Digital Walkabout

Sencha launches Flex-to-HTML5 fast track program

Sencha has launched a new fast-track program for Adobe Flex developers looking to develop HTML5 applications. The new program provides Flex developers a variety of ways to become familiar with the Sencha suite of professional tools, which include Sencha Designer, an application builder for mobile and desktop Web applications, and Sencha Touch, a JavaScript framework for developing HTML5 Web apps and mobile-packaged applications.

Adobe Flex is now an open-source software development kit (SDK) for developing cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Flex applications can be written using Adobe Flash Builder, or by using the now freely available Flex compiler from Adobe. Flex enables developers to build mobile applications for iOS, Android and BlackBerry Tablet OS devices, as well as traditional applications for browser and desktop using the same programming model, tool and code base. Ted Patrick, Sencha's director of developer relations - and formerly a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe - said the company's technology is a great fit for Flex developers who want to reach the rapidly growing market for HTML5 applications.

"Developing with Sencha frameworks enables Flex developers to leverage their core skills and build apps from classes, components and JavaScript that deliver pixel-perfect rendering across all popular mobile and desktop platforms.... In addition to our professional-grade tools, Sencha offers the training, support and documentation that Flex developers need to tackle serious development projects," Patrick said, in a statement. In a blog post, he added, "Having worked on Flex at Adobe, I have a deep respect for Flex as a technology and ecosystem. Flex is great technology but the foundational dependency on Flash Player is forcing many projects to re-architect towards HTML5. Within this disruption, I believe there is a great opportunity for Flex developers to learn a new technology, leverage existing knowledge and deliver great application experiences with Sencha. I also believe that Flex developers have the opportunity to define and lead the movement toward HTML5 applications as they bring years of experience building world-class applications with components, classes, MVC and a futuristic version of ECMAScript." "Sencha offers Flex developers a fast path to getting productive with HTML5", Patrick said.

Similar to Flex, Sencha frameworks are object-oriented and component-based, and offer a rich set of UI widgets, layouts and animations, with object lifecycle management and event handling. For more rapid development, Flex developers can use Sencha Designer, a visual application builder for creating complex user interfaces, data models and controllers. Sencha toolsets and frameworks also are backed by the company's technical support, services and training. "Sencha is our vendor of choice for JavaScript frameworks," said Yakov Fain, managing director and partner of Farata Systems, in a statement. "Ext JS and Sencha Touch are well-architected, cleanly extensible and offer a solid foundation for any serious JavaScript development."

To help Flex developers ramp up fast with new HTML5 technologies, Sencha has developed an educational curriculum and tools designed specifically for Flex developers. The Sencha initiative kicks off with a free webinar: Moving from Flex to HTML5 and Sencha. Along with the webinar, Sencha is delivering a series of HTML5 applications to road show training events over the coming months, and has published a white paper: "The Development Manager's Quick Guide to HTML5." In addition, Sencha is developing new features for its products to make it easier to connect to SOAP and SOA-based back-ends, and is implementing support for Adobe Action Message Format (AMF) to make it easier for developers to leverage existing back-ends while migrating their user interfaces to Sencha-based technology.

"Sencha frameworks provide a solid transition for Flex developers who want to get productive with HTML5" said Brett Cortese, president and CEO of Universal Mind, in a statement. "We're excited by the speed and efficiency we've gained by using Ext JS and Sencha Touch for our clients' projects." "Sencha Touch is built from the ground up to leverage HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, enabling us to build rich Web applications that look and feel native right out of the box,"Craig Walker, CTO of Xero, said in a statement. "Relying on the extensive set of UI widgets, layouts and animations, we were able to start building features immediately from day one rather than worrying about the underlying architecture. Plus, we were able to leverage our existing skills and use open Web technologies." "Sencha frameworks provide a component layer and solid structure to ensure our large dev teams stay in sync when we create intricate components for our clients' multilayer enterprise apps," said Michael Labriola, senior consultant and founding partner of Digital Primates.

