CyberTrend 04

APRIL 2015 VOL. 13 ISS. 04 CYBERTREND.COM

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8 COVER STORYmaking sense of your colocation service provider options

13 BUSINESSMicrosoft: facts about its history you might not know, and details about Windows 10

20 CLOUDof course there are risks associated with cloud computing, so it's essential to weigh those with the benefits particular to your organization

24 MOBILITYtackling mobile botnets, and improving your company's mobility efforts with the right management tools

30 DATAbusiness intelligence solutions are varied and plentiful, so choose carefully

34 ENERGYthe latest news and research into energy-conscious tech

36 ITthe dawn (and meaning) of the software-defined data center, and good practices for a successful IT reorganization

42 NETWORKINGyou can't afford an inefficient network, so take all steps possible to improve it

46 SECURITYunderstanding custom malware, and a look at new standards for retail payments

52 STORAGEhow solid-state drives can improve your systems' performance

54 WEBnew way to program for the Web, and tried and true ways to stay safe online

58 ELECTRONICSthe latest in premium consumer electronics

60 TIPSsmartphone, malware, laptop setup, and other tips for mobile professionals

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© Copyright 2015 by Sandhills Publishing Company. CyberTrend TM is a trademark of Sandhills Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material appearing in CyberTrend TM is strictly prohibited without written permission.

Volume 13 : Issue 4 : April 2015

WHICH MANAGED SERVICES ARE RIGHTFOR YOUR ORGANIZATION?

8

MICROSOFT & ITS NEWEST OPERATING SYSTEM

13

Global Cybersecurity Index Deems U.S. Most Committed

❯ The United States has the highest com-

mitment to national cybersecurity based

on the final results of the GCI (Global

Cybersecurity Index), a collaborative

project between ABI Research and the

International Telecommunication Union.

ABI Research reports that Canada ranks

second, and third place honors go to

Australia, Malaysia, and Oman jointly.

The following five areas are taken into

consideration when determining how

countries stack up in what’s called the

“global ranking of cybersecurity readi-

ness”: legal measures, technical mea-

sures, organizational measures, capacity

building, and cooperation.

Our Appetite For Mobile Data Continues To Grow

❯ Improved stability for mobile uploads

and downloads, thanks in part to car-

rier aggregation solutions that reliably

accommodate faster uploads and down-

loads, will drive a continued rise in data

consumption, says ABI Research. ABI

reports that average monthly data con-

sumption per subscriber was 445MB

in 2014, and projects that the figure

will rise to 2,289MB within five years.

Looking at global figures, ABI expects

mobile data upload traffic to rise from

6,860 petabytes last year to more than

60,000 petabytes by 2019, with the big-

gest increases happening in Africa and

Latin America.

Worldwide Semiconductor Capital Spending To Slow

❯ After a strong 2014 for semiconductors,

marked by a 12.9% growth in spending,

Gartner expects worldwide semiconductor

capital spending to grow just 0.8% this year.

Capital equipment spending will grow 5.6%,

down from previous estimates of 11.3%

growth, as companies take a more conserva-

tive approach to investment strategies and

focus more on ramping up new capacity.

“As we get better visibility into individual

company spending plans for 2015, it is ap-

parent that caution is a prevailing sentiment,

with the exception of memory, where man-

ufacturers are adding capacity in response

to favorable market conditions,” says Bob

Johnson, research vice president at Gartner.

Gartner: Rethink How You Respond To Change

❯ Digital business is changing the world, and companies that succeed must

be willing to invent new business models and change the way they function,

according to research firm Gartner. Those business models and processes,

in many cases must be deliberately unstable and designed for change and

the ability to dynamically adjust to customer needs, the research firm notes.

Gartner offers several somewhat bold predictions for digital businesses:

Device Usage Can Reveal Credit Card History

❯ Let’s say an entity has possession of a sizable data-

base of anonymized credit card data—that is, detailed

credit card purchase history that is divorced from

personally identifiable information such as names

and addresses. Far from being a useless pile of data,

this information can be paired with other informa-

tion—say, from time-stamped social media posts or

a publicly available review—to “reidentify” who you

are, according to research published in the journal

Science. Researchers from MIT, Aarhus University,

and Rutgers studied the credit records of 1.1 million

people for three months and found they could “re-

identify” 90% of individuals by pairing the credit card

data to just four other points of public data. The re-

searchers say that while the data people generate using

their smartphones and other devices are an immense

help to scientists fighting diseases and other beneficial

research, the data can also be used for marketing pur-

poses or potentially exploited by criminals. The report

concludes that more research should be done to help

individuals and groups keep data private.

By 2017, 70% of successful digital business models will rely on deliberately unstable processes.

Insufficient business process management will be a major stumbling block, preventing 80% of businesses from achieving desired outcomes.

Just 30% of digital business transformation initia-tives will be successful. Those that are successful will be done by leaders who are willing to innovate rapidly.

4 April 2015 / www.cybertrend.com

As IoT Analytics Grows, Startups Tackle New Tech

❯ The IoT (Internet of Things) ana-

lytics market should reach $5.7 billion

by the end of the year, according to ABI

Research. ABI projects that in the next

five years, IoT analytics—including inte-

gration, storage, and data—will make up

a third of big data and analytics revenue.

According to Aapo Markkanen, ABI prin-

cipal analyst, “about 60% of this year’s

revenues come from three key areas: en-

ergy management, security management,

as well as monitoring and status applica-

tions.” The challenges that accompany

gathering IoT-related data from sensors

and machines, however, are driving inno-

vation in the startup market.

IT Hiring Will Continue To Be A Challenge This Year

❯ IT leaders hoping to have an easier time

finding qualified technical talent this year

will be disappointed: Challenges will re-

main this year, according to CompTIA’s

“IT Industry Outlook 2015.” In fact, 68%

of executives surveyed expect a challenging

or very challenging hiring environment this

year. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

notes that the unemployment rate for com-

puter and mathematical occupations is less

than half the national rate. About 43% of

U.S. IT companies have job openings, and

36% are fully staffed but want to hire to

support business growth; understaffing has

caused 20% of companies to postpone or

cancel projects, the report states.

Some Companies Share Data Better Than Others

❯ Big data analytics solutions can pro-

foundly improve decision-making capabili-

ties at multiple levels within an organization.

But to achieve such benefits, organizations

must share the information gleaned from

those solutions. According to a recent

Economist Intelligence Unit report spon-

sored by Teradata, companies are lagging in

this area. Of the executives surveyed for the

report, 65% agreed that “some departments

have much better access to data than others”

and 57% agreed that “some important busi-

ness data is not captured or disseminated.”

The report recommends hiring personnel

with the appropriate skills to help retrieve

and circulate usable data.

For CEOs, Company Change Requires Collaboration

❯ CEOs are embracing joint ventures to access both emerging technologies and new customers

equally, and it looks as though this type of collaboration will only continue to grow in 2015. A

2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of global CEOs reveals that 51% of CEOs intend to en-

gage in new alliances and partnerships in the next year. In terms of partners, 66% say they are

currently engaged or considering collaboration with various suppliers. Second to this group is

customers, say 66% of CEOs. More than half of the same respondents cite business networks,

clusters, or trade organization; firms and other industries; competitors; and startups as partners

with whom they want to work. Here are some of the reasons why CEOs around the world work

with other industries in “joint ventures, strategic alliances, or informal collaboration”:

Gartner Predicts That The IoT Will Directly Impact IAM By 2016

❯ The IoT (Internet of Things) will con-

tinue be a driver for further advancements

in technology, specifically for new IAM

(identity and access management). Research

firm Gartner says the IoT will be respon-

sible for new “device and user relationship

requirements” in 20% of IAM implementa-

tions though the end of 2016. Gartner also

predicts that, in general, EMM (enterprise

mobility management) will be a significant

IAM requirement as organizations work to

maintain reliable and secure access to apps

on Web and native application architectures.

Moreover, by the year 2020, Gartner predicts

that two sweeping changes will occur: “60%

of organizations will use active social identity

proofing and let consumers bring in social

identities to access risk-appropriate applica-

tions” plus “new biometric methods will dis-

place passwords and fingerprints for access to

endpoint devices across 80% of the market.”

47% Access to new customers

47% Access to new/emerging technologies

42% Access to new geographic markets

40% Ability to strengthen our innovation capabilities

28% Ability to strengthen brand or reputation

26% Sharing of risks

26% Access to talent

15% Access to new industries

CyberTrend / April 2015 5

Smart Card Shipments Up, Saturation Nears

❯ Smart card vendors are shifting strate-

gies as they face lower prices as a result of

a potentially saturated market, according

to a report from ABI Research. Last year,

vendors shipped about 8.8 billion smart

cards for a year-over-year growth of

about 9%. More than 80% of those cards

shipped into the SIM or payment cards,

market, ABI notes. Smart card vendors

see potential in adding software and ser-

vices, making cards more suited to em-

bedded security, ABI reports, including

anti-counterfeiting, brand protection, and

securing data, certificates, and identities

on mobile and consumer electronics de-

vices, says Senior Analyst Phil Sealy.

Make Way For More Part-Tablet, Part-Phone “Phablets”

❯ Despite its strange-sounding port-

manteau of a name, the phablet (larger

than a phone, smaller than a tablet) is

poised to make it big, according to a

new forecast from Juniper Research.

Thanks to the popularity of smart-

phones with larger screens, which

manufacturers originally launched in

part to steal some of the limelight from

small tablets, smartphone-makers are

planning to give buyers more of what

they want: phablets with 5.5- to 6.9-inch

screens. Juniper predicts 400 million

phablets will ship worldwide in 2019,

compared with the 138 million phablets

it estimates will ship this year.

Larger Screens May Not Come With Higher Price Tags

❯ As smartphone companies prepare to pro-

duce larger-screen models in the coming

months, display manufacturers are encoun-

tering increased pressure to reduce prices, ac-

cording to a recent IHS report. Display prices

already dropped 14% in 2014 compared

with 2013, says IHS, which expects another

double-digit drop this year. Smartphone-

makers worldwide, particularly those in

China, will attempt to keep phone prices

low despite growing screen sizes. “China is

the major battlefield for 5-inch smartphone

displays,” says Terry Yu, analyst with IHS.

“Demand for these displays is very strong,

but they face strong competitive price pres-

sure in the set market.”

Vehicle Connectivity Technologies Accelerate

❯ The use of embedded con-

nectivity in vehicles will in-

crease from 13.4% in 2014 to

52% in 2020, according to ABI

Research. The research firm

also expects 2020 to be the

first year we’ll see widespread

availability of V2V (vehicle-

to-vehicle) systems. In terms

of wireless connectivity, 4G

LTE (Long Term Evolution)

cellular is playing a key role,

but consumers are slow to buy

into added services. “While penetration levels of embedded connectivity in vehicles

continue to grow steadily, it remains challenging for car OEMs to convince users to pay

for built-in connected car services,” says Dominique Bonte, vice president and practice

director for ABI. “While initiatives such as allowing adding connected car systems to

shared data plans by GM in the United States are definitely going to boost uptake, full

penetration is unlikely to be achieved solely through consumer-led drivers.” Looking

at V2V systems, ABI expects that over the next 10 years, with the arrival of 5G cellular,

data latencies will fall to as little as 1 millisecond, meaning that 5G could supplant the

dedicated V2V technology in use today.

Tablets & Smartphones Will Be Primary Devices For Online Use

❯ In the next four years, more than half of

mobile device users will turn to their smart-

phones and tablets first for online activities

such as communications and content con-

sumption, according to key mobility predic-

tions from Gartner. Van Baker, research vice

president with Gartner, says that according

to consumer use patterns, the smartphone

is emerging as the first-option device when

on the go, whereas the tablet is utilized for

longer sessions. PCs still have their place, he

says, but they’re used primarily for complex

tests. “As voice, gesture, and other modalities

grow in popularity with consumers, and as

content consumption tasks outweigh content

creation tasks, this will further move users

away from the PC,” Baker says. In terms of

enterprise mobility, Gartner projects that

40% of enterprises will rely on Wi-Fi as the

default for workplace connectivity, which

coincides with increased mobile demands.


Search & Real-Time Analytics Fuel Swiftype’s Growth

❯ Founded in 2012, Swiftype offers organi-

zations powerful search tools for their web-

sites. Swiftype customers are equipped with

tools and dashboards to customize search

functions and review analytical information

based on site usage, while websites using

Swiftype tools allow visitors to perform site

searches and advanced searches. Swiftype

also works with mobile devices. In March,

Swiftype announced it had raised $13 million

in Series B funding led by New Enterprise

Associates. In its blog post, Swiftype said the

company will use the new funds to hire more

search engineers, expand sales and mar-

keting, and “establish a stronger position of

leadership within the search industry.”

Blippar Blends Augmented Reality & Advertising, Gets $45M

❯ New York-based startup Blippar recently

raised $45 million in funding to further its

augmented reality and image-recognition

platform. The Blippar platform allows

manufacturers to transform products into

“blippable” objects. Consumers with the

Blippar app can point their smartphone

cameras at the objects to reveal 3D views,

provide further information, or unlock spe-

cial content. Blippar also has uses in the

education market. The company did not

disclose the identities of its recent investors,

but Ambarish Mitra, founder and CEO,

explained in a press release how Blippar in-

tends to use the funds. “This funding brings

us closer to our ultimate goal of creating a

new kind of cognitive behavior,” he said,

“one that enables us to instantaneously ac-

cess information and content directly from

any of the physical objects or collateral in

the world around us.”

Cylindo’s Visualization Tool Has The Furniture Industry’s Attention

❯ In most industries, demos have gone virtual. Three-dimensional product modeling is par-

ticularly helpful for manufacturers, designers, and salespeople, who can take out a tablet com-

puter and show off new products and features without hauling around the actual products and

prototypes. Cylindo, a startup based in Copenhagen with offices in San Francisco, offers a 3D

visualization platform

called 360 HD Viewer

for furniture manu-

facturers and retailers,

and counts Turnstone

and Steelcase among its

customers. In addition

to the viewer, Cylindo

offers furniture con-

struction and custom-

ization software called

Furniture Builder and

room design software

called Room Planner.

Cylindo recently raised

$1 million in new funding. “Our platform removes the friction retailers have when dealing with

products visualization,” said CEO Janus Jagd in a press release, “and we have seen conversion

rates increase at an average of 30% when our technology is utilized.”

Startup Offers Analytics Tools For Sales Reps, Managers & Ops

❯ “Read your prospect’s mind.” That’s the

ability San Francisco-based startup Tout

seeks to provide with its sales analytics tool

of the same name. Tout is a communications

enabler for sales, with email and calendar

functions to help salespeople easily track

conversations, compose emails without cut-

ting and pasting, remember follow-ups, and

book meetings that make sense. Recently,

ToutApp announced it had raised $15 mil-

lion in a Series B funding round. Scott Weiss

from Andreessen Horowitz, which led the

newest investment, will join ToutApp’s

board. ToutApp says it will use the new

funds to expand its sales, marketing, cus-

tomer service, and engineering operations.

Visually’s Brand Content Platform Brings In $3.3 Million

❯ Visually, a company that offers a platform

for creating brand content such as info-

graphics, presentations, and videos, claims

to have gained more than half a million users

since its 2011 launch. The San Francisco-

based startup raised $3.3 million in March,

bringing its total raised to $15.4 million. “As

brands struggle to keep pace, Visually serves

as a trusted partner, helping brands, pub-

lishers, and agencies scale in the short-term

or as an ongoing extension of their in-house

creative teams,” said CEO Matt Cooper in a

press release. Visually reports 80% growth in

average spend per client over the past year,

and plans to use the new funding to invest in

ever-newer tools to further that growth.

STARTUPS


Why Choose Managed Services? IT’S ALL ABOUT EXPERTISE, NOT NECESSARILY RELINQUISHING CONTROL

IT MAY SOUND counterintuitive, but

sometimes the most advantageous move

an organization can make is to give up.

This doesn’t mean getting out of busi-

ness altogether, but rather giving up in

the sense of delegating certain tasks to

a third party to perform instead of as-

signing them to internal personnel. Such

is the nature of hiring an MSP (man-

aged service provider). In exchange for

contracting with a MSP to take over the

real- and full-time management and

monitoring of any number of IT ser-

vices to whatever extent is possible or

reasonable, an organization can dedicate

its own staff to developing and growing

critical areas of the business.

What engaging with an MSP doesn’t

mean is turning over ownership and con-

trol of whatever service, equipment, ap-

plication, or other asset the MSP manages

or monitors. What it does mean is that

in many cases the company can realize

CAPEX and OPEX savings, as well as ac-

quire access, expertise, and insight into

operational areas, technologies, hardware,

and more that the MSP possesses but the

company didn’t otherwise have access to.

While many executives are generally

aware of the benefits an MSP makes pos-

sible, some are less aware of exactly what

types of managed services are available to

their organization or what these services

entail exactly. This article explores some

of the more common types of managed

services that MSPs offer and what to ex-

pect with each.

Range & Quality Managed service providers range from

being very small companies focused pri-

marily on serving companies in their

immediate city or region to extremely

large companies that offer services on a

global scale. Dan Kusnetzky, founder of

Kusnetzky Group and industry analyst,

says MSPs attempt to differentiate them-

selves through their customer service,

expertise in given vertical segments, per-

formance, reliability, and pricing. Those

KEY POINTS

• The managed services market includes a diverse array of pro-viders offering a broad spectrum of specialization in terms of service delivery and customer specialties.

• Organizations are focusing strongly on managed security and backup/recovery services due to data security concerns.

• Although some types of man-aged services are delivered onsite, many are delivered remotely and in an automated manner.

• Server management/monitoring and storage continue to be staples of many providers’ offerings, although certain aspects are be-coming more cloud-based.


that primarily focus on pricing, he says,

“often offer very limited levels of service.”

As of Q1 2015, says Charles Weaver,

CEO of the MSPAlliance, there were

more MSPs than ever in operation.

Weaver attributes this fact to how

modern companies have grown so re-

liant on technology. Another factor is

the ever-increasing number of risks to

company data that organizations are

now facing. Furthermore, companies

strongly desire to focus on their core

businesses rather than on meeting in-

ternal IT demands. For an upcoming

“state of the market” report, Weaver says

50% of companies surveyed reported

using managed services for this reason.

“They rely on IT, but they don’t want to

be bogged down with it. They want and

need to outsource it to someone else who

can do it better than they can,” he says.

Weaver describes the current MSP

market as delivering a robust array of

companies, providers, and services.

Residing somewhere between MSPs that

are “more general practitioners” and

those that take “a broad spectrum” ap-

proach are those covering “every imag-

inable area of specialty and expertise,”

Weaver says. “There are so many dif-

ferent types of MSPs doing so many

types of specialization, either specializa-

tion of the services they deliver or spe-

cialization with the expertise by servicing

a particular grouping of customers,” he

says. (Weaver, as well as many others,

consider cloud computing as a subset or

type of managed service.)

Wolfgang Benkel, Forrester Research

principal analyst, says the distinguishing

characteristic of a “managed service” is

that the MSP manages the service de-

livery. In other words, it’s responsible for

the “how.” The client, meanwhile, is fo-

cused on the outcome of the service, or

the what. Factors that differentiate man-

aged services from one another include

the type of service, the level of vendor re-

sponsibilities, and the scope of the service.

In terms of types, Benkel says, the

managed services spectrum includes ap-

plication, infrastructure, and network ser-

vices. Often, these are delivered remotely

and in automated fashion, although some

are essentially labor-based. Depending on

the client, Benkel says, the level at which

the vendor is responsible for managing

service delivery can vary from being an

entirely vendor-managed service environ-

ment down to a client’s predefined ser-

vice environment (processes, procedures,

tool, etc.). The company’s environment

can dramatically influence the benefits

and advantages it sees from the managed

service depending on how much it con-

strains the MSP, he says.

Generally, a managed service affords

the MSP a certain level of autonomy in

how it performs its work, with the MSP

using its own processes, tools, and assets.

“Higher accountability for service delivery

or continuous improvement are impor-

tant elements to participate on vendors’

expertise, cost reductions, and internal

investments and innovations for better

quality and efficiency,” Benkel says.

In terms of scope, managed services

vary greatly. A broad scope, for example,

could mean a managed workplace en-

tailing all activities around the workplace,

including desktop and desk-side man-

agement, service desk, email, and similar

functions. More narrowly defined ser-

vices might include a managed mailbox or

server or network monitoring. “Different

customers tend to favor varying levels of

granularity in their managed services,”

Benkel says.

Availability & Growth Weaver says among the bevy of man-

aged services available, security and

backup are categories that companies

are focusing on currently to address an

important core theme: data privacy and

security. These services “aren’t uniquely

different,” he says. “They’re intertwined.

They’re forever connected in my opinion.

The days of just making sure you have a

duplicate copy of something are over.”

CEOs and management teams today

are very cognizant of how important

data redundancy and availability are,

as well as the need to protect that data,

Weaver says. Although some companies

are addressing data privacy and secu-

rity concerns through separate compo-

nents—BYOD (bring your own device),

MDM (mobile device management),

etc.—delivered by different MSPs, these

components are being combined “to

focus on one core business objective: the

customer,” Weaver says.

Among MSPs, there is currently a great

deal of focus on offering colocation and

cloud services, particularly to companies

in regulated industries, Kusnetzky says.

Additionally, more focus is falling on da-

tabase-as-a-service and backup, and/or

Managed service providers that primarily focus on pricing “often offer very limited levels of service.”

DAN KUSNETZKYIndustry Analyst & Founder : Kusnetzky Group

MANAGED SECURITY SERVICES COVER CONSIDERABLE GROUND. FEATURES CAN INCLUDE FULL-TIME IDS (INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM) AND IPS (INTRUSION PROTECTION SYSTEM) MONITORING, VPN SERVICES, INSTANT NOTIFICATIONS OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL INCIDENTS COVERING THE NETWORK AND DEVICES, ENSURING VARIOUS COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS ARE MET, PROVIDING ONSITE SUPPORT, AND MUCH MORE.


disaster recovery-as-a-service offerings,

he says. “We’re hearing less about desktop

as a service, or VDI [virtual desktop infra-

structure] as a service,” he says.

In general, most managed services

being offered today across the applica-

tion, infrastructure, and network spec-

trum are pretty mature, Benkel says.

Broadly, Benkel says, the managed

service model is a trend that, to a de-

gree, is overlapping with the cloud ser-

vice model (such as private managed or

private hosted clouds), “although the

cloud model is normally interpreted as

a self-service model,” he says. “That said,

there are numerous opportunities for

managed services around cloud models,

and they’re growing rapidly.” Fueled by

growing client interest, managed services

are also expanding in areas of mobility

and big data, he says.

Common Managed Service Types Although MSPs have arguably paid

more attention to larger companies tra-

ditionally, today evidence suggests that

midsize organizations are becoming in-

creasingly attractive to MSPs. Overall,

while MSPs are continually working

toward providing new services that ap-

peal to their target audiences, there are

a group of common services that com-

panies have long leveraged, including

the following.

❯ Server management & server perfor-

mance monitoring. Managed services

in this segment can include configura-

tion assistance, management of virtual-

ized environments, operating system

patch monitoring, troubleshooting,

support, and more. Benkel says while a

considerable amount of server manage-

ment is performed via the traditional

outsourced model in which servers re-

side in the supplier’s data center, man-

agement can also be provided for the

customer on premises.

Historically, Weaver says, server

management and performance moni-

toring has been “the bread and butter of

what MSPs do,” and along with desktop

management it is one of the more com-

monly delivered managed services. “In

the cloud world, you see a lot of [server

management] work being put into con-

sulting and what I’ll call virtualization

types of projects where [MSPs] are vir-

tualizing and consolidating servers but

then still managing them,” he says.

❯ Network management. As with

many managed services, network man-

agement is one that’s generally deliv-

ered remotely. “It’s often bundled in

with broader outsourcing relation-

ships,” Benkel says. Essentially, network

management equates to the monitoring

and analysis of the customer’s network,

Weaver says, as “most MSPs don’t con-

trol the network. They can’t. That’s

something for the ISP [Internet ser-

vice provider] or bandwidth provider

to handle.” In addition to providing

network-specific expertise, managed

network services can entail providing

real-time notifications covering de-

vices, WLANs (wireless local-area net-

works), routers, switches, and other

components, as well as configuration

management, performance and be-

havior-related reports, identifying is-

sues, and coordinating support.

❯ Security. Managed security services

cover considerable ground. Features can

include full-time IDS (intrusion detec-

tion system) and IPS (intrusion protec-

tion system) monitoring, VPN services,

instant notifications of internal and ex-

ternal incidents covering the network

and devices, ensuring various compli-

ance requirements are met, providing

onsite support, and much more.

In recent years, managed security

services, including perimeter detec-

tion, have become popular offerings,

Benkel says. Managed security is also

becoming a more segmented area de-

pending on the customer in the ques-

tion, Weaver says. Enterprises, for

example, often seek vastly different se-

curity abilities than do SMBs (small to

midsize businesses). Beyond firewall

log management/monitoring, for ex-

ample, enterprises also want data and

analytics in terms the MSP combing

through firewalls to determine who is

probing the company. “They want to

find out where their vulnerabilities are.

