In this podcast we have a company spotlight for you on Interoute and we’ll be hearing their views on the rise of the enterprise app store and the changes within the purchase requirements for enterprise level applications. Joining me is Interoute’s CTO Matthew Finnie to tell us more.

 For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Matthew starts by giving us a bit of background on Interoute the company and why they have specific views on this market.

We are an infrastructure provider right across Europe and we do everything as we say from the ground to the cloud that means literally everything from our 60,000 kilometers of Lit Fibre right up to fairly sophisticated converge networking cloud computing infrastructure for some of the biggest companies in Europe and across the world so our services extending into 88 countries and we basically focus on communications, computing and connectivity infrastructure for enterprises and for service providers.

Talk us through the transitions and changes in the way that organisations are purchasing applications over the past few years?

I think where we have come from is that people would have bought their computing resources or assets and then license it in some way, everything from the days when you would get your books and books of CD’s and label it up and this kind of thing. We have always had pretty much the same mechanism whereby we want to buy the license for something. But the what has changed with things like the consumer app stores is instead of me taking physical media and having it come through the post or a person delivering it and shoving it into a machine I am now downloading it. This is possible because networks have got quick enough and useful enough as a delivery method but fundamentally we still have the enterprise level, and we still have a model whereby we are going out and licensing it in pretty much the same model as we have for the last 10-15 years. Now though you have got more of a subscription type model but fundamentally we have improved the delivery of the media and this is the pivot point in all of this in terms of how our consumer app store is starting to tip over into the enterprise and all that entails.

It appears to be a case of people wanting the same experience within the purchase of enterprise app’s as they currently have within the consumer market then?

Ten or twenty years ago your enterprise experience, your company experience, your corporate experience led your home experience you would go into the office to upload the video or download the video or do whatever you wanted to do. However, these days it is probably the inverse, people stay at home and feel they have got a far better experience and more agility in how they use their IT environment at home than they would have in the office. There are a ton of reasons behind that security and IT practice being one but fundamentally I think the biggest difference is really the difference between the thing you are downloading it onto and I think that is where the challenge is really for the enterprise app store.

How have the developments in cloud services affected this process?

The rise in cloud if you want to give it that name really means for many people that they can get access to those services which in traditional times would buying a server that you would rack, connect and patch it through to your corporate network for access. It created a model where if people have those kinds of platforms they have far more agility because they can get them as and when they need it. You are getting closer to this environment.  If you take this ultimate consumer environment you are out and about and trying to find something and you realize that there is an app that does that thing for you, you can download it and you can use it instantaneously. The enterprise is never going to quite do that immediately because typically you are downloading it, using it and then if you like it only then releasing it to a community. One of the key developments we have seen and one of the big shifts in the way people buy from us is that one of the challenges for the enterprise is that unlike the consumer who has an iPhone or an Android phone or a Windows desktop or an Apple operating system, i.e. 4 or 5 tightly controlled platforms, the enterprise is a far more complex beast. It may have grown organically; it may have grown through acquisition so you have got different bits of infrastructure in different places and not always on the right place. So, one of the things we have seen a lot people doing is using the cloud and we checked network communication and computing as really a way of homogenizing their infrastructure. That gives you a much more level playing field in terms of how your corporate infrastructure can run and therefore it means that the enterprise app store actually starts to make a lot more sense if you have got a consistent layer of infrastructure.

We had a customer the other day who is a VPN customer of ours who needed a firewall, he went onto our cloud store and had a quick look and decided it kind of made sense had a quick live text chat with one of our engineers and then bought it. That was it. In the traditional world that transaction would have been a 2 to 4 week type engagement. You are getting a far more immediate type of interaction but a key part of that is is people are able to standardize their infrastructure.

Has this enabled software vendors to pass on a cost saving to their customers as well?

That is one of the most fascinating things and we see first hand what people are willing to pay for. Most people will be aware that one of things we see with cloud infrastructure / software defined networks is that it kind of breaks apart the components of software technology.

For example, that firewall you used to buy as a box is really a Linux box running some software. Now you strip off the software you can see in the naked daylight the value of that software. On the cloud store we advertise the price that the consumer tells us that they think is the right one which is great. It is interesting to watch what people will pay for and what they won’t pay for and in what they see value and what they won’t see value in. I think the next 2 years are going to be really interesting because if you like for every type of software we have on the cloud store we will have the nearest open source equivalent. The key thing you have right now is that you have far more transparency about it especially at the appliance level. The cost of the software was hidden in the cost of the hardware in the appliance level and if you separate the two out as you do now you will say that the Firewall was for instance, 160 Euros a month and be able to question whether that is good value and the answer is – it depends on the user.

Is there a security risk here in that the way that the software is delivered is opening up an opportunity for malware planters to access a much larger number of organisations than they could have ever have dreamt of with traditional software delivery?

I think the thing about security in the cloud is sort as the same as it ever was really. If you look at how for example we have built our cloud infrastructure we have tied it into the NTLS infrastructure so we use network separation to isolate instances so those instances are matched from the hypervisors through the VLAN and beyond so it is exactly the same security and separation mechanisms you will use in your own private cloud environment. Fundamentally people talk about the cloud at a computing level but you have got to bear in mind that everybody is connecting to a network and all networks (99% of them) for most people will be shared in some way or multitalented to give it the more correct term. I think the normal considerations have to be taken into account just because it has got cloud in front of it does not mean you shouldn’t ask where is my data. Is all the software that sits on your cloud store has it been certified has it been checked do you know where it has come from, this kind of thing. I think that for us we have seen for security that most of the security concerns are answered in exactly the same way as you would answer any question and I think that should be the rule that anyone should apply, the key thing here is if you ask a question like that and you give an answer which I was once given when someone asked where the data was then I would start to worry because if it is in the cloud you want a street address. It is in a data centre somewhere and it is extracted and it is the level of control that you give the user in these sorts of things that is important so whatever the brand whatever the label just apply the same security rigor that you would with any service and you will probably get the right answer.

Have you had to challenge perceptions around the idea that some IT managers may hold that a program on a disk is fundamentally safer than something downloaded from a website or cloud server?

I would have thought (and you can’t speak for all IT managers) that most of them would have been comfortable with receiving patches and updates from software vendors via networks which has been the case for a number of years now. I remember when I had a company and we were working with Microsoft a lot and we would get our update pack through the post in the early to mid 90’s. It was big, there were a lot of CD’s there and most people should be comfortable with receiving software off the likes of Microsoft via Microsoft.com for instance. You can’t be completely paranoid but by the same token you should just be sensible. If you trust the brand you are getting it from, be it a brand you know or someone who has got a track record of customers that look like you and smell like you then that is a big part of it. Is it a website you have never been to before? Does it share a generic name or sounds like something slightly knocked up? Then I would probably doubt it myself too. Again it comes back to apply a sort of common sense, if it is a brand you know and trust and also if you can ring someone up and say this didn’t work then you can buy with confidence. That’s another thing, what is your comeback if it doesn’t work and what is your comeback if things don’t work out the way you want them to? It is understanding that and it is reading the SLA that will tell you what they are willing to warrant and what they are not willing to warrant.

