Consumerization and the BYOD Trend Heighten Data Leakage Fears

The growing consumerization trend is doing more than simply wreaking havoc for IT administrators looking to protect the corporate network from unknown infiltrators--it's also dramatically changing how data is being created, consumed and stored.

While that opens up market opportunities for a myriad of vendors, it's a veritable Pandora's Box for corporate IT grappling with ensuring that data leakage doesn't become the order of the day in the age of BYOD, or bring your own device. Ultimately, it has everything to do with creating information ubiquity, making data available to employees no matter where they are or what device they're using.

"This is a really interesting space because it overlaps so many adjacent areas that there isn't a category yet," says Terri McClure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "The whole consumerization and mobilization of the workforce is what's driving this market ... the second driver is multiple people sharing that one copy of the truth versus having to email it between each other. It's not really true collaboration if everyone is working on a separate version of a file."

ESG is in the midst of studying the subject and future reports are forthcoming. In the meantime, the IT consultancy did produce a December 2011 report entitled "Online File Sharing and Collaboration in the Enterprise." It found that end users are "looking to tackle issues like data sharing, portability and access from multiple intelligent endpoint devices, creating a conundrum for IT as it needs to balance business enablement, ease of access, and collaborative capacity with the need to maintain control and security of information assets."

That's precisely what's driving the online file-sharing and collaboration segment of software-as-a-service, says McClure.

"This market is coming from the consumer workforce into the enterprise because enterprise IT is solving the challenge of collaboration with solutions like Microsoft SharePoint," she says. "But those solutions aren't Web-enabled so the challenge is, as more consumer devices make their way into the enterprise, a lot of people are solving this sharing between devices and one file between each other on their own."

Though new vendors are coming to the fore, the market itself isn't new, explains Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT Inc.

"It's new in the sense that we're seeing different players coming into the space and tweaking the services that they offer ... everyone's trying to reinvent the wheel," he says. "All of these solutions tend to roll in the same general direction.

"In businesses that are active users of information technology, information represents the crown jewels for a lot of companies, literally and figuratively."

Next: Secure Collaboration Tools to Protect DataOne vendor looking to capitalize on the growing opportunity is the lesser-known Soonr Inc. Though the company has been in business since 2005, it's maintained a low profile, selling its wares through partners. With the launch of a new product dubbed Soonr Enterprise, the vendor aims to answer corporate IT's need for business groups to access files securely within the cloud.

"Last year was the first year that mobile devices outsold personal computers, and it's only going to get worse or better depending on how you look at it from here on," says Martin Frid-Nielsen, Soonr's CEO. "We're seeing people carrying around [corporate] data on their devices, including laptops ... the IT people in these companies are concerned about physical security, about device security and also with what's being shared with others and they're worried about company data falling into the wrong hands."

But if it's a corporate-provisioned account, when an employee leaves, the company can just wipe out all those files.

"The company has control of its own information. There's still a possibility of data leakage. If someone really wants to steal data they could, there's always way to do it," McClure adds. "That's why so many companies are interested in these corporate-sanctioned accounts and that's the opportunity companies like Soonr are going after."

Everyone wants a piece of the pie, she says, and the market is wide open. There's no clear-cut leader in this space as of yet.

"There's VMware, with its Project Octopus; Microsoft SkyDrive; Google Drive; Apple iCloud, it's all about enabling mobilization," she adds. "There's not a leader in the business solutions space ... and it's a huge market."

One thing that consumerization has done is drive home the need for simplicity from the user's perspective. Enterprise IT must now consider the end user's experience unlike ever before when it comes to evaluating new solutions. And generally, IT executives are increasingly focused on service culture development.

"You need to make this as seamless and easy for everybody involved," King says. "Frankly, if you don't do that, your employees will find a service that does offer an intuitive user interface and ease-of-use tools."

So Long, Unlimited Data Plan: Customer Focus Dies at Verizon Wireless

It seems that, right now, the mobile carriers are counting on customers having short memories, deep pockets and low expectations. Blazing-fast networks aren't enough, as there are still human beings on the receiving end of the grief that comes with impressive throughput. The prevailing strategies blowing across the mobile space are decidedly customer-unfriendly, and the carriers are heading in a bad direction.

Consider my own situation, as a longtime Verizon Wireless customer (there are plenty of similar tales from other carriers' customers to be heard). Having long since cut the landline at home, we have five phones from Big V on our family plan. Three of those phones are in the hands of teenagers, and my own has a data plan, given my lines of work. I'm on an unlimited data plan--but not for long. But more on that in a bit.

My family grew up with New Every Two, the Verizon Wireless policy that let each phone be replaced for free or at significantly reduced cost every couple of years. And we made use of that, changing out the kids' flip/feature basic phones as the teens put normal wear and tear on them. We grew accustomed to it, and New Every Two was part of what kept us as loyal Verizon Wireless customers.