What ports hackers are trying to hack

in from. They want data,” Weaver says.

SMBs, meanwhile, generally just want

the MSP to ensure the company isn’t

being hacked, he says.

Moving forward, Weaver expects

more specialization in managed security

services to occur, as well as more lay-

ering of additional security types, such

as SSO (single-sign-on), multi-factor

authentication, and password manage-

ment. “I think we’re starting to see the

beginning of a tidal wave of what many

in the enterprise have been accustomed

to seeing for maybe a decade or more—

a way to go beyond just usernames and

passwords,” Weaver says. “Take multi-

factor authentication, for example. We

have yet to see mainstream businesses

adopt that technology, but it’s going

to come, and it’s going to come chiefly

because of MSPs enabling its delivery as

a service.”

Another example of this movement

is MDM, Weaver says. Depending on

a customer’s size and needs and the

MSP’s capabil it ies, MDM services

differ, including in terms of specialty

features. “Some MSPs are only han-

dling device policies and pushing out

to the best of their ability which apps

can reside on mobile devices and how

“In the cloud world, you see a lot of [server management] work being put into consulting and what I’ll call virtualiza-tion types of projects where [MSPs] are virtualizing and consolidating servers but then still managing them.”

CHARLES WEAVERCEO : MSPAlliance


to authenticate users on those devices,”

Weaver says. Other MSPs, however, are

doing more sophisticated things, such

as managing desktop virtualization on

tablets. “It’s not new technology, but

we’re seeing proliferation of that tech-

nology now that cloud is coming into its

own,” Weaver says.

❯ Storage. Similar to servers, storage

is a big and important part of the MSP

marketplace. Benkel says managed

storage offerings are corresponding

with interesting occurrences now hap-

pening with managed hosting and man-

aged cloud-like models. Weaver says

his organization is “definitely seeing

a bifurcation of public cloud and pri-

vate or hybrid cloud storage needs and

providers. Thus, you have vendors and

their respective channel partners deliv-

ering both sides of those types of data

backup, and I don’t think there’s any-

thing really slowing that down.” Weaver

says that while actual storage of data is

becoming commoditized, what’s not is

the expertise in how to architect and

manage solutions. “That’s still very

much an in-demand offering,” he says.

Depending on the MSP, man-

aged storage services can cover SAN

(storage area network), NAS (network

attached storage), dedicated, and on-

demand cloud approaches. Services can

involve a company storing its data and

applications in-house or in the MSP’s

facility. Features can include capacity

and performance monitoring/manage-

ment, backup and restore management,

archiving abilities, local/remote data

copying, design and deployment of in-

frastructure services, alerts, support,

and more.

In terms of backup and disaster re-

covery, Benkel says, companies can

acquire these as discrete services or

bundled in with additional services,

such as IT infrastructure management.

Numerous sources point to backup and

recovery as a specific managed services

segment that midsize companies par-

ticularly are looking to handoff respon-

sibilities for to a third party, particularly

those offering cloud-based approaches.

❯ Communications. Managed services

in general have been a staple for com-

munication service providers for years,

Benkel says. With this segment, Weaver

says, “we’re talking mostly about VoIP.”

He adds that while this specialty seg-

ment of the market, which he describes

as “principally hardware resellers selling

the actual phone systems,” has focused

on the legacy VoIP and telephony space,

hosted cloud-based phone systems are

becoming a common theme on the

vendor and MSP sides.

Overal l , Weaver says , managed

communication services are primarily

about managing communications sys-

tems (provisioning or deprovisioning

users, for example) and not about tasks

such as boosting bandwidth. A survey

of various providers of managed UC

(unified communications) indicates fea-

tures including administration abilities;

proactive monitoring and management;

alerts; and oversight concerning de-

vices, servers, carrier links, and other

components. Features of cloud-based

approaches offer similar abilities in

terms of monitoring call volumes, usage

patterns and histories, and call quality

and availability tasks.

❯ Migration. Although there’s often

still a need for some type of human in-

tervention, much effort associated with

managed services for servers, applica-

tions, and database migration has been

automated, Benkel says. Weaver adds

that much of this segment concerns

“consolidation through virtualization—

taking 100 servers and turning them

into 10. There’s a whole project that’s

related to that, and the ongoing man-

agement of the technology that’s needed

to virtualize that type of server farm.”

Although many MSPs offer such ser-

vices, many are also moving this pro-

cess from a physical server to a hosted

service (“whether it’s called ‘cloud’

or by another name”), Weaver says.

Whether talking about the migration of

servers, PBX phone system, key appli-

cations, or backup drives, Weaver says,

“the general trend is moving that stuff

out of the office and into the cloud.”

❯ Helpdesk. Most MSPs have some

type of helpdesk or network opera-

tions function available. “Not a lot of

MSPs skip the helpdesk,” Weaver says.

“Most MSPs that interface with their

customers do so through the helpdesk.

So it’s a very common offering.” That

said, Benkel says, service desk offer-

ings are under siege due to a growing

interest in self-service support models,

particularly among younger users.

Nevertheless, helpdesk remains a key

category of managed services for both

applications and infrastructure re-

quirements, he says.

In general, managed helpdesk ser-

vices offer a good example of how an

organization can outsource functions

to a third party and simultaneously en-

able internal IT staff to focus on core

business objectives rather than tasks

such as hiring and training personnel,

operating trouble ticket systems, etc.

Most MSPs’ offerings in this segment

are ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)-

based and include certified expertise

across various IT areas.

Services in this area generally cover

multiple operating systems and plat-

forms, desktops, notebooks, servers,

mobile devices, VoIP systems, cloud-

based services, security, virtualization,

and more.

“Higher accountability for service delivery or continuous improvement are important elements to participate on vendors’ expertise, cost reductions, and internal invest-ments and innovations for better quality and efficiency.”

WOLFGANG BENKELPrincipal Analyst : Forrester Research


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.COM

A Customer-Inspired Evolution MICROSOFT LISTENED TO FEEDBACK WHEN DESIGNING WINDOWS 10 & IT SHOWS

MICROSOFT IS KNOWN for quite a few

technological innovations in the com-

puter space, including both hardware and

software, but the company is perhaps best

known for its popular Windows oper-

ating system. The Windows OS has seen

many iterations over the past three de-

cades, some of which were well-received

and others that didn’t quite live up to

expectations. All of these past highs and

lows have ultimately led us to the where

we are now with the impending release

of Windows 10. We’ll get to the reasons

why Windows 10 could win back users

who were disappointed with Windows 8

and 8.1, but first, a brief history of how

Microsoft first started working on the

operating system and how the company

learned from its customers to get to where

it is today.

Early Vision & The Creation Of MS-DOS

Microsoft’s origin story is among

the most interesting in the tech world,

partly because it’s somewhat of an un-

derdog story. Two men, Bill Gates and

Paul Allen, decided to establish a startup

called Microsoft in 1975, and although

the company had humble beginnings, it

would quickly make its mark on the soft-

ware world. It all started with the vision

of its founders: to get as many computers

out into the public as possible, both for

consumers and business users.

Microsoft put its lofty ambitions on

the back burner somewhat in 1980 when

it was approached by IBM to work on

a project called Chess. In this partner-

ship, IBM would take care of the hard-

ware and Microsoft would focus on

creating the operating system. That’s

how MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating

System) was born.

The job of MS-DOS was to help

manage the hardware itself and to run

programs in a more effective manner.

And because the operating system is

essentially the brain of the system that

helps programs get the resources they

KEY POINTS

• Microsoft’s first operating system was MS-DOS, but it didn’t take long for the company to em-brace windows, both as an inter-face design philosophy and as an operating system name.

• Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 were seen by many as stumbling blocks, which is why Windows 10 is important for Microsoft.

• Based on customer feedback, Microsoft brought back the tradi-tional Start screen in Windows 10.

• Windows 10 is a unified OS designed to work on PCs, tablets, and smartphones as well as on Microsoft’s new HoloLens and Surface Hub products.

PHOT

OGRA

PHS

COUR

TESY

OF

MIC

ROSO

FT


need from the hardware to run, MS-DOS

was absolutely crucial to IBM’s com-

puting platform. A year later, in 1981,

IBM shipped its first PCs with MS-DOS

installed. The operating system had an

immediate impact on the industry, even

though it was viewed as a bit compli-

cated for the general public due to the

complexity of certain commands.

What’s In A Name? Understanding that it would need

to simplify the user interface to make

t rue headway in

the marketp lace ,

M i c r o s o f t c o n -

tinued fine-tuning

its operating system

a n d e v e n t u a l l y

landed on some-

thing that looked

q u i t e d i f f e r e n t

f r o m M S - D O S .

In 1985, the first

true Windows op-

e r a t i n g s y s t e m ,

Windows 1.0, was

launched, and it’s

safe to say that this

revolutionary step

forward changed

everything people

knew about com-

puters. Instead of

using complicated

M S - D O S c o m -

mands, users were

now able to mouse

through different “windows” in order

to get to the data and programs they

needed. Windows 1.0 launched with nu-

merous programs, including Windows

Writer, Notepad, and Calculator as well

as a calendar, clock, and many others

that would serve as foundations for fu-

ture applications.

Over the next few years, Microsoft

continued to build on its operating

system with Windows 2.0, Windows

3.0, and Windows NT. Each new ver-

sion would come with new programs,

better performance, and improved vi-

suals. And as the platform continued to

mature and change, the popularity of

personal computers also began to grow,

which eventually led to Windows 95.

Windows 95 sold an astounding 7

million copies in its first 5 weeks, which

was unheard of at the time, and it had a

major marketing campaign behind it that

even included a Rolling Stones tune as

its theme song. Windows 95 was the first

of Microsoft’s operating systems to truly

take advantage of the Internet, and in

1995 Microsoft released the first version

of Internet Explorer. Windows 95 is also

notable because it marked the first time

the Start menu and many other classic

interface tweaks were put into place.

Over the next few years, Microsoft

would release Windows 98, Windows

Me, and Windows 2000, all of which

continued to make improvements on the

basic Windows formula. Windows 98 in-

cluded the ability to play DVDs as well as

connect USB devices. Windows Me intro-

duced Windows Media Player 7, which

made it much easier for users to manage

their digital media. And Windows 2000

Professional was designed for office

workers in mind, as it supported more

networking and USB device options than

previous Windows versions had.

Microsoft’s 14-Year Rollercoaster Ride

W h e r e a s m o s t o f M i c r o s o f t ’ s

Windows iterations were well-received

and seen as positive steps forward, that

wouldn’t always be the case. But before

consumer confidence wavered somewhat

in subsequent years, PC users would first

get access to what is widely considered to

be one of the best operating systems of

all time: Windows XP. Built to give con-

sumers quick access to their applications

without putting any clunky UI barriers

in the way, Windows XP was built with

the user in mind and was designed to be

as easy to use as possible.

Microsoft refined its Start menu,

Taskbar, and many other built-in

tools. Microsoft improved the inter-

face to make the windows themselves

look cleaner. And with Windows XP

Microsoft focused on customer sup-

port and security more than any other

Windows iteration before it. It was clear

that with XP, Microsoft was taking many

of its customers’ concerns into con-

sideration and answering every ques-

tion along the way. Windows XP also

gave consumers a choice, with Home,

With its newest operating system, Windows 10, Microsoft blends familiar elements such as the Start menu with the tile layout that dominated the screen in Windows 8’s Metro design. Developed with touchscreens in mind, the Metro layout had turned off many desktop PC users.


Professional, 64-bit, Media Center

Edition, and Tablet PC editions all re-

leased in the following months and years.

Windows Vista fol lowed XP in

2006, and while it sported many im-

provements, especially with security,

there were some issues that prevented

some users from making the upgrade.

Alternating with Windows Me, Vista

marked the beginning of Microsoft’s

rollercoaster of up and down releases

where seemingly every other Windows

version would be well-received. For

some, Vista’s user interface seemed like

a clunky amalgamation of new ideas

mixed with old ones, which lent the op-

erating system an awkward in-between

feel as if it were a half-step rather than a

full new release.

With Windows 7, released in 2009,

Microsoft righted many of the perceived

wrongs that Windows Vista possessed.

The interface once again had a fresh coat

of polish, with added features such as the

ability to pin favorite programs to the

Taskbar for quick access. Microsoft added

many other navigational features as well,

including the ability to roll the cursor

over a minimized program to see a pre-

view of what’s happening in that window.

Windows 7 was also the first Windows OS

to embrace touchscreen controls.

Whereas Windows 7 was widely

viewed as a return to form for Microsoft

and was seemingly well-received by

most, Windows 8, although certainly

revolutionary, might have taken touch-

screen controls a bit too far. Windows

8 introduced the tile-based Metro in-

terface where instead of relying on the

traditional Start menu arrangement or

shortcuts on the desktop, users would

see a colorful screen full of program

tiles they could either touch or click.

For many users, the major problem

with Windows 8 was that its interface

was difficult to navigate without a touch-

screen display. In essence, Microsoft was

trying to bring a tablet-style interface

to desktops and laptops but with mixed

results, which was jarring to users that

were comfortable with the traditional

Windows layout. With Windows 8.1,

Microsoft addressed some of these is-

sues and reintroduced the Start button,

making it easier to revert back to the

original Desktop layout complete with

shortcuts. But users still had to use the

tile-based interface in many instances,

and the Start button didn’t always

work as it had worked traditionally, so

Windows 8.1 was ultimately viewed as

a half-measure for users who wanted a

more familiar Windows experience.

It is precisely for this reason that

Windows 10, which is slated for release

this year, is so important not just for

consumers, but for Microsoft as well.

Windows 10 & The Importance Of Customer Feedback

Before we dig into the reasons why

Windows 10 is shaping up to be a re-

turn to form, it’s important to under-

stand that Microsoft’s penchant for

innovation and evolution has often been

at odds with the desires of its customer

base. Take the company’s Xbox One

gaming console, for example. When

Microsoft first announced the console

in early 2013, it came with not only a

hefty price tag of $500, but also a slew

of unpopular features.

One example that has many paral-

lels to the Windows rollercoaster is

the fact that the console came with a

Kinect motion-tracking camera with

built-in microphones that could be used

for voice commands. In fact, the entire

Xbox One interface was tile-based and

designed to be navigated much more

easily with voice and gesture commands

rather than with a traditional con-

troller. This may sound familiar to users

of Windows 8 and 8.1 that wanted the

option of navigating the interface in a

more traditional desktop-style fashion.

Fortunately for Xbox One fans,

Microsoft backtracked on many of its

unpopular features, including one that

required an always-on Internet con-

nection, even if users wanted to play

games offline. In the coming months,

Microsoft also listened to customer

feedback and not only readjusted its

user interface to be easier to navigate

with a controller, but also started of-

fering console SKUs without the Kinect.

This anecdote about Microsoft’s

gaming divisions is important be-

cause it directly relates to Windows

10. Although Windows 8 and 8.1 were

revolutionary in their introduction of a

more touch-oriented, tile-based layout,

it wasn’t the type of revolutionary

change that a large contingent of users

could appreciate. Because those users

were so vocal, Microsoft listened and

has redesigned its operating system in

the form of Windows 10, with the goal

of giving users the best of both worlds:

touch-friendly tiles that work well on

tablets, and more traditional interface

Microsoft responded to complaints about the original Xbox One game console by making adjustments to the tile-based interface and reducing the price. This move was similar to the way Microsoft is handling Windows 10 as a follow-up to Windows 8.


features that work well on full-sized

computers. The hope is that with this

newest iteration of Windows, users will

have more options for navigating the

interface and interacting with data and

applications.

More Refined & Easier To Navigate

For evidence that Microsoft clearly

listened to consumer feedback when

designing Windows 10, look no fur-

ther than the new desktop layout.

Instead of automatically booting to a

s i d e - s c r o l l i n g , t i l e -

based layout, you’ll find

the traditional Desktop

s e t u p t h a t w a s u s e d

in Windows vers ions

through Windows 7 .

There are, however, some

slight tweaks in Windows

10 to make navigation

even easier.

For example , when

y o u c l i c k t h e S t a r t

button, the menu pops

up like you remember,

with icons for frequently

used applications at the

ready. But when you

look to the right of those

apps, you’ll notice a tile-

based menu that looks

similar to the Windows

8 setup, with tiles seg-

mented into an email,

social media, and news

section; a Work section with Microsoft

Office programs and other productivity

apps; and an Entertainment section for

media streaming applications, games,

and more. There’s also a search bar just

below this menu, so you can type in

keywords and quickly find the applica-

tion you’re looking for.

As with earlier versions of the Start

menu, in Windows 10 you can use it

to pin frequently used applications

for quick access. This saves you from

having to use the search bar to find a

favorite program, or hoping a program

icon shows up in your recently used list.

Everything about Windows 10’s layout

indicates that Microsoft has taken user

criticism to heart without compromising

its forward-looking vision. Yes, you have

a traditional Start menu, but you still

have an application menu that is friendly

for touchscreen devices as well.

New Security & Management Features

In addition to productivity—new

versions of Office are scheduled to

debut at Windows 10’s launch and in

future updates—Microsoft has placed

major emphases on security and ease

of management for its newest operating

system. In terms of security, Microsoft

has integrated more enterprise-grade

security solutions than in any earlier

version of Windows. For example, there

are identity and information protection

tools in place designed to protect users

and their data from external threats,

and Microsoft has added features to

protect users from data theft and

phishing scams.

Perhaps the most significant im-

provement on the security side, and one

that enterprises will appreciate, is the

ability to protect data regardless of its

location. There have always been ways

to protect data on the desktop, but it’s

much more difficult to do so once the

data leaves that environment. Windows

10 includes tools to protect data

whether it resides on the desktop or

has been moved to a mobile device, sent

via email, transferred to a USB memory

stick, or migrated to the cloud. And to

help companies better manage mobile

devices and remote workers, Microsoft

has included more VPN (virtual private

network) features in Windows 10 for

secure and reliable network connections

regardless of location.

In terms of management, Windows

10 is easier to use than past versions. The

OS is simpler to install, and the process

of initiating updates is much smoother.

Users can even choose how often certain

devices are upgraded depending on the

circumstances. For example, if there is a

mission-critical system that can’t go down

for a full OS update, an administrator

can choose to push out only security up-

dates to ensure data is always protected.

Other systems, meanwhile, can be set up

to always receive the newest features and

productivity improvements available so

their users can stay up to speed and work

more efficiently.

Microsoft says its new Web browser, currently in development under the code name Project Spartan, will be much faster and more intuitive than Internet Explorer, and will allow users to annotate Web pages, among other features.


Another important Windows 10 ad-

dition is the newly refined app store.

Rather than having to purchase an ap-

plication for each individual device,

you can now essentially buy them

in bulk depending on how many in-

stances you need for

your workforce . You

also have more freedom

to redistribute applica-

tion licenses as you see

fit and transfer them to

different users or de-

vices. If your organiza-

tion prefers to curate its

application offerings,

you can set up a unique

Windows 10 app store

that only provides em-

ployees with access to

approved programs. You

can also offer applica-

tions your organization

has developed along-

side those in the curated

Windows 10 app store

space to ensure users al-

ways have access to the

tools they need.

Universal ApplicationsIn an effort to unify its desktop and

mobile iterations, Microsoft is intro-

ducing universal applications that are

designed to seamlessly transition from

one device to another. Whether it’s

your photos, videos, and music, or

messaging, email, and calendar appli-

cations, they will look and operate ex-

actly the same whether you’re on your

desktop or your tablet. And perhaps

the biggest new feature with universal

apps is that you can sync your infor-

mation via OneDrive and keep all of

your devices up-to-date with the most

current information.

This idea of universal apps also

applies to the newest versions of

Microsoft’s Office pro-

ductivity suite. For users

that prefer a touchscreen-

oriented setup, they’ l l

have a unified experi-

ence across their many

touch devices, whether

they’re using Outlook,

PowerPoint, Word, Excel,

or OneNote. These improved touch-

screen-friendly controls also make

it easier to add handwritten notes to

presentations or documents. For those

more interested in the traditional

desktop Office experience, Microsoft

will be making announcements in the

coming months about future versions

of the applications.

Improved InternetIn conjunction with its Windows

10 announcements, Microsoft indi-

cated it is preparing to release a new

Web browser, code-named Project

Spartan, as an Internet Explorer re-

placement. According to Microsoft,

the new browser will be much faster

and more intuitive, so users can surf

the Web more quickly and more reli-

ably. The browser will also provide the

ability to annotate with keyboard or

stylus as well as view articles in a read-

only mode both online and offline. As

with other new and updated Microsoft

products, this new Web browser is

designed to extend across multiple

Windows 10 devices and offer a consis-

tent experience regardless of platform.

Cortana Personal Assistant

Another significant

addition to Windows 10

is the Cortana personal

assistant, which was pre-

viously available only on

Windows smartphones

but will become avail-

able for PCs and tablets.

Named for a character

from the popular Halo

video game franchise,

Cortana is essential ly

Microsoft’s answer to

Apple’s Siri, but with a

few more tricks up its

sleeve. The digital per-

sonal assistant can not

only he lp users f ind

what they ’re looking

for more quickly, it can

also provide the weather

forecast, updated flight

information, and much more.

Cortana is also heavily integrated

into Microsoft’s new Project Spartan

Web browser (a code name, by the

way, that is another reference to the

company’s Halo franchise). When

using the browser to search for cer-

tain topics, Cortana will automatically

know how to provide any relevant in-

formation, including directions and re-

views. This feature is not only helpful

for consumers, but also business users

who want to quickly set up meeting

reminders and perform other tasks.

Rather than submersing users in a virtual reality experience, Microsoft’s HoloLens projects interactive high-definition 3D holograms into the world around them.


P a r t o f W i n d o w s

10, Cortana is in-

tegrated into more

a p p l i c a t i o n s t h a n

comparable digital

a s s i s t a n t s , w h i c h

makes it an inter-

e s t i n g f e a t u r e t o

watch for.

Windows As A Service

Microsoft is po-

sitioning Windows

1 0 a s a p l a t f o r m

rather than a static

operat ing sys tem.

Gone are the days

w h e n y o u ’ d h a v e

to wait for the next

major update—such

as f rom Windows

8 to 8.1—to get ac-

cess to new features

and improvements.

Microsoft sees Win-

dows as a service

now and is dedicated

to pushing out updates as often as pos-

sible to the OS. With this approach,

user feedback will be more impor-

tant than ever and Microsoft will have

the ability to add new functionality

to the platform as needed to address

customer concerns. It’s a wildly dif-

ferent approach than in the past and

a welcome change for consumers and

businesses that prefer to update to the

newest version of an OS as soon as it

comes out. With Windows 10, you’ll

always have access to the newest fea-

tures as soon as they’re available.

Whether it’s to make up for past

disappointments or just to make sure

that everyone can take advantage

of its new features, Microsoft is of-

fering Windows 10 as a free upgrade

to eligible Windows 7, Windows 8,

and Windows 8.1, as long as users up-

grade within the first year of the new

OS’s availability. Microsoft has offered

similar deals in the past, but it hasn’t

always extended the offer to cover so

many past Windows versions. The

main goal for Microsoft, it seems, is

to ensure that as many users as pos-

sible upgrade to Windows 10 and start

taking advantage of the new features

and consistent updates. Microsoft ul-

timately wants to unify the Windows

10 OS across desktops, laptops, smart-

phones, tablets, and wearables.

HoloLensSpeaking of wearables, hot on the

heels of the Windows 10 announce-

ment, Microsoft also revealed a new

headset called HoloLens. HoloLens is

similar to other AR (augmented re-

ality) and VR (virtual reality) headsets,

such as the Oculus Rift or Samsung

Gear VR, but it’s truly in a category of

its own. Rather than submersing users

in a VR experience, HoloLens projects

interactive holograms into the world

around them in high-definition.

These holograms are in 3D and can

be displayed on almost any surface. For

example, a demo video from Microsoft

shows a person using HoloLens and

projecting an application menu onto a

wall, which the person could interact

with. Another user was able to play a

build-your-own-world video game on

a table, the floor, or a couch. And yet

another user made a video call with

his father while working on a sink; he

was able to draw on his tablet’s screen

and show his daughter how to change a

pipe without being in the room. There

are also examples of HoloLens being

used for space exploration where a

rover or similar vehicle can take im-

ages of a planet and then a HoloLens

application creates a 3D representa-

tion that users can walk through and

interact with.

The device might sound like some-

thing out of a science fiction movie,

but it is indeed a reality and has

been successfully demonstrated by

Microsoft live on stage. While all of

the features we’ve discussed are inter-

esting, but perhaps the most impres-

sive thing about HoloLens is that it’s a

standalone device that doesn’t require

any cables, phones, or other physical

connections to work.

Designed with business users in mind, the Windows 10-powered Surface Hub is a large touchscreen display that can read up to 100 separate touch points simultaneously and includes a built-in computer.


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The HoloLens is a lightweight

headset with a transparent lens that

can be adjusted to fit any head size,

which allows users to move around

the room freely and comfortably,

without having to be tethered to an-

other device. HoloLens is certainly

a technology to watch as it could

have many important use cases for

consumers and business users alike.