Does the way that this delivery method allows IT Mangers to pick and choose certain elements of software they want to pay for actually impact in the way that the applications are actually developed?

Yes because I think you still have a fairly strong element of even thought the delivery mechanism is changing quite rapidly the licensing mechanism is still almost the same shrink-wrapped model you used to have, you buy it and you might have a lease model etc. One of the biggest things we saw when we first started the cloud store was how differently people wanted to use this. One of the key things that this environment gives you is the ability to do is just try things and see if they work and if they do then you buy them and I think that is what changes with software is that people are going to be far more agile in the bits they use so instead of having these big long development programs at the end of which you are only going to get some kind of result. Instead, people are releasing little modules as they go through and I think for a lot of people the way they digest software will be more receptive and we have seen the ones that do well are the ones that have the lowest barrier to entry. They will have utility billing module right down to an hour the minimum commitment might only be a month or something and so people are really able to have complete freedom to try something. What that does is it ultimately reduces and eliminates the pre decision type work that people have traditionally had to go through. I think the software licensing will change and on the back of the change you are also going to see a shift in the way software is developed to be more modular in the way it is released.

Andrew Dixon is SVP of Marketing and Operations at Igloo who feature in our company spotlight for this episode of the ITProPortal podcast.  Andrew has a vast amount of experience in the professional IT industry having worked alongside Bill Gates at Microsoft. Here, he talks to us about their current offerings around social, mobile and cloud.

 For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Andrew, start off then by introducing Igloo, who are you, what do you do and where did it all start?

Igloo is what we refer to as a social business software company and essentially we make cloud based intranets that bring modern communication and collaboration tools into the business for the purposes of productivity. The company started in 2009 essentially as a platform that helped to connect together whether it is employees inside organizations or connect organizations to external constituents like customers and partners and so essentially we produce both social intranets and social extranets that are 100% cloud based.

I mentioned that you worked alongside Bill Gates at Microsoft. Tell us about the sort of things you were doing back then and how those insights have helped you at Igloo software?

I had the privilege of working for Microsoft for about 18 years and worked on a number of different businesses many of which helped in how to apply the learning here in my current role. One of the places that I worked was heading up office PR so I spent a lot of time working on the problems that knowledge workers face in communicating and collaborating together and how we can make a better office product for them. In addition I had the good fortune of working with Bill Gates and other senior leaders at Microsoft working on the tablet PC that was really the pre-curser to the iPad back in 2000/2001. What that taught me was a lot about how knowledge workers interact on mobile devices and how that is different from lets say a desktop and the types of things you could do on a different size screen and portrait mode. It really educated me a lot on mobile and how you can build great applications for the purposes of mobile. Then of course I worked on the Windows products as well and ran a lot of the Windows campaigns and was able to look at the operating system aspects. All of these things helped me to be able to inform now what we do with social business software, which is essentially the next generation of productivity tools that take the form of intranets inside companies.

Social, mobile and cloud are of course areas that all IT departments are looking to integrate but tell us what you think organisations should consider when they look for providers of these solutions?

What is interesting is I have been in the industry now for almost 25 years and I have witnessed a lot of technology and milestones from mainframes to client servers onto virtualization and that sort of thing but really it is social, mobile and cloud that are really the largest technology trends that I have seen to-date. They are compelling trends in their own right but they are converging together to drive social adoption within organizations.

If we start with social I think it was Mackenzie that found in a recent survey that something like 72% of organisations surveyed had already adopted a social technology of some type so it is clearly in main stream adoption right now within most corporations.

On the mobile side of things Gartner has assessed that by the end of this year, your cellphone is going to outpace your laptop as the most popular device to access the internet and so clearly mobile is having a profound effect on our working and personal lives.

Then on cloud it was also Gartner that assessed that by the end of this year only one-fifth or 20% of organisations will have no IT assets whatsoever so they are going to turn 100% of their IT requirements to the cloud. When you bring all three of those trends together those things are what is really driving this very aggressive adoption of social technology.

These services really have changed the habits of employees and the way people work haven’t they?

There is no doubt that that is the case and it is more a case I would say that it is people now working the way they want to work versus the way they have been asked or in some cases forced to work based on the tools that they have been given.

If you think back to the tools that a knowledge worker used to be productive and how that has changed in the last 20 years, we have given you a word processor, we have given you a cellphone, we have may be given you a spreadsheet or presentation programme and email but not much has really changed. What happened is in the consumer world there started to be this emergence of tools that were far more lightweight and easy to use and self-service. We all know Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and these are all tools that end users were able to configure and get up and running to work on their own. It allowed them unprecedented levels of networking with their peers, with their friends and with their family. So they came into the workplace expecting the same self-service lightweight tools and they didn’t get them. So the consumer market is really where these business social software trends and tools came from because this is how end users really want to work.

So talk us through some of your offerings and how you have managed to bring social, mobile and cloud all into one package?

You can think about Igloo as the new generation of intranet. It is not the intranet that you are used to. The intranet that you are used to, if you have one is a one way read only information repository where you go to find information out or documents and it is generally outdated and stale and it is certainly not the place that you go to collaborate. It hasn’t been the place you go to get instant updates on what is going on in your organization either. So the category of social business software that Igloo provides is a modern intranet that pulls together modern communication and collaboration tools that do those things for you.

I will describe some of those. You are probably familiar with Wikis which is essentially a new type of document, a forum for asking questions and micro blogging for sharing a thought very quickly. Also, activity feeds which automatically tell you what is going on in your company by giving you a list of new documents for example that have been uploaded or comments that have been made. The ability to follow content so if I follow a piece of content I am interested in, each time somebody updates it I am automatically notified so I can go and see what has changed. The list goes on to include rating where I can rate content and then later on I can assess what is the content that has been the most popular and the most consumed and try to seek out who the authors are of that content.

All of these tools now have come together in one modern intranet service that is 100% cloud. In other words there is no installation, no maintenance and no patching you just turn it on and allow people to communicate and collaborate on documents and produce finished products and content as a result of that collaboration.

An interesting feature is the ability you have built in to track the engagement of users, why was this important to integrate into your offerings?

The justification for deploying a new social strategy, whether it is Igloo or anybody else needs to have some kind of ROI associated with it. You can’t just say people are going to be more productive because they are working more along the ways they want to work to justify this new investment, you need a way of being able to measure that. You need to be able to look at what type of interaction people are having with each other and what content and that assessment is what I am seeing along the lines of the improvements I am looking to drive within my company. So we have contracted with Microstrategy who are a leading analytics provider in the BI space who have made possible for the very first time the ability to actually measure peoples interaction with each other and content as an indicator of their success. For example, for lets say you have two teams one east coast sales team and one west coast sales teams. We know that the east coast sales teams are selling better than the west coast we just don’t know why. They are getting the same type of leads they have the same type of skills, now we can delve into what it is that the west coast team doing differently, are they following content more often than the east coast team are they micro blogging and communicating more often, are they maybe following content from other departments like the product group so they can see what products are coming down the pipe and are able to convey that to their prospects?