Using private cloud for BYOD security

Mobile device security in the enterprise requires centralized management. Private cloud allows IT admins to consolidate existing management and provisioning processes to secure mobile devices. “Cloud computing and mobile computing are parallel developments because both, in some way, involve moving applications and data from the client to the server,” said Tony Iams, senior vice president at analyst firm Ideas. But that doesn’t mean security issues are identical. “Running business apps on mobile devices, especially when companies are thinking about BYOD [bring your own device], opens up a whole new can of worms with respect to security,” said Kamesh Pemmaraju, analyst at the Sand Hill Group. What has changed in the move from laptops to mobile devices is that, instead of intruders attacking Windows OS, for example, they now have to know multiple mobile platforms -- iOS, Android, Windows mobile, etc. But this diversity among mobile devices not only complicates life for hackers, it also complicates life for IT administrators. BYOD compounds security issues because employees use a single personal device to access both personal and corporate data. To make sure apps are secure, mobile devices need to be centrally administered, centrally managed and provisioned, added Pemmaraju. Private clouds are built to provide centralized management control, most often from a single management console, over various pools of resources, such as servers, storage, etc. This central control expands naturally to mobile device protection and authentication for application protection. Mobile security must extend beyond the device Mobile device security should start with on-device protection, ensuring that end users enter a password to access the device. But protection needs to spread beyond that -- to applications and data. IT teams must ensure mobile devices aren’t being used to access sensitive information or remote corporate databases.

Experts recommend the bare minimum for mobile device security should include a firewall, anti-malware, strong passwords, lock-out and data removal after multiple failed logins, as well as the use of gateways between mobile devices and the enterprise network. Additionally, any mobile-based application that accesses corporate data should be stored in the cloud, with centralized security provided by the cloud provider.

Mobile device management (MDM) tools can help centrally secure devices. In a cloud environment, MDM tools can extend the centralized cloud security policy to mobile devices, giving IT a single comprehensive security policy for all enterprise devices. MDM tools such as those from Sybase, MobileIron and Symantec can unify security measures across disparate mobile devices.

In addition, some enterprises use hypervisors on mobile devices to isolate personal data from corporate data and to remotely wipe lost devices. MDM tools can also perform a remote wipe of data if a device is lost or stolen.

Identify weak links in mobile cloud and plan ahead
Even mobile apps built specifically with security in mind are at risk. In many instances, end users are security's weak link; the best-written app with the highest levels of security can be brought down with a single download.

In the case of BYOD, end users download applications from app stores and run them on devices that also access corporate data. End users trust that app stores are secure, even though certain applications within them can be nothing more than malware. Therefore, limiting access to back-office applications and data is critical.

Marcus & Millichap, a large commercial real-estate firm headquartered in Calabasas, Calif., prohibits across-the-board access to corporate databases via mobile devices. Real estate agents at the company can only view secured data, inventory, information on buildings for sale and research reports via a Cisco VPN and a Web browser running on a mobile device. The company prohibits end users from changing data from their devices.

Marcus & Millichap uses a downloadable iPhone/Android application that lets end users collaborate through email with other agents and brokers. The app does not have secure layers, so it only allows communication among loan originators and other agents via text message or email.

Identify at-risk data early on, advise some mobile cloud security experts. Monitor traffic on networks to identify content that’s sent across communication channels (data in motion), scan storage to identify where sensitive data is located (data at rest), monitor data as end users interact with it (data in use) and alert users if data is sent to an unauthorized device.

Creating mobile security policies can be difficult, especially with BYOD. But nearly all polices should include rules about the number of devices employees can sync, limitations on which apps employees can download and rules about connecting to corporate internal networks via mobile devices.

If you plan to integrate mobile devices into the enterprise, include the following policies and technologies to ward off hackers and prevent mission-critical data loss:

Data encryption
Password logins
Authentication for corporate application use
Mobile device management (MDM) tools that extend corporate security policies to mobile device usage and can remotely wipe devices
Activity monitoring and logging to identify security issues
Separating employee information from corporate information
Using VPNs to access corporate data
The mobile device explosion is perfect for cloud in terms of administering and managing backend support, said Pemmaraju. “Many enterprises have not gotten to the cloud stage, yet mobile is simmering on the horizon,” he added. “Mobile will accelerate corporations moving to the cloud. Separating out personal from corporate on the mobile device is extremely important.”

Starting out with Public Cloud

Looking to spin up a virtual machine and get that project done in a hurry but not sure what your choices are in terms of cloud vendors? Here is a listing (not a rating) of some of the top vendors and what they offer.

Amazon
Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2) is the dominant player. It offers several instance types in six groupings: Standard, Micro, High-Memory, High-CPU, Cluster Compute, and Cluster GPU. VM Import option allows you to import virtual machine images from your own environment at no additional charge. However, detailed monitoring is an extra charge but basic monitoring of EC2 instances is free. Amazon EC2 pricing requires no minimum fee and there's even a calculator to help you estimate your monthly bill and a detailed comparison page to help you choose between On-Demand, Reserved and Spot Instances pricing so you can make the best cost choice for your project. Specific Instances pricing is here. All told, EC2 is a full rent-a-data-center-service but it has crashed before so it is not infallible.