And it’s specifically designed to work

with Windows 10.

Surface HubWhile it may not be as futuristic

as HoloLens, Microsoft’s Surface

Hub is no less impressive. Imagine

taking a Microsoft surface tablet,

blowing it up to the size of an LED

television, and giving it even more

power, and you’ll have some idea of

what Surface Hub can do. Designed

with business users in mind, the

Surface Hub, which is powered by

Windows 10, is a touchscreen de-

vice that can read up to 100 separate

touch points at once and has a built-

in computer. The device ships with

Microsoft Office, including stan-

dards Word and Excel, as well as the

OneNote whiteboard and Skype For

Business applications.

The Surface Hub could change the

way companies orchestrate meetings,

with built-in features for drawing on

the screen and videoconferencing.

Surface Hub is also designed to

be customizable in order to meet

unique business needs. Buyers can

choose between 55-inch and 84-inch

4K models, and there are multiple

device installation and update op-

tions as well.

Products such as HoloLens and

the Surface Hub illustrate just how

dedicated Microsoft is to making

Windows 10 work on a wide range of

platforms, whether those platforms

be traditional or new and innovative.

This means the company is equally

dedicated to supporting the Windows

operating system and giving users

what they want. Imagine being able

to start a project on your desktop,

swing it over to your tablet to make a

few quick changes, and then sending

it to a Surface Hub for a presentation

or to the HoloLens headset to give

every individual a unique, interac-

tive experience. This is the promise of

Windows 10, and it will be interesting

to see how Microsoft delivers on it.

EVERYTHING ABOUT WINDOWS 10’S LAYOUT INDICATES THAT MICROSOFT HAS TAKEN USER CRITICISM TO HEART WITHOUT COMPROMISING ITS FORWARD-LOOKING VISION.

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tech industry leaders, news about cutting-edge research,

and reviews of the newest hardware and software.

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Facing Down Cloud Concerns BRACING FOR THE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH USING CLOUD SERVICES

RESEARCH INDICATES organizations are

increasingly adopting cloud services. It

also shows executives still have reserva-

tions about embracing cloud services due

to perceived risks—security and a lack of

control over cloud environments being

examples. In short, for some executives

using cloud services is still equivalent to

cozying up to the enemy—the organiza-

tion might benefit from the relationship

but it also might get burned.

The reality about cloud services is that

there are benefits and risks to using the

services. Whether the benefits outweigh

the risks enough to adopt a service can

be a matter of separating the truth from

misconceptions, viewing cloud services in

the proper light, and mitigating real risks

as much as possible. The following offers

advice for doing so.

Then & NowA good starting place for gaining

perspective on cloud services is un-

derstanding how they compare with

traditional enterprise software/hardware

in practical terms. Like traditional infra-

structure, cloud services are essentially just

another technology or operating model

to leverage. “Organizations comparing

cloud services to traditional enterprise

software need to think about how tech-

nology supports their business, and like-

wise how their business adapts to take

advantage of cloud services,” says Ed

Anderson, Gartner research vice presi-

dent, cloud services.

Notably, Anderson says, cloud ser-

vices enable capabilities previously

difficult or impossible to support via tra-

ditional enterprise software. Examples

include self-service or on-demand in-

terfaces; metering, or monitoring, man-

aging, and optimizing services and

consumption; and elasticity and scal-

ability, or access to virtually unlimited

capacity delivered on a pay-per-use

model. Sharing or multi-tenancy, mean-

while, gives cloud services unprece-

dented efficiencies, Anderson says.

KEY POINTS

• Research shows organizations are increasingly shifting workloads to cloud services, indicating accep-tance of certain cloud-associated risks.

• Although misconceptions about cloud services exist, security remains a top concern among executives.

• Some experts believe the business benefits cloud services can enable, such as speeding up deployments of new business services, outweigh potential risks.

• Selecting the right cloud service and obtaining benefits from it relies on knowing what the organization’s desired outcomes are for using the service from the outset.


Also noteworthy is that cloud ser-

vices can be accessible using standard

Internet technologies. In other words,

no special software is required to use

a service, unlike the old client/server

model, Anderson says. Overall, if com-

panies can combine cloud technologies

and cloud operating models, he says,

they can unleash a new level of produc-

tivity, efficiency, and agility.

Organizations seem to be recognizing

such capabilities. Laurent Lachal, Ovum

senior analyst for infrastructure solu-

tions, says if equating “cloud services” to

public cloud services (SaaS [software as

a service], IaaS [infrastructure as a ser-

vice], and PaaS [platform as a service]),

they’re growing at a much faster pace

than on-premises hardware/software

products. He does note that compa-

nies are mixing cloud and on-premises

resources, such as operating both on-

and off-premises storage or mixing an

on-premises antivirus software with a

cloud-based malware database.

Elsewhere, a 2014 Frost & Sullivan

survey indicated that more than 70%

of executives polled had implemented

cloud services to cut hardware or soft-

ware maintenance. Karyn Price, Frost &

Sullivan cloud computing analyst, says

businesses are shifting workloads to the

cloud to replace hardware and tradi-

tional software licenses. “A full 75% also

noted they’re shifting some workloads

to SaaS services to reduce server and

network infrastructure costs associated

with deploying traditional software li-

censes,” she says.

While strategies vary, Lachal says, gen-

erally the younger the CIO or company

and the more competitive the industry,

the more likely it is that the organiza-

tion will turn to public cloud services.

“Startups don’t have any choice. No ven-

ture capitalist will provide money for

their own infrastructure,” he says. “They

have to start on a public cloud, and if and

when successful can then develop their

own private/hybrid infrastructure.”

Today, Anderson says, “cloud first”

initiatives and organizations’ declarations

to move all IT operations to some type of

cloud model are less common, including

because there’s growing realization that

some cloud services are ideal for some

scenarios but not others. Most organi-

zations are now indicating intentions

to implement hybrid cloud and hybrid

IT environments, thus leveraging the

best of different cloud and non-cloud

environments.

Pros & ConsFor some organizations, cloud ser-

vices represent the best path forward,

because their existing technology base is

ill-equipped to support their businesses,

Anderson says. For others, there are

various pros and cons concerning cloud

services relative to their existing environ-

ment to weigh first.

Arguably, no area about cloud ser-

vices concerns executives more than

security and unauthorized access to

company data. Anderson says security

always tops organizations’ list of rea-

sons not to use cloud services, despite

some security concerns being as much

psychological as real and options being

available to mitigate many real security

issues. Beyond security, executives see

reliance on the public Internet to access

applications as a con.

In terms of costs, while using cloud

services can translate into cost savings,

there’s a risk it won’t. For example,

particular applications running in the

cloud may not be well-suited to cloud

models, making them more expensive

to run there. Additionally, cloud of-

ferings may be priced to benefit pro-

viders, not consumers. Further, costs

associated with a cloud service—migra-

tion, integration, data management,

bandwidth, training, etc.—may out-

weigh the cost savings a service other-

wise provides.

Despite such factors, Price says, enter-

prises are increasingly using cloud com-

puting as a strategic IT initiative to deliver

efficient application access to remote or

mobile employees, ease the process of en-

tering new markets, and streamline man-

agement of routine IT tasks.

Among the possible advantages to

using cloud services, elasticity and scal-

ability are often cited as the most ben-

eficial. Lachal says cloud services enable

users to provision and release IT re-

sources and ecosystem services quickly

and automatically as needed. “The risk is

over-consumption, or keeping resources

running when they’re no longer needed,”

he says. Anderson notes that agility is the

top benefit CIOs identify for using cloud

services by a wide margin. Agility occurs

when organizations use cloud services in

conjunction with a cloud-oriented oper-

ating model, he says.

Another benefit to using cloud services

includes the on-demand, self-service

nature of the cloud, which Lachal says

equates to fast, convenient IT resources

and provisioning—though, without sys-

tems/processes in place, there’s the risk

of a lack of control in who provisions

what. Another positive is the straightfor-

ward access the cloud enables to services

via GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for

users and open, published, and docu-

mented APIs (application programming

interfaces) for software applications. “The

benefit here is being able to access func-

tionality easily without much training or

investments,” Lachal says.

Innovation and evolution are addi-

tional benefits worth noting. “Much of

the new innovation in software is now

directed toward cloud services first, tra-

ditional offerings second,” Anderson

says. Lachal says because providers use

“Organizations comparing cloud services to traditional enterprise software need to think about how technology supports their business, and likewise how their business adapts to take advantage of cloud services”

ED ANDERSONResearch Vice President : Gartner


customer feedback and actual user be-

havior to iteratively and continuously

evolve and expand their resources and

services, they’re more closely aligned

with customers’ needs.

Weighing Risks Vs. RewardsIt isn’t surprising that executives view

cloud services with a decidedly risk-re-

ward mind set. This isn’t unique to cloud

services. “It’s a factor in every IT deci-

sion,” Anderson says. The problem is that

many misconceptions regarding cloud

services’ benefits and risks exist, he says.

Many within business departments, for

example, believe public cloud services al-

ways lead to cost savings. The truth is that

cost savings isn’t always the best reason to

use cloud services.

Key is noting that cloud service adop-

tion “deserves the same thorough treat-

ment as any technology initiative,”

Anderson says. Being clear on desired out-

comes—whether cost, agility, innovation,

etc.—will provide a much better chance

to select the right IT services to obtain the

desired outcome. Balancing the outcomes

with a realistic assessment of the associ-

ated risks is vital, Anderson says.

Also vital is recognizing that cloud

services come in many types beyond

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, private, public, and hy-

brid. Lachal points out there’s public-

private hybrid clouds, connected public

clouds, shared private clouds, virtual

private clouds, shared virtual private

clouds, managed private clouds, man-

aged public clouds, hosted private

clouds, and hosted and managed private

clouds. Each has a specific balance of

risks and benefits. “The more options,

the more likely a company is to find one

that fits their requirements,” he says.

Overall, Price says, the increased

cloud adoption of 2014 that’s expected to

continue in coming years indicates IT is

finding ways to mitigate common risks

associated with cloud adoption. Further,

the potential business benefits—making

IT more service-centric, deploying new

business services faster, and entering new

markets quicker and easier—outweigh the

potential risks, she says.

In terms of mitigating risks, MSAs

(master service agreements) and SLAs

(service-level agreements) provide one

means to do so. MSAs typically pertain

to general terms and provide an umbrella

agreement outlining the provider-con-

sumer relationship, Anderson says. SLAs

are assigned to specific services, outlining

how services are expected to perform.

SLAs should also detail penalties in

the event the service does not perform as

promised. Anderson says a well-written

SLA can mitigate risks if it outlines penal-

ties that truly compensate the organiza-

tion for losses. “That said, most cloud

service SLAs don’t come anywhere near

that level,” Anderson says. Most out-

line basic terms of service performance

and “generally very weak penalties for

non-performance,” making cloud service

adoption riskier for consumers because

“there’s very little recourse if the service

doesn’t perform,” he says.

Anderson believes this is true currently

because most providers aren’t entirely

sure of the risks themselves. Thus, they

hedge on penalties while the market con-

tinues to expand. “As the market matures

and as competition increases, SLAs are

likely to get better and used by providers

as a differentiating ‘feature,’” he says.

Until then, consumers bear most of the

risk of using the service.

Lachal sees MSAs as defining SLAs.

Currently, he says, there’s too much focus

on negotiating contracts and not enough

on ensuring providers and consumers

manage their relationships for the long-

term and adapt to evolving technology

and market conditions to ensure the

cloud service can meet ongoing enter-

prise requirements.

Changing The Mindset Overall, it does appear executives’ fears

concerning using cloud services are less-

ening in certain respects. Price points to

Frost & Sullivan’s research concerning

adoption of IaaS in 2014. At the time of

the survey, 50% of businesses stated they

used public cloud infrastructure while

30% intended to adopt IaaS in the fu-

ture. That’s up from 2013 when there was

15% usage and 15% anticipated adoption.

Price says the sharp increase “evidently

demonstrates that either IT is finding

ways to mitigate risk of cloud deployment

or executives are recognizing the benefits

of cloud computing, which in turn over-

shadows any fear of potential threats.”

Lachal says in any IT context, in-

cluding public clouds, security (making

using IT secure), security compliance

(showing IT is secure), and regulatory

compliance (showing IT complies with

regulations) have always been top con-

cerns. Such concerns are leading vendors

to react at various levels, he says. Most

enterprises, he says, acknowledge that

public cloud security, security compli-

ance, and regulatory compliance “is at

least as good as their own, if not more,”

he says.

As the cloud industry and organi-

zations continue to mature, Anderson,

believes misperceptions about cloud ser-

vices will continue to fade. Many cloud

offerings are climbing the “slope of en-

lightenment” to the “plateau of produc-

tivity,” he says, indicating “the reality

of cloud service capabilities are finally

sinking in with consumers.” Even if con-

cerns are misguided, he says, it’s impor-

tant organizations thoroughly examine

any cloud service under consideration

to ensure it meets their needs without

exposing them to too much risk.

The sharp increase in cloud services use and adoption “evidently demonstrates that either IT is finding ways to mitigate risk of cloud deployment or executives are recognizing the benefits of cloud computing, which in turn overshadows any fear of potential threats.”

KARYN PRICECloud Computing Analyst : Frost & Sullivan


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Enterprise Mobility GET DEVICES & APPLICATIONS UNDER CONTROL WITH ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MANAGEMENT

THE LIST OF TOOLS and concepts for

managing various aspects of mobility

in the workplace is littered with enough

acronyms to make even the steadiest

executive dizzy. Beyond strategies and

tools for BYOD (bring your own de-

vice), there are also MAM (mobile

application management) and MDM

(mobile device management) categories,

and depending on whom you ask, the

list can include MBM (behavior), MCM

(content or collaboration), MEM (ex-

pense), and MADP (mobile application

development platform) entries.

Go ahead and add EMM (enterprise

mobile management) to the list. Unlike

individual tools, however, EMM is a

comprehensive approach to mobility

management, combining multiple tools

that address devices, applications, data

security, and other areas. “Increasingly,

enterprises are managing multiple dif-

ferent mobile populations with varying

needs,” says Chris Silva, research director

at Gartner. “In an organization with

corporate-owned devices and some per-

sonally owned devices, device-level con-

trols may be possible for some but not all

devices, leaving IT in need of full-device

controls for some users [and] app-level

controls for others.” EMM suites enable

using a single console to manage multiple

policies and enforcement methods, some-

thing essential to managing mobility on a

large scale, Silva says.

Some experts believe as mobility

continues to transition into a main IT

concern, EMM solutions will be key.

The following explores EMM as a

concept, problems it can address, im-

provements it enables, and features

and tools an all-encompassing solution

may contain.

EMM UnwrappedIn a paper exploring MDM’s future,

Forrester Research recently reported

that although enterprises commonly use

MDM technologies to enable workforces

to gain the proper access on mobile

KEY POINTS

• EMM solutions bring together mul-tiple management tools for devices, applications, security, data security, costs, and other mobility concerns into one solution.

• Cloud-based EMM solutions are generally quicker to implement and more flexible price-wise, and they eliminate tasks related to applying product updates.

• In terms of security, EMM solutions provide enterprises with greater vis-ibility and control over the mobile de-vices using their networks and data.

• EMM solutions typically include MDM and MAM elements to address device and application control and then add two or more other manage-ment pieces.


devices, early MDM solutions only met

basic security and management needs

surrounding mobility. As mobile strat-

egies mature, management needs ex-

tend beyond those concerning the

device. Forrester believes MDM solu-

tions will evolve into EMM solutions,

enhancing legacy MDM solutions in

the primary areas of security, support,

and experience.

Essentially, EMM provides a broader

toolkit than MDM or MAM tools do

alone, says Christian Kane, Forrester

Research analyst. “EMM is really the

evolution of MDM,” says Kane, who

depicts EMM as an equation: EMM =

MDM + MAM + MCM (collaboration

options and data security) + Secure

Network Gateway. Most solutions con-

tain MDM and MAM and pieces of the

other two, he says. Silva says compared

with MDM, “an increasingly legacy

term” that really only focuses on man-

aging devices, EMM combines device

and MAM with management of enter-

prise content used on mobile devices.

Richard Absalom, a senior analyst at

Ovum, says a complete EMM solution

includes “deep cross-platform” abili-

ties spanning MDM (to manage and

secure everything on a device), MAM

(to deploy, manage, and secure the

apps workers need), MADP (to enable

building custom apps meeting particular

organizational needs), NAC (network

access control; to govern access to data

over corporate networks), IAM (iden-

tity and access management; to set poli-

cies based on individual user profiles),

and TEM (telecommunications expense

management; to monitor and manage

telecommunications spending). A typical

solution might incorporate two to four

of these components, typically MDM,

MAM, and certain NAC elements, he

says. Leading solutions come close to

providing all components, but no single

vendor “covers every aspect of every

component well,” Absalom explains.

Peter Crocker, principal analyst and

founder of Smith’s Point Analytics,

says the core of EMM is securing valu-

able enterprise data on mobile devices,

including by controlling applications,

data, and the device. Enterprises that

don’t use an EMM solution, Crocker

says, risk compromising the security of

their data.

Silva says enterprises are rolling out

EMM to view where and how their

data is accessed and stored. “It’s not

uncommon for breaches of data usage

policy or simply fair use policies to be

untraceable in the absence of a formal

management tool,” Silva says. There is

potential, though, to bottleneck produc-

tivity if workers can’t tie their personal

devices into enterprise systems due to

security concerns, he notes.

Silva says leading EMM providers

have either built out or included deep

integration with enterprise file syncing/

sharing or a mobile variant. They’re also

including controls aimed at the man-

agement of internally developed mobile

apps or customizing third-party apps

that the solution manages to allow for

flexibility in policy. “Vendors accom-

plish this through offering some develop-

ment components to develop apps with

or customize public apps,” Silva says.

“Some have a curated collection of pre-

configured versions of popular apps.”

Elsewhere, EMM can benefit orga-

nizations seeking to view and control

what devices are accessing the corporate

network, prioritize network traffic, and

improve certain business processes by

mobilizing different line-of-business

applications, Absalom says. Further,

they can address spiraling mobile costs,

user support challenges, misuse of cor-

porate assets, and productivity leakage

(or “tele-shirking”), says Rob Bamforth,

principal analyst with Quocirca.

Enter The Fray Why consider an all-encompassing

EMM solution vs. simply using indi-

vidual tools? EMM solutions evolved

out of MDM “in most cases because

customers needed more,” Kane says.

Although organizations might not nec-

essarily need some deeper security tools

that some EMM solutions provide,

many organizations will look at EMM

tools eventually, because their mobile

strategies will mature, Kane explains.

In terms of vision and control, an

EMM solution provides users one lo-

cation where they can go to manage

all aspects of mobile strategy, from

development and deployment of apps

to managing costs of call/data plans.

Absalom says leading EMM vendors

have mostly positioned themselves by

specializing in one or two areas of EMM

and building out their offerings via

acquisitions or internal development.

“MADP is one component often left

out,” he says. Absalom explains that

some vendors prefer to keep it this

way, because they believe EMM should

be platform-agnostic around MADP

and work with whatever platform the

customer chooses. They have a point,

he says, but for enterprises that want

one vendor to meet all mobility needs,

MADP capability is crucial.

Bamforth says an EMM solution

should be better integrated than indi-

vidual tools. However, because many

EMM solutions come about via acquisi-

tions, solutions may be at various stages

“Increasingly, enterprises are managing multiple dif-ferent mobile populations with varying needs. In an organization with corporate-owned devices and some personally owned devices, device-level controls may be possible for some but not all devices, leaving IT in need of full-device controls for some users [and] app-level controls for others.”

CHRIS SILVAResearch Director : Gartner


in the integration process. “There may

also be a watering down of some ca-

pabilities—security tightness in some

areas, for example—in order to make

the entire suite more functional and

coherent,” Bamforth says. In these cases

and where there are strong specific re-

quirements, an organization may be

better off considering more specialized

tools, he says.

A key consideration in adopting

EMM is whether to do so via an internal

or cloud-based offering. Cloud options

are quicker to implement and more

cost-effective for SMBs, Crocker says.

Similarly, Absalom says cloud offerings

generally have more flexible pricing.

Also, they are quicker to scale up and

get updated regularly. For enterprises

responsible for storing highly sensi-

tive data, however, cloud EMM solu-

tions present the same data security and

leakage risks as other cloud services,

Absalom says. Bamforth notes there

may also be international concerns in

terms of where the cloud provider is

incorporated and stores data.

Overall, preference for cloud-based

EMM consoles is growing, Silva says.

Due to the rapid rate at which device

OSes and abilities within solutions

change, he says, opting for a SaaS EMM

deployment “eschews the overhead of

having to ensure the console is con-

stantly up-to-date. We’ve seen as many

as 30 product updates in a single year

for some EMM tools, which equates to a

lot of operational overhead to keep up.”

In general, organizations can ex-

pect to see certain improvements after

adoption, even if they aren’t experi-

encing specific mobility problems. For

example, by addressing mobile applica-

tion and security needs, EMM may help

accelerate mobile application deploy-

ment, Kane says. Bamforth says many

controls used for mobility can be readily

applied to other devices/assets, and “be-

cause most organizational boundaries

are essentially porous now and many

will work ever closer with external third

parties, this is a good thing to look at.”

The increased visibility into usage

that EMM enables can also introduce

better cost controls, something Silva

sees as a chief benefit. Beyond intro-

ducing a lower overall risk profile via

controls for protecting devices and en-

terprise data, EMM can protect users

in terms of tracking down lost or stolen

personal phones or tablets, he says.

Ultimately, enterprises should strive

to transform their business processes

through employee use of mobile de-

vices, Absalom says. “That means

giving access to the right apps on the

right devices that they need to do their

job[s],” he says. Thus, if certain em-

ployees use PCs, tablets, and smart-

phones, typically they should have

access to all their tools and apps on

each device, whether it’s corporate or

personally owned. “EMM helps to en-

able and secure this multi-screen way

of working,” Absalom adds.

Tomorrow’s EMM As mobile OSes mature, more ad-

ministrative control features are being

incorporated into the software, some-

thing Silva says will shift the evolution

of EMM solutions to focusing more on

app- and data-level controls. Although

a truly platform-agnostic future in the

management of mobile devices is not

close at hand, Silva says, “as EMMs

evolve and provide controls that are

far more flexible than the ‘locked-

down device’ model many users chafe

against today, more users can benefit

from having mobile access to informa-

tion.” That information could prove

more useful, too, he says, because app-

level controls and policies mean users

are seeing the right data and apps de-

pending on who those users are and the

context in which they’re using the de-

vice. “EMM will mature to be as much

about intelligent service delivery as se-

curity,” Silva says.

Gradually, Absalom says, EMM

is becoming more integrated with

broader IT service management abili-

ties. Organizations desire the ability to

manage all their endpoints and appli-

cations from one place, “from servers

down to smartphones,” he says. Thus,

mobile–specific features are becoming

more aligned with more traditional end-

points, he adds.

Kane believes EMM solutions will

ultimately sit alongside their coun-

terparts for PC management in a

“Workspace Management” type solu-

tion. “Employees use a wide range of

devices increasingly, but they’re trying

to do similar things at a high level,”

Kane says. “You need applications ac-

cess and data access regardless of the

device you’re using at that moment. So

companies will look to manage things

like access, policy, and security across

all of these things in a much more con-

sistent way.”

EMM solutions evolved out of mobile device man-agement, “in most cases because customers needed more.”

CHRISTIAN KANEResearch Analyst : Forrester Research

Many controls used for mobility can be readily applied to other devices/assets, and “because most organizational boundaries are essentially porous now and many will work ever closer with external third parties, this is a good thing to look at.”

ROB BAMFORTHPrincipal Analyst : Quocirca


AS EACH GENERATION OF smartphones

and tablets continues to become more

powerful, cybercriminals are begin-

ning to target these devices with more

sophisticated attacks. Gartner reports

that roughly 1.36 billion smartphones

will ship globally in 2015 while PC ship-

ments for the same period are expected

to be a meager 316 million units. You

don’t have to be a security expert to see

the writing on the wall; any malware

type that’s a proven money maker in the

PC world can—and will—make the leap

to the mobile world. Lots of malicious

code has already done just that. Alcatel-

Lucent’s Motive Security Labs estimates

that there were 20% more infections in

2013 than in the previous year and 25%

more in 2014. The firm estimates that

there are about 16 million malware-in-

fected mobile devices currently in use.

But one of the few malware types that

has yet to really dig its teeth into our

portable devices is the botnet. According

to analysts, that’s about to change.

Mobile Botnets THE NEXT BIG THREAT TO TAKE AIM AT SMARTPHONES & TABLETS

Botnets Hit The RoadThe term "botnet" refers to a series of

computers, or smartphones and tables

in the case of mobile bots, that have

been infected with a self-replicating

backdoor Trojan that lets cybercrimi-

nals force the network to perform un-

authorized commands, en masse. Once

infected with such malware, a computer

or mobile device becomes a single node

in the botnet, referred to as a zombie or

bot. The strength of the botnet is in the

numbers. Cybercriminals use a system

known as a command-and-control com-

puter to issue commands and distribute

the malware.

