet switches. They can be downloaded when more services and features are required. There are also extensive scripting capabilities as well additional layers of intelligence that perform tasks like identity management to integrate security and policy enforcement that identifies, locates, and authenticates connected devices and users.

The centralized management platforms use network-level intelligence to replace the duties performed by a PC’s Operating System. These platforms automate tasks, like assigning profiles, and they also allow resources to be added, dropped, or relocated via a Web interface.

Comparing apples and organgesThe article argues that SDN can be used to converge networks. With SDN he argues that 6 networks can be converged on top of the regular wide-area infrastructure. He proposes that enterprises can converge their WLAN/BYOD, Unified Communications (UC), Physical Security for surveillance, Audio-Video Bridging, and HPC into a single network with SDN. These “silo” solutions become part of a single unified edge in an SDN environment. The network OS will immediately recognize new devices, phones, access points, or switches that use the OpenFlow communications protocol, and they will be configured automatically. This feature also applies to new employees as well as those that get a new position in the company. Rights will be assigned automatically according to their job title.

Network 1. WLAN/BYOD: The author predicts a new generation of Access Points (APs) that lowers the cost of deploying and operating a secure, reliable 802.11n WLAN, by using SDN acts as a virtual controller and coordinate the operation of neighboring APs. The SDN virtual controller handles BYOD and other security issues automatically. When a new device is detected, the relevant privileges and policies, determined by the network administrator for the device owner are granted automatically. No other process is required.

Network 2. Unified Communications: UC is a particularly interesting application according to the article. The article states that SDN can address concerns about bandwidth-hungry services like video streaming impacting other media. The issue can be addressed in real-time. If congestion is detected, then the management platform will dynamically allocate additional resources for the duration of the session. It’s that simple Mr. Emmerson concludes.

Network 3. Physical Security: On the physical security network, No Jitter reports that software intelligence embedded in the operating system automates tasks including IP surveillance camera and device discovery, configuration, authentication, power management via Power over Ethernet, and network policy assignment. Automated device discovery is enabled via LLDP.

Network 4. Audio-Video Bridging: Mr. Emmerson says that AVB technology is available on the switches. If AVB is available on network switches (rb- You may want to check with Cisco (CSCO) on the cost of their AV systems before you put it on a switch the TX9000 costs like $300,000.00) If you can swing the money, benefits include reduced complexity of cabling and installations, interoperability between networking devices, and a reduced need for complex network setup and management. The infrastructure negotiates and manages the network for optimal prioritized media transport.

Network 5. High-Performance Computing: The No Jitter article says that High-Performance Computing (HPC) can use SDN to eliminate the Fiber Channel network typically used to connect big data storage to HPC boxes. The author claims that the high-speed, low-latency communications needed by HPC can now be met with 40 Gbps Ethernet in the data center and SDN. He says, “Fiber Channel can go away.”

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Mr. Emmerson concludes that SDN can solve many of the evils that plague IT. He writes that “SDN enables the consolidation of all the various network types that enterprises employ, and it automates many of the routine management tasks. In turn, this results in the ability to run more efficient communications tasks and to operate in a unified corporate environment.” (rb- especially if you use Extreme (EXTR) equipment)

I do agree with several other conclusions he makes in the article. He says that SDN is an IT game-changer, “The game it’s changing is the closed, proprietary world of networking with its vertically integrated hardware, slow innovation and artificially high margins: a world that hasn’t changed much for decades.” Did I almost hear the C_ _ _o word in there?

SDN reality checkHe breathlessly concludes that all that ails IT will be cured by SDN, “… the benefits of managing one network instead of different silos, the real-time automation of configuration and resource allocations tasks, and the tight integration of devices and the network will lead to efficiencies of scale and facilitate the development of next-generation services. SDN is enabling IT to make better use of corporate resources: to do more while operating in an era of tight budgets and a problematic economy.” Yeah but there also has to be someone to break down the silos and get the video guys and the facilities guys to give up some of their turf and headcount.

What do you think?

Is the biggest challenge to SDN technical or political?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 21, 2013
Comments Off on Tablet Info

Tablet Info

Outside the office, workers turn to the tablet over the PC

Outside the office, workers turn to the tablet over the PCTablet computing is not overtaking smartphones or PCs in the enterprise, but they’re definitely carving a new business niche for themselves a survey conducted by cloud content management firm Alfresco shows. According to the data cited by GigaOM, tablets have replaced the PC as the go-to workstation for working at home and on the road.