These types of insights are going to be very powerful to help reinforce those types of behavior across the company.

Where do you see the developments in this space going next? What do you see the future holding?

The world is moving more and more towards self-service and it started in the consumer space. That expectation has been brought into the business and it is to the benefit of the business user and IT departments if implemented correctly. In the case of BYOA and BYOD, (‘Bring Your Own App,’ and Bring Your Own Device’) I would say that the pendulum has maybe swung too far in that direction to the point that it is the end user who is now starting to dictate what comes into the company. All this has started to put pressure on IT departments to really regain some level of control and process and how all these things work together.

So, while it was an important milestone to start having these end user driven applications come into the company I think you are going to see the pendulum start to swing back into more of a balanced place where IT is the provider and the entity that puts process around the applications even though these applications are self supporting. You are going to see IT departments becoming more of an ad market place where the apps are sanctioned and applications that any user can use and the user goes in self provisions and uses those and configures those themselves.

In terms of security do you see enterprise class app stores being the answer to managing the distribution of these services?

It really is. I refer to some of the Dropbox type of cloud transfer utilities as ‘consumer cloud’ and they are very popular because they do a good job of transferring files but they are not necessarily secure. What enterprise needs to see is a secure solution that integrates with what they have already got, be it an active directory or a single sign-on that meets all of their security requirements. Having enterprise class of cloud provider is critical versus a consumer class because that just doesn’t scale over time and so you will absolutely see that balance of end user friendly tools but with enterprise class security.

BYOD, or bring your own device is a constantly growing talking point here on IT Pro Portal and in this podcast John Engates from Rackspace joins me to discuss new industry research they have released in partnership with Manchester Business School into trends and growth of BYOD across the industry.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

John starts with explaining how this research came about.

We have been doing surveys out to prospects and customers and people in the industry around BYOD. This is not just a Rackspace customer survey but covers the broader industry and we wanted to gauge how people are adopting these various technologies and the trends that are behind them. We started with cloud computing and we have moved on most recently to mobile, Bring Your Own Device and the trends towards application delivery on a mobile device within the context of IT. It seems that the trend is really picking up in that direction. One of things that we picked up on was the trend towards more and more business applications within the enterprise being delivered primarily on a mobile platform. I think in the past we used to look at maybe a desktop client and then we moved on to the web browser and I think the trend is in the direction of many applications being delivered as a primary mechanism on the mobile device and whether that is a tablet or Smartphone or some other device.

As we look forward the real trend is that people want that same experience that they get in their consumer lives whether it is a social networking app or one of their other favorite applications, they want that same experience delivered from the IT department with their business applications. That came through loud and clear in the survey.

Were there any real surprises within the survey’s anything that you didn’t expect to find?

We are a company that is always looking ahead in terms of cloud computing and adoption of these technologies so I don’t think there were huge surprises. I think there was more a validation for us. I think the surprises were in just how far people are taking this, the numbers were higher than we expected in terms of adoption. There were some numbers in the 80% range where I figured that people would be 50:50 in terms of how they were adopting mobile devices. Some of the questions we asked led me to believe that this was just an unstoppable trend in terms of the adoption of mobile in the workplace for real business applications, I think that was quite a surprise to me.

You mentioned that employees expect now to have access to applications within the workspace in the same way that they do out in the consumer world. What challenges is this presenting to IT departments?

I think what IT departments need to understand is the kind of tools and techniques and the technology that the big consumer web properties are using. That is part of our interest in this; to understand how fast this adoption cycle is going to happen and therefore how that impacts the tools and the technology that we are going to deliver. Cloud computing is a great enabler for mobile and mobile is a great driver in demand for cloud computing. I think they are like two sides of the same coin so from my perspective the message to IT is that you need to start taking these next generation tools very seriously. You cannot build a great mobile experience with last generation technology and last generation architectures so you need to be looking forward at what the big web properties are doing. What is Google doing to deliver their experience on the Android? What is Apple doing to deliver their mobile experiences? How can you take advantage of that as an IT leader or business leader and how can you tap into the same technologies set and make that a part of your application portfolio underpinning. That is really what we are driving towards as a company here at Rackspace with all the cloud computing offerings that we have we are trying to give IT the same technology foundations as the big guys have.

What are employees hoping to get out of mobile working or BYOD?

I think from an employee’s standpoint it is very much like the consumer standpoint they want convenience, they want access anywhere all the time they want a lightweight experience where they can get into their application very quickly and not feel like they have to open the laptop and find the Wi-Fi and log into the VPN and do all the things we are used to doing in a laptop or notebook experience. They want it at their fingertips, instant and reliable access. We are an increasingly mobile workforce, much more than in the past. We want to do business from the coffee shop, from the airport and we want to stay in contact with the rest of our workforce everywhere. We basically want the same kinds of experiences that we have come to expect at home. BYOD is the idea that a worker can bring the kind of tools, tablet or Smartphone they want to use into the workplace and not everybody necessarily is going to allow unlimited choice but we should have a great experience for the employee so they are not frustrated with his interactions with the tools and the apps that they are going to have to use in the workplace.

Did your research identify a rise in corporate app stores?

That was another thing that came up in the survey actually the idea that we were as employers or as businesses going to have our own app store. I can’t remember the number off the top of my head but again that was one of the ones that stood out to me that there was a large degree of interest in a corporate app store where employees had their approved applications and their native workplace applications and the ability to mix and match those depending upon their job role or needs within the organization. But yes, that was another idea that came up and I didn’t realise it was going to be as interesting to people as it was. They want the same experience as iTunes or the Android store but within the workforce.

What are the attitudes and concerns around security with BYOD?

I think everyone thinks of security when they think of adopting a new technology or bringing in a new technology into the workplace. Security should be on the mind of everyone in IT and even the employees themselves should be thinking that way. I don’t think it should be overwhelmingly difficult to start to adopt these new technologies otherwise we are stifling innovation. If you put security in this land of unattainability and just assume that we can never do this kind of thing because it is just not possible then I think you really just put people off from really trying to do innovative things. If you think about security in a practical way, the same way we have thought about it for all of computing history, you just tune it for the mobile. There are certain types of applications that are probably going to come sooner or earlier than others but we certainly do not want to turn off the innovation pipeline by saying things like security is a blocker and we cannot get past it.

What is the level of investment put into BYOD and mobile working by businesses out in industry in general?