More targeted malware may allow

a cybercriminal to access your pass-

words, sensitive data, and your fi-

nancial accounts, but with botnets at

their disposal, cybercriminals can col-

lect valuable data from hundreds or

thousands of infected devices, gen-

erate spam and initiate phishing scams

using massive combined contact lists,

use the IP addresses of the infected de-

vices to obfuscate the source of mal-

ware or a given attack, launch DDoS

(Distributed Denial of Service) attacks

to take down websites, force the devices

to run background processes to perform

ad-click fraud, mine cryptocurrencies,

and more.

According to Pierluigi Paganini,

Security Affairs founder, one of the

primary ways mobile botnets are a

different animal compared with tra-

ditional botnets is due to the fact that

current mobile platforms are largely

unsecured. Windows users, for the

most part, have been conditioned to

mistrust links in unexpected emails,

they run antivirus software, and they

generally know to avoid visiting suspi-

cious websites. That same user, how-

ever, is rarely so cautious when using

his smartphone or tablet.

As a result, the ever increasing BYOD

trend is posing new and real threats to

businesses. According to Paganini,


“Mobile devices today are a mobile ap-

pendage of company infrastructure, com-

promising a mobile device could offer a

validated opportunity to infiltrate internal

networks.” Gartner recently predicted

that by 2018, a quarter of all corporate

data traffic would pass between mobile

devices and the cloud, thereby bypassing

traditional perimeter security measures.

Mobile Botnet ActivityAlthough they have yet to re-

ally ramp up, you don’t have to look

far to find examples of recent mobile

botnet attacks. Paganini points to the

November 2014 report from mobile

security app-maker Lookout, which de-

scribes the NotCompatible.C malware

that targets Android-based devices as

‘the most advanced mobile botnet ever.’

The malware can piggyback on com-

promised mobile devices to gain access

to secure enterprise networks. After the

malware has a foot in the door, it relies

on a peer-to-peer control scheme that

makes it dangerous, unpredictable, and

difficult to detect and remove.

Apple devices aren’t immune to

infection either. For example, in late

2014, Palo Alto Networks discovered

WireLurker malware that targeted

Apple iPhones and iPads. The mali-

cious software makes its way onto a

device when the user attempted to in-

stall pirated versions of popular Mac

apps. Once activated, it downloads and

installs enterprise-signed apps to the

device without the user knowing. If the

malware gets onto a jailbroken Apple

device, it can perform a few more nasty

tricks, including modifying system soft-

ware, and copying address book con-

tents and Apple IDs from iMessages.

In March 2014, cyber intelligence

firm SenceCy found a variant of the

Zorenium Bot that had recently added

iOS to the list of susceptible device op-

erating systems, which had previously

included Windows and Linux. At last

check, the malware was capable of

avoiding detection by antivirus apps and

let cybercriminals use infected phones to

stage DDoS attacks and perform other

illegal activities, such as form grabbing

(nabbing authorization and log-in cre-

dentials from Web forms), acting as a

banking Trojan, and mining for crypto-

currency.

Apple and Android are the most

popular mobile platforms, but they’re

not the only ones that are vulnerable to

zombification from smartphone- and

tablet-centric malware. According to

Paganini, “Every platform and every

device is a potential target.”

Is Your Device Infected?If you suspect that your mobile de-

vice may be running some malicious

software or has become an unwilling

party in a botnet’s nefarious activities,

Paganini suggests that there are few

ways you can tell. For those with data

caps and talk-time limits, keep an eye

on your bill and usage. Any unexpected

spike in one or the other may be an

indicator of an infection. “Pay attention

to dropped calls or strange disruptions

and interference during a conversa-

tion and data transfer,” he adds. Other

signs include quicker than typical

battery drain and a significant reduc-

tion in the performance of the device,

which can indicate numerous unwanted

background processes consuming

CPU cycles.

How To Avoid Becoming A BotAs Paganini first pointed out, being

proactive can go a long way toward

keeping your device from becoming

a bot. This means installing and run-

ning security software on your smart-

phone and tablet, making sure to keep

it up-to-date, and scanning for infec-

tions periodically. Other suggestions

include avoiding opening unsolicited

emails and attachments, staying away

from untrusted websites, refraining

from installing applications from third-

party app stores, and only downloading

apps that are necessary. Paganini sug-

gests that unnecessary apps effectively

give cybercriminals more opportuni-

ties to get to your device. If you use an

Apple device, don’t jailbreak it; most

of the iOS-specific malware available

gets on the device via apps installed

from sources outside the Apple App

Store. And finally, if you use removable

storage on one device that may have

been infected, don’t move it to another

device before verifying that it is not

going to transmit the malware.

The Year Of The Mobile BotnetAlthough there are examples of mo-

bile botnets in the wild, they aren’t nearly

as prevalent as they are in the PC space.

That being said, Motive Security Labs is

calling 2015 the year of the mobile botnet.

Your mobile devices are as susceptible as

PCs and notebooks to malware in all its

various incarnations. To effectively pro-

tect yourself and your organization, you

need to take proactive steps, use common

sense, and stay informed on the latest se-

curity developments.

“Mobile devices today are a mobile appendage of compa-ny infrastructure, compromising a mobile device could of-fer a validated opportunity to infiltrate internal networks.”

PIERLUIGI PAGANINI Founder : Security Affairs

BEING PROACTIVE CAN GO A LONG WAY TOWARD KEEPING YOUR DEVICE FROM BECOMING A BOT. THIS MEANS INSTALLING AND RUNNING SECURITY SOFTWARE ON YOUR SMARTPHONE AND TABLET, MAKING SURE TO KEEP IT UP-TO-DATE, AND SCANNING FOR INFECTIONS PERIODICALLY.


http://www.supermicro.com

Business Intelligence Solutions WHAT ENTERPRISES CAN REALISTICALLY EXPECT FROM THEIR INVESTMENT

IN A RECENT REPORT, Michael Lock,

Aberdeen Group vice president and

principal analyst, writes that while ex-

ecutives traditionally have greatly, if not

completely, based key business deci-

sions on their experience and first-hand

knowledge, utilizing analytical tools and

processes would enhance that experi-

ence with data-driven insights.

Organizations that base decisions

on experience and intuition over data,

says Howard Dresner, author and chief

research officer at Dresner Advisory

Services, place themselves at a strategic

disadvantage by not having their finger

on the pulse of their business, market,

or customers. While the notions and

myths some organizations hold about

BI (business intelligence) software and

analytics are changing, especially as

newer workers climb the ranks, more

education is still needed, he says.

Positively, Lock writes, “even the

stodgiest, slowest moving organiza-

tions” are waking up to the power of

data-driven decision-making. Today, he

states, analytics is entering the C-suite,

reaching senior managers seeking to

extract maximum value from data, pro-

vide employees with analytical capa-

bilities, and deliver repeatable business

results. For these executives and others,

the following explores what BI software

is; what results it can provide; and how

to choose tools, avoid mistakes, and

measure results.

The Purpose BI software helps companies or-

ganize, extract, and analyze internal

and external data gathered from busi-

ness departments; social media efforts;

retail, marketing, and digital initia-

tives; and other sources. The aim is

unearthing patterns and insights that

would otherwise be difficult to rec-

ognize. Using tools such as historical

and predictive analysis, OLAP (online

analytical processing), text and data

mining, dashboards, data visualization,

KEY POINTS

• Before selecting BI software and tools, map out a clear BI strategy and goals in order to best fit your organization’s needs.

• BI software offers numerous possible benefits, but making data-driven decisions isn’t possible if cul-tural and human roadblocks exist.

• Companies already with BI software in place may find it dif-ficult to convert users who are comfortable with the current solu-tion to the new one.

• Avoid the influence of marketing or following other companies’ leads and instead match a solution to your business’s use cases and problems.


and reporting, BI software can identify

a company’s strengths and weakness

and help its leaders make better and

faster decisions concerning business

opportunities, strategic plans, ineffi-

cient processes, past missteps, cost sav-

ings, and more.

Although “BI software” and “busi-

ness analytics” are commonly used as

if they’re interchangeable, some argue

there are distinctions between the two.

Cindi Howson, Gartner vice president,

views “business analytics” as the ap-

plication of BI software. Some vendors,

she explains, “say BI is just reporting—

I disagree—whereas BA includes re-

porting and prescriptive analytics.”

Similarly, Lyndsay Wise, president of

Wise Analytics, says while there are

differences, “the marketplace is ripe

with semantics.” Essentially, she says,

the goal of BI and BA is gaining value

from data and attaining broader busi-

ness visibility to support better deci-

sion-making and strategic success.

Whatever they’re called, says Daniel

Ko, Info-Tech Research Group ana-

lyst and manager, what’s important is

finding a tool that suits the organiza-

tion’s needs. Ko describes BI software

as a “spectrum of tools” he views as

“last mile” tools delivering and pro-

visioning data to end users. At one

end are reporting tools. At the other

are predictive analytics suites. “BI

and business analytics tools are in be-

tween,” he says.

Used properly , BI software can

solve “typical” and “atypical” prob-

lems , Ko says . Typica l problems

arise when running operations, such

as “how many products we sold last

week” or “how year-to-date activities

compare to those last year.” Atypical

problems represent strategic BI and

are basically “open” questions arising

from business curiosity and start with

a hypothesis and/or observation. A

market ing manager , for example ,

might propose that placing diapers

alongside beer may boost the sales

of both. “BI can be the platform to

gather data to prove and disprove the

hypothesis,” Ko says.

Generally, Ko views low-end tools

as doing static reporting with little or

no user interaction, answering typical

questions, and pushing information to

users. High-end tools let users explore

data on their own to derive insight.

The Abilities Dresner believes most organizations

have a sizable amount of low-hanging

fruit that BI software can help grab.

“Things they simply didn’t know about

their business that they should have

known,” he says. Finance, accounting,

sales, manufacturing and logistics,

human resources, and other departments

all have quantitative aspects to analyze if

enough good data exists, says Nik Rouda,

Enterprise Strategy Group senior ana-

lyst. While BI doesn’t necessarily track

qualitative information, “even this is im-

proving with more nuanced analytics of

text and social,” he says.

Howson cites BI software as poten-

tially improving revenues and customer

service, increasing operating efficien-

cies, exploring new opportunities, and

predicting future outcomes. At a min-

imum, it should help businesses know

what’s happening “based on facts, not

gut feel,” she says. Jeff Cotrupe, Frost

& Sullivan big data and analytics in-

dustry director, meanwhile, says ac-

cessing, processing, and querying big

data for analytic insights can help solve

problems in virtually any business area.

Companies in every vertical are using

tools to determine who their best cus-

tomers really are, where improvements

in production and other processes are

needed, how to optimize customer ex-

perience, and more, he says.

What BI software can’t do is solve

problems when “cultural and human

nature” obstacles prevent a company

from being data-driven, Howson says.

Further, BI software can’t “magically

solve data-quality issues” and provide

answers/insight without good data,

Ko says. “A lot of people are trying

to introduce BI to a culture that isn’t

data-centric,” he says. “These imple-

mentations will fail because the de-

mand for BI “simply isn’t there.”

Make A Match Notably, Cotrupe says, while there

are numerous vendors in the BI soft-

ware space, none has “al l the an-

swers or all the solutions.” Often, the

smallest providers offer the most in-

novative solutions, he says. Arguably

the best starting point to deciphering

which BI software is most appropriate

is defining the company’s overall goals,

use cases, and applicable users.

Wise recommends fu l l eva lua-

tion of the business pains the com-

pany is experiencing and what the

business and technical requirements

are . Speci f ica l ly , determine what

data sources are required and how

to acquire, store, and manage them.

Further, identify where calculations/

processing will occur and how the

company will interact with the infor-

mation. “Unfortunately, some busi-

nesses overlook the importance of data

management and its role in broader BI

initiatives,” Wise says.

Also critical is allowing for enough

flexibility to integrate software with

all current and future data sources,

Rouda says. Thus, choose software

that can be used by anyone likely to

be asking questions about the business

and that offers enough performance to

satisfy users and workloads, can scale

to handle data volumes, and provides

as much security and governance as

possible. More subtle features can in-

clude an ability to work with data/users

“Look at [a BI tool] like a portfolio. Some stocks you want to hold on to for a long time, and others you might get rid of and pick up others.”

HOWARD DRESNERAuthor & Chief Research Officer : Dresner Advisory Services


in disparate locations, work on mobile

devices, and foster collaboration.

Ko says selecting the most suitable

BI platform is an art, as it requires bal-

ancing IT and business needs, which

often conflict because IT wants a plat-

form that’s easy to develop, test, and

manage while the business wants some-

thing that’s easy to use, interactive, and

collaborative. Decisions should involve

both groups. Ko recommends an “ap-

prove and vote” strategy in which IT

provides several options the business

votes on to help ensure the platform is

IT-sound but one that business users

will adopt and use.

Traditionally, IT has managed BI

software post-implementation. As usage

matures, however, business analysts

may manage report creation or access,

Wise says. “With the advent of self ser-

vice and data discovery, organizations

are looking more at user group manage-

ment or having the business manage

BI,” she says. That said, with data gov-

ernance becoming more challenging in

terms of ensuring the data being ac-

cessed/analyzed is valid and reliable as

more users have increasing freedom to

access it, IT will become more respon-

sible again, she says.

Both Ko and Dresner suggest consid-

ering establishing a BICC (BI compe-

tency center), which Dresner describes

sitting between IT and users, essentially

providing an advocate for users but

simultaneously upholding some cor-

porate standards. Dresner says his re-

search shows that organizations that are

strategically successful with BI always

have a functioning BICC.

Avoid MistakesAmong missteps possible when pur-

chasing BI software is selecting the

wrong tools for the wrong users and

use cases. One tool, for example, may

be appropriate for user-assembled

dashboards and discovery-style appli-

cations but not for large scale finan-

cial reporting on transactional data,

Howson says.

Another mistake is following this

line of thought: “We’ve always used

vendor X, so why change?” Rouda ex-

plains, “There’s a lot of stickiness in

the markets, and while traditional ap-

proaches may have been successful at

meeting traditional requirements, the

needs are changing rapidly.” Big data,

for example, brings a lot of new possi-

bilities, he says, “and a BI tool is often

the front end of that technology stack.”

E l sewhere , some organizat ions

make decisions based on marketing

campaigns or what others have done

instead of matching solutions to busi-

ness problems, requirements, and tech-

nical specifications. Others overspend,

under-spend, and fail to “land and ex-

pand,” Ko says. Marketing, confusing

pricing models, and politics can cause

buying more than is needed. Other or-

ganizations under-spend by buying a

specialized tool that can’t scale up and

out. “Land and expand” pertains to

buying a suitable platform at the right

cost but believing the project is done

after implementation. “The project

isn’t done,” Ko says. “[Organizations]

fail to grow with the BI tool, leaving a

number of functions unused.”

Some people , meanwhi le , v iew

buying BI tools from one vendor a mis-

take, while others view buying various

tools from multiple vendors the same.

Rouda says while there’s an argument

that buying more integrated solutions

from fewer vendors offers support-

ability, deployment, and administration

benefits, most people he speaks with are

more interested in best meeting their

requirements than in choosing a spe-

cific provider. Wise says a “one-stop

shop” approach can make sense if a

company is already heavily invested in

a particular vendor, but a piecemeal ap-

proach can favor companies that desire

collecting best-of-breed tools or that

want to start with just one tool.

Dresner advises against a “one size

fits all” approach or taking the “get the

hammer and then we can build what-

ever we need” approach. Instead, he

advises narrowing prospective tools to

a subset that meets the organization’s

needs. “Look at it like a portfolio.

Some stocks you want to hold on to for

a long time, and others you might get

rid of and pick up others,” he says.

Ko says using multiple tools is fine

if there’s a business case for each. An

organization that already has a tradi-

tional BI tool, for example, may want

to add a data visualization tool to com-

plement it and enable certain abilities.

Conversely, buying from one vendor

may provide integration, bundled dis-

counts, and easier vendor manage-

ment advantages. The risk is getting

locked into one vendor’s architecture,

poor client services, and increases in

licensing fees.

Measuring ResultsObviously, a company that purchases

BI software will want to see results.

The question is, how do you measure

them? “Very carefully,” Rouda answers.

“Sorting out the impact of good insights

vs. other macro and micro environ-

mental factors can be difficult. ‘Did we

sell more because of the economy or be-

cause we knew who to target?’ ‘Did we

“With the advent of self service and data discovery, orga-nizations are looking more at user group management or having the business manage BI.”

LYNDSAY WISEPresident : Wise Analytics

TRADITIONALLY, IT HAS MANAGED BI SOFTWARE POST-IMPLEMENTATION. AS USAGE MATURES, HOWEVER, BUSINESS ANALYSTS MAY MANAGE REPORT CREATION OR ACCESS, WISE SAYS.


make the right decision because we’re re-

ally smart or because the software told us

something we didn’t know?’” This aside,

Rouda cites cost and business process

improvements as good indicators.

Very few companies use ROI to mea-

sure the impact of a BI solution, says

Howson, who wishes more did. While

soft benefits (user adoption, for example)

are often used to measure impact, she

recommends seeking out hard benefits

and anecdotal stories that demonstrate

success. For example, “We saved $3

million in supply chain costs by better

analyzing our data.” Revenue growth

through better targeting markets isn’t

the way businesses are measuring re-

sults, Cotrupe says. Companies are also

improving their one-call, or one-on-

line-interaction resolution, increasing

production without impacting human

resources, and seeing CAPEX and OPEX

savings using predictive analytics to help

accurately forecast future needs.

Ko recommends using a simple BI

adoption x BI consumption formula,

where adoption equals the number

of people using BI, and consumption

measures how much BI is consumed

and how frequently. The product of

both provides a diagnosis of the health

of overall BI, he says. Ko stresses this is

only an overall diagnosis. Companies

still need specialized lenses to iden-

tify areas to target. Example include

BI governance, people, processes ,

data, and technology. Deficiencies in

these areas will cause BI health to dip.

Further, companies should speak with

end users and stakeholders for addi-

tional context.

Ultimately, Wise says, measuring

results means ensuring the BI tools a

company has adopted are addressing

the business challenges that necessitated

their use to begin with. “The reality for

many organizations is that it becomes

challenging to identify success beyond

time saved, which becomes difficult to

validate over time if broader benefits

aren’t being realized,” she says.

Dresner, meanwhile, believes BI’s

success or failure has little to do with

technology and “everything to do with

human beings. It comes down to in-

ertia. Comfort level. Fear. Politics.”

Often, organizations don’t want to

know about problems because knowing

means having to do something about

them, he says. “BI is about changing

behavior, and humans don’t like to

change because it’s uncomfortable.”

Failing, however, means “it’s just a

matter of time before that organization

evaporates,” he says.

Call It QuitsA difficult question some companies

will face is knowing when it’s time to

disentangle from one BI solution or

switch to a different one. Further com-

plicating matters is how to go about

it. While change is disruptive, Rouda

says, the alternative is staying relatively

uninformed and under- informed,

which isn’t worth avoiding the effort

involved in switching.

Triggers that cause a company to

rethink its current situation include

BI strategy reviews, an underlying

business model changing, declining

BI adoption and consumption, tools

not adapting to new analytics tech-

nologies and data sources, and new BI

technologies emerging. How difficult a

transition is “depends on how deep the

roots are,” Dresner says. If data is cur-

rently in a structure segregated from

the actual BI solution, it may be easier.

“But all these solutions have their own

semantic layers. It is difficult,” he says.

Also diff icult is converting and

training users for a new solution when

they’re comfortable, allied, and still

getting results from the current one.

“People get emotional about that,”

Dresner says. “Hopefully [the new so-

lution] is better than what you have. If

not, you have a bigger problem on your

hands.” Ultimately, the new vendor

may provide resources to help with

the money, resources, and consultants

possibly required in migrating to a new

solution, he says.

Scalability, licensing, and capabili-

ties are challenges Wise cites as accom-

panying a switch to a new solution. In

terms of scalability, organizations must

consider whether perceived problems

really have to do with the BI solution

or with the data warehouse/infrastruc-

ture. “After all, the solution will only

perform as well as its infrastructure, so

if a database isn’t optimized it becomes

a challenge to get results quickly,” she

says. Elsewhere, organizations some-

times deploy a solution at a depart-

mental level, but it doesn’t scale in

terms of use, Wise says. For example,

licensing may become astronomical, or

the solution might not meet the needs

of other users, for reasons that can in-

clude a deficiency in ease of use.

In terms of capabilities, use cases

and organizational needs change over

time. “Not all vendors’ products are

created equally,” Wise says. Using pre-

dictive analytics, for example, requires

specific capabilities not all solutions

provide easily.

If desiring to change products, Wise

advises a full evaluation first, asking

why the original solution was selected,

why it’s no longer valid, what went

wrong, who desires the change and

why, and what benefits and challenges

are involved. Challenges should touch

upon the current infrastructure’s read-

iness to implement the new solution.

Sometimes, Wise says, organizations

become too eager to consider changing

BI strategy due to a new CIO’s or IT

director’s previous experience with the

current BI solution. “Those types of

reasons aren’t valid for a rip and re-

place,” Wise says.

“A lot of people are trying to introduce BI to a culture that isn’t data-centric. These implementations will fail because the demand for BI “simply isn’t there.”

DANIEL KOAnalyst & Manager : Info-Tech Research Group


GreenovationsThe technologiesthat make our lives easier also produce some unwanted side effects on the environment. Fortunately, many researchers, manufacturers, and businesses are working to create solutions that will keep us productive while reducing energy demands to less-en our impact on the environment. Here, we exam-ine some of the newest “green” initiatives.

Adding A Graphene Layer To Black Phosphorus May Lead To Faster Next-Generation Communications Devices

❯ Researchers at the University of Minnesota Department of Electrical and Computer

Engineering have demonstrated it may be possible to create devices for high-speed optical

data communications based on a material called black phosphorus. The 2D substance, a

crystallized form of phosphorus, can be used as both a photo (light) detector and a semi

conductor, so researchers have been experimenting with it as a material in next-gener-

ation optical circuits. The team at the University of Minnesota found it could combine

layers of the material to vary its photo detection properties. They discovered that adding a

one-atom-thick layer of graphene to the black phosphorus layers protects and strengthens

the overall structure. The team built an optical circuit with the layered materials and was

able to transfer data at rates up to 3 billion bits per second. At that rate, downloading a

typical HD movie would take about 30 seconds.

AMD Says Upcoming Carrizo Line Of APUs Will Offer Double-Digit Performance Increases While Cutting Power Requirements 40%

❯ Chip-maker AMD says its next line of APUs (accelerated processing units), code-

named "Carrizo," will offer significant power and performance benefits over its current

Kaveri line. Carrizo will pack about 29% more transistors (nearly 3.1 billion total) in

roughly the same size die as its predecessor and feature new cores under the name

"Excavator" that increase the number of instructions per clock cycle while decreasing

power requirements nearly 40%. Carrizo also provides increased support for HD dis-

plays including true 4K resolutions. The new power technology that AMD is rolling

out in Carrizo is called AVFS (adaptive voltage and frequency scaling). AMD says

AVFS checks for "droops," or transient drops in voltage, every few nanoseconds and

cuts power usage in the GPU by up to 10% and in the CPU up to 19% without af-

fecting performance.

ENERGY-CONSCIOUS TECH

Black phosphorus material (represented by red layers) combined with a sheet of graphene one atom thick (in black) may hold the key to speeding up communications in future electronic devices.

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Eiffel Tower Goes Green With Two Wind Turbine Installations

❯ The Eiffel Tower, one of the world's

most recognizable architectural struc-

tures, has a new set of wind turbines from

the Urban Green Energy company. The

two turbines, installed 400 feet above

ground, were painted to match the tower's

famous iron struts so they would blend

into the structure. They are expected

to produce about 10,000kWh of power

annually. The installation was part of a

project that included adding solar panels

to a visitor pavilion and installing new

heat pumps and a rainwater recovery

system, all in an effort to reduce the eco-

logical footprint of the tower as part of the

overall city of Paris Climate Plan.

Apple Commits $848 Million In Largest Commercial Solar Deal

❯ Apple has agreed to a 25-year arrange-

ment to purchase solar power from First

Solar's California Flats solar project.

The $848 million investment will pro-

vide Apple with 130MW (megawatts) of

power from the 280MW facility, with the

remaining 150MW to be sold to Pacific

Gas & Electric. First Solar said the Apple

purchase represents the largest agreement

to date in the solar industry to sell solar

power to a commercial entity.