Rackspace
Rackspace Cloud Servers have gotten a lot of buzz lately around OpenStack, a joint Rackspace and NASA open-source cloud project. But there are a lot of moving parts thus the odds for something going wrong is higher. This is not necessarily a black eye for RackSpace as rival Amazon completely mishandled a crash in April underscoring that "stuff happens" even to the best of cloud vendors. Rackspace does offer very high customer service which is extremely helpful if something does go wrong. Pricing is based on server size with Linux-based servers being slightly cheaper than Windows. This site too offers a calculator to help you estimate costs in advance and a compare page that takes on Amazon EC2 head-on. Rackspace publicly claims superiority in a number of areas ranging from a greater selection of server sizes to third-party software support and admin level troubleshooting. Bandwidth is free between cloud servers but you have to upgrade your entire plan to upgrade storage. Pricing appears higher than Amazon but that may not translate to the final bill, especially if your project is small. You may get a better indication of pricing differences by running the calculators on all the cloud vendors and then compare the monthly estimates of each. All told, Rackspace is a strong company with an excellent reputation in support and delivery.

Joyent
Joyent is operating on a completely revamped infrastructure management platform called SmartDataCenter 6 which has granular analytics and added management, performance and security capabilities. Two free analytics packages, Joyent Cloud Analytics and New Relic, are included and they give users a good view into latency and other issues that some competing providers fail to reveal. Joyent uses SmartOS and KVM hardware virtualization. Pricing is based on server size with a minimal difference between Linux and Windows as is seen in the public cloud services field overall. Appliances, i.e. Percona/MYSQL, RIAK, Node.JS, and Zeus Load Balancer, are priced as an additional cost.

IBM
IBM got into the cloud game early albeit quietly. The IBM platform runs virtual machines in a variety of formats along with other IBM services. It tends to cater to more conservative enterprise developers rather than the bolder programming crowd. The pricing is a bit confusing and is detailed in a charging schedule. Anonline IBM SmartCloud pricing plan spells out a $3000 one-time fee for the Enterprise On-boarding Service Package and a $1000 one-time fee for a Virtual Private Network Service on unreserved virtual machine instances.

Cloudshare
Cloudshare offers a free trial period and a super simple browser-based process. No need to even enter credit card information to get started and play around to see if you like it. Multi-server, fully functional SharePoint farms come with fully-licensed, best practice SharePoint templates pre-installed. Pricing for the full enterprise product is not readily accessible online and requires a call to the sales department for a quote. Cloudshare ProPlus which is suitable for enterprise app use and designed for development, testing and collaboration of smaller teams, is priced online starting at $49 a month for unlimited hours (but subject to save and suspend after 60 minutes of no activity) and rising to well above $599 for the always-on option (no automatic save and suspend).

Terremark
Terremark's vCloud Express is VMware based and requires no minimum commitment. Live chat service is available from the landing page to help you get started or to figure out what you need for the project at hand. Chat follows you from page to page standing at the constant ready. While there is a full-blown Terremark enterprise option, vCloud is designed more for smaller businesses, individual departments, rapid prototyping, and developer coding and testing. Adding and deleting extra capacity is relatively simple although the vCloud pricing table isn't. Priority support is an additional $500 or 20% of your usage fees, whichever is greater in a given month. The good news is that you can enable priority support whenever you wish so it really isn't an expense unless and until you need it. Prebuilt server templates contain licensed Windows/SQL software for a fee based on the number of VPU servers you use.

Elastic Hosts
ElasticHosts also offers a free trial period, but for five days which is less than the 14 day free period offered by Cloudshare. Pricing is based on by month or by burst and an online calculator helps you calculate the cost in advance. You have a choice in UK and US-based data centers and you can pay in either U.S. dollars or British pounds. The service configures VMs like hardware and provides persistent storage, static IPs and a simple API. ElasticHosts also offers ElasticStack, a platformthat allows hosting providers and data centers to offer their own branded cloud services.

Dell and HP
The cloud space is getting very crowded and there are even more public cloud providers preparing to launch. Dell is launching its public cloud offering later this year. The company has strong experience in cloud computing with a wide array of products to help companies make the big move. Dell's public cloud offering teams the company with VMware and its vCloud Datacenter Services offering. Prices have not yet been announced but there is little doubt that Dell will be a serious contender worthy of full consideration as an option.
HP has also announced an upcoming public cloud service, which is now in beta but a public launch date has not been announced. HP's platform is based on the open-source OpenStack project which adds steam to that movement overall.