The Alfresco study found that staff is using tablets:

  • 48% of enterprise employees are using tablets after hours at home,
  • 55% of respondents use tablets at business meetings (vs. 24% using PCs),
  • 50% are turning first to slates at conferences, compared to 13% using their laptops.

Alfresco reported that employees prefer the smartphone at more informal business functions

  • 57% using them at business lunches and
  • 51% using them in coffee shops.

But the tablet is also starting to become commonplace even in those more casual settings: 34% of respondents said they would haul out their slate at a lunch meeting, while 43% would do the same in a coffee shop.

The Alfresco data indicates that the 3-screen reality is coming true. Tablets aren’t replacing either smartphones or laptops, but are instead creating a new space in-between. The vendor says it’s pretty clear that laptops are increasingly tethered to the desk or cube, while tablets are the tool of choice on the go.

RB- This has huge implications on the support side of the equations

Incorporating Tablets into Enterprise Security

Incorporating Mobile Devices into Enterprise SecurityEnterprise information security hasn’t caught up with the consumerization of IT according to Lenny Zeltser in a recent article on the Lenny Zeltser on Information Security blog. The author states that the urgency with which organizations need to account for consumerization is driven by modern mobile devices such as Apple iPhones and iPads.

Enterprises are coming to terms with the idea of employees connecting to the corporate network over a VPN. Be it from personal laptops and home workstations according to the article. However, most organizations haven’t looked at the effect that the proliferation of powerful mobile devices has on enterprise security architecture.

Mobile devices sometimes have VPN-like access to the corporate network. In most cases have access to the company’s email contents, calendar, and address book. The devices are as powerful as laptops were just a few years ago. Yet, their operating system’s security has not benefited from the test of time. Tablets and mobile devices lack most of the security controls we’d expect to find in a “legacy” workstation OS.

Mr. Zeltser argues we need to understand how to model the threat vectors related to mobile devices and how to adjust the security of the enterprise architecture accordingly. The measures will probably involve:

  • Greater segmentation of the company’s network,
  • Treating any device that users interact with, whether it’s a desktop or a mobile phone, as an untrusted node,
  • Standards and tools to lock down the configuration of mobile devices,
  • Practices and technologies for managing vulnerabilities in applications and the OS of mobile devices,
  • Incident response plans that incorporate both “legacy” IT infrastructure assets and mobile devices.

BYO tablet? Three ways business is getting it all wrong

BYO tech? Three ways business is getting it all wrongSilicon.com had an article describing Three ways businesses are getting BYOD all wrong. The author claims the days of the standard work-issued laptop are numbered as businesses let staff use their own computers and gadgets in the workplace.

However, in the rush to adopt bring-your-own tech, businesses are placing too many restrictions on how personal devices can be used at work according to Anthony Vigneron, collaboration services global manager at global law firm Clifford Chance. He estimates that about 10 percent of firms’ 7,000 staff share the same device at home and work.

Mr. Vigneron described for silicon.com three ways businesses get it wrong when it comes to letting staff use personal devices at work.

Use sandboxing

Businesses are often advised to provide personal devices with secure access to corporate systems using sandboxed virtual machines. Sand-boxed machines allow remote access to corporate info via a virtual desktop that is run from the business’ data center.

He says it is better to let users access corporate data and apps from their device’s own OS. “Trying to deliver applications within a sandbox is not what users want. That’s not consumerization, that’s just another way of providing the same apps on different hardware,” he said.

“People want to use the native applications. They don’t want to have to log in through some other system.” He concludes “The business should be able to control some of the applications staff use but you don’t want all those things inside another application.”

Give them a choice

Mr. Vigneron argues that the line where work life ends and private life begins is becoming increasingly blurred. So it doesn’t make sense to treat them as two separate entities. By not allowing workers to merge their work and home calendars, contacts, and emails, businesses are imposing an artificial distinction on their staff. He explains, “You do want some separation … People want the choice of being able to work with the same interface.”

Costs matter

Letting staff use their personal smartphone while working may seem like a good idea. However, employees might be in for an unpleasant shock when they get their phone bill. Mr. Vigneron said “For companies to allow for consumerization, the price has to get to an equivalent of what we can get as a corporate. They’re not doing that at the moment.”

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Tablet computing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| July 14, 2012
Comments Off on 1983 Mobile Device

1983 Mobile Device

Commodore EXECUTIVE 64 ad from Australia, could be the first mobile device. It was advertised as the first “portable” full-color computer. The Commodore EXECUTIVE 64 was introduced in 1983 and had a retail of $1,000.

Commodore EXECUTIVE 64 1983 Mobile Device

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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