The Shape Of Things To Come: Using Funnels To Capture Solar Energy Increases The Absorption Efficiency Of Solar Collectors

❯ Solar energy researchers the world over are continuing their push to improve

the effectiveness of solar power cells, and some are finding inspiration in unusual

areas. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light examined

the funnel-like shape of concentrated cone cells in mammalian retinas and then

replicated the shape in a silicon substrate to see whether it would help increase

the effectiveness of solar power collectors. Professor Silke Christiansen and her re-

search team at MPL found that a layer of these "light funnels" was able to improve

the efficiency of light absorption by about 65% over other types of silicon collec-

tors. The initial results were so encouraging, researchers are now studying how to

economically create the funnel structures for larger solar cells. The team created

the funnels using the same sorts of manufacturing processes semiconductor com-

panies use, which should make it easier to commercialize the new technology.

Company Proposes Constructing Tidal Pools That Would Provide Renewable Power To The U.K.

❯ Tidal Lagoon Power has submitted a plan to authorities in the U.K. to build a

series of tidal pools that would generate eco-friendly power using tidal forces. The

company would first construct giant breakwater walls miles long to enclose a sec-

tion of water. In one part of the wall, they would install huge turbines and sluice

gates. The gates would be closed when tides begin, so that water outside the pool

would be higher than inside the pool. At a certain point, the sluice gates would

open, and the water rushing into the tidal pool would generate electrical power

via the turbines. When the water inside and outside the pool equalized, the sluice

gates would shut. As the tides ebbed, the water inside the pool would become

higher than the surrounding sea. Eventually the sluice gates would open again,

only this time the water would rush out from the pool back into the ocean, again

generating power via the turbines. The company says this arrangement means the

turbines would generate power four times daily, in a regular and dependable pat-

tern, with each pool generating hundreds of megawatts of energy. Authorities are

reviewing the plan now and if they approve, construction will begin this year.

Images from a scanning electron microscrope show how researchers at MPL (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light) were able to create uniform funnel shapes in a silicon substrate using existing technologies.

The two turbines installed 400 feet up in the Eiffel Tower in Paris were painted to match the rest of the structure.

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Keys To A Successful IT Reorganization HOW TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS WITHOUT ALIENATING YOUR WORKFORCE

ENTERPRISES UNDERGO staffing changes

on a near-constant basis, but there are

some unique instances where a complete

overhaul or reorganization is necessary to

ensure future success. Why do companies

go through reorganizations? What is that

process like? How can you make sure a

reorganization goes as smoothly as pos-

sible for the business and its employees? It

can be complicated and sometimes messy,

but if you plan well and keep lines of

communication open, you’ll have a much

higher chance for success.

Why Do Companies Reorganize? There are a variety of reasons why com-

panies decide to reorganize their work-

forces, whether that is one department

or the entire company. Reorganizations

are broken down into different types,

making it easier to understand why they

occur and how they impact business.

Andy Woyzbun, executive advisor at Info-

Tech Research Group, refers to the two

main types of reorganization: remodeling

and reconstruction. How you navigate

the process will all depend on which type

you choose.

Remodeling, Woyzbun says, is typi-

cally triggered because an employee left

the company, and you have to decide

“whether it makes sense to replace that in-

dividual, define a new job, or not fill that

position at all.” In that same vein, there

may be a situation where an employee

simply isn’t working out in his current

position and you have to decide whether

you want to let him go or move him to

another department. While both of these

scenarios are relatively small events in the

grand scheme of things for many larger

enterprises, they can have a ripple effect

that spreads through the entire company.

Reconstruction is a little bit different

from remodeling because it usually origi-

nates at the top of the organization rather

than at the employee level. There are mul-

tiple reasons why a company many deem

reconstruction is necessary, a few of which

include financial issues or pressure to

KEY POINTS

• Determine why you’re embarking on a reorganization and make sure the reason is something employees will understand.

• Avoid rumors by planning well ahead of time and not announcing plans until the right time.

• Understand that this process will affect every employee differently and that you’ll need a plan for com-municating with individuals that stay with the company.

• Make sure you have a way to measure success and determine whether you met your goals. This can be through measuring cost savings or by tracking employee productivity and behavior.


downsize. Another reason might be due

to a recent merger or acquisition and the

company needing to combine or consoli-

date workforces.

The third common driver for reorga-

nizations, according to Woyzbun, focuses

primarily on IT and “tends to be a per-

ception that the current organizational

structure is not suiting [the company]

well and it could be because technology

has changed.” This could be because the

company is moving to a more cloud-ori-

ented approach and is outsourcing certain

responsibilities or because the enterprise

needs to hire new employees that are “fa-

miliar with mobile technology as opposed

to the in-house stuff you’ve been doing

for years,” Woyzbun explains.

Ensure You Reorganize For The Right Reasons

An easy way to alienate your work-

force and completely crush employee

morale is to reorganize your business

just for the sake of shaking things up.

For example, Lily Mok, research vice

president at Gartner, says that when a

new CIO or head of IT comes into an or-

ganization he sometimes has the propen-

sity to make sure he leaves a legacy on

the company by making staffing changes

from the outset. While this is certainly

a way to make a lasting first impression,

some employees may become scared of

the new leadership or feel less loyal to

the company if they’re afraid their jobs

are in constant jeopardy.

For that reason, says Diane Berry, re-

search vice president at Gartner, it’s

important to take a softer approach to

this process. “We tell them to take a step

back,” she says. “Any significant reorga-

nization can have a profound impact on

your organization, so tread lightly. One

of the first questions I ask on any of these

organizational design calls is ‘Why are you

doing this?’ It’s a validation. Hopefully

they’re not doing it for politics or just to

do it.”

What are some of the right reasons

for going through a reorganization? It

ultimately depends on what your busi-

ness goals are and where you want to go

in the future. Mok says most companies

reorganize in response to a “strategic

directional change” as the company moves

forward with new technologies and pro-

cedures. For example, if your company is

going to embrace the cloud, you’ll want

employees that know how to manage SLAs

(service-level agreements) and understand

how that infrastructure works. “Improving

IT’s overall performance, efficiency, and

effectiveness will be the drivers behind ren-

ovating or overhauling the IT infrastruc-

ture,” Mok says. And you’ll need people

with the skill sets to operate and manage

that new infrastructure.

How To Perform A Successful Reorganization

Once you decide which reorganization

type best fits your needs—and determine

that it’s for the right reasons—you’ll need

to create a plan for educating employees,

one that also walks them through the ac-

tual restructuring process. You’ll want to

start with the actual reorganization and

figure out which worker will go where.

“The first thing is the thoroughness of

the planning process and recognition

of people’s strengths and weaknesses,”

says Woyzbun. “It’s one thing to decide

to move Joe to a new role and a dif-

ferent thing to know that Joe is going to

do a reasonable job or needs additional

training. There’s a comprehensiveness

you need to go through before you fi-

nalize the desired end state.”

From the business perspective, in terms

of keeping employees educated and up-

to-date, make sure you keep everything

secret until you pin down a specific plan.

Woyzbun says that the most destructive

force to following reorganization protocol

is rumor and innuendo. If you don’t stay

ahead of the rumors and let them build,

you could eventually have a frenzy on

your hands that leads to a drop in produc-

tivity as well as overall employee morale.

“We had an experience that I saw in an

organization [recently] where there was a

particular business unit whose head was

being moved from that particular unit to

a different role in the organization,” says

Woyzbun. “He mentioned to a group of

people who were not the employees of that

business unit that he was moving into this

particular role. Well, of course, word got

back to his employees who were dazed

Some people are going to be upset or disappointed and you need to be able to pick them out one by one and either have the top dog or their manager figure out ‘do I need to worry about this particular individual and spend more time with them or do I just assume this person is OK and move on?’”

ANDY WOYZBUNExecutive Advisor : Info-Tech Research Group

“Renovating is sometimes adding roles, and not necessar-ily tearing it down to the base and starting from scratch. Reorganizations could be various levels. In some cases improving efficiency could be to redefine the process oriented skill set required for people working in various functional silos so that they have the end-to-end account-ability for service level agreements. “

LILY MOKResearch Vice President : Gartner


and confused as to ‘what’s going to happen

to me?’ You have to keep this quiet and

secret, and then when you do announce it,

make sure that the information delay is as

assured as possible.”

The key is to understand that when

you plan to terminate people, every em-

ployee is going to react in a different way.

You have to gauge the potential reaction

of each affected individual and prepare

for “personalized hand holding” that may

need to occur, says Woyzbun. This is also

important for ensuring success after the

reorganization. “What you want, espe-

cially after a reorganization, is that people

feel reengaged,” he says. “Chances are if

you reorganize and don’t let people feel

that they’ve been communicated with or

they’re unclear about what they’re going

to be doing tomorrow, then the engage-

ment goes down and the performance goes

down. What you don’t want to do is create

any significant shock like that.”

Mok agrees that these are all key con-

cepts for performing a successful reorga-

nization and stresses just how important

communication is throughout the process.

“The communication of why we are doing

it, the change management strategy, and

how we transition from the current state

to the future state all need to be part of

the planning process,” she says. You can’t

constantly be in damage control mode and

try to fix issues after the fact. You have to

have a strong process in place for how you

keep employees in the loop about how the

reorganization will affect them.

“Communicate as quickly and with

as much transparency as you can,” says

Berry. “I’m a big advocate of the big bang

theory, as it makes sense to do it as swiftly

as possible, which means engaging HR, no

matter what level of maturity they are, up

front. They’ll play a very good tactical role.

I tell leaders to be very mindful of making

changes to job titles. I’m not saying

you don’t need to do that, but be very

mindful of the importance and impact of

that. People care about their job titles and

they really care about who they report to.

However you communicate each of those

types of changes, do it with sensitivity.”

Important Tasks For After The Reorganization

Even after the reorganization takes

place, there are still more jobs to be done.

In fact, Woyzbun says that “dealing with

people you’ve decided to terminate” is ac-

tually “the easy part” and “pretty straight-

forward” when compared with how you

handle the people who are still there. For

example, if you downsized your work-

force and built a smaller team, but the

same workload still exists, your employees

may question whether they can actually

get their work done on time in the same

way they did before.

There are also situations where a man-

ager is let go or moved to a different area

and her previous department is left in

limbo. This can be distressing for em-

ployees, because they aren’t sure to whom

they need to report to or go to for help.

You have to manage those relationships

carefully following a reorganization and

make sure that no employee feels ne-

glected or unsure of his new role in the

organization. “Those are things that need

to be thought through and planned,” says

Woyzbun. “You have to tell people what

this means to them in terms of a new

role and what some of the changes are

that might impact them, [such as] people

disappearing or people being added. You

have to be able to communicate that

clearly to every one of the employees.”

How To Measure SuccessOnce the reorganization is complete,

you’ll want to start watching for when

you reach the goals you set forth when

you decided to reorganize your company.

This means figuring out how to measure

results. In some situations, this is a rela-

tively simple task, especially if your only

goal was to save money, because you can

compare financials from before the reor-

ganization. Where Woyzbun says metrics

are actually needed is in the case of mea-

suring IT productivity after the reorga-

nization. He says it’s important to make

sure that the ability for IT to do its job

was not impaired by the changes, espe-

cially in “situations of significant down-

sizing.” An example would be reducing

the amount of people working your help

desk. After the reorganization, are you

still able to field the same number of calls

and solve issues in a timely manner?

Another key thing to track, in addition

to financials and productivity, is employee

behavior. “When you change people’s

roles, they need to acquire different knowl-

edge and skill sets,” says Mok. “Are they

acquiring these skills at the expected rate?

How quickly will they be up to speed to be

proficient in those new roles? Those will be

measured at the individual level. Certainly

productivity, performance, and overall en-

gagement level are key measures at the

organizational level to see whether we’re

maintaining or improving our operational

efficiencies and performance goals that

we’ve set out. It’s important to perform

a current state assessment and establish

a baseline before you implement a new

model, so that you can compare.”

“Make sure you look for areas of vulnerability when going through this process and find the people you really don’t want to lose. . . . Don’t assume that Suzy and Joe and all of those great people know [the company has] a place for them. Have those important conversations. . . . the longer you dilly dally with this kind of stuff, the longer it will impact the morale and productivity no matter how much you communicate. You just want to keep it as minimal as you can.”

DIANE BERRYResearch Vice President : Gartner


MOST EXECUTIVES HAVE HEARD of

SDDC (software-defined data center) and

know it’s touted as the data center’s fu-

ture. Many know the enhanced flexibility,

agility, and scalability a SDDC can offer

over a traditional data center promises to

translate into all types of business-specific

positives. What many executives don’t

know, however, is exactly what a SDDC

entails in terms of core components and

functionality. That’s partially due to con-

fusion, disagreement, and vendor hype

surrounding SDDC. The following aims

to provide a clearer picture.

The ElementsOne roadblock to arriving at a uni-

versal definition of SDDC is that vendors

with an interest in SDDCs tend to attach

unique descriptions to the term. Tony

Lock, Freeform Dynamics distinguished

analyst, says this includes nicely fitting

definitions to their existing or planned

products. Similar to many others, Lock

views a SDDC as IT infrastructure in

Step Into Tomorrow’s Data Center THE CORE COMPONENTS OF A SOFTWARE-DEFINED DATA CENTER

which servers, storage, and network con-

nectivity can be altered dynamically ac-

cording to changing requirements and

business service levels. Notably, these

changes occur “without having to get out

and move things by hand,” he says.

Conceptually, SDDC is often presented

as physical IT infrastructure that’s vir-

tualized and offered as a service. Rather

than manually provisioning components,

moving servers, changing cables, etc.,

configuration and control occurs through

policy-based automation via software.

Thus, a SDDC offers the ability to easily

change resources allocated to services/

applications based on what’s needed pres-

ently. “It’s about making things far more

flexible,” Lock says.

Greg Schulz, Server and StorageIO

founder, says the different benefits of

virtualizing “are sort of the core tenets

around software-defined aspects.” While

many people see “software-defined” as

being about consolidating and stacking

virtual machines, he says, it’s also about

redefining hardware and software such

that there’s an ability to move applica-

tions around more flexibly, make service

delivery more responsive, and respond to

new requests faster and with more capa-

bility. “You still need hardware, but how

much you need and how you use it, that

equation starts to change,” he says.

John Sloan, Info-Tech Research Group

director, says that technically SDDC

concerns the logical abstraction and or-

chestration of physical infrastructure

components. What this really means is

“standardization and commodification of

the hardware is finally reaching an end

game,” he says. This started with virtual-

ization of industry-standard x86 proces-

sors, but similar abstraction of network

and storage resources is “about to drop,”

Sloan says. “The fundamental principal is

that management of the data center ser-

vices, servers, network addresses, storage

volumes is done as a logical abstrac-

tion,” he says. “In the SDDC, hardware is

not physically differentiated. Hardware is


capacity. By adding more disks or proces-

sors or switches, you add more capacity to

the pool.”

The BenefitsThe general theory is that a SDDC

enables delivering greater flexibility and

better service quality to more services

with fewer physical resources, thus pro-

viding a cost benefit. Speed is another

noteworthy benefit, particularly from

a business perspective. Years ago, says

Donna Scott, Gartner vice president and

distinguished analyst, provisioning IT in-

frastructure for new projects could take

months. Enterprises with virtualization

and some standardization in place can

now do this much quicker, but “there’s

still a problem in terms of bringing it

down to the minute or hour”—something

CEOs will increasingly demand in the

future to drive new business initiatives,

Scott says. “The data center has just been

too static in the past,” she adds.

Beyond speed, SDDC promises to

provide IT more time to spend on the

business. “The typical infrastructure and

operations group does a lot of manual

things,” Scott says. “What they’re really

trying to get to is ‘How can I do every-

thing in an automated and policy-based

way so that I can give more time to my

CEO and lines of businesses to grow the

business?’” Thus, SDDC is also about im-

proving internal processes to free up time

and resources.

For Lock, SDDC’s core benefit is the

potential to flexibly respond to changing

workloads without having to greatly over-

provision upfront the physical resources

each service uses. Instead, an organiza-

tion could configure a SDDC to operate

in an automatic fashion where physical

IT resources (CPU cycles, storage, and

networking) are allocated without physi-

cally reconnecting anything. Lock points

out this does require that security, data

protection, disaster recovery, and other

associated services all work in tandem

more fluidly than previously.

Both Lock and Schulz stress that SDDC

depends on strong management tools.

Schulz says any customer speaking with

a vendor about SDDC should specifically

ask the vendor what it’s doing, what it’s

enabling in terms of management, and

what its capabilities are.

The automation aspect of a SDDC,

meanwhile, necessitates a SDDC has effec-

tive policies implemented through which

resource allocation occurs, Lock says, be-

cause it’s highly unlikely any SDDC will

have limitless resources on hand, even

if connecting to a public cloud outside

the data center. To date, Lock says it’s

clear that an idealized SDDC of this na-

ture hasn’t been realized, “especially if we

look at the huge variety of services being

run today in data centers and the range of

hardware solutions already deployed.”

The Big Picture A noteworthy challenge that Roy

Illsley, Ovum principal analyst, cites

concerning SDDC is that rather than in-

volving just one technology, it entails sev-

eral coming together, with each currently

residing at different maturity levels. Illsley

sees the management tying these technol-

ogies together as the final piece of SDDC

that technology vendors are now working

on. As various SDDC components are

at different degrees of production-readi-

ness, CIOs should ensure any move to a

software-defined approach incorporates

the right technology and vendors and is

executed for appropriate use cases.

Lock says there are numerous steps

involved in transitioning to a SDDC,

including from the underlying hard-

ware platforms, the virtualization, and

management tools on through to sig-

nificant modifications to data center

operational processes. “Other matters

must also be modified, including poten-

tially how data centers are budgeted and

how resource contention conflicts are

handled. These are business decisions,

not choices made by IT,” he says.

Transitioning to an SDDC may also

pose employee-related challenges for

organizations, including jobs changing.

Thus, Scott says, enterprises must re-

member the SDDC movement is about

meeting business-growth requirements

and how to use employees’ skills at a

higher value to the organization. “It’s not

like there’s a desire to cut out that net-

work guy’s job. The desire is to put what

he knows in policy so it can just run,”

she says. “So that smart guy who works

for the company that knows the business

and can help grow the business can be

put to better use. That’s why this move-

ment exists.”

From a training perspective, Sloan says

the main challenges with SDDC are the

same as those for convergence in gen-

eral. “With increased automation and or-

chestration comes less need for touching

the hardware. There’s also less need for

silo specialty—storage administrators,

network administrators, etc.—and more

need to be able to manage end-to-end ser-

vices,” he says. “One of the impediments

to greater software-defined networking

adoption has been resistance from tradi-

tional network admins,” he says.

"In the SDDC, hardware is not physically differentiated. Hardware is capacity. By adding more disks or processors or switches, you add more capacity to the pool."

JOHN SLOANDirector : Info-Tech Research Group

“Other matters must also be modified, including potentially how data centers are budgeted and how resource contention conflicts are handled. These are business decisions, not choices made by IT.”

TONY LOCKDistinguished Analyst : Freeform Dynamics


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You Can’t Afford A Bad NetworkDEMANDS WILL ONLY CONTINUE TO GROW, SO MAKE SURE YOU START PREPARING NOW

MOST COMPANIES THESE days have

strong and capable WANs (wide-

area networks) in place to handle the

day-to-day rigors of a bustling office

environment. But when it comes to in-

troducing technologies such as hybrid

cloud computing, or when simply con-

sidering the sheer number of network-

enabled devices out there fighting for

bandwidth, you might find that your

network is bumping up against max-

imum capacity much more quickly

than you imagined.

As companies move an increasing

number of workloads offsite and as

hardware and software solutions de-

mand larger quantities of bandwidth

and network resources, this problem

is only going to grow. For that reason,

you need to start preparing now for

where you want your network to be in

the future, otherwise you could end

up in the troubling position of playing

catch-up with the needs of your cus-

tomers and employees.

Spot The Signs Of An Overtaxed Network

Before you can start deciding how

much capacity you’ll need in the fu-

ture, you need to first understand

what your limitations are right now.

Network issues can manifest themselves

in a number of ways, but one of the

most common issues comes from ap-

plications performing poorly. Andrew

Lerner, research director at Gartner,

says that application performance is-

sues often arise in remote offices, espe-

cially when they are international. For

example, a SaaS (software as a service)

application perform perfectly in your

Dallas and San Francisco offices, but

just chug along in Singapore. “That’s

just the nature of increased latency,”

Lerner says.

Lerner says that newer technolo-

gies, including cloud computing, can

also cause problems for networks and

overall performance. “Traditionally, ap-

plications are run out of the data center

KEY POINTS

• Make sure you’re able to spot the tell-tale signs that your network is overtaxed and be proactive in ad-dressing networking issues.

• Keep your users and applications in mind when designing your net-work and don’t work in a vacuum or you could end up running into preventable issues in the future.

• Consider building a hybrid WAN so you can have multiple network connections in play depending on the use case.

• WAN orchestration tools can help you better manage your network and granularly decide which ap-plications run on which connections for the best possible performance.


and then the WAN is designed to de-

liver traffic from a remote branch to a

data center,” he says. “Now, when you

move the application out of the data

center into a cloud provider, it changes

the equation. In networking, you cannot

overcome the speed of light, so if you

add hundreds or thousands of miles be-

tween users and their applications, you

can have poor performance as a result.”

In addition to finding specific issues

in your network infrastructure, you can

also get a feeling of just how well or

poorly your network is performing by

talking to your users. Andre Kindness,

principal analyst at Forrester Research,

says the key to determining the state

of your network and figuring out how

to fix it is to speak to customers and

employees. “You have to base it on the

employee experience and the way you

can do that is with the amount of tickets

coming in for it, or set up metrics,” he

says. “But it fundamentally goes back to

the customer or employee experience.

That should be No. 1, and it should be

the first place people go to.”

Be More Proactive In How You Solve Networking Issues

Another concept network administra-

tors need to embrace is being proactive,

in general but also just in terms of re-

sponding to and solving network issues.

This is where network monitoring tools

come into play, which are solutions com-

panies don’t focus on enough, according

to Kindness. “Typically, your fallback po-

sition is if you are having a lot of tickets

coming in or if the business is com-

plaining, then you start using monitoring

and testing tools,” he says. “The problem

is that people always do it afterward, but

monitoring money should be spent equal

to what you spend on infrastructure or

other things. You need to have a lot of

good information about what goes on so

you can solve the problems.”

Kindness offers up the example of a

university that developed a unique ap-

plication that not only offers information

about the school, but also gives users a

conduit from which they can send tech-

nical service tickets directly to networking

teams. If a user is experiencing a spotty

connection or poor performance, he can

report it. At that time, the app sends the

information directly to the networking

department and monitoring is automati-

cally increased in that specific area. Using

the app, network administrators can

gather data about what the user was doing

at the time of the incident and where they

were in the facility. Imagine being able to

pinpoint dead zones in your office or your

data center using a similar application.

It could drastically reduce the amount of

time it takes to solve networking issues

and give users the support they need.

Be Mindful When Upgrading Or Reconfiguring Your Network

Something else you need to consider

once you actually start retooling your

network is how important it is not to

design in a vacuum. Lerner says no

matter how much it seems like common

sense, network administrators don’t pay

enough attention to where applications

and users are when designing the net-

work. But if you keep those facts in mind

throughout the process, you can plan out

your capacity and coverage accordingly

to avoid potential issues in the future.

“We like to call it right-sizing,” says

Lerner. “The first step to right-sizing is

figuring out where your users and ap-

plication are. Don’t just upgrade your

MPLS [Multiprotocol Label Switching]

network to add bandwidth to it. Take

a step back. Maybe you don’t need to

add bandwidth to your MPLS network;

maybe you need to deploy Internet to

your branches. It’s really grassroots. Start

with your user community and the ap-

plications you’re running and take out

a map. That’s step one. It sounds like

common sense, but you’d be surprised

how many people don’t do it.”

Prepare Your Network Now For Future Growth

In the same way you need to be pro-

active when handling network per-

formance issues, you also need to be

proactive when designing and planning

out your network. The key to doing this

successfully, according to Kindness, is to

get networking people involved early in

the process whenever a new technology

is implemented. He says that networking

people assume they are involved on proj-

ects from the start 89% of the time, when

in fact, app developers only tend to in-

volve them in the process from the very

beginning 50% of the time. This creates a

major disconnect between teams and can

lead to poor planning and execution.

“What we recommend is that net-

working people get out in front of it and

market themselves,” says Kindness. “You

have to have a mind set that you under-

stand and are embedded in the busi-

ness. It’s more than just a network. It’s

understanding what customers do at a

retail site as a networking professional.

“The way to orchestrate that today is using scripting, manual CLI [command line interface]-based configura-tions, which is not that easy and is difficult to scale. You have a bunch of players out there that are focused on WAN orchestration to make that much easier to do to . . . . Instead of . . . IPs, ports, and CLI, they basically give you a GUI so you can drag and drop YouTube. It’s a combina-tion of workflow, centralized intelligence and visibility, and automated changes to keep up with the application requirements. That’s where orchestration would fit in.”

ANDREW LERNERResearch Director : Gartner


You have to work with the GM at the site

and the developers creating an app for

the retail store. Part of the networking

job is being part of that business team

out there, and helping set the overall

strategy or direction of IT, and not come

in afterward. Engaging and working with

the end user is typically not done, but it

should be done in today’s world.”