Notice that most of the public cloud players are companies you already know. That's the good news in that it lends familiarity to an otherwise tricky equation. The bad news is that there is lots of fine print to weed through and none of it tends to be straightforward. Make sure you understand all the legalities wrapped in the service level agreements (SLAs) to avoid problems later and run the monthly calculators offered on most of these sites to get a better feel for actual costs before you commit.

Cloud Security as a Service

Cloud Security as a Service Amid growing enterprise adoption of cloud computing, it's no surprise that security professionals have been searching for security mechanisms to secure cloud-based server hosting. The effort often begins by looking to the same technologies that were used to secure the data center, such as firewalls, antivirus and intrusion detection systems. It's a logical approach; cloud-based resources must be secured as if they were local resources. However, the types of risks traditional security technologies were created to combat focus on risks to local resources only, which limits their effectiveness when attempting to secure a cloud-based resource. Fortunately, there are several new types of cloud-based security products, offered as a service, that have been introduced to mitigate cloud computing risks. Cloud Security as a Service provides the same benefits of cost and scale to security professionals as Software as a Service offers to the enterprise. The model of paying only for services used, with the ability to ramp up quickly, works just as well for the information security industry as it does for other areas of IT. In fact, information security professionals now have access to a dizzying array of new tools with enhanced capabilities. So what features are important when considering Security as a Service? In this tip, we'll examine the features that are most important, particularly in a cloud server security platform. Cloud Security as a Service: Encryption The cloud computing model seeks to reduce IT costs by utilizing shared computing platforms for multiple customers. This means a company’s most confidential data may only be kept separate from other customers through a key index field in a database. Cloud-based encryption can ensure this data is kept private. These services can easily integrate with the major cloud hosting providers and offer compliance with mandates like FIPS-140-2, PCI DSS and HIPAA-HITECH. Cloud-based encryption offers several advantages. One is the ability to manage private encryption keys. During an encryption implementation, the storage of private keys can be cumbersome or overlooked entirely. This creates the possibility for data loss, if the keys are lost, or a data breach, in the case of stolen or mishandled keys. There are cloud encryption service providers that offer a single management console through which private keys can be stored and managed. These same systems can be used to implement segregation of duties. A cloud-based encryption offering enables an administrator to access cloud-based servers for maintenance and not have access to unencrypted company data. Cloud Security as a Security: Identify management Identity management has always been a struggle for enterprises, even when using only internal information systems. The cloud introduces new identity management challenges. Company employees often find themselves with multiple login credentials to multiple websites or SaaS applications. These applications have different password complexity rules and aging schemes, which cause employees to write down account information or create weak passwords. There are protocols that will allow the security team to tie these accounts together via a single sign-on system, but this is often a tedious and time-consuming option. Various cloud providers may use different authentication methods and protocols such as SAML, OAuth and OpenID, increasing complexity and rendering an SSO project prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, there are cloud-based options that can aid in this area as well. Cloud identity management providers specialize in weaving together disparate authentication protocols into one management framework. They can also link into internal authentication resources, such as Microsoft Active Directory. This allows for a much-needed single sign-on experience for users of cloud-based resources. Cloud IdM also enables standardized account configuration, including password complexity, aging and intruder-lockout status. Access hours can be configured centrally, as can the requirements for strong authentication. This is one of the areas where cloud-based security services really shine. Cloud Security as a Service: Configuration and vulnerability management It can be easy to lose track of the number of virtual servers created in a cloud environment. The advantage of using cloud computing is these virtual servers can be created quickly to meet business needs. Yet as servers are created across multiple cloud-service providers' environments, tracking, configuring and hardening each virtual server quickly becomes a sizable challenge for most enterprises. Providers often aren't much help. Amazon, for example, uses different management tools for its virtual environment than Rackspace. How can a company securely configure and manage its virtual servers amid all of these technology obstacles? There are several promising cloud-based security offerings in the area of configuration and vulnerability management. They can provide full configuration management -- including monitoring patches, service configurations and even firewall settings -- from a single management host. These tools can provide insight into vulnerabilities that may be present through configuration or file integrity monitoring. These cloud-based configuration services allow a single configuration to be pushed to all registered servers, regardless of hosting location or operating system. This includes internally hosted servers, which creates an aggregated view of a company’s technology assets, both cloud and on-premise, from one management console. The only limitation with these offerings is there is still limited support for Windows-based technologies. These products are evolving and should soon be able to offer the same level of support for Microsoft-based systems as they do currently for Linux-based systems. However, cloud-based configuration management is a game-changing technology that no security team working with virtual infrastructures should be without. Cloud Security as a Service: Availability The last feature is one that cloud-based Security as a Service providers tend to do very well. Availability is important because a cloud-based server infrastructure is often more vulnerable to losses in connectivity through malicious acts than local servers. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, now much easier for even novice cybercriminals to initiate, are common today as attackers attempt to take down websites and other enterprise infrastructure for a variety of reasons. Cloud-based security providers have responded with capable defenses to help ensure availability. Several of the providers in this area are also content delivery networks. These providers maintain large amounts of bandwidth that can be used to "blackhole" or negate a denial-of-service attack and keep a client’s cloud service running. They have built on their products to include other options, such as cloaking the original website or hiding the original DNS server. In turn, the attacker cannot find the target company’s resources, and is only able to direct an attack at the cloud security provider. Any company using cloud-based servers should consider these types of defenses, or else it risks being taken down by the next hacktivist. Conclusion Cloud Security as a Service offerings have developed almost as quickly as other commercial cloud applications. This rapid development has resulted in a vast array of security services choices that often exceed their internally hosted counterparts in features and functionality. Security professionals should develop a working knowledge of the security services that are available in order to properly mitigate risks introduced by the use of cloud-based infrastructures. They can offer more insight than ever before into their overall security operations, as well as automate some of the tedious work so they can focus on their core objective: securing their organisation.

