Tag Archive for IT

| June 7, 2012
Comments Off on ‘Personal Cloud’ to Replace PC by 2014, Says Gartner

‘Personal Cloud’ to Replace PC by 2014, Says Gartner

‘Personal Cloud’ to Replace PC by 2014, Says GartnerMike Barton wrote on Wired’s Cloudline that there’s no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner (IT) believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives as soon as 2014.

Gartner logoSteve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement, “Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets, and other consumer devices.” He continues, “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

cloud-happy futureIn the article, Mr. Burton writes that Google plans a cloud-centered future with Google (GOOG) Play and Android mobile OS. But the personal computer will also not miss out on the cloud, as Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) are planning to weave the cloud into the next generation of their desktop operating systems, Windows 8, and OS X Mountain Lion.

But a cloud-happy future will not be as easy as that, because Gartner says, “it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.” Gartner sees a number of factors are converging to make for a perfect personal cloud storm by 2014.

Megatrend No. 1: Consumerization— Gartner says what corporate IT has seen so far been a precursor to the major wave that is starting to take hold across all aspects of IT as several key factors come together:

  • ConsumerizationUsers are more technologically savvy
  • The internet and social media have empowered and emboldened users.
  • The rise of powerful, affordable mobile devices changes the equation for users.
  • Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and statuses within organizations can now have similar technology available to them.

Megatrend No. 2: Virtualization — Virtualization has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can set up client environments.

App-ificationMegatrend No. 3: “App-ification” — Apps change the way applications are designed, delivered, and consumed by users and it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market.

Megatrend No. 4: The Ever-Available Self-Service Cloud – The cloud opens a whole new level of opportunity for self-servicing users. Every user can now have a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do.

Megatrend No. 5: The Mobility Shift — Wherever and Whenever You Want Today, mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices.

The Mobility ShiftGartner’s Kleynhans said. “In this new world, the specifics of devices will become less important for the organization to worry about. Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, but no one device will be the primary hub. Rather, the personal cloud will take on that role. Access to the cloud and the content stored or shared in the cloud will be managed and secured, rather than solely focusing on the device itself.”

Wired says that former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie made the same point recently, “People argue about, ‘Are we in a post-PC world?’. Why are we arguing? Of course, we are in a post-PC world.” Ozzie reportedly told a conference,  ”That doesn’t mean the PC dies; that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.”

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Goodie for Gartner, they get paid for codifying the obvious. Consumers are moving to the personal cloud. DVDs vs.Netflix streams. Files on your hard drives vs. some distant data center run by Dropbox. Photo albums vs. Flickr. Books vs. Kindles and Nooks.

Related articles:
  • Supermodels, Megatrends, and Ultra Big Paradigm Shifts to the Cloud

 

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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| January 2, 2010
Comments Off on Personal Laptops at Work?

Personal Laptops at Work?

Personal Laptops at Work? CIO.com is reporting on a recent survey by Gartner which claims that 10% of a firm’s laptop computers are employee-owned. The research firm says that companies are starting to let employees use privately owned laptops for work purposes, according to a  survey of 500 IT managers in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. The IT managers said they expect that percentage to creep higher next year.

Gartner says that some employees like the trend because it means they can have more powerful laptops and newer designs than their companies’ IT departments offer. The survey found that 47% of workplaces have banned employee-owned PCs, 43% have policies that allow the use of employee-owned PCs for work-related purposes, and 10% have no policy on the matter.

Gartner believes this trend is popular with employers because of cost. When employees bring their own hardware to work, and the employer doesn’t pay for it or support it.

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Who was Gartner interviewing? What regulated firm (SOX, PCI, HIPPA, etc.) would allow unknown devices on their internal network. This trend needlessly exposes the company to malware and data theft risks. We encourage our clients to go in the opposite direction. We talk to them, write and enforce policies to ban personal devices like USB drives and iPods for the data theft risk. We also suggest they get control of their remote access and private email on the corporate network.

This really seems to be a lax policy in this age of cyber-crime because privately owned hardware could open the door for a hacker.

What do you think?

 

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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| December 9, 2009
Comments Off on Which Anti-Malware is Best?

Which Anti-Malware is Best?

Which Anti-Malware is Best?In a report, AV-Comparatives compared the base performance of some of the top anti-malware products on the market. The objective of these tests was to identify how well antivirus scanners can detect new malware using their base functions.

Base anti-malware functions included their proactive scanning and heuristics methods, without the advantage of downloading the latest signatures. Forcing a test without the latest virus signatures makes it possible to evaluate the strength of the heuristic-or proactive, technology of the anti-malware engines.

ArsTechnica summarizes that the tests were run on two sets of malware. Set A, which contains malware from December 2007 to December 2008 (of which most products could detect over 97%). Set B, contained 1.6 million samples of malware collected between August 11 and August 17, 2009. This set included the following categories of malware: Trojans (69.5%), Backdoors/Bots (20.7%), Worms (6.1%), other malware (1.5%), and Windows viruses (0.4%).

Results

Ars reported these proactive detection results (rounded to the nearest percent):

After taking these results into consideration and adjusting for false positives, AV-Comparatives rated the security companies from best to worst in three categories:

  • Advanced+:
    • G DATA,
    • Kaspersky,
    • ESET,
    • F-Secure,
    • Microsoft,
    • Avast,
    • eScan.
  • Advanced:
  • Standard:

In September of 2008 NetworkWorld reported on Gartner claims that enterprises are paying too much for security software. Gartner says vendors simply aren’t doing enough to keep up with the prevalence of threats on the Internet. Neil MacDonald, a research vice president at Gartner says that security vendors are “maintaining high-profit margins on firewalls and antivirus software despite these products being nothing more than commodities.” NetworkWorld says that during his presentation at the Gartner’s 2008 IT Security Summit in London, Mr. MacDonald was vociferous in his condemnation of how security products are actually increasing their prices over the years across a backdrop of lowered effectiveness, contradicting pricing schemes across the rest of the IT industry.

Anti-malware pricing is broken

Security vendors have maintained a pricing scheme that contradicts the rest of the IT industry, Mr. MacDonald said. Typically with software or hardware, prices go down year after year with the introduction of new and better products. In some cases, however, security software often loses its effectiveness as new threats emerge, while prices stay high. “Why in antivirus year after year do we pay more for something that gives us less?” MacDonald asked. “It’s insanity. Why is information security immune from the trends of the IT industry?”

Gartner recommends that firms use the commodity status of security software to their advantage, “I know it’s hard to switch but you have to seriously enter the negotiations,” MacDonald said. “Let the vendors know that you are not afraid to switch.”  And he recommends that buyers should aggressively negotiate for better prices.

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While most malware writers are script kiddies with an affinity to making minor modifications to existing malware there are some very good black hat hackers out there that are not dummies.  These tests are important for buyers to understand which product’s core functionality is more efficient against new threats and not rely on constant updates to augment their capabilities. In the face of new threats, superior heuristic capabilities are crucial to anti-malware software? The weekly, daily, or even multiple times a day, definitions updates are the lifeline of the anti-malware industry. The need for constant updates is what drives the annual payments for subscriptions.

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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