Not only was New Every Two recently killed off, but now it also costs $30 to update even the low-end feature phones. The website may show free for a given phone, but in the age of New Carrier Math, free equals $30. I was told by Verizon that this helps subsidize pricey units being sold at a loss, like the iPhone. In other words, I get dinged $30 to replace my daughter's "free" phone so those folks living the iPhone lifestyle benefit. Uh, hello? What's wrong with this picture? Even worse, when complaining via online chat with a Verizon rep, I was told this is actually a good deal because it's cheaper than other carriers. Uh huh, a good deal--for Verizon Wireless.

Let's talk about bloatware. On my smartphone, I have at least a dozen apps that I cannot remove. Evidently the NFL, Slacker Radio, Verizon Wireless itself and several other entities are also subsidizing smartphone costs as the slew of unwanted apps cannot be uninstalled and are a fact of life. I have no choice what crapware comes bundled into "my" phone. These apps take up memory and use my data plan and battery life against my wishes by checking into various mother ships for updates--and that's just supposed to be OK with me. With an unlimited data plan, perhaps I shouldn't care. But nothing is sacred these days, and unlimited ain't what it used to be.

Depending on the carrier, an unlimited data plan is actually quite limited. Again, using New Carrier Math, the word unlimited departs from being defined as "without limits" and has been reworked to loosely mean "a few gigabytes, after which you will pay quite a bit more than you might expect." It's absolutely nuts, and glitzy, sexy, high-tech-themed commercials make it no easier to swallow.

But the data plan story gets even worse. Verizon Wireless CFO Fran Shammo has announced (and rather coolly, I might add) that the much-loved $30 monthly data plans that many longtime customers like me enjoy will soon be a thing of the past. Despite what we signed up for, we're being forced into not-yet-defined family share plans, because, Shammo says, "That is beneficial to us"--us being Verizon Wireless. He might as well have said, "In your face, Loyal Customer!" Just like with the cable companies, the new mantra of dealing with mobile customers appears to be, "We say it, you pay it--and just shut up about it."

Evidently, the promise of smokin'-fast 4G networks is supposed to make everything else moot in the mind of the modern mobile customer. But it doesn't. Those of us with a longer history of loyally paying our bills to the carriers can't simply ignore that any friendly relationship we had as customers is being systematically dismantled by the carrier itself and replaced by overhyped promises of a fast network. And that's just not enough for some of us, as we want to be treated like valued customers again.

Thanks a bunch for nothing, Mr. Shammo.

Four Sins of Mobile Website Design, and How to Avoid Them

According to a study released March 1 by Pew Internet, 46% of adult Americans are smartphone owners. A study released last year by Microsoft Tag found that more than half of all local searches were conducted on mobile devices. Despite that growth in mobile usage many sites are still horrible on mobile devices. Here are four things to avoid in mobile website design:

Adobe Flash. I get it: Flash is great for animations and cool interactive stuff. HTML lacked those features, JavaScript was dicey, and HTML5 was a long time coming. In the meantime, Flash filled a gap. However, using anything other than standard HTML + CSS for key components like navigation is just bad practice. How can visitors interact with your site if they can't navigate through it?

If your website makes extensive use of Flash, fire your web developers and hire ones who know what they're doing. Web developers who rely on Flash are doing you a disservice: Your site won't work on iOS or many Android phones, which will drive those people away. Tell your restaurant-owner friends to stop paying web developers who rely on Flash and PDFs.

If you must use Flash, degrade gracefully. A recent BBC article on big wave surfing had a video of a monster 72-foot wave. When rendered in a browser that doesn't support Flash, the video player was replaced with an image and a note saying the video would have been shown if the browser supported Flash.

At least the BBC article looked good and welcoming.

JavaScript popovers. Don't use popovers that cover the page and don't quit on their own. I know, advertisers love popovers, but they don't render well on mobile sites, offering just a teeny-weeny "X" to close them.

Frankly, I wanted to read this story in the graphic at left, but when I see a popover, I leave immediately. You got the ad impression, but that's it. When I leave, there's no chance that I will interact with your site further and there is less chance I will return, ever--at least, not willingly.

While I'm on the topic of JavaScript: For your mobile sites, remove any JavaScript that isn't absolutely necessary. While 3G and 4G speeds are faster than ever and mobile phones pack a lot of processing power, page rendering can take a long time--especially when multiple Web requests are outstanding. I'm pretty patient, and I might wait 5 to 10 seconds for a page to load, but many others won't. Exacerbating the issue is that partially rendered pages are barely useable in browsers that are trying to complete the page and zoom in/out and scroll.

JavaScript navigation that obscures content. See the gray boxes with arrows in the image at left? They're in the way and remain there while I scroll up or down (thankfully). This is one of the least-intrusive examples I've seen. Like JavaScript popovers, these navigation aids just get in the way and don't really help. I have no idea why I would click on unnamed links--they're useless. If you want to direct visitors to other content, either integrate the links into your text or put a list of links at the end of the post. Visitors will find it.