When to pass on a PaaS provider

In a cloud market poised for growth, it’s no wonder why you can’t go far without practically tripping over a PaaS provider, each with subtle differences from the next. Platform as a Service allows cloud architects to bring their own code and use preferred stacks without having to provision virtual machines and manage OSes, reducing infrastructure management issues.

And settling on the right PaaS model is important to ensure you build a flexible, elastic and portable enterprise cloud. So, which type of PaaS provider should you pay attention to -- a programming language-specific platform, a language-agnostic platform or a hybrid PaaS that coordinates development and deployment across multiple clouds?

Is language-specific PaaS a thing of the past?
Language-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers are less common than they were in the early days of cloud. Providers supported Java, Ruby and Python, for example, but not all frameworks at once. If you work primarily with one language, then a language-specific PaaS can be the cloud development tool for you. The advantage of language-specific PaaS is it offers specialized support and value to the customer beyond the hosted development environment.

Python and Java developers both have language-specific PaaS options. PiCloud.com, a Python-based PaaS offering, provides a library that is easily imported into Python programs, enabling developers to distribute their computations across the cloud. PiCloud does not replace a development environment or give customers a cloud-based alternative to the IDE (integrated development environment). It gives managers code that enables them to run the compute-intensive portions of their applications in the cloud. This is ideal for analysts and scientists who work with large amounts of data, are comfortable in the development environment and need access to compute resources.

Language-agnostic PaaS: More languages, more flexibility
The trend to work with a mix of cloud platforms is gaining momentum. Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos recently went so far as to declare the “LAMP stack is dead and the cloud killed it.” While that may not be exactly the case, each layer of the stack is becoming more multifaceted than before. And PaaS providers are following suit; the majority of the market falls into the language-agnostic camp -- even those that started with a single-framework-support model.

PaaS providers such as Cloud Foundry, DotCloud and Red Hat were designed for developers working with multiple programming languages. For example, if you host your application at DotCloud, you can use Postgres, MySQL and MongoDB in your data services layer. The marginal effort required to work with multiple databases is much lower because you do not have to install, manage and maintain multiple databases.

The advantage of language-agnostic PaaS is the flexibility to work with multiple languages and frameworks on a case-by-case basis. You may not find the same level of language-based customizations (e.g. libraries for distributing your code across cloud servers), but you will find support for general-purpose development tools like Git for managing code.

When to look to a hybrid PaaS option
Another type of PaaS could be distinguished by the way it abstracts Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models and on-premises resources. CloudBees’ AnyCloud is a PaaS offering that enables users to manage application workloads on a trusted hosting provider or on-premises, within the data center. Consumers can deploy instances in Amazon EC2 as well as in an OpenStack private cloud and manage them as part of a single PaaS with AnyCloud.

There are a number of advantages to the hybrid model. For example, imagine if you may have a sizeable Oracle database that is not practical to replicate in the cloud, you would need to maintain it on-premises. A hybrid PaaS gives you the flexibility to access on-premises data from applications that run in a PaaS environment.