Certainly mobile permeates the workforce at least at my company and the companies I visit a lot the mobile devices are in the hands of the employees all day long. They are on the move constantly and now I think we are starting to think about what application experiences we need to create so that they are even more effective with those devices. The question is are we going to as IT leaders, truly enable them to be as productive as they could be or are we going to give them the license to use these in a full business context rather than the current situation of a hybrid of personal and business, heavy on the personal and light of the business. I think is how it stands today but I think we could certainly flip that around and at least make it balanced and maybe even flip to the other direction. We need to give them the right tools and the right apps and give them license to use it in the ways they want to. In some ways it’s a matter of time, we need soak in this new technology. It is a little bit like ecommerce was in Europe in the early days, we were reluctant to put our credit card number into a website and that took a while for people to come to realise it was okay and it was going to be safe. We all picked it up as second nature and the mobile experience in the workforce will probably be the same.

It’s interesting to see how new technology is changing the way we work and do business isn’t, looking forward do you think the days of the desktop PC really are over now?

For me personally I believe it is. I think I have a tendency to try out the new stuff and move on very quickly. A true desktop is something I don’t own any more and I have a very small mobile set of tools. I use a thin laptop, tablet and a Smartphone and I tend to go for the smaller devices so I think that we are definitely going in that direction. There may be pockets where a large monitor and a desktop computer make a lot of sense but for the mobile workforce for the people who are consuming a lot of data, the executive staff can do without a true desktop or at least very soon we will be able to. They will always exist but certainly the days are numbered.

The most recent global study from Brocade has found that Data Centre’s are ill equipped to serve demands in the era of Virtualization and Cloud. The study appears to show that almost two thirds of users lack confidence in data centre networks today. Here to tell us more is Brocade’s Simon Pamplin.

 For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Simon first of all let’s start with what you identified that lead to this study initially?

The global study went out to just under 2000 people who were all IT decision makers. What we were looking to find out was whether their network infrastructure was fit for purpose or their businesses future plans. We were obviously looking to see how they were going to grow their networks over the coming few years. The interesting the information that came back really told us that Brocade’s strategy around fabric based technology and the future direction we have with software defined networks is absolutely on the money. Some of the scary statistics that we came back with were that a third of the businesses are experienced multiple network outages these days due to the fact that their infrastructures are not fit for purpose any more in the way they were originally designed for the way the businesses interact today. That is quite a shocking statistic in my perspective anyway.

Tell us about the sheer pace of change that has occurred within virtualisation and cloud and the issues this rate of change has caused?

If you go back a few years, the traditional three tier model service, the client server type interaction of an external application talking to maybe a data base or something in a data centre is what we refer to as north south traffic. The three-tier architecture that pretty much every network supplier has implemented and designed worked perfectly for that. It was a very good robust way of doing things. Unfortunately the way that data centers’ and businesses have changed means that there is far more inter process communication within the Data Centre. So you think about virtual servers to other virtual servers you talk about virtual farms of servers and talk about load balancing cross multiple applications. All that interaction is happening within the data centre so you now need to allow and enable this high performance, low latency conversation to happen within the data centre and the old model unfortunately introduced too many different hops or levels if you like to move from one point to the other. So as the applications and the usage of the applications have changed the design really has not changed with it and as a result we are starting to see it is creaking a bit at the edges. Brocade identified it with the way we treat fabrics and the way we have got on in our storage business for many many years.  You have got to remember Brocade has been in the fabric business since 1995 so we have a very long history and understanding of the benefits of the fabric technology. So when we employed that in the Ethernet world we realized that the whole benefit of the fabric being a very flat high performance layer two type network allowed these communications to happen so much so much sooner. The fabric itself is self-forming, you can plug in a new device and the fabric will have a new life and make it available to the rest of the fabric. It’s deterministic so it knows exactly the best path to go from point A to point B in the fastest way so that if something happens within the fabric like the link gets damaged then it will automatically reroute traffic. So there is no redesign required when the fabric has to flex to the applications needs.

Have data centers’ fallen behind and is cost a factor in any of this?

I wouldn’t necessarily say that they have fallen behind but I would say that business and the way that we use applications and the way that consumers use applications has changed so fast that the traditional ways of building data centers’ has not been able to keep up. I think that is where we are seeing the push around these highly virtualized datacenters and where Brocade’s strategy for the ‘on-demand’ data centre really comes into it’s own. Data centers’ have to be very flexible these days and they have got to be scalable and they have got to have a large amount of automation in them in order to cater for the demands of the customer base.

I would not say they have fallen behind I would say that the customer requirements have changed dramatically and very fast.

What impact are you seeing on businesses from the shortcomings that this study has suggested?

The impact we are seeing is really around the customer experience and customers are demanding very high level of service level agreements with their hosting environments or their internal IT department and what we are starting to see is that if they have very high performance requirements or very high uptime requirements some of this flexibility I just referred to that they don’t yet have is causing them problems in meeting those requirements. In these cases it is costing them money certainly if there is compliance issues meaning downtime is quite a financial hit that they can take in certain situations.

What needs to be applied to data centers’ to solve these problems?

One of the nice things around the whole concept of fabric and virtualization and software defined networks, certainly with fabrics you can bolt them on to an existing network so you can have a planned migration of the network from three tier you can add on a network without having to do a written replace so it is a very low risk way of migrating one environment into another. As you start to move into things like software defined networks Brocade has released the ability to do hybrid ports and what I mean by that is we can have an ISDN enabled flow network port that you can control via software and you can have that living in the same environment as ports that are dedicated to traditional networking infrastructures and ones that are dedicated 100% to software defined networking control under open flow. Brocade has made it simple and have de-risked the move from the traditional network architectures into what we believe is the architecture that data centers’ of the future will require and demand.

The report states here that 91% of organisations have admitted to needing substantial upgrades to cope, that 91% can’t really afford not to can they? 

I think this report is making that a pretty clear statement that the way that applications and customers interact and the customer service level agreements demand they have to change their data centre networks, data centre networks in the past were absolutely suitable for the way that applications were interacting with them. Unfortunately applications be they mobile, be they different types of web interaction have a different set of requirements in the data centre and the traditional three tier model we are starting to see is not necessarily fit for purpose for the way applications are talking to each other and to customers these days. What we are seeing is people moving into fabric technology which has a much simpler method of management of the infrastructure so the costs are running larger and larger enterprises is also reduced when you employ fabric infrastructure.

What would be your advice to IT managers listening to this that know themselves that they need to upgrade as well?

Obviously contact your local Brocade sales rep and have a more in depth discussion around the requirements for their own business but you have got to remember we have deployed well over 1000 of these brand new Brocade customers globally in all sorts of different verticals so we can certainly make their decisions a lot easier with a lot of case studies and reference cases in that are bound to fit into one of those areas so there are plenty of things that we can do upfront to demonstrate the capabilities and the terms and the benefits of fabric technology within their data centre.