Speaking of JavaScript: Desktop UI things like hovering over links, mouseovers and other actions don't translate well to mobile, where someone's finger is "clicking" on page elements and not mousing around. Dropdown menus and flyouts work fine on desktops, but they're very difficult to use on mobile devices. Think carefully about using them: In fact, don't.

"Under construction" notices. Make your content work with mobile devices, period. A page like the one at left may seem helpful, but it's off-putting. Even more so because I clicked through anyway, and the page rendered fine. I bet the trigger was a Flash video widget. (See No. 1.)

Most modern mobile browsers, at least the ones I use on Android, anyway, render "desktop versions" of sites really well. Sure, visitors have to pinch in to see the text, but browser UI elements like magnifying a touched area of a page, smooth zooming and improved character and image rendering make getting to your content easy and reliable for visitors, without telling them you couldn't be bothered to support mobile devices.

The upshot: If you aren't coming up with a mobile-friendly design for your website, you're driving visitors away. A well-designed mobile site lets visitors on small form-factor devices connected via potentially slow and congested networks see your content and interact with your site quickly. Figure out which components are most useful for your visitors and design your site accordingly.

As Brian Katz, who heads up the mobility group for a global pharmaceutical company, says in a recent blog post about application development, "know why you are creating an app, figure out what data you need to access and how you will do that securely and then worry about the best tool to use for building the actual app. Don't spend so much time working it backwards."

Compuware Tunes APM Tools for Mobile, Cloud and Big Data

Compuware is responding to the surge in mobility, cloud computing, big data and networking with upgrades to its dynaTrace and Gomez application performance management (APM) tools.

The updates, announced this week, will affect how customers build and deploy applications, says Steve Tack, CTO of Compuware's APM business unit. "Customers are working a lot more with native mobile applications ... as well as the sheer proliferation of different browser types and a global base of customers, partners and employees," he says. "They've lost the insight into the relationship between performance and user behavior."

As users become more mobile and applications more diverse, customers want a better understanding of how performance relates to business results, he explains. "Without visibility to users at the edge, there is a blind spot," Tack says, citing conversion or abandonment rates as areas of concern.

He says customer feedback shows that the user experience is the most critical part of measurement and the key to driving those transactions. Compuware's newly announced User Experience Management tool, with analytics and transaction visibility, aims to address performance management "at the edge of the Internet."

The focus on mobile monitoring in the APM tools is particularly interesting, notes Julie Craig, a research director at Enterprise Management Associates. "Compuware is one of the first major vendors to offer a single solution for Web performance monitoring across traditional Web and mobile Web," she says. "Both the Gomez and dynaTrace PurePath solutions support mobile, and with the explosion of mobile applications, this is shaping up as an essential capability for APM toolsets."

Because so much innovation is now taking place in the cloud, customers also need stable applications for their public- and private-cloud technologies, Tack says.

"There is a lot of value from what you can get from Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure in terms of elasticity, but [the cloud] introduces new performance challenges when you don't have control over the data center," she says. "What becomes top of mind is that it's all about the app" and how to control the transactional aspect that the application delivers.

Since most of today's applications are distributed across multiple infrastructure elements, it isn't enough to monitor infrastructure alone--users have to be able to see the entire application end-to-end, Craig says. And even if customers use a cloud application like SugarCRM, for example, the end-to-end application also includes network and desktop monitoring, at minimum. "APM vendors are developing solutions that monitor public cloud in context to the end-to-end application--giving customers the 'big picture' they can't get from the information the cloud vendor provides alone."

Compuware has also released dynaTrace Data Center Real User Monitoring, which provides analytics and real-time status on performance availability and the business impact of applications for end users.

The company has also set its sights on big data--its dynaTrace Enterprise is geared at providing visibility into Cassandra NoSQL and Hadoop Map/Reduce big data environments.

"From the APM perspective, the ability to process big data as part of application monitoring and profiling and as part of auto-generated service models is very important," says Craig. "Information from logs, data streams, messages and other sources is becoming increasingly important to automating the APM process and producing real-time APM information." She says other suite vendors--most notably, IBM--have been able to process this kind of information for some time, but this capability is lacking in many competing APM tools.

On the whole, Craig says, the Compuware upgrades have several differentiators in terms of APM coverage. One is comprehensive coverage for a variety of applications and enterprise use cases, and another is ease of use. She says dynaTrace "has always been known for its quick installation and time to value, as are the cloud-based Gomez solutions." With the upgrades, Compuware is focusing on ease of use for mobile monitoring as well, she says. "It has also introduced a more unified monitoring platform incorporating on-premise, cloud and now mobile applications."

Microsoft Security Advisory (2695962): Update Rollup for ActiveX Kill Bits - Version: 1.0

Microsoft Security Advisory (2647518): Update Rollup for ActiveX Kill Bits - Version: 1.0