A potential disadvantage of some hybrid PaaS models is the need to configure and maintain the abstraction layer. Certain hybrid PaaS models require some in-house management effort and know-how.

The PaaS market is maturing and differentiating. Enterprises should choose a PaaS model that fits with development languages and frameworks. If you work with a single language and can benefit from specialized support, a language-specific PaaS model may be right for you. However, as companies move to more complex cloud deployments, the need to work with multiple languages and a mix of stack components increases. In such cases, a multi-language and multi-framework PaaS offering makes sense. When you have a complex mix of off-premises and on-premises applications and data, you may want to seek out a hybrid PaaS provider.

Welcome to the era of design

By Adam Swann, head of strategy at gyro New York, as posted on Forbes.com

All businesses, no matter what they make or sell, should recognize the power and financial value of good design. Obviously, there are many different types of design: graphic, brand, packaging, product, process, interior, interaction/user experience, Web and service design, to name but a few. In this post, I am referring to design as a broad and deliberately applied discipline, with the aim of creating simpler, more meaningful, rewarding experiences for customers. You see, expecting great design is no longer the preserve of a picky design-obsessed urban elite—that aesthetically sensitive clique who‘d never dare leave the house without their Philippe Starck eyewear and turtleneck sweaters and buy only the right kind of Scandinavian furniture. Instead, there’s a new, mass expectation of good design: that products and services will be better thought through, simplified, made more intuitive, elegant and more enjoyable to use. Design has finally become democratized, and we marketers find ourselves with new standards to meet in this new “era of design.” To illustrate, Apple, the epitome of a design-led organization, now has a market capitalization of $570 billion, larger than the GDP of Switzerland. Its revenue is double Microsoft’s, a similar type of technology organization but one not truly led by design (just compare Microsoft Windows with Apple’s Lion operating system). Every day my Twitter feed populates with astounding growth facts about the likes of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and the more recent travel site, AirBnB. It is no coincidence that these successful brands seem to really value design and utilize it to secure a competitive advantage. Even the UK government has issued its “design principles,” naturally on a clean, easy-to-navigate website. But why have people become so design sensitive? Why does that credit card mailer look so bad and dated now? Why can’t you access my account details? Why does airport signage seem so unhelpful? Why doesn’t that technology plug and play? Perhaps Apple’s global dominance has elevated our design expectations, or Ikea’s vision to bring great design at affordable prices to everyone on the planet has finally taken effect, or perhaps the Internet has taught us what well-designed user experiences and good design really are. Likely, it is a combination of all. What is certain is that the design bar has been raised and design-oriented businesses are winning. Think how swiftly and strongly a design experience shapes our opinion of that brand, company or store, for good or bad. For instance, we know quickly when a website is bad. And we associate that feeling of frustration, or worse, disappointment with that brand. Design-oriented organizations invest in thinking this stuff through. They put design at the heart of their company to guide innovation and to continually improve products, service and marketing. They recognize that a great design leads to differentiation, customer loyalty and higher profits.

First Direct, a UK bank, has designed all its service touchpoints so carefully that it has become the most referred financial brand in the UK, with over 82 percent of customers happy to recommend it to friends. It’s a joy to use via any channel, and despite being a bank, I’d happily recommend it.

When you buy Apple Care, instead of receiving the standard bland letter or email, you receive a nicely designed box containing the paperwork, guidance and all the information you need. You have questions? No problem. There are clear user diagrams and a simple section on the website to help you.

The impact on brand is that customers see these brands as both progressive and customer-centric. Thoughtful and innovative design makes us feel good. It is no surprise that we are happy to advocate them, talk about them in social media and can be fiercely brand loyal.

As Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney, once said, “A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.” That thinking still holds true, but it all happens a lot faster now. Thanks to the Internet and a hyperconnected, social-media-fueled society, brands can be instantly undermined and that experience shared with millions.

So this is a call to action for executives to recognize this new era and make the effort to transform even a mundane product or service into something more rewarding and more memorable. Try to assess each element of your service or product and better it—to see design not just as a marketing thing but as a genuine source of competitive advantage, customer and employee satisfaction and, lastly, a route to higher profits.