Aruba Networks have released some interesting research called 20/20 vision into how the role of the IT professional is evolving. The research which was conducted in partnership with Phillip Brown at Cardiff University details some interesting implications for those with a career in IT. If you are working as an IT Manager in any sized organisation you may have noticed the changes already and Chris Kozup from Aruba Networks is here to discuss their findings from research into just how that evolution is taking place.

 For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Chris introduces us to the research and the reasoning behind it.

Aruba has carried out research in respect of what is happening to the state of IT and specifically to the IT professional. The reason for this is that we see a lot of trends on the market place that are really reshaping the role of IT and so it was our goal to do both qualitative and quantitive research combine those findings together and take a look at essentially what the evolution is of the IT professional based on a lot of key the trends in the market place. Trends like BYOD, cloud and virtualization are all having significant impact on the types of skills that IT professionals need in order to be successful and also where they need to go to get those skills.

What were the knowledge gaps that lead you to conduct this research?

First and foremost obviously we spend a lot of time with the IT professional and I think part of this was trying to understand what the impact of a lot of the technology shifts that are occurring in the market place, things like consumerisation of IT. What the impact of that is on our customers and obviously those enterprises that are yet to be our customers. Some of the key findings included the fact that more and more we are expecting the IT professionals to build on communication skills. The key take away from this report was actually that communication skills will be more important than technical skills to the IT professional by 2020.

Have you found that there is somewhat of a skills shortage within the IT profession at the moment?

There is definitely a shortage in technical skills, but also skills around business interest. Both of these are often hard to come by and if we take a deeper look into each of those, first and foremost we see that technical skills are increasingly becoming more and more specialized. We actually expect that increasingly organizations will have to look outside to find the appropriate technical skills that they need and in fact what our research shows is that 76% of the respondents expect that the number of projects that are outsourced to specialists will increase. So this certainly shows the dynamic where the enterprise IT department is expecting to have more and more of a challenge keeping up with a lot of the deep technical expertise. That now creates an opportunity for many, certainly for partners and for consultants and the like it creates an opportunity for them from enterprises looking to find those pockets of deep expertise.

The other thing that we found here is a need for the ‘communicator’ as we will call them; this individual understands the impact of IT and can transfer that into the language of the business. This role is going to become more and more important to IT in the future. I think the impact on a lot of IT departments is that they have to think about the type of person they are looking to bring into the organization. Often the person who is very technically adept may not necessarily be the right profile of individual that is going to be the most successful in driving the IT department forward in the business. Rather looking for those individuals who have very strong communication skills, very strong writing skills that have the ability to understand different audiences and craft a message based on those audiences. That type of skillset we believe will become more and more critical for IT especially as IT becomes more fundamental to the success of the business.

Well you worked with Cardiff University on creating this report, is this something that they have taken note of for the education of students?

Absolutely and in fact Phillip Brown is the professor of work employment and the labour market at Cardiff University and he gave us a lot of great insight. He played a significant role in crafting the direction of this study and the findings of the report but certainly we see a lot of work going on both from Aruba as well as generally in the IT industry in terms of interfacing with students earlier and getting a lot of curriculum around not only technology but increasingly a lot of the soft skills that are required by a professional as they come out of University. This will ensure they can combine effectively the IT skillset together with a lot of the soft skills that ultimately will help them to be successful in this new environment.

What problems arise from a lack of communication between IT teams and their businesses?

Essentially at macro level the biggest problem is the loss of competitive advantage because quite frankly these days IT is such a critical piece of any business that if you have this disconnect between the IT department and the business itself then the business is not going to be able to optimize to the level that it is required in order to maintain competitive advantage within the market place. This linkage between IT and business is really critical and we believe that it is not so much about the technical attitude of the IT department but more about how that IT department is able to understand the trends in the business and listen to the users in the business and be able to adapt solutions to the requirement of those users and then deploy and maintain that technology for them.

Is it a shift then from the IT department’s stereotypical image of being stuck in a cupboard somewhere to having a more central role in business?

That is absolutely right and this is good news because if you think about the career path for the average IT professional, that old stereotype is not a very glamorous career path in some respects. Whereas today with IT playing such a significant role in the success of the business we in fact see more and more likelihood that even the ranks of the CEO can originate out of the IT discipline. One of the things that came up quite a lot in the focus group that we conducted with all levels of IT professionals was this expectation that we will see an increase of the CIO rank moving into the CEO rank and that is great news in general for the IT professional because it means that ultimately their strategic value to the business is only going to increase from here.

Something that stood out to me was the statement in this report from Aruba that 30% of the workforce will know more about the devices they use for work than the IT department – this may have serious implications for IT departments surely?

I think that the underlying trend that drives that is of course BYOD and in some respects this is an acknowledgement by IT that historically IT was the ‘be all and end all’ of technology. If we had a technical question we knew that we could go to the IT department and most likely find the wisest IT person who had all the answers about technology. These days the reality is that the average new person entering the workforce is going to know more about certainly consumer technology than often the IT individual will. So, this is somewhat of an acknowledgement by IT that the role of technical specialist whilst still important will be affected by the fact that more and more users are becoming tech savvy. That role actually becomes a little less important again hence the shift towards more communication of policies and communication of change. It is a kind of embarrassment from IT that often they will be dealing with the user who knows as much if not more about the solutions that they are using because they have chosen them. In many cases the IT department will know that the skill set change here that is required is understanding how to interface with that new class of user and then understanding how to establish the policies for acceptable use of that new technology.

Does the fact that the devices and technologies in use in organisations now are designed to be so user friendly, so easy to integrate and so robust meant that IT departments are no longer really needed to program things and fix technical issues, really what they focus on is communicating the benefits of these technologies to the rest of the company instead?

You have hit it spot on and I think the other part of that is not just in terms of how to set up or configure devices or applications, which increasingly have become more and more user friendly. We have dramatically changed the interface between the technological guts of the IT system and it’s user to the point where we have abstracted a lot of the complexity around how to use and set up that. The implications of this also in terms of IT departments themselves is that the everyday person does not really need to know how to configure a product because through self help guides and graphical interfaces a lot of these tools have made it easy. Even within Aruba’s own technology we deliver ways in which the IT manager or the network manager can very simply install new products without having to actually touch the product, they can literally ship it to a remote location and ask a non IT skilled person to essentially plug it in to a power point and the product will configure itself.  It is this type of change that means that technical expertise at times is less critical in IT today. Once again we come back to the primary point of being able to communicate to the business and being able to understand the needs of the business being far more important and will become increasingly more so in the future.

We mustn’t forget the people that want to join the IT profession because they don’t want to be making presentations but would rather be fixing problems, building things and dealing with just the technical side of IT. Is there still going to be a place for these people or are they better off finding work with these companies that are supplying technical services as part of the increased outsourcing you mention?