When it comes to actually imple-

menting new networking approaches to

be able to meet capacity requirements

and user demand, Lerner recommends

looking into hybrid WAN layouts.

Hybrid WAN is a combination of an

MPLS connection, which is usually the

primary network for a data center and

business-critical applications, and the

Internet, which is used for almost every-

thing else. With hybrid WAN, you can

decide whether an MPLS connection or

regular Internet connection is a better fit

for a specific site and make sure perfor-

mance will always on par.

Hybrid WANs are important to con-

sider also because they can help you

save money. “People are building hybrid

networks and optimizing the speed, la-

tency, and bandwidth out to their SaaS

applications and IaaS (infrastructure as

a service) cloud locations as well as to

their corporate data center,” says Lerner.

“That’s not just for application perfor-

mance, because it’s cost optimization as

well. In North America, a T1 connec-

tion is $250 to $300 a month vs. getting

residential broadband at 50Mbps for $70

a month. That’s a hard conversation to

have with your CEO, CFO, or CIO to

justify the existence of MPLS, because

the price per megabyte is just so much

higher than consumer Internet. People

need a way to bridge those two together

and hybrid WAN is the current trend.”

Lerner also envisions a future where

companies don’t have to centralize

all of their network traffic at the data

center, but can actually just focus on

connecting the home office or remote

sites directly to the colocation facility

that hosts a given SaaS application. He

says there are somewhere between 50

and 200 shared-location data centers

out there that many major SaaS vendors

use to host their applications, so in the

future you might be able to connect di-

rectly to that facility for the lowest pos-

sible latency. “That’s a very early-stage

trend and not many people are doing

that, probably less than one-tenth of

1%, but it’s an early indicator of the way

people might start to think about their

WANs in the future,” Lerner says.

Take Advantage Of WAN Orchestration Technologies

Once you have all of these net-

working pipelines in place, you need a

way to manage them and route traffic

for specific applications. That’s where

WAN orchestration solutions come

into play. Using the hybrid WAN

model as a baseline, for example, you

can decide that you want your CRM

system to run on MPLS while appli-

cations such as YouTube run on the

Internet connection. Then, if the MPLS

fails, you want the CRM system to

move over to the Internet and take pre-

cedence over YouTube.

Lerner says that “granular policies”

like these were much more difficult in

the past, but are more manageable now

because of WAN orchestration. And

the great thing about WAN orchestra-

tion solutions is that they are coming

from startups and newer vendors as well

as well-established “incumbents,” says

Lerner, so you should have plenty of op-

tions to choose from.

The interesting thing about hybrid

WAN and the idea of a two-lane net-

work highway is that most companies

already have those MPLS and Internet

connections in place, but use one as a

backup in case the other fails. Kindness

says that in a perfect world, companies

with this setup are wasting 50% of their

potential capacity, but in the real world,

companies are already underutilizing

their network connections so much that

they may only be using as much as 11%

of their primary network connection,

let alone the backup lane sitting there

entirely unused.

“At any one time, you’re not using all

of the capacity,” says Kindness. “You’re

only using about 11%, which is ridicu-

lous. You can actually make both pipes

smaller. If you have the ability to flip

back and forth, you can optimize both

of them and make the links smaller, be-

cause combined together, both links are

for my worst-case scenario. But indi-

vidually,” he adds, “they can be smaller

than what I have today and I can le-

verage both of them.”

Once you start looking at those pipe-

lines as two active connections rather

than one active and one backup, you

can take advantage of WAN orches-

tration and other helpful tools. In es-

sence, you can pick and choose which

applications run on which networks to

find perfect matches, such as putting

YouTube or SaaS-based application

on the Internet rather than the MPLS.

“Those examples right there could save

a lot of money and improve the user

experience,” says Kindness. “If you

don’t have recreational traffic on the

link going back to the data center, then

you’re freeing up more bandwidth for

the critical business apps.”

“Typically, your fallback position is if you are having a lot of tickets coming in or the business complaining, then you start using monitoring and testing tools. The problem is that people always do it afterward, but monitoring money should be spent equal to what you spend on infrastructure or other things. You need to have a lot of good information about what goes on so you can solve the problems.”

ANDRE KINDNESSPrincipal Analyst : Forrester Research


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to speed on the latest technol-

ogy news and information about

products for your company.

Understand Custom Malware HOW TO AVOID PAINTING A TARGET ON YOUR BACK

THOSE OF US WHO consider ourselves

fairly tech savvy don’t typically ascribe

much intelligence to the malware du

jour making headlines and fattening cy-

bercriminals’ wallets. We tell ourselves

that common sense and a sound secu-

rity strategy are all that is necessary to

keep us and our organizations from be-

coming the low-hanging fruit that mal-

ware is so adept at plucking. But smart

malware that favors a methodical and

selective approach over casting a wide

net using click-here-for-nude-photos

phishing tactics not only exist, but it’s

getting smarter everyday. Custom mal-

ware is the laser-guided missile of the

malicious software universe; most ev-

erything else is just carpet bombing.

This relatively new weapon is ca-

pable of infiltrating secure systems and

phoning home camera feeds, activity

logs, key strokes, and screenshots that

enable dedicated cybercriminals to suss

out the chinks in any organization’s

armor. Such deep-cover malware is

tailor made for the long con and a big

score, and it has already shown just how

effective it can be at fleecing some of

the most secure financial institutions in

the world.

Custom malware is a broad term for

a kind of malicious software that is de-

signed to lock in on a limited number

of target systems and open a backdoor

communication channel between ad-

ministrative systems and the hackers,

all without arousing suspicion or setting

off any alarms. These attacks typically

become evident only after the crooks

have made a clean getaway, and by

then, the breached institutions are often

looking at lost funds, destroyed equip-

ment, and priceless sensitive informa-

tion gone.

A Foot In The DoorDodi Glenn, ThreatTrack Security

senior director of security intelligence

states, “Oftentimes, you’l l see the

hacker use a ‘regular’ piece of malware

KEY POINTS

• Custom malware attacks are a more targeted form of hack that has the potential to do a signifi-cant amount of damage.

• Although a relatively new type of threat, custom malware at-tacks typically use traditional phishing techniques.

• Sometimes custom malware attacks are engineered or aided by a disgruntled current or former employee or client, but this is not always the case.

• Be proactive by educating your employees about how to avoid threats and performing network penetration testing.


to get a foothold into the organization.

For example, they’ll get someone to in-

stall a backdoor on their work machine.

From there, they bounce around using

the victim’s username and password.”

The email recipients or infected web-

site visitors are usually people in sensi-

tive positions at the target company,

often those with administrative rights

and access to other key systems. Glenn

elaborates, “Once [cybercriminals] get

access, they start looking for additional

pieces of information that will lead to

a better and longer attack. What they

learn can lead to helping them con-

struct custom malware to exploit spe-

cific systems or access/steal data while

avoiding detection.”

Custom malware attacks often em-

ploy social engineering tactics, which

rely on human-to-human interaction to

obtain key details about the target and

security systems. One example of a so-

cial engineering attack might involve a

cybercriminal calling a network admin-

istrator for a large corporation, claiming

to be an executive on the road in des-

perate need of immediate access to a

secure internal system. By appealing to

the victim’s natural desire to be helpful

or by offering a promotion or an im-

mediate pay raise in return for agreeing

to bend the rules, the cybercriminal can

subvert numerous security measures in

very short order.

The HeistsOne recent custom malware at-

tack reported by Symantec referenced

a large banking institution’s recent

breach. Instead of attacking the finan-

cial institution directly, scammers man-

aged to spoof an email from a golf club

that many of the firm’s executives fre-

quent. When the executives opened the

PDF file detailing some upcoming golf

tournaments, more than a dozen dif-

ferent bits of malware were installed

on their systems. Without violating a

single security policy, those executives

exposed the company to some very

nasty new customers.

The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky

Lab recently detailed a two-year-long

breach involving more than 100 banks

in 30 countries, and the estimated take

was more than $300 million. Because

not all financial institutions that were

hacked are reporting the amounts of

the losses, some experts believe that

the figure could be as high as $1 bil-

lion. It was a simple email phishing

scam that installed the malware, which,

Kaspersky has dubbed Carbanak, on

the key systems. From there, the cy-

bercriminals observed the day-to-day

activities of the employees who handle

account transfers and perform book-

keeping; and obtained video footage

and sti l l images that helped them

plan how, when, and where to strike.

Based on the data they gathered, the

thieves knew that account balances

were checked at specific times of the

day, and by artificially inflating and

then transferring the excess amounts

from accounts between those balance

checks, they were able to make it look

like the numbers changed very little if

at all. The criminals also managed to

get ATMs to dispense cash at specific

times and places. One banking client

reported that $7.3 million was nabbed

this way.

The U.S. health care insurer Anthem

recently reported that 80 mil l ion

current and former customer and

employee records went missing, in-

cluding names, birth dates, and Social

Security numbers. The cybersecurity

firm brought in to manage the crisis

said that the cybercriminals who per-

petrated the breach used a form of

custom malware.

Other high-profile corporations that

have been victimized by custom mal-

ware in recent months include Home

Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Sony Pictures,

and Target. But cold hard cash and data

that can be sold on the black market

aren’t the only objectives for cyber-

criminals wielding custom malware,

some are using the unique malware to

perpetrate various kinds of espionage.

The Associated Press reports that the

State Department’s unclassified email

system came under a custom malware

attack late last year.

Custom Malware’s ForerunnerOne of the earliest examples of

a highly specialize malware designed

to perform lasers-precise at tacks

was Stuxnet, which was blamed for

“Oftentimes, you’ll see the hacker use a ‘regular’ piece of malware to get a foothold into the organiza-tion . . . . Once [cybercriminals] get access, they start looking for additional pieces of information that will lead to a better and longer attack. What they learn can lead to helping them construct custom malware to exploit specific systems or access/steal data while avoiding detection.”

DODI GLENNSenior Director Of Security Intelligence : ThreatTrack Security

CUSTOM MALWARE ATTACKS OFTEN EMPLOY SOCIAL ENGINEERING TACTICS, WHICH RELY ON HUMAN-TO-HUMAN INTERACTION TO OBTAIN KEY DETAILS ABOUT THE TARGET AND SECURITY SYSTEMS.


wreaking havoc on Iran’s nuclear en-

richment plans in mid-2010. A multi-

part attack originally delivered via an

infected USB drive, Stuxnet consisted

of a worm that was capable of hijacking

industrial systems, a link file that issued

commands to the copies of the worm,

and a rootkit designed to mask the mal-

ware’s behavior and keep it hidden for

as long as possible.

Stuxnet, like the forms of custom

malware we’re hearing so much about

lately, was designed to remain dor-

mant on the infected systems that

didn’t meet certain prerequisites. On

the other hand, the malicious soft-

ware became active on any system that

was running a Microsoft Windows

operating system and also featured

Siemens Step7 software, which was

used to manage the programmable

logic controllers of Iran’s nuclear cen-

trifuges. Whenever a dormant system

suddenly met Stuxnet’s attack criteria,

the malware would wake up and begin

causing trouble.

Although Stuxnet started out as a cy-

berattack targeting Iran’s nuclear pro-

gram, it has since turned up all over

the world. Some experts believe that it

has been reverse engineered to become

active under different circumstances.

Furthermore, the strategies it used to

propagate and cause damage have been

used to attack other targets, including

some that may have been friendly to the

interests of the group behind the devel-

opment of Stuxnet.

Tracking Down The HackersOne of the reasons custom malware

has such a sneaky reputation is due

to the fact that many attacks benefit

from insider information, either from a

former or current employee or a client

who knows intimate details about the

organization’s security operations.

Oftentimes an organization that has

been hit in all the right (or wrong)

places at just the right (or wrong)

times will be inclined to assume that

an insider is indeed responsible, which

subsequently shortens the list of poten-

tial culprits.

According to Glenn, however, it’s

important not to put too much stock

in the “inside job” theory before you

have hard evidence that this is the case.

“[The presence of custom malware] in-

dicates that the person(s) behind the

attack know something specific to the

company they are targeting.” And that

information is just as likely to come

to the crooks via the backdoor com-

munication channel established by

the hack as it is to have come from a

current or former employee or client.

Furthermore, cybercriminals using

such sophisticated attacks are no doubt

happy to misdirect a subsequent inves-

tigation by making the attack look like

it originated from within the enterprise.

Hack YourselfGlenn suggests that penetration

testing can be an excellent proactive

measure. “Simple [penetration] testing

could reveal a lot about a company.”

This entails hiring security experts that

are familiar with cybercriminal tactics

to stage an attack on the network in an

attempt to expose security holes.

Because custom malware needs to

get that initial foot in the door using

traditional malware, training employees

how to avoid exposing the organiza-

tion is key. Glenn suggests that edu-

cation is the best way to “prevent the

employees from being the gateway

into the company.” This includes de-

scribing common social engineering

techniques and how to recognize suspi-

cious emails, websites and URLs. “Keep

machines on the network updated, an-

tivirus signatures updated, and ensure

that best practice security measures are

followed. It is also important that firm-

ware updates are applied to appliances,

such as hardware-based firewalls.”

In addition to using penetration

testing to audit systems, Glenn high-

l ights the importance of audit ing

employees, as well, “by doing staged

phishing/targeted attacks.” Although

custom malware sounds like a night-

mare for any organization, it is pos-

sible to fight back, and doing so can

effectively prevent virtually all types of

malware attacks.

BECAUSE CUSTOM MALWARE NEEDS TO GET THAT INITIAL FOOT IN THE DOOR USING TRADITIONAL MALWARE, TRAINING EMPLOYEES HOW TO AVOID EXPOSING THE ORGANIZATION IS KEY.

Custom malware attacks often begin with a typical phishing scam.


IF YOUR BUSINESS WORKS with payment

cards, you are undoubtedly familiar with

PCI (Payment Card Industry) DSS (Data

Security Standard), a set of information se-

curity requirements enforced by major credit

card merchants such as American Express,

Discover, MasterCard, and Visa. By fol-

lowing PCI DSS, your business is sure to

exercise the recommended practices and

security controls and thereby reduce the

chance of credit card exposure. In late 2013,

the PCI Security Standards Council pub-

lished PCI DSS 3.0, which would be active

Jan. 1, 2014 through Dec. 31, 2017; version

2.0 remained active through the end of 2014.

If your business only recently made

the transition to the newer standard, you

likely noticed some new business processes

and practices. If your organization was

caught off guard by the change, you might

be surprised by the new mandatory prac-

tices. “Significant changes to the definition

of scope and certain security controls in

the new standard mean some businesses

have more heavy lifting to do than in

New Payment Security Standard WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PCI DSS 3.0

years past,” says Michael Aminzade, vice

president of global compliance and risk ser-

vices at Trustwave. Here, we explore what

you can expect with PCI DSS 3.0.

From 2.0 To 3.0Part of the focus with PCI DSS 3.0 is to

help organizations make payment security a

part of everyday work. Laura Johnson, com-

munications manager for the PCI Security

Standards Council, says “PCI DSS 3.0 helps

organizations focus on security, not compli-

ance, by making payment security business-

as-usual.” PCI DSS 3.0 also sets clearer goals,

and more detailed terms help ensure busi-

nesses know what exactly constitutes compli-

ance. “The updates are based on feedback

from the market on what they’d like to see in

the standard, as well as in response to what

we see in breach reports,” says Johnson.

PCI DSS is based on 12 core require-

ments and fundamental principles. With

PCI DSS 3.0, the PCI Security Standards

Council added new sub-requirements to

reinforce the key areas of focus. Some key

examples include: “Requirement 8.4 covers

password education for users and require-

ment 9.9 comprises training and education

around POS security.” The raised sub re-

quirements help businesses monitor effec-

tiveness and maintain compliance.

There are also some critical changes

to note. “To help strengthen security

among third-party service providers, the

PCI DSS 3.0 requires all providers clearly

articulate which PCI DSS controls they

will address and which are left to the mer-

chant,” says Aminzade. “The change pro-

vides more transparency for merchants

so that they can make educated decisions

when working with an external partner.”

Another new requirement involving third-

party service providers are unique pass-

words for each merchant that remotely

connects to the business, with PCI DSS 3.0

calling for two-factor authentication.

PCI DSS 3.0 also has provisions to im-

prove security. James McCloskey, Info-

Tech Research Group director, advisory

services for security and risk, says “New


requirements under section 1.1 clarify

what a network diagram must include, and

then, add the requirement for a cardholder

data to the flow diagram.” The new re-

quirement helps to reduce the risk of PCI-

relevant and network components going

under the radar. “By meeting the require-

ment, organizations can work to imple-

ment appropriate controls for each and

every in-scope element of their network,”

McCloskey adds.

Data Breach PreventionPerforming risk assessment, of course,

is an important step in data breach secu-

rity. With PCI DSS 3.0, penetration testing

requirements are more stringent. “When

conducting penetration tests, merchants

or whoever is performing the test, will

have to follow an industry framework,”

says Aminzade. “The standard also man-

dates tester independence meaning the

person who tests the system cannot be the

same individual person who manages or

administers the system.”

Many of the sub-requirements we men-

tioned previously will also help protect

customer data. Johnson says, “Breach re-

ports over and over have pointed to lack of

education and awareness, weak passwords

and authentication challenges, third-party

security challenges, slow self-detection in

response to malware and other threats as

leading causes for compromise.” Echoing

those thought, Aminzade says, “The

bottom line is that businesses need to un-

derstand security first, so that they inher-

ently are in compliance with the PCI DSS.”

Small-Business ImpactThe additional guidance for PCI DSS 3.0

requirements is ideal for small businesses.

“It helps organizations that perhaps don’t

have an established security department to

understand the security objectives behind

the requirements,” says Johnson. “We are

looking to provide additional guidance to

help small merchants understand where to

begin to secure their payment card data,”

she adds. The PCI Security Standards

Council will soon launch a task force to

address small-business security concerns,

as well.

Aminzade provides an example of the

type of improved transparency you’ll see

in PCI DSS 3.0. “The standard includes

more stringent legal contract requirements

aimed at third-party providers,” he says. “It

requires all providers to clearly articulate

which PCI 3.0 controls they will address

and which are left to the business.” When

working with a third party, you can ref-

erence the legal contract requirements to

make more educated decisions.

Big BusinessesEnterprises and large organizations must

often use a multilayered approach to secu-

rity, because doing so localizes the impact

if one security element becomes compro-

mised. “PCI Standards provide layers

of defense to ensure businesses can prevent,

defend, and detect attacks on their systems,”

says Johnson. Any extra security layers will

also face extra scrutiny. Aminzade says “If

a merchant uses segmentation to reduce the

scope of their cardholder data environment,

it must now penetration test the segmenta-

tion boundaries to prove isolation from the

card data environment.”

Large enterprises will also want to talk

with key personnel about using strong

passwords and avoiding phishing links,

and cover why they should never share

company information on social or public

platforms. “A daily coordinated focus on

maintaining these controls provides a

strong defense against data compromise,”

says Johnson. Besides personnel, PCI DSS

3.0 recommends that you regularly check

the security of your hardware. “POS de-

vices will now need to be inspected on

a periodic basis to make sure they have

not been infected or had skimming device

fitted to capture payment card details,”

Aminzade explains.

Focus On Security, Not Compliance

“The changes in PCI DSS 3.0 are a

step in that security-first direction,” says

Aminzade. “They all will help strengthen

organizations’ security programs; however,

businesses cannot look at compliance as the

end-goal for data protection.” PCI DSS 3.0

does cover a lot of ground, though, in terms

of organization security. For example, topics

for requirements include risk assessment,

continuous vulnerability scanning, testing

incident response, and proper management

of security programs, just to name a few.

With such a variety of security categories,

you might need help from a third-party

expert to meet the requirements. “If busi-

nesses struggle with a lack of manpower

and resources in-house to make sure their

security controls and services are working

properly, they should augment their staff

and partner with a third-party team of ex-

perts whose sole responsibility is to protect

their information,” says Aminzade.

Johnson also wants us to remember that

compliance isn’t about just passing the an-

nual audio. “It’s about ongoing vigilance

and multiple layers that address people, pro-

cess, and technology,” she says, “We have

to shift from a compliance mind set to a

prioritized risk-based approach that’s built

into the organizational DNA.” PCI DSS 3.0

is the foundation on which you’ll build the

risk-based security posture.

The PCI Security Standards Council indicates that education and policy enforcement can help to prevent attacks.

“The updates are based on feedback from the market on what they’d like to see in the standard, as well as in response to what we see in breach reports.”

LAURA JOHNSONCommunications Manager : PCI Security Standards Council


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TECHNOLOGY IS OFTEN a double-edged

sword. While its advancement means

the tasks enabled by it can be completed

in less time, in more places, and at less

of a cost, those benefits usually come

with a different sort of cost. Consider, for

instance every time the Wi-Fi specifica-

tion is updated. To enjoy the significant

boost in throughput that a new Wi-Fi

spec typically delivers, you'll need a new

router and wireless adapters for your in-

dividual devices.

With SSDs (solid state drives), how-

ever, these costs are lower than you

might expect. Also, the inherent ben-

efits aren't limited to just a few special

circumstances. The short answer to the

question, "Are SSDs worthwhile?" is

"Yes, they are." In this article we'll ex-

plain why.

The Waiting GameDue to the large investment involved,

we understand that organizations large

and small need to carefully weigh the

Solid Advice On Solid State Drives DUMP YOUR HARD DRIVES & ACCELERATE YOUR BUSINESS WITH SOLID STATE DRIVES

pros and cons of upgrading any com-

ponent across a fleet of machines. SSDs

are fairly unique in that, typically, all

you need to do is install the SSD in

place of a PC's or laptop’s current HDD

(hard disk drive). As long as the PC or

laptop in question is no more than five

or so years old, the upgrade really can

be that easy. For this reason, you don’t

need to put off SSD upgrades until your

next major system refresh.

Part of what makes the upgrade so

simple is the data and power connec-

tions that SSDs use are identical to the

ones that modern HDDs use. The Serial

ATA 3.0 connector over which data

travels is a compact yet high-speed in-

terface that enables throughputs that

approach 6Gbps (gigabits per second),

which is why it’s sometimes referred to

as SATA 6Gbps. Despite supporting the

same interface, HDDs have never been

capable of delivering data fast enough to

approach that speed. SSDs, on the other

hand, were built for speed.

Inside SSDs & HDDsHDDs consist of one or more mag-

netic metallic discs (called platters) that

revolve at a rate of thousands of times

per minute (5,400rpm, 7,200rpm, and

10,000rpm are common HDD spin

speeds) as an actuator arm with dedi-

cated read/write heads for each platter

move across the surface. For a file to be

read or written, the actuator arm must

move to the proper position, the disc

must spin to align the head with the

proper location, and then the file must be

transmitted. The 6Gbps throughput only

impacts the final step in this process, the

spindle speed and actuator movement

add a great deal of latency to the HDD’s

access time.

The big advantage for HDDs is their

relative low cost, as we went to press,

you could spend between 5 and 10 cents

per Gigabyte of HDD storage capacity.

These devices also tend to have higher

total capacities, up to 8TB (terabytes)

and good reliability. If your primary


concerns are capacity and price, then

you should consider sticking with your

existing HDDs.

SSDs consist of NAND flash mem-

ory, the same technology found inside

USB thumb drives, and a controller

chip, which is designed to perform

the essential functions of the device,

such as error-correction, preventing

any memory blocks from wearing out

the device prematurely, finding and

disabling bad blocks, caching read and

write commands, and encrypting data.

Another one of the controller’s tasks is

garbage collection, which is the series

of data-shuffling operations that en-

sures there’s space for new data to be

written. When an SSD receives a call

for data, it electronically locates the

corresponding row and column to

address the memory chip, which can

occur incredibly quickly.

In the early days of SSD manufac-

turing, SSDs garnered a reputation for

being unreliable and failing prema-

turely. Unlike the magnetic platters

in HDDs, the flash chips in SSDs very

gradually degrade the more they’re

written to. Since those early days, new

memory chips have been developed

that can handle significantly more

reads and writes, and modern control-

lers can further minimize the problem.

The practice of overprovisioning, or

setting aside a portion of the SSD’s

capacity for various SSD lifespan-

boosting commands, is another way

in which SSD manufacturers have im-

proved drive reliability. SSDs today are

every bit as reliable as HDDs.

Pricing for SSDs is sti l l signifi-

cantly higher than for HDDs, typi-

cally around $0.45 per gigabyte for

consumer-grade devices. Capacities of

SSDs top out at 2TB, but the highest

capacity drives are rare and very ex-

pensive. The most common capacities

today (available at $0.45 per gigabyte)

are between 240GB and 512GB.

Some applications wil l hammer

an SSD with frequent read/write op-

erations, such as using them in high-

traffic servers. However, enterprise-

grade SSDs, which tend to cost more,

can even perform just as reliably as

HDDs in these environments. For or-

ganizations that use hundreds of drives,

the MTBF (mean time between failure)

rating, can be a useful way to calculate

life spans compared to the HDDs cur-

rently in use.

Speed ComparisonThe number of instances per second a

storage device can perform a data read or

write command is called its IOPS (input/

output operations per second). This is

generally how we gauge the speed of

SSDs compared with HDDs.