The battle for BYOD security

Despite desktop virtualization's BYOD security benefits, it isn't always the best way to prevent data leakage. To really hit a security homerun, you need strong data access control methods. Implementing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can solve some BYOD security issues, because when users access applications from personal devices, those apps are actually hosted in the secure corporate data center. That helps prevent incoming attacks, such as those spawned by viruses, but it won't do the trick when it comes to confidential data leaving the data center. Turning to VDI for BYOD security End users, disgruntled with sometimes-archaic IT policies and rules, have started bringing to work the devices they cherish most: iPads, iPhones, mobile hotspots, MacBooks, Android devices and so on. But when they access corporate data (Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Adobe PDF files, etc.) from these devices, IT is no longer in control. Even if a user simply sends an email from a secure corporate environment to his or her personal device, that transaction can create bring your own device (BYOD) security issues. To lessen those risks, some organizations turn to virtualization -- usually session virtualization, where users run their applications and access corporate data from servers inside the corporate data center. Many companies try VDI or traditional server-based computing (think Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and Citrix XenApp). VDI can improve BYOD security by letting users access all their applications that are hosted in a centralized location under your company's control. When connected to the corporate network, users are sent to a separate network segment that only allows them to get to their hosted applications. Plus, by virtualizing the presentation layer using a remote display protocol, the only connection to your data center is simple as that: a remote display one. Sounds great, right? Why VDI can't do it all External threats aren't the only problems surrounding BYOD. Data leakage is another major issue, and no matter how well-architected your VDI deployment is, you're at risk if data can be manipulated outside your data center. When it comes to BYOD, your definition of security will probably have to change. If the purpose of BYOD security is to guarantee that devices can't disrupt data center operations by introducing viruses or malware, a hosted solution such as VDI will help immensely. But BYOD security must also address the possibility of information leaking from the data center, and in that respect, desktop virtualization may not help at all. MORE ON BYOD SECURITY: BYOD security: How application streaming and VDI can help IT pros mix VDI with BYOD to simplify device management VMware shops using View 5 for BYOD realize VDI challenges When using VDI to facilitate BYOD, admins often forget the controls to prevent data from leaving the data center. If users can connect and open or save files on their local, personal devices, there's potential for unknown parties to access confidential data. For instance, just check internally if you can create a rule in your Microsoft Outlook to forward all your received emails to an external account. You probably can, and that means sending confidential information out of the secure network. The damage this can cause for a company may be more significant than a virus hitting a bunch of servers in a certain network segment. What you need is some solid data access control methods. Data access control methods Data can also be infected or compromised externally and sent right back into the data center. In this case, you are still vulnerable to zero-day attacks. To combat these kinds of BYOD security issues, you can use data access control methods such as port knocking, white lists and intrusion prevention systems. To further improve data access control, you should also centralize application execution. The next step is to protect data leakage by controlling when and where users can actually access data and how data is sent to the outside world through your corporate network. To do so, you can use email gateways that control how attachments are handled (WebSense Email Gateway, for instance) and implement file securing/access control tools such as Seclore and others. A good BYOD initiative starts with a solid foundation for protecting your most important asset: your data. Data access control methods are king, so make sure you understand that aspect of BYOD security before jumping onto the VDI bandwagon.

Adobe Digital Marketing Summit

The introductory keynote, led by Brad Rencher, Senior VP and GM of Digital Marketing, and other Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, CTO, Kevin Lynch, and Facebook’s VP Global Solutions, Grady Burnett, kicked off some engaging discussion today. The main themes focused on the concept of “the digital self”, as well as content personalisation and predictive marketing.

Everyone has a “Digital Self” out there in the online space, and each of us potentially represents a highly valuable customer to businesses with an online presence. When I go online, I much prefer to see relevant ads that engage me as a consumer, rather than generic ones that aren’t tailored to my needs. Brad Rencher reinforced the concept that ‘personalisation matters’. This has been a recurring topic recently so it was interesting to explore how this is evolving.

Dynamic, personalised and engaging content drives today’s consumers to take action, and marketers must be able to deliver and optimise this in real-time. However, for this to be effective you must be able to understand the core data and analytics across personalised experiences, advertising, publishing and social marketing. Shantanu’s view is that technology is most powerful when it is used as an enabler, and today we definitely have access to marketing technologies that enable this understanding.

Based on the morning’s  announcements of the releases of CQ5, the Adobe Predictive Marketing Solutions, and Discover 3, data mavens are can take control of their data and drive the most relevant content as well as analyse the data that will help them make better marketing investments.

Day 2 centred on Adobe’s key technology and marketing experts, including John Mellor, VP Strategy & Business Development, who, collectively, shared some of the technological advancements in the world of digital marketing.

Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, provided his views on the ‘Digital Self’ - the ‘Digital Self’ isn’t solely defined by individual employees of a company, but also through the products of a brand and the multiple interactions linked to a particular business.