I think ultimately that skill set is still going to be required because I don’t think we ever abstract to the point that we will become dummies so to speak. I think we are always going to have a need for the technical expert. The point that you bring up is though, does their become a shift in where that persons skills are most highly valued? I think the answer is probably ‘yes’ and the good news for those people is that moving into more of an on-demand or product based model actually probably bodes pretty well for the potential for that role to be quite lucrative. I don’t think we are saying that this class of individual who likes to get into the detailed technology, configuration and troubleshooting will go away but it does potentially mean that where those individuals sit in the ecosystem will change. It is also the case that those skills will remain certainly highly valued.

Research conducted by Varonis, has found that half of companies have lost a device with important company data on it, furthermore the report details the obsession as it puts it that the workforce have with remote devices.

Well this obviously raises concerns over the security of business and personal data alike so David Gibson VP of Strategy at Varonis is here to tell us more.

 For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Firstly David, tell us about Varonis and why this study was relevant to you?

Varonis was founded in late 2004 and started operations in early 2005 and our founders were storage experts and came from Network Appliance. We have really helped organizations manage and protect their unstructured information so that’s the information that lives on file shares or in their intranets, or their email. Our goal is to make sure that only the right people have access to the right data at all times and that all use is monitored and that all abuse is flagged and that people are able to access that data from the right devices and that once that data is no longer needed it gets archived or deleted appropriately.

Give us the top headline figures that this report has revealed then?

I think that what we have seen is that the nature of collaboration is changing. First of all digital collaboration is in the mainstream and almost every organization is data driven. If you think of business process today everything from customer relationship management to human resources information everything at some point gets down to some kind of digitised format even your voicemails are now digital. The format of our collaboration of our business is digital and as we can see the ability to access that digital information is paramount. People want access to their email, files and other services from any device from anywhere from wherever they are working and it seems like also for any time of the day even during meals as our research indicated. That is why it is relevant for us because we deal with digital assets and collaboration. We wanted to observe the habits that people are forming and living with these days.

Your report is entitled Bring your Own Demise? Is the problem really that serious?

It really depends on the value of the information that we are talking about. They say that every day a disaster starts with an email these days. If you think about if you have a Smartphone, do you access your emails from your Smartphone?  If you left that device in a pub and you did not have it password protected what would that mean for you personally? Think about it in those basic terms for people that use their mobile devices for work. You have customer lists and potentially your business plans, blueprints, property details. All these are things that you want to access from those devices. Many organisations I am sure are restricting what people can access from which device but from our research you can see that there are quite a few security implications and organisations are definitely feeling the effects of disseminated information that is in a device that is not necessarily locked out.

Were there any surprises in the attitudes of workforces towards security on things like smartphones from the conclusions of you report?

I am not really surprised that not all the devices had protection on them but I think that the message is that we need to start thinking about all the different places that our information lives and how valuable it is. We really need to start to make sure that basic fundamental controls are around the information no matter where it lives.

What sort of encryption, password and other security measures are people using already and are they enough?

If you take a look at some of the research that we have done over the past year or so. There are some basic fundamental controls that are not as widespread as we might think they might be. A lot of organisations, (if you take a look at our state of data protection research) don’t really know, or are not confident that they know where their critical information is stored. It is not just their own information that is stored it is actually information from their business partners, customers and third parties.

Information that they have a responsibility to protect and they don’t know where it is stored. Other controls that are missing include the fact that very few organisations audit all access and they don’t necessarily review who it is that has access regularly. They also don’t know where the information belongs or who it belongs to, so they don’t have an owner assigned to that information. If you want to know where can we augment our controls I think there is going to be the basic controls around this information.

Does the report go as far as to offer some advice for organizations and their mobile device obsessed workforce to limit the potential risk?

At the conclusion I think that the first thing is to understand what is and what is not allowed. There is statistically difference in the companies that have and don’t have a BYOD policy but it is important to start educating your employees about what is allowed to be on those devices and what is not allowed to be on those devices. I think that to start with, employees need help to understand the value of the information that the organization has and what the controls are that they deserve and I think basic controls around your devices and once you make sure that the device doesn’t contain anything it shouldn’t contain then lets add additional controls like password protection, encryption, remote wipe potentially.

Years ago if a member of staff had taken important documents from the  office and spread them out across the table in the local pub it probably would have been frowned upon, but essentially that’s the situation we have with mobile enterprise isn’t it, we are carrying all this sensitive information around with us?

That’s true and I think that there is a fine line between productivity and security. It is very clear that we need to collaborate in order to function. We need as we have said organizations which are data driven now. If you didn’t have access to your email or intranet or your file shares your productivity would plummet and so it is important that we are able to collaborate but we need to collaborate securely. Making sure that we are conscious about the information we are storing and where we are storing it, who has access to it and who is using it and making sure that we have the fundamental controls in place to spot where sensitive data is exposed to risk where people might be abusing their access, or just have too much access. Those are things that we need to make sure that we adopt wherever our critical information is stored.

Do the advantages to business of being able to have their workforce working remotely and on the move still out-weigh the potential risks or is it a risk that’s perhaps simply not worth taking?

I think that that is the choice that every organization is going to need to make and they are going to need to make it with respect to their own digital assets. It may be that some assets really should never be accessible outside of the organization. It may be that some are acceptable but I don’t think there is a blanket statement that you can make about what risks an organization should be willing to accept. I think that each organization is going to have to decide where are their critical assets and where should people be allowed to access those assets. What is acceptable use and how can we control our environment.

Timo Ahomäki is Chief Technical Officer of Technotree, who recently commissioned research into mobile operators and customers worldwide on their views towards loyalty. Timo gives us an overview of the research findings and what they mean for mobile operators.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Timo, firstly tell us what Technotree’s interest was in conducting this research?

Technotree are a company who are very much involved in the business of support systems of the operators and one of our main targets this year and going forward is to look at customer life cycle management so what does it mean to manage really the life cycle, the revenue cycle of the consumer beyond just doing offers beyond doing campaigns and beyond just doing simple customer care. So the approach with this research was really to look at what is it that drives the customer experience and what is it that drives the loyalty of the consumers towards their operators. Then assess how that could be incorporated into our solutions and offerings.

A simple point of view might suggest that loyalty is down purely to cost, is it as simple as that or is it more complex?

I think there is a little bit more to it. Cost is an important factor obviously but I think with most markets globally today moving from a growth of subscriber base to more trying to maintain and them milking more revenue out of that base I think the cost has to be balanced with the opportunities that are out there in the market. These opportunities naturally are very different in different markets because of market maturity and spending levels of the consumers.

Looking at the actual customer behaviour stats that you have identified then, what is the average lifespan of a customer and does it vary across markets?