Benchmark tests show that a stan-

dard consumer-grade 7,200rpm hard

drive typically doesn’t achieve more

than 200 IOPS and very expensive en-

terprise-grade 15,000rpm hard drives

can only manage between 450 and 300

IOPS. A standard consumer-targeted

SSD, on the other hand, has IOPS in

the neighborhood of 8,000 or more.

This is a fairly involved way of

saying that SSDs aren’t just a little bit

faster than traditional hard drives,

they’re a lot faster. And that speed can

translate directly into more produc-

tive employees, dramatically improved

server and workstation performance,

and better ROI for your organization.

For mission-critical applications,

where high-speed, low latency perfor-

mance is the ultimate goal, SSDs are

the most viable option. But the benefits

of SSDs apply across the board.

Cool & CompactSSDs can generally withstand higher

temperatures than HDDs, and their

form factors start at 2.5 inches, which

is the size of a common laptop HDD.

SSDs tend to consume about 50% to

66% of the power that HDDs do, so if

you use a lot of devices in a very con-

fined space, these power savings can

add up quickly.

Superior StorageModern SSDs have what it takes to

make it in the business world. Better

yet, they significantly outperform HDDs

in terms of energy consumption, read/

write speeds, and shock resistance. Even

in terms of reliability, SSDs are very

competitive. The lone advantage HDDs

have, price per gigabyte, is continuing

its free fall. If you’ve been on the fence

about upgrading, now is the time to give

SSDs a spin.

HDDs (hard disk drives) currently offer higher capacity per dollar ratios than SSDs (solid state drives), but they lose to SSDs in virtually every other way.

SOLID STATE DRIVES ARE FAIRLY UNIQUE IN THAT, TYPICALLY, ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS INSTALL THE SSD IN PLACE OF A PC'S OR LAPTOP’S CURRENT HARD DISK DRIVE. . . . THE UPGRADE CAN REALLY BE THAT EASY.


PROTECTING YOUR digital identity is just

as important as locking the front door to

your home; refraining from leaving valu-

ables in the car; and keeping track of

your credit cards, debit cards, driver’s li-

cense, and other identifying documents.

Passwords (and the associated usernames)

are often the only things standing between

cybercriminals and our precious data. We

spoke to several experts and collected a

laundry list of dos and don’ts to help you

choose the best passwords and keep them

strong for as long as you need them.

Our Bad Habits RevealedEvery year, various security vendors

and research institutions post lists of the

most common passwords users continue

to use. According to Alan Tang, director

of research at Info-Tech Research Group,

one of the worst things we can do when

choosing a password is make it too easy

to guess. “Passwords that are too simple

or too common often fall victim to dic-

tionary attacks. Examples are 123456,

P@55w0rd$ DeC0ded EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON WHAT TRULY MAKES A STRONG PASSWORD

password, LetMeIn, abcdef, incorrect,

abc123, new2day, princess, dragon, Base-

ball, Football, Monkey, [and] ILoveYou.”

Other password-picking bad habits Tang

highlights include using one password for

all or multiple logins, sharing passwords

with others, and using passwords that con-

sist of personal information, such as names

of children or pets and birth dates.

Ant Allen, a Gartner research vice pres-

ident, says we should avoid making our

passwords too complex. “The fundamental

problem is that we are trying to shore up an

authentication method which is extremely

weak anyway, with many vulnerabilities,”

he says. “The focus of a lot of the regula-

tions and a lot of what organizations are

trying to do anyway, even if they’re not

subject to regulations, is to make pass-

words long and complex. And that creates a

burden on users.”

Barbara Kraus, Parks Associates director

of research, echoes much of what Allen and

Tang warn against, but she reminds us to be

mindful that a person’s choice of username

can introduce vulnerabilities, as well. “If you

use your email address as your user ID and

one of those [most common passwords] as

your password, you’re very much opening

yourself up to have that hacked.”

What Makes A Strong Password?The analysts we spoke with also gave

advice for how to strengthen our online

identities. Although most websites and

online service providers institute rules

regarding the types of characters that a

person must use in his password, Allen

believes that “difficult to guess” does not

have to equal “difficult to remember.” He

levels a finger at password requirements

that force users to use uppercase and low-

ercase characters, numbers, and symbols.

He argues, “You can get the same kind

of password that is difficult to guess from

using a long simple password, but that

is a lot easier to remember.” Allen la-

ments that not every system can accept

long passwords and many legacy systems

don’t support them. Although there are


things we can do to make our passwords

resistant to breach, Allen suggests that a

more systemic solution to the problem

may be necessary. “If you can’t use it uni-

versally in an organization,” he says, “then

you can’t use it at all.”

Until all systems allow the longer easy-

to-remember passwords, Kraus advocates

creating passwords that have uppercase and

lowercase letters, a number, and a special

character. Tang proposes that organizations

make strong password creation part of a

periodic training curriculum and require

passwords be a minimum of eight charac-

ters. He also suggests leveraging tools, such

as password managers.

Using Different Passwords Is KeySome experts recommend using dif-

ferent passwords for different accounts.

Your financial accounts, for example,

shouldn’t have the same password as your

online shopping accounts. If you have mul-

tiple financial accounts, maybe one with a

bank and another with a brokerage, then

you need different passwords for each one.

According to Tang, “Some organiza-

tions don’t change the default password

that come[s] with the devices from ven-

dors, such as network devices.” He says

that using different passwords for every

login “reduces the risks of [exposing] all

your systems/data if a single password has

been comprised.”

Passwords Go BadNo matter how secure your password is,

it’s a good idea to periodically change it to

stay ahead of cybercriminals, especially be-

cause some breaches can go undiscovered

or unreported. Although being forced to

change your passwords can be frustrating,

it can save you a lot of future headaches.

When choosing new passwords, Krause

advises against reusing passwords you

changed recently. “Our general rule is:

Don’t use the last three,” she says. Tang

suggests that you avoid using your last

four passwords. Regarding how often you

should change passwords, Kraus recom-

mends doing so at least every 180 days.

“And that’s for every password. If you have

10 different passwords, you want to change

them all every six months.”

For regulated organizations, Tang rec-

ommends checking compliance require-

ments to determine how often they should

change passwords. “For instance, PCI-DSS

[PCI Data Security Standard] requires

changing user passwords at least every

90 days,” he says. Many of the organiza-

tions Tang encounters require a password

change every 30 or 45 days.

Allen reports that a lot of organizations

set passwords to expire between 60 and 90

days, but he sympathizes with users who

are frustrated with frequent forced pass-

word changes. “The traditional justification

for that periodic change was to limit the

window of opportunity for the attacker,

but even with a 60-day period, that means,

on average, that attacker’s still got 30 days

use out of it, which is plenty of time to do

damage—establish back doors so you’re no

longer reliant on passwords. So it’s a very

weak control.”

Whom To Trust?When it comes to your sensitive data

and the passwords you choose, you

shouldn’t trust anyone. A friend or loved

one may be unlikely to steal your informa-

tion or sell it to data thieves, but they may

not be as careful as is necessary with the

info you supplied them.

Kraus suggests that you be aware of your

surroundings and the hardware you’re

using as you input passwords and log into

your accounts. “Nobody should be looking

over your shoulder when entering your

passwords. You shouldn’t enter passwords

on computers you don’t control. . . . If

there’s any malware on that computer, it

can steal your passwords. The same with

unsecured Wi-Fi; it’s easy to hack for pass-

words and data.”

Allen says, “Even if you make your pass-

word difficult to guess, that doesn’t mitigate

phishing attacks, spyware attacks, and so-

cial engineering attacks. If an attacker waits

until you’ve logged in [to launch] the attack,

then no type of authentication can prevent

the breach.” In short, if you’re using a com-

puter you don’t trust or a network with

other users you don’t trust, don’t use either

to access sensitive personal data.

“The fundamental problem is that we are trying to shore up an authentication method which is extremely weak anyway, with many vulnerabilities.”

ANT ALLENResearch Vice President : Gartner

“Passwords that are too simple or too common often fall victim to dictionary attacks. Examples are 123456, password, LetMeIn, abcdef, incorrect, abc123, new2day, princess, dragon, Baseball, Football, Monkey, [and] ILoveYou.”

ALAN TANGDirector Of Research : Info-Tech Research Group

“If you use your email address as your user ID and one of those [most common passwords] as your password, you’re very much opening yourself up to have that hacked.”

BARBARA KRAUSDirector Of Research : Parks Associates


THE WEB AS WE KNOW IT was not built

from the ground up to be the globally acces-

sible and culturally transformational tech-

nology that it has become. Instead, it started

as a fairly simple means for exchanging

small bits of information between remote

locations. Because it evolved organically

over time, there’s no single computer lan-

guage that Web developers rely on to create

the kinds of interactive applications we have

come to associate as synonymous with the

modern Web. The collection of languages

used today has significantly complicated the

task of programming Web applications and

created an environment that is replete with

security vulnerabilities. And the demand for

coherent, safe, and high-performance Web

applications is only growing.

Ur/Web is a relatively new functional

programming language designed to make

sense of it all by letting programmers write

script that uses a variety of modern Web

Ur/Web Seeks To Simplify Web Development MIT STREAMLINES ALL YOUR FAVORITE LANGUAGES UNDER ONE UMBRELLA

technologies without having to program in

each respective language. According to the

code’s author Adam Chlipala, a computer

science assistant professor at MIT, “I've de-

signed Ur/Web to be the language in which

I most want to use to develop Web applica-

tions.” Ur/Web is very much a working

developer’s development language, built to

perform similarly to ML and Haskell, but

with added features designed to support

more rules, functions, and modules.

The project page (www.impredicative

.com/ur/) describes Ur/Web as a form of

statically typed metaprogramming based

on row types. It is composed of two in-

terdependent components: the Ur, or the

language itself, and the special standard

library plus a collection of parsing and op-

timization rules. As we went to press, Ur/

Web had begun to outgrow its status as a

research language and was gathering trac-

tion as a highly functional, easy-to-use, and

significantly more secure alternative, espe-

cially among, in Chlipala’s words, “serious

fans of typed functional programming.”

From Chaos To CoherencyIf you were to dissect any Web page

today, you’d come across sections of code

written in HTML (Hypertext Markup

Language), XML (Extensible Markup

Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets),

JavaScript, and more for defining the Web

page’s core formatting, handling data that

is both human and machine readable, de-

scribing the user interface, running client-

and server-side scripts for user interactivity,

and countless other purposes. The problem

with this approach is that this patchwork

of code is very often expensive to generate

from scratch on a per-page basis, buggy,

and vulnerable to attacks.

Ur/Web bridges the gap between dispa-

rate code in a way that’s strict but logical.


Chlipala describes three distinguishing

characteristics of Ur/Web: “compile-time

checking of sanity properties of whole

applications, new approaches to modu-

larity where key parts of Web apps can be

strongly encapsulated inside of modules,

and a simple concurrency model.”

The Upside Of Ur/WebUr/Web-based Web sites are designed

to always remain stable during page gen-

eration functions. They also resist a variety

of common problems Web programmers

encounter, including any type of code-in-

jection attacks, pages with invalid HTML,

dead intra-application links, mismatched

HTML forms and fields, faulty client-side

code that references AJAX-style services,

invalid SQL query attempts, and

improper state recording in the

code base during SQL databases,

browser, or Web server com-

munication.

Type safety, or the ability

to prevent type errors (that is,

errors in program behavior re-

sulting from constant, variable,

and function discrepancies oc-

curring between differing data

types), is paramount to Ur/Web.

Other Web applications written

and compiled in Ur/Web return

server code, browser client code,

and SQL code that is designed to

work with the associated data-

base back end.

A Guard At Every DoorPart of what makes Ur/Web so resilient

to code-injection attacks are its strict rules

for how each page element is generated.

This “strongly typed” format lets the pro-

grammer use a preset data type for each

variable and function. As a result, no page

elements can attempt any form of unin-

tended interaction with any other page

element, which is why any attacker who at-

tempts to send maliciously formatted data

through a Web form will get nowhere fast.

Furthermore, Ur/Web supports variable

scoping, or the ability to limit where a vari-

able can be called within a program, to give

developers even more ways to protect their

applications and Web pages.

One example Chlipala uses to describe

this compartmentalization is a Web page

that features both a dynamically updating

calendar widget from a known library and

an adjacent advertisement widget that gets

its code from a third party. Using more

traditional programming languages, it’s

possible for hijacked advertisement code to

infect the calendar widget and change what

it displays or how it works. With Ur/Web,

this code-to-code interaction is impossible

unless the programmer enables it.

Other specific threats thwarted by Ur/

Web include buffer overflow attacks, auto-

matic run-time interpretation of strings as

code vulnerabilities, and cross-site request

forgery attempts in which an intruder tries

to access the site as a trusted user.

Ur/Web UsersAs we went to press, the current ver-

sion of the Ur/Web source code, Release

20150103, was out of beta. Chlipala

states that programmers should feel

confident in turning to Ur/Web when

building their next application. Outside

of hobbyists, academia, and some busi-

ness applications created by enthusiastic

developers, Ur/Web has yet to reach a

wider audience.

With so much attention on Web de-

velopment right now, it’s not surprising

that many developers are taking a “wait

and see” approach. But Chlipala is fully

cognizant of Ur/Web’s uphill battle,

saying that he suspects the current lack

of examples of relatively conventional

Web-app functionality implemented in

Ur/Web is the reason more developers

are remaining on the sidelines. “I'm

working now on fixing that problem," he

says. "For instance, I've built an app to

manage our annual visit weekend for the

people we've admitted into my depart-

ment's Ph.D. program. I plan to release

these examples, and the framework that

they use, soon as open source.”

In The WildThere are several examples of websites

and applications that rely on Ur/Web and

illustrate what the functional program-

ming language is capable of. Vladimir

Shabanov used Haskell and Ur/Web to

create a commercial RSS reader

called BazQux Reader, which

supports thousands of paying

subscribers. The Bitcoin Merge

Mining Pool is another ex-

ample. New Zealand-based

Extensibl is a software develop-

ment services and consulting

firm aimed at startups, and

Ecosrv, primarily used as a da-

tabase for network routers up-

grading their firmware, is one

application of Ur/Web that

Chlipala did not foresee. “That

wasn't my idea of the canonical

user of a Web application!”

Chlipala is still actively de-

veloping Ur/Web, focusing his

efforts on creating examples

of common Web applications designed

to support various applications that are

useful within MIT. “I'm continuing to

develop it as a practical platform, ad-

dressing bug reports and feature requests

from users, applying it to some local

MIT Web apps, and doing a bit of re-

search on useful additions, like new opti-

mizations in the compiler.”

As we went to press, Chlipala ex-

pressed his intention to keep Ur/Web

available as an open source project for the

foreseeable future. Although he didn’t feel

up to the task of predicting how Ur/Web

will grow over time, he was confident that

Web application programmers who tried

it would find it a joy to work with.

Techempower.com reports that Ur/Web is one of the top ten performing frameworks.


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Smartphone Tips A ROUNDUP OF HANDY ADVICE

Use Foreign Language Keyboards

❯ Windows Phone 8 supports more than

40 languages with separate on-screen

keyboards for each. Of those, Windows

Phone 8 provides automatic text sugges-

tions while you type for more than 30

languages. By default, Windows Phone

8 smartphones sold in the U.S. market

will come with the U.S. English key-

board active and ready to use. If you

add one or more foreign language key-

board, a language button will be added

to the keyboard, allowing you to switch

quickly between keyboards for dif-

ferent languages. To add a keyboard,

access Settings, tap Keyboard, tap Add

Keyboard, select each keyboard you

would like to add, and tap the Add

button. To remove a keyboard, follow the

same steps but tap Remove at the end.

Move iTunes Music To Your Windows Phone

❯ If you have a Windows Phone 8 smartphone and store your music in iTunes

on a PC running Windows 7/8, you can download Microsoft’s Windows Phone

App For Desktop to move iTunes content to your phone. This is ideal for those

who have used an iPhone or iPod and now wish to play media mainly on a

Windows phone. Install and download the program, launch it, click Settings,

and (under Sync Music, Videos, And More From) select iTunes. Tweak other

settings to control what media is transferred to your phone and whether or not

it transfers automatically.

Set Up Global Roaming

❯ If your Windows Phone smartphone and wireless carrier support it, you can

start setting up global roaming by accessing Settings and tapping System and

then Cellular. For the Data Connection option, tap to turn service on; for Data

Roaming Options, tap to enable mobile data roaming and choose the type of

service; and for Voice Roaming Options, tap to enable and choose the type of

service. The Activate Network option displays which network your smartphone

is connected to.

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Reset The Swype Dictionary

❯ Android devices with the Swype on-

screen keyboard let you glide your finger

from one letter to the next to spell a word

without having to press each letter sep-

arately. As with any small-screen key-

board, the results can sometimes differ

from what you intended to type, either

because you touched a few wrong keys or

because the keyboard’s auto-correct fea-

ture incorrectly assumed you were trying

to type a different word. After you enter

a word that Swype doesn’t recognize, it

is added to the Swype dictionary. If at

some point you would like to clear your

added words from the Swype dictionary,

access Settings; tap My Device, Language

& Input, Preferences, and Reset Swype’s

Dictionary; tap the pop-up box option to

confirm that you want to take this action.

Adjust Your Phone Lock Wait Time

❯ Once you set up Android’s built-in

locking system, you must enter a pass-

word, PIN, or pattern to gain access to your

phone. This is a great security feature, espe-

cially for absent-minded mobile individuals

who occasionally lose track of their phone.

But it can also be a nuisance, especially if

you use your phone often. Being required to

enter a passcode every time you want to use

your phone can quickly get old.

Some Android phones offer the option

to set a timeout period that must elapse

before the phone lock feature kicks in.

This can be an acceptable compromise be-

tween locking right away and not locking

at all. To set the phone lock timeout, go

to Settings, Security, Lock Phone. If your

phone has this feature, you will see an op-

tion for setting the lockout time period.

Select a time period that will let you use

the phone freely, but will lock the phone

before someone can pick it up and use it

should you accidentally leave it behind.

Try 5 minutes to start, and then adjust the

time if that’s too short or too long.

Change Your Primary Shortcuts

❯ The primary shortcuts on a current Android smartphone are the persistent but-

tons at the bottom of the screen for Phone, Contacts, Apps, Messaging, and Internet.

You can remove any of these except for the Apps shortcut, and add shortcuts

to the apps you’d rather have quick

access to. Press the Home button

so that you’re looking at the Home

screen, and then press and hold the

primary shortcut you wish to replace,

and drag it to an empty spot on the

Home screen. Repeat this to remove

other icons from this area, if you like.

Then, press and hold the icon for any

app you want to add to the primary

shortcut area and simply drag the icon

to the desired spot.

Check Battery Level & Optimize Battery Life

❯ For most smartphones, the de-

fault battery indicator doesn’t pro-

vide much more information than

a general idea of how much life the

smartphone has left. But for those who

would like to see a little more battery

data or even analyze just how much

battery life individual applications are

eating up, Android provides a way. Go

to Settings, Device, and then Battery.

This menu will not only show you how

much battery life remains, but also the amount of battery life each app is consuming.

This information should give you a solid foundation for where to cut down on

power hogging apps.

For instance, if you leave your Bluetooth or GPS features turned on 100% of

the time, it’s going to drain your battery much faster than if you only turn them

on when you need them. You should also consider connecting to a Wi-Fi network

when possible, but not leaving the feature turned on when you’re out of Wi-Fi

range. Make sure you don’t leave apps running unnecessarily in the background and

try dimming the brightness of your display. All of these small changes can often lead

up to big improvements in overall battery life.

Snap Photos While Capturing Video

❯ Your particular phone may not support this feature, but Android has the ability

to perform dual image captures. When you’re using your phone to record video,

you can tap the screen and a hi-res still image will be shot at the same time, without

pausing the video recording. Android will save the still image to your photo gallery.

ANDROID

Primary shortcuts are those that appear at the bottom of every Home screen on an Android smartphone, such as the HTC Droid Incredible shown here. You can edit the primary shortcuts if you like.


Know Your Wireless Connection Options

❯ BlackBerry 10 displays one or more

cellular data connection icons de-

pending on the type of service your

BlackBerry is connected to at the time.

In addition to the familiar “bars” and

Wi-Fi indicator, there are numerous

cellular icons, including:

• 1X - 1XRTT data (slow)

• 1x - limited 1XRTT (slow)

• 2G - 2nd generation cellular (slow)

• 2g - limited 2G (slow)

• 3G - 3rd generation cellular

• (medium)

• 3g - limited 3G (medium)

• 4G - 4th generation cellular (fast)

• 4g - limited 4G (fast)

• 4GLTE - 4G LTE (Long Term

Evolution) (fast)

• E - EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates

for GSM Evolution) cellular data

(medium)

• e - limited EDGE (medium)

• G - GPRS (General Packet Radio

Service) cellular data

• (medium-slow)

• g - limited GPRS (medium-slow)

• H - HSDPA/HSUPA (High-Speed

Downlink/Uplink Packet Access)

cellular data (medium-fast)

• h - limited HSDPA/HSUPA (me-

dium-fast)

• H+ - HSDPA+ cellular data (fast)

• h+ - limited HSDPA+ (fast)

• X - no mobile network coverage

Can’t Save Images & Videos?

❯ If you are unable to save new image

or video files to your BlackBerry 10

smartphone, try using the File Manager

app to delete older media files to gain

more space on the device’s media card,

or insert a new media card. When you

insert an empty media card, access the

File Manager app, navigate to find the

media card, and create a folder named

Camera if there isn’t one already there.

Add Contacts To Your Home Screen

❯ Since the introduction of BlackBerry 6 and through to BlackBerry 10, the

BlackBerry Home screen has been able to contain icons for things other than apps,

including Web pages and documents. One often-overlooked use for this capability is

to add one of your contacts to the home screen. Launch the Contacts app and high-

light the contact you wish to have on your home screen. Press the Menu key and

select Add to Home Screen. A dialog box will appear, with an icon for the contact

and the contact’s name. You can change either by tapping on it. When you’re done,

tap the Add button.

Forget Auto-Correct, Create Your Own Text Shortcuts

❯ All right, don’t actually forget auto-

correct. Despite its often-documented

failings, auto-correct (known as “word

substitution” in the BlackBerry uni-

verse) is arguably more helpful than

not when it comes to typing on a

smartphone touchscreen. However, if

you’re using a BlackBerry 10 smart-

phone, you can create your own text

shortcuts to speed up your typing. If,

for example, there’s a certain unusual

word, or even an entire phrase, that

you use fairly often, you can establish

a shortcut using an abbreviation or a

nonsense word that, when you type it,

uses word substitution to replace what

you typed with the full word or phrase.

To do this, access Settings, and then tap

Language And Input, Prediction And

Correction, Word Substitution, and the

Add (plus sign) icon, then enter the ab-

breviated and full text when prompted.

Zoom, Even When The Screen Doesn’t Allow It

❯ Every touchscreen user probably knows by now what it means to “pinch to

zoom,” in which two fingers are used to zoom in or zoom out on a screen’s text and

images. As you’ve likely noticed, however, there are many apps and browser pages

on which this is possible, and many others on which this isn’t possible. Don’t let

that stop you, however. If you have a touchscreen BlackBerry 10 smartphone, access

Settings, tap Accessibility, and switch on the Magnifying Mode feature. Doing this

magnifies the screen a little bit right away. You can adjust the level of magnification

by sliding two fingers apart on the screen (to zoom in) or by pinching two fingers to-

gether (to zoom out). To toggle Magnify Mode on and off without having to go into

settings, use two fingers to swipe down from the top of the screen.

BLACKBERRY

Within the Language And Input settings, tap Word Substi-tution on the Prediction And Correction screen to alter the ways in which your BlackBerry smartphone substitutes typed text with other text.


Prevent Data Tracking

❯ To protect the privacy of your data

usage, you’ll need to disallow the moni-

toring of your iPhone. On iOS 8, you

can do this by tapping Settings, Privacy,

Location Services, and Systems Services.

Find the Diagnostics & Usage switch and

turn it off.

It’s also wise to switch off Location-

Based iAds because leaving it on makes

your real-time location visible and ef-

fectively informs Apple and its partners

that they can use your information to

customize your advertising experience.

Limit Ads

❯ While you’re changing settings to pre-

vent tracking, the Advertising setting is

also worth changing. To do so, access

Settings, tap Privacy, tap Advertising, and

switch on Limit Ad Tracking—but keep

in mind that this only prevents tracking

and interest-based advertising, it does not

necessarily decrease the number of ads

appearing on your iPhone.

Hide A New Email Message To View Another

❯ With every version of iOS prior to

iOS 8, composing a new email mes-

sage with the Mail app meant that your

new email message occupied the full

screen. If you needed to view a previous

email message, you would have to close

your new message, tap to save it as a

draft, and then, when it came time to

return to it, tap Mailboxes, scroll down

to Drafts, and find the message there.

With iOS 8, a new email you’re com-

posing doesn’t take up the full screen.