For example, events such as the Adobe Summit are their own “Digital Selves” – e.g. with 6000 tweets shared in the last 48 hours. The Digital Self is defined largely by external factors, like how people will actually use your products/technologies and what they say about them. So how are you influencing your Digital Self?

In addition to the above concept, Biz had two other pieces of advice to share with the fellow marketers in the room:

• In regards to privacy, if you are not 100% comfortable about sharing your content or data across social media platforms, then don’t. You must define your own boundaries.
• On developing social strategies, a strong recommendation from Biz is to speak and engage with your customers in a most humanly manner as possible. Don’t reach out to them as if you are writing press releases and it is acceptable to show your vulnerabilities. People will appreciate your reaching out to them, even if it’s not perfect.

Following the breakout sessions throughout the day, we were treated to a very special closing keynote session: Sneak Peeks showcasing new technologies by Adobe product developers, including Cathi Kwon, Abishek Pani, John Bates, Cedric Huesler, and J.D Nyland. These may never be publicly available, yet the aim was to showcase what’s possible to the delegates.

• Tweet2Win – to help you manage twitter contests
• Project Navigator – for guided analytics
• Social Connect – for simplifying social targeting
• Admania – for better ad segmentation
• Primetime – for real-time video clips and ads via Auditude
• Pinsanity – for deeper analytics and better engagement
• Geo Fencing – clever segmentation targeting
• Sweetlanding – for faster campaign landing pages creation
• Fortune Teller – the next generation sentiment guidance

My three favourites were Social Connect, Primetime and Fortune Teller.

 

Dropbox ushers in Storage-as-a-Platform

With Dropbox's announcement of auto-image upload from Android devices, following its acquring partners such as Picasa to use it as a device and set-top-box backing store, we are now seeing the emergence of Cloud Storage-as-a-Platform. 

What's not mentioned by the TC article - this builds on the Dropbox SDK, growing in popularity, to enable apps on devices - from smartphones to notebooks/desktops - to integrate with Dropbox Cloud storage directly, enabling auto-synchronisation to the provider. Whilst not as yet neatly integrated as iCloud's Photostream, this is a solid step in the building of Storage-as-a-Platform, where one can plug in their Cloud storage solution of choice to their apps. 

Watch for the continued transformation of Cloud storage from simple repository to content hub,, where one can look forward to accessing their content, anytime, anywhere, with ease, transparency and fine-grained management using their preferred apps. This architecture addresses one of the greatest problems of Cloudbursting: partitioning app processing from data sources. More than just connecting one's apps to one's data in a highly decoupled fashion, one can now run their apps in a Cloud separate from where their data lives. This may sound simple - but has been a messy and complicated problem for years. No longer. 

 

 

 

 

What are the principal barriers to Cloud adoption?

45% of European IT decision makers view a lack of security and service level agreements (SLAs) as top concerns for moving to the cloud, according to a survey by Interxion.

Created with service providers (SPs) and system integrators (SIs) in mind – two of the key groups supporting companies’ transition to the cloud – the survey results aim to provide a clear understanding of how organizations are using the cloud today and plan to be using the cloud tomorrow.

The perceived challenges of moving to the cloud also include apprehension of being locked into a specific infrastructure vendor, as cited by 40% of respondents. Under the umbrella of security concerns, preventing data loss was stated as the main fear overall, with 71% of respondents identifying it as one of their top three security concerns.

However, preventing outages, rated second with 64%, and was cited most often as the top issue due to the severe impact outages can have on business processes and bottom line performance.

Despite the concerns of deploying to the cloud, the survey found that 69% of European IT decision makers believe the cloud is a priority today. Large companies led the charge with 71% believing it’s a priority, with small and medium companies close behind at 68 and 67% respectively. Moreover, 75% of the companies either currently use or plan to use cloud computing within the next two years, showing significant growth potential for the industry.

Encouraging results surrounding the future of the cloud come from nearly half of the respondents, who expect that more than 50% of their IT will be delivered from the cloud within the next two years, with 23% citing more than 75% of their IT expected to be housed in the cloud.

Additionally, an overwhelming 90% of those planning to deploy a private cloud said that they are likely or very likely to choose a hosted solution rather than buying their own hardware, signifying the opportunity for SPs and SIs to meet the demand for these services.

Confirming that the cloud is already fully engrained in today’s business landscape and has lasting power for the future, the survey gives SPs and SIs valuable insight for delivering value to their current cloud-based customers, emphasizing the need to address the security and SLA concerns of potential future customers.

One way to alleviate the barriers to entry is by allowing organizations to determine compliance in the cloud before and whilst they are deployed. More on this in the next post....