We found that customers globally view themselves as surprisingly loyal but the funny thing is that we know that in certain countries such as Kenya or Nigeria in Africa journey is a very big problem for the operators. The average lifetime of a customer from a customer prospective seems to be very long. I think that the crux is that there is a perception difference first of all but over all what we have found is that if we take the point of view that if a loyal customer stays with the operator for more than 2 years (renewing their contract at least once) we can see that a significant amount of customers globally actually exceed that.

Were there any surprises that you weren’t expecting to find as part of this research?

One of the surprising aspects we found in this research was that the perception between how the consumers themselves viewed their loyalty and what the reality or what the operators viewed is slightly different. Consumers view themselves as more loyal than they actually are. There could be many factors behind this one could be that in many countries consumers hold the same cards as some multiple operators so they are actually loyal to more than one operator. The other interesting angle we found was that gadgets do actually play a big role. For example consumers are actually looking forward to upgrading their devices and receiving an upgrade device offer from their operators, whereas the operators themselves may be do not view the device upgrade as such an important factor in loyalty.

Why should, from an operators point is customer loyalty important and are there any benefits to the customers in remaining loyal? 

Loyalty is a very complicated thing because there is reality and there is perception.  I think from an operators view the traditional way to look at loyalty is to I guess to avoid customer acquisition cost , or one of the reasons to look at loyalty is to avoid acquiring those customers over and over again and that is a cost factor. The other factor is that we can clearly see that customers who stay with their operator for longer tend to spend more money with those operators so they acquire a portfolio of services that produces more and more money for the operator. From an operators point of view naturally it makes a lot of sense to invest in customer loyalty and keeping those customers. From a customer’s point of view I don’t know what the real need to stay loyal would be beyond familiarity and beyond getting a broader set of services a broader bundle of services from  a single source.

What would you suggest that the mobile operator industry as a whole learn from your findings?

One of the key findings that would be useful for the industry as a whole would be to look a little bit beyond the traditional view to loyalty so to look into not just the set of services to look at, not just the pricing and competitiveness of the pricing but also the usage pattern or the pattern that the consumers behave in when they change. Like the device upgrades that consumers viewed as highly desirable would that be something that the industry could look at and see if we can use that proactively to drive loyalty instead of may be adding more services, adding more to the portfolio which were not always necessarily that well perceived by the consumers.

So it’s a case of flexibility rather than adding more and more products to keep consumers engaged with operators then?

Flexibility is very important and I guess offering products and services and just adding more stuff into an already big portfolio will not necessarily bring in the results but it would be better to try and make it cleverer and package the value in a way that the consumer can immediately see as beneficial for them.

What has Technotree been doing to support service providers in light of this research?

We are currently rolling out a set of products to our customer base that enables them to more intelligently target offerings for example. Use the information they have from their customers to find combinations of products that would be compelling to their customers not only from the point of view of loyalty but also from the point of view of finding up sell opportunities that are not intrusive from the consumer point of view. This research basically supports our thinking on how service bundles work in the market across the different geography’s and across the different types of operators.

Alan Bentley is SVP Worldwide at security company Lumension. He talks to us about their new Endpoint Management and Security Suite built to tackle malware like 'Reflective Memory Injections' in particular and address issues around cross-platform encryption.

 For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Alan, firstly a quick trawl through your website will reveal advice around ‘Reflective Memory Injections’ – cited as one of the most serious malware threats affecting businesses today. Explain what these are and what they do?

It is quite technical so unfortunately a bit of technical depth is required to fully understand what reflective memory injections are. They come from buffer overflows and remote dealer reflections around buffer overflow which a lot of people will have heard of. What that basically means is that any application that is effectively loading has allocatable memory and it has hooks into the operating system to make that application have allocatable memory and strings to make it work. What a memory injection does is, exploits a vulnerability in the application that can be exploited by a hacker to make the memory overflow so memory is allocated to make the application work correctly, a buffer overflow effectively moves the memory into a different memory space where the hacker will have some kind of shell code to inject something into the application to make it do something it wasn’t expecting to happen. The shell code itself is normally relatively small but certainly can do denial service or distributed denial services and also then make calls for the application to go and find other pieces of malware codes to inject into it. That is not new it has been around for  a while but buffer overflows are always listed as critical vulnerability because of their nature and they are very invasive and hackers can then write things to disc and then pick up other bits and pieces in terms of trying to get local privileges etc etc.  Traditional technology like antivirus and application control white listing are really looking at hashed executables to ensure that only the right DLL’s etc are using the right calls to the operating system to make it work. With reflective memory injection the real clever thing about reflective memory injection is that it doesn’t use any local OS load functions. What that means is that ultimately your traditional security technology is looking for any changes in patterns within the local OS or what is written to the disc so reflective memory injection is basically creating a malicious DLL in memory without relying on any local OS load functions. It is really difficult to even know it is happening let alone stop it unless you have very good clear forensic process and analysis on a particular machine to look for anomalies in the way that executable libraries are occurring. But the reality is that it is almost impossible to do across multiple machines so you have to have a particular technology that can look for that particular type of attack.  The reality of the way we operate in the world now is that, as we have to move into identifying advanced persistent threats and sophisticated forms of attack buffer overflow or memory injections. These are the types of vectors that criminals or organised people in the hacking environment use to be able to gain access to a machine. They look for vulnerability in the application itself and they then try and execute a memory injection within the application. They now know that reflective memory injection is a very difficult thing to protect against so the sophistication is there for them to be a be really able to move into using these types of attacks against people.

What sorts of organisations do these types of threats affect the worst, already we know governments and banks are particularly vulnerable don’t we?

Absolutely, especially the types of attacks that are occurring against critical infrastructure like governments and banks. We have seen the US banks being under constant attack over the last 12 months, it is almost like a cyber war against those. The UK government is seeing thousands of attacks hourly. There is nation against nation stuff going on but there is also a lot of cyber terrorism hacking and anonymous political people with statements to make, so we are all having to think about the way we protect ourselves these days as the world that we operate in has changed completely. I would like to say that it is not just government and banks and the nature of types of attacks we are trying to protect ourselves against. In today’s modern environment are much more obvious than they have ever been, what I mean by that is that the name of the game is to get in get what you want and get out before anybody realises that it has happened and therefore certainly something like reflective memory injection is totally in a stealth mode in terms of wanting to do something for anybody who picks it up. That is why you would use a reflective memory injection because you know that the majority of people are not even going to know that you have gone before anybody realises that it has happened. That is a threat for all organisations not just for government and banks I would say.

Behind every attack is a human being with criminal intent isn’t there and we perhaps might not appreciate how dangerous these kinds of cyber attacks are around the world from those that wish to do nations harm?