Instead, there’s a gap at the top, so if

you need to look at an earlier message

you can minimize the email you’re

writing by dragging New Message to the

bottom of the screen. To return to your

email, simply tap New Message.

Make The Most Of Reminders

❯ The Reminders app, which is native in (or built into) Apple iOS 6 and later, can

help you keep track of day-to-day to-do items as well as tasks associated with proj-

ects you are managing or tracking through Microsoft Outlook.

Works With Outlook

❯ If your iPhone is set up to work

wi th Microsof t Exchange , the

Reminders app will automatically

sync with Outlook’s Tasks feature.

You can view Outlook tasks (along

with all of their associated details)

in the Reminders app, and likewise

you can see tasks you add to the

Reminders app on-the-fly when you

return to your computer’s Outlook

program. The Tasks list is the default

list in the Remembers app; you can

create additional lists, which will au-

tomatically sync with Outlook as well.

Establish Sync Preferences

❯ Access your iPhone’s settings,

scroll down, and tap Reminders.

Here you will see the period of time

the Reminders app will cover when

syncing with Exchange. Tap Sync if

you would like to change the time

period. Options are 2 weeks back, 1

month back, 3 months back, 6 months

back, or all reminders; tap one of these

options, tap the Reminders button to

go back, and tap the Settings button to return to the main settings screen.

Add, Modify & Delete Reminders

❯ To add a reminder, open the app, tap the Add icon (plus sign), and type the

reminder text. Tap Done or, if you have another reminder to add, tap Return and

enter the text for the next reminder. Tap any reminder in any list to modify it (set

a reminder notification or due date, set the reminder to repeat, etc.) or delete it

(swiping to the right and tapping Delete also works).

Quick Keyboarding Tips

❯ Having to enter a submenu just to access the apostrophe really muddles typing

words with apostrophes, such as the conjunctions it’s, we’ll, we’re, and they’re.

Oftentimes, your iPhone automatically suggests the appropriate word. When auto

suggest utterly fails to read your mind, however, you can type certain words a cer-

tain way to get auto suggest to display the word you want. To type it’s, we’ll, we’re,

or they’re, just type itss, welll, weree, and theyrr, respectively, followed by a space.

IOS

The Reminders app is part of iOS and integrates with your Microsoft Outlook Tasks.


YOU’RE READY TO give your presenta-

tion, but until that first slide appears on

the big screen, you can never be sure

that your equipment has got your back.

We can’t tell you not to worry, but these

handy tips should help bail you out if

your presentation goes south.

Hardware & Cable Connections

It can be difficult to track down the

source of problems that occur when

you are connecting a notebook and

projector. Following are some things to

watch for.

Video. Turn off all equipment and

connect your notebook’s video out port

to the projector. The usual connection

choices for a notebook are VGA (Video

Graphics Array), DVI (Digital Visual In-

terface), HDMI (HD Multimedia Inter-

face), and DisplayPort. Many projectors

have VGA and one or more digital con-

nections. If possible, use a digital connec-

tion for high quality.

Laptop-Projector Setup Problems TROUBLESHOOT COMMON ISSUES WITH THESE HANDY TIPS

Sound. Some HDMI and Display-

Port digital video connections can carry

audio through the same port, but both

notebook and projector must support

audio over the digital video connection.

Traditionally, audio is connected using

the notebook’s audio out jacks and the

projector’s audio in ports; both of these

are often RCA or 3.5mm. If you’re not

using the projector’s built-in speakers,

make sure you connect your notebook’s

audio out to the sound system you in-

tend to use and turn the volume down

on the projector’s speakers.

Mouse. If you are using a mouse, or a

remote mouse controller, make sure the

controller/mouse is connected, usually

through the notebook’s USB port. If you

are using a wireless device, make sure the

notebook has the appropriate wireless

connection enabled. This is typically Blue-

tooth or a USB port wireless dongle.

Network ConnectionMany venues supply network pro-

jectors, which are made available as a

shared resource. Making a connection to

a network projector is as easy as plugging

MANY VENUES SUPPLY NETWORK PROJECTORS, WHICH ARE MADE AVAILABLE AS A SHARED RESOURCE. MAKING A CONNECTION TO A NETWORK PROJECTOR IS AS EASY AS PLUGGING YOUR NOTEBOOK INTO THE CORPORATE NETWORK VIA WIRED OR WIRELESS ETHERNET.


your notebook into the corporate net-

work via wired or wireless Ethernet.

Check with the company’s IT staff for

specifics. Once connected, use the net-

work connection wizard in Windows 7 to

find the projector you wish to use:

• Click Start (the Windows button

in the bottom-left corner of the

screen).

• Click All Programs.

• Click Accessories.

• Click Connect To A Network

Projector.

• The network connection wizard

may inform you that your note-

book’s firewall is blocking the

ability to connect with the pro-

jector. Click to establish the net-

work connection.

• Either have the wizard search for

available network projectors or

enter the projector’s address manu-

ally if it is available.

Once the device is connected, a

Network Presentation window will mini-

mize to your Taskbar. When you’re ready

to make your presentation, open the

Network Presentation window and select

Resume. Your notebook will treat the net-

work projector like an external monitor.

No VideoIn many cases, your notebook will

detect that you have a projector plugged

into one of its video outputs and will

automatically turn on the port. Not all

notebooks do this, however; and even

those that can still have missing video

if the notebook isn’t set to duplicate the

Desktop or extend it to the secondary

monitor (the projector). Many note-

books use a function key combination

to toggle the projector port on or off

and set how you can use the display. We

recommend using the control panels

in Win7:

• Right-click a blank area on the

Desktop.

• Select Screen Resolution.

• Select the second display from the

drop-down menu.

• Select Extend These Displays from

the Multiple Displays drop-down

menu. Your Desktop background

should now appear on the projector.

Win7 also has a pop-up display for

selecting the content that is sent to the

projector. Press the Windows-P keys

to bring up the four possible selections:

• Disconnect Projector (turns the

projector display off)

• Duplicate (mirrors your computer’s

Desktop on the projector)

• Extend (uses the projector as an ex-

tension of your Desktop)

• Projector Only (turns off your

notebook’s display and uses the

projector as the main display)

Video Is Out Of RangeWhen the projector can’t reconcile a

video signal from a notebook with its

preset resolution, it displays an out-of-

range message. To solve this in Win7:

• Right-click a blank area on the

Desktop.

• Select Screen Resolution.

• Select the display associated with the

projector.

• Use the resolution drop-down menu

to adjust the resolution to the cor-

rect value. Try 800 x 600 or 1,024

x 768 as these are resolutions that

many projectors can handle.

Display Turns OffIf the projector’s display turns off

during your presentation, you'll want

to check your notebook’s power man-

agement feature, especially if you’re

running the notebook off of its bat-

tery. Whenever possible, use your AC

adapter to run your notebook.

Video Won’t Display OrIs Choppy

Your slide presentation works fine,

but when you try to show a video, all

you see is a blank window or a choppy

rendition of the video. Trying to dis-

play a video on two monitors can be too

much for a video card that has marginal

graphics capabilities. If video isn’t dis-

playing correctly, change the Display

settings to make the projector the pri-

mary display.

NOTEBOOK-PROJECTOR TROUBLESHOOTING TIPS

• Turn off all equipment before connecting the notebook to the projector.

• If possible, use a digital connection to ensure a high-quality presentation.

• If you’re not using the projec-tor’s built-in speakers, turn them down and connect the notebook’s audio out to the sound system.

• If you’re using a wireless mouse or controller, make sure you can establish the wireless connection.

• Use the straightforward net-work connection feature in Windows 7 to connect to a network projector.

• If there is no video, check all the ports and then check Windows’ Screen Resolution settings.

• Adjusting the screen resolu-tion can resolve out-of-range messages.

• When a projected image isn’t proportionally correct, try re-positioning the projector and/or changing the projector’s keystone setting.

• If a display turns off during a presentation, check the note-book’s power management settings.

• If video isn’t displaying cor-rectly, change the Display set-tings to make the projector the primary display.


EXCEL SPREADSHEETS are useful for

tracking finances, storing important fig-

ures, or even creating databases of informa-

tion. But the only way to take full advantage

of Excel is to use functions and formulas.

Whether you simply want to find the sum

total of a column of numbers or calculate

compound interest, formulas are the best

way to transform your data. Here are exam-

ples of formulas that might save you time.

Calculate Compound Interest❯ Because Excel doesn’t have a built-in

function for calculating compound interest,

Microsoft provides a formula that will get

you the results you need using

present value (PV), interest rate

(R), and the number of invest-

ment periods (N). So, if you

make an investment of $100 and

Excel FormulasMAKE THEM WORK FOR YOU

want to see how much money you’ll have

in 10 years with a 4% interest rate, you can

plug those numbers into the =PV*(1+R)^N

formula. In our example, your formula

would be 100*(1+.04)^10. Note that you

need to change the 4% figure into a dec-

imal number, otherwise you might expect a

larger than life return on your investment.

Calculate the formula and you’ll see that

over 10 years your initial $100 investment

will grow to $148.02.

Calculate Percentages❯ You can calculate percentages in a va-

riety of ways using Excel, depending on

the information you already know. For

instance, you can use a simple division

formula to find a comparison between

two numbers. For instance, if you shipped

25 products and only one of them was

returned, you can simply enter =24/25

(or use cell coordinates) to get a figure

of .96 or 96%. If you want to calculate

change between numbers (200 to 250, for

example), you can use the formula =(250-

200)/ABS(200) to get a growth rate of .25

or 25%.

Sum Of Totals Across Multiple Worksheets❯ Let’s say you keep track of sales figures

over the years using the same Excel docu-

ment. Not only do you want a record of

your current year’s sales, but you also want

your sales figure from the previous year

at the top of each sheet. This will require

the use of the SUM function as well as

some cross-sheet calculation. Using the

SUM function, =SUM(Sheet1!A1:A6) for

instance, you can take numbers from the

Excel doesn’t have a built-in compound interest function, but

you can use this relatively simple function to get the same result.


first sheet, add them together, and display

them in a cell on the second sheet.

MATCH Function❯ Excel’s MATCH function makes

it easier to find the location of a specific

figure relative to its order in a column.

For instance, if you are searching

for the number 780 in a column of

30 cells, you can type the formula

=MATCH(780,B1:B30,0) to find your

exact match. If the information is located

in the 15th cell, for instance, you’ll receive

the result of 15 from the formula. You can

also use a 1 or -1 modifier in place of the 0

to find the number that is greater than or

less than your desired figure.

Round Up Or Down❯ If you work with figures that have mul-

tiple decimal numbers and need to round

up or down to a specific decimal place,

then Excel has two easy functions you

can use to get the job done: ROUNDUP

and ROUNDDOWN. For example, take

a number you want to round up, such

as 12,345.678 and decide what decimal

place you want to round to. Then, use the

function =ROUNDUP(12,345.678, 2) and

Excel will automatically round it up to

12,345.68.

WORKDAY Function❯ WORKDAY lets you take a start date

and a number of days to determine what

your end date will be with weekends and

holidays taken into account. For example,

you need to enter the DATE formula,

we’ll use =DATE(2015,4,1) into the A1

cell, and a specific number of days in the

A2 cell, we’ll use 18, you can use the for-

mula =WORKDAY(A1,A2) to find your

end date, which in this case is April 27,

2015. You can also add holidays to the

formula by entering the dates into cells

and adding them to the end of the formula

=WORKDAY(A1,A2,A3:A9), which will

change the end date.

Display Current Date & Time❯ Excel’s NOW function is a quick and

easy way to display the current date and

time in your spreadsheet. Type =NOW()

into a field and the date and time will ap-

pear. This information doesn’t update

automatically, but rather every time you

make a calculation within the spreadsheet

as well as every time you open that par-

ticular Excel document.

REPT Function❯ Typing the same thing over and over

can quickly get repetitive, especially if

you need 32,767 instances of the same in-

formation. If you think that number is

oddly specific, you’re right. It’s the max-

imum number of times you can use the

REPT function, according to Microsoft.

To use the REPT function,

simply take a word, number,

or other entry (“Repeat,”

in this instance) and tell

Excel how many times you

want it repeated by typing

=REPT(“Repeat”,5) into a

cell. You can also use this

function to better visualize

data. For instance, you can

use symbols to represent

sales figures or your amount

of customers and watch your

growth over time.

Cross-sheet calculation makes it possible to link formulas across multiple sheets in the same workbook,

so you don’t have to copy and paste information or calculate figures outside of Excel.

The MATCH function is helpful if you want to find a specific figure in a long column of numbers. It shows you where your query is located in relation to the array you provide in the formula.


AN UNFORTUNATE FACT about using

an Internet-connected computer these

days, whether it is a personal or com-

pany-issued notebook, is the constant

threat of malware infection. Even when

taking preemptive action to combat

malware attacks, there’s a fair chance

one will eventually hit your notebook

anyway, if for no other reason than

the sheer volume of malware that at-

tackers introduce daily. Frighteningly,

a leading security software maker re-

portedly gathered 15 million new mal-

ware samples between April and June

2014 alone. Of this number, Trojan

horses accounted for 58.2% of all newly

detected malware threats and were re-

sponsible for 62.8% of all global com-

puter infections.

What’s startling is that these attacks

included zero-day threats in which, as

the name suggests, zero days expire

between when a given vulnerability is

discovered and when attackers release

malware targeting the vulnerability.

Isolate Malware HOW TO COMBAT ATTACKS

With malware being so prevalent and

persistent, a large part of combatting

it is being able to recognize signs that

a system may be infected and then

knowing how to troubleshoot the

problem. Also important is what secu-

rity tools are available to detect, protect

against, and remove malware. The fol-

lowing details these issues and others

for notebook business users.

The Warning SignsAlthough new malware variants are

constantly being developed and re-

leased, malware is generally catego-

rized into several common groups,

including viruses, worms, rootkits,

spyware, Trojans, keyloggers, adware,

and ransomware. What these groups

have in common is an aim to infect

a user’s notebook to steal personal

or company information, hijack the

system outright, or cause other types

of damage. Malware infections can

transpire in numerous ways, including

when you visit an infected website, in-

stall software or an app with malware

hiding inside, click links or open at-

tachments in email, or insert an in-

fected USB thumb drive.

Though warning signs that malware

may be present can differ depending

on the malware type, there are some

primary indicators to look for. Michela

Menting, ABI Research practice di-

rector, says the most common include

applications and programs running no-

ticeably more slowly, slower Internet

performance, and data or files that

are unexpectedly deleted or altered.

A notebook running more slowly, for

example, could indicate malware is

stealing computing resources to fuel

whatever activity the malware was de-

signed to execute, such as hijacking

the system to help generate and spread

spam to other systems.

Some specific examples of changes

in notebook performance to watch out

for include programs, files, and folders


that take longer to open or that don’t

open at all and the notebook taking

exceedingly long to shut down or not

shut down at all. Menting says an easy

way to check for system performance

issues on Windows notebooks is to

look at the processes running in the

Task Manager and pay particular at-

tention to memory or CPU resources.

“If users regularly check the Task

Manager, they may be able to more

easily spot when something looks dif-

ferent from normal,” she says.

Other odd or strange system-related

occurrences that can signal possible

malware activity include the note-

book’s battery draining more quickly

than normal, beeps or alarms sounding

u n e x p e c t e d l y , a n d i n t e r n a l f a n s

speeding up for no obvious reason.

Elsewhere, the sudden and constant

appearance of error messages can be

a clue that malware is present, as can

a Web browser’s home page changing

or new toolbars appearing in the

browser without the user’s involve-

ment. Additionally, an inability to ac-

cess various system tools; messages

that report that administrator rights

have been denied; and a sudden disap-

pearance or appearance of unfamiliar

icons, shortcuts, folders, photos, and

file types are all other possible malware

warning signs.

Pop-up messages, including those

that appear out of the blue when a

Web browser isn’t even open, are an-

other indication that malware (par-

ticularly adware and Trojans) may

be present. An especially cruel type

of malware-related pop-up is one that

warns a user of security vulnerabili-

ties on his notebook and recommends

that he download or buy the suggested

security software (which happen to be

fake). Another indicator to watch for

includes phony social network posts

that the user appears to initiate and

share with his contacts.

Immediate ResponseWhen you suspect malware has

infected your notebook, Menting

advises turning off its Internet con-

nection. “Most malware will use the

Internet connection to send informa-

tion back or infect other computers

on a network,” she says. “Isolate the

laptop and then run an antivirus scan.”

Additionally, ensure that antivirus

software on the notebook is up-to-date

with the latest malware signatures.

“If not, then copy a free AV program

onto a USB thumb drive and use it to

install [the software] on the discon-

nected infected PC,” she says. More

sophisticated malware, Menting says,

“may be able to obfuscate its presence,

and others, such as zero-days, have

simply not yet been uncovered by secu-

rity firms and, therefore, an antivirus

[program] will not help.” In such cases,

Menting says the best option may be to

wipe the hard drive clean and reinstall

the operating system.

Means Of PreventionAs a means of prevention, Menting

says, at the least, you should ensure

that a firewall is running and working

properly. Generally, she says, most op-

erating systems have built-in security

features that users should activate.

Addit ional ly , numerous programs

(including PDF and document-creation

programs) provide options to pass-

word-protect files. “These are really

useful for protecting sensitive docu-

ments,” she says. “On browsers, there

are a number of security features that

can also be activated or increased.”

Malware Removal ToolsBeyond built-in tools, numerous

malware-removal tools are free for

download and use, as are numerous

useful and easy-to-use program-based,

on-the-fly encryption tools and anti-

theft products. Menting says, “Users

should definitely consider protecting

their data as well as their devices.” She

says specific features and abilities to

seek out in such tools included an-

tivirus, antispam, antiphishing, and

antispyware; firewall and intrusion

prevention systems; email, browser,

chat/instant messaging, and appli-

cation protection; privacy, ID, and

online transaction protection; en-

cryption and password management;

ant i theft and remote locate/ lock/

wipe; and cloud-based services and

backup platforms.

Usage-wise, routinely run antivirus

scans and avoid opening email and

attachments or clicking links within

messages from senders you don’t rec-

ognize; don’t reply to suspicious email;

avoid visiting suspicious or unknown

websites; don’t click pop-ups that ap-

pear suspicious and consider using a

pop-up blocker; and don’t download

and instal l software from suspect

sources. Additionally, keep software,

including Web browsers and security

programs, updated; back up data regu-

larly; and report suspicious activity to

your company’s IT department.

“Most malware will use the Internet connection to send information back or infect other computers on a network. Isolate the laptop and then run an antivirus scan.”

MICHELA MENTINGPractice Director : ABI Research

WITH MALWARE BEING SO PREVALENT AND PERSISTENT, A LARGE PART OF COMBATTING IT IS BEING ABLE TO RECOGNIZE SIGNS THAT A SYSTEM MAY BE INFECTED AND KNOWING HOW TO TROUBLESHOOT THE PROBLEM.


IF YOU HAVE USED a computer for any

amount of time, then you know that PC

problems can often occur with little

warning. Maybe you are having trouble

connecting to a Wi-Fi hotspot, or you

can’t get your mouse to work. We ex-

plore how to troubleshoot these and other

common PC problems so you can get back

to work quickly.

Hotspot TroubleshootingOrdinarily, when you carry your

laptop into an airline lounge, it will auto-

matically connect to the available Wi-Fi

hotspot. But what if that doesn’t happen?

First, check that your notebook’s Wi-Fi

adapter is turned on. Often, you’ll see a

backlit Wi-Fi icon near the keyboard. If

the icon isn’t illuminated, look for a

physical switch that you can flip to en-

able the adapter. Sometimes, the state of

your network connection is easily deter-

mined by an icon in the notification area

of the Taskbar. For instance, a red X on

the network icon indicates the adapter

PC Problems On The Road? HERE ARE SOME QUICK FIXES

is disabled while an asterisk means the

adapter is in the process of detecting the

available networks. You can right-click

the network icon in Windows 7 or Win8

and select Troubleshoot Problems. When

the Windows Network Diagnostics utility

opens, it will reset your connection, disable

the wireless adapter, and then enable the

adapter again.

The utility will display descriptions

of the problems it detects along with

some recommended solutions. In most

instances the utility will repair the con-

nection and report the issue as “Fixed.”

To enable a disabled adapter, right-click

the Network Connections icon, click

Open Network And Sharing Center, se-

lect Change Adapter Settings, and then

right-click the name of the wireless

adapter. In the resulting menu, you can

choose to disable or enable the adapter,

connect to or disconnect a network, and

diagnose problems, among other op-

tions. Click Properties to access detailed

options that may help you troubleshoot

the problem.

When your adapter is working prop-

erly, Windows may display a message in-

dicating there are several available wireless

networks. Select the message and choose

a network SSID (service set identifier, or

name) from the list. (You may need to

input a security password.) To display a list

of available networks in Win 8, go to the

Settings option in the charm bar and click

the Available Networks icon. If the adapter

is working and your system appears to be

connected, but you still can’t access the

THE WINDOWS NETWORK DIAGNOSTICS UTILITY . . . WILL RESET YOUR CONNECTION, DISABLE THE WIRELESS ADAPTER, AND THEN ENABLE THE ADAPTER AGAIN.


Internet check for a browser-based splash

screen and/or a Terms Of Use statement

to agree to. Launch a fresh browser session

and click the Home icon to redirect.

Fix Broken Outlook PST & OST Files

The PST (personal storage table) file

and the offline OST (Outlook Data File) is

where Outlook stores messages, calendar

events, and notes specific to your email ac-

count. If this file becomes corrupted, you

may find yourself ousted from Outlook.

There are a few things, however, that you

can do to get a foot in the door.

Scanpst.exe (Outlook 97-2003, 2007,

2010, and 2013), Microsoft’s Inbox Re-

pair tool, lets you solve busted PST/OST

problems quickly. To access the tool, close

Outlook and navigate to C:\Program

Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12. (This

last folder may have a different number;

for instance, our version of Office 2013

stores the utility in the \OFFICE15 folder.)

Double-click Scanpst.exe. By default,

the address for our OST file was already

listed, but if the field is blank, look in the

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local

\Microsoft\Outlook\ folder. Click the

Options button to access Replace, Ap-

pend, or No Log functions and click OK.

Click Start to begin the scanning process.

Windows will inform you of any errors

and prompt you to perform a repair when

the scan is complete. Before clicking the

Repair button, make note of the scanned

file’s backup location. Click Repair and

OK when you see the Repair Complete

message. Launch Outlook to see if this

fixes the problem.

If the file structure was corrupted be-

yond repair, Scanpst.exe resets your file

structure and rebuilds the headers. The

Recovered Personal Folders item in your

Outlook folders list, if it appears, will con-

tain all the data that is recovered. You can

then drag the data to your new PST file and

delete the Recovered Personal Folders item

from Outlook.

A Touchy TouchpadIf you use your laptop on a dock (and

use an external mouse and keyboard),

you can go weeks or months with a de-

activated touchpad and never realize it

until you hit the road. If you find your-

self in this situation, you can activate

the touchpad by pressing the Fn (func-

tion) key simultaneously with the F

number key associated with the laptop’s

touchpad (often labeled with an image

of a touchpad). Using this key combi-

nation will either automatically activate

the touchpad or display a device settings

dialog box that gives you the option to

enable your touchpad. Alternatively,

you can check the notification area in

the lower-right corner of the screen for

a touchpad icon. Click the icon and the

touchpad control panel appears where

you can enable or disable an input device.

An Unresponsive Keyboard Or Mouse

If your programs and applications

don’t respond to keyboard commands,

use your mouse to shut down the com-

puter by clicking Start, then Shut Down

(in Win7) or tap the Power Button and

tap Shut Down (in Win8). Unplug the

keyboard from your PC and then re-

connect it. Restart your PC to deter-

mine whether this process corrected the

problem. (If both input devices are un-

responsive, you can press and hold the

Power Button on the tower to manually

shut down your system.)

If your mouse isn’t responding, but

your keyboard is, press the Windows key

in Win7 to open the Start menu, use the

Right-Arrow key to select Shut Down,

and then press ENTER. In Win8, press

CTRL-ALT-DELETE, press the Tab key

until the power icon is highlighted, and

then press ENTER. Unplug your mouse

and then reconnect it. (If necessary, you

can press and hold the Power button to

shut down the PC.) Then restart your

computer to see if these instructions fix

your problem.

If you’re using a wireless keyboard and

mouse, ensure that the peripherals are

synced and in range of the wireless re-

ceiver. You may also need to install new

batteries. If these steps don’t enable pe-

ripheral communication with the PC, try

reinstalling device drivers. You can often

download these from the mouse and key-

board manufacturer websites.

The Microsoft Outlook Inbox Repair Tool (Scanpst.exe) lets you quickly recover corrupted Outlook PST and OST files.

THE PST FILE AND THE OFFLINE OST IS WHERE OUTLOOK STORES MESSAGES, CALENDAR EVENTS, AND NOTES SPECIFIC TO YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT. IF THIS FILE BECOMES CORRUPTED, YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF OUSTED FROM OUTLOOK.


http://www.msi.com

CyberTrend 04

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