I agree with it and I think we are seeing a lot more of it in the mainstream press. Certainly China were slated as being the people that were attacking Google and we are definitely starting to see a little bit more understanding that cyber warfare is without doubt the pre-cursor for any type of warfare. We have seen with other examples the Iranian chemical plants how it was never said who actually did it but it was certainly a nation against nation in terms of injection code that somebody had a remote capability to control their nuclear plant and effectively slowed it down by six months. I think we would be naive to think that there wasn’t already some kind of espionage cyber capability in North Korea; I wouldn’t say it definitely is but I would be surprised if it wasn’t. Nations against Nations have been conducting espionage way before computers were invented but I ultimately all of our critical infrastructure and all of our individual work is done operationally from an infrastructure point of view that is totally reliant on computers.  All the stuff we are doing right now without computers we wouldn’t be doing this podcast.

And as threats go it’s probably the cheapest and most covert there is?

To a certain extent I would agree with you. The other side that has been going on for years and years and I think governments have a pretty good handle on Nation against Nation because they are all doing it against each other and ultimately there are kind of rules of engagement and one should not cross the boundary unless or is a diplomatic incident. I think the real challenge is around organisations that have intent but not necessarily the monetary backing and then there is also cyber criminality which is a huge business. Cyber criminality makes more money than drugs and the drug problem worldwide is huge. This is also for hire and you can buy programmes that will bring your competitors website for 50 bucks an hour. These are all over the Internet and you can buy these malwares as a service. It is already out there and you get it and purchase it and put it against somebody you have a grudge against or a company that you want to put out of business and it is 99% anonymous.

As part of the industry working to guard organisations against attacks like these, tell us the measures and technologies that you are developing to address issues especially around Endpoint Management?

Looking at security as whole I would say that there is not one technology that can do everything you need. There is no silver bullet unfortunately or fortunately whichever way you would like to look at it. We focus on one particular area of security which is Endpoint management and managing the Endpoint in terms of being proactive about controlling access and whether or not there are vulnerabilities within applications that you are running and whether those applications are authorised to run.  We have been in that business for a pretty long time and as I said at the beginning, the key thing with buffer overflows is that 99% of the time, they are exploiting a known vulnerability within the application itself. Patch management has been around since the beginning of time but it is still an absolute critical security posture to take care of because if you mitigate known vulnerabilities, you are doing a very good job of protecting yourself. We do patch management and security control and device control and antivirus all on the same platform. The application control is where the reflective memory injection comes into play because with our application control we are putting a trust mechanism into applications that allow to execute within your environment within a business environment so you are effectively white listing applications saying I trusted this application, I have hash coded every line of code within it so it can only execute that which I have approved to use and there are a  lot of organisations around the world that are starting to recognise that defence in depth strategy is better than just relying on one or two technologies and application control is being seen as a very important component of the first line of defence against malware because there is so much of it, there are so many people developing it and just trying to keep up with signatures is becoming incredibly difficult. So with our application control a reflective memory is all part of that application control module because with application module control we are looking at local OS load functions, we are looking at the DLLs that allow to execute. We are basically looking at all of that to the files that save to disc and if you are injecting malware into memory on an application that is authorised to run so that is another component so we have built that reflective memory injection into at that high level of security to cover people that are trying to just do memory injections which without technology to help you do that it would be a very very manual process to try and check all of your machines for reflective memory injections.

Also I notice you have been working quite extensively on covering mobile devices, tell us about your work there?

Yes we have. We have a broad spectrum of customers around the world and although we are a US based company we are very global we have offices Galway, Luxemburg, UK. A lot of our customers because we are talking about security around the Endpoint a lot of our customers have said to us mobility is the thing they are having to deal with BYD people’s expectations to be able to use different mobile devices and tablets and bring those to work.  It is almost like that is the business driver has come before the security conversation. The reality of your tablet, your phone, you’re smart phones etc they are just an extension, just another Endpoint so it made absolute sense to us to move into that market place.  We give our customers an enforcement, visibility and protection so without visibility you can’t understand what the risk is associated to the business and you can say to people yes, you can bring what you like but unless you know what they are bringing and what they are connecting to in your corporate environments you have no concept of the risk associated with that so you can actually see what is happening so bringing visibility on a corporate level and giving you the ability to enforce policy whether it is a corporate owned device or whether it is owned by the user themselves because obviously there will be different types of policies based on whether it is owned by the employee or the corporation. Then the ability to protect yourselves from loss of data, theft, IP and certainly customer data which is important to a lot of organisations that are governed by compliance.

The rapid adoption of Enterprise Mobility has caused some real challenges for the security industry hasn’t it?

I think it the security organisations around the world are probably screaming no it is not an after though but the employees and the board members are saying yes I want my ipad, I want to be able to use this Smartphone etcso for the security industry certainly within the organisations are playing catch up to try and figure out how they can best protect their corporate environment but that is ultimately the name of the game when it comes to security when you are talking about business as a whole it is a complete risk management environment.  I have to have the best for my business and make the maximum efficiency and effectiveness and I have to match that against the risk associated with doing it. The most secure environments are the ones where you are not allowed to do anything but obviously if you can’t do anything you would not be in business very long. That is the whole crux of the problem for security mangers around the world today it is trying to balance the requirements if the business which smart phones, tablets ipads are an absolute requirement and they are only going to get more and more. You only have to look at the Intel report that came out showing the massive decline in PC sales and an organisation that size and the big increase of sales of tablets and most people today are not going out and buying a big old chunky laptop let alone a box that sits under their desk at home they can get everything they need by using ipads and tablets and smart phones.

Office environments are not straightforward are they in terms of platforms and just like ourselves here at ITProPortal many offices have bother Mac and Windows systems running and you have managed to design a system that encrypts across these different platforms and languages haven’t you?

We work on the Linux, Linux Mac on the patch management side of life so we give our customers the ability to patch across platforms and also what we have released through 7.3 is the ability to decrypt on a Mac from an encrypted device that has been corporately encrypted on your machine at work that may be a Windows device so  have got read write decrypt on a Mac using our inbuilt what we call S Valbro which is an inbuilt encrypted capability in the device itself so we have added that because you are absolutely right as we don’t just want to decrypt the USB onto a Windows and I want to go home and I have got a Mac book at home and I want to work on my work when I am at home so I want to decrypt it and then encrypt it back on a stick  when I get back to work.

Alan looking into the future and the developing patterns of threats, what do you see as the security issues that will be concerning us in the next couple of years?

I think it is more of the same right now I see in the terms of the nature of attacks that we have to defend ourselves from external and let us not forget the internal as well engineering issues as well. I think organisations really have to get more proactive about how they manage their environments from a people process and technology point of view. It is going to be more of the same and it is going to be a continuous battle and the goal posts will continue to move and so if we look at the way we are trying to defend ourselves in a reactive way we will never get ahead of the game. For me certainly the mobility side will certainly increase so we will have to manage people’s capabilities from a mobility point of view, but we need to be putting ourselves in a trust mechanism rather than a threat mechanism because if we just try and guess what the nex6t threat is going to be by the time we have guessed what it is it is already executed. For me it is about making sure we understand what the risk is to our businesses and we put ourselves at a point of educating our people in terms of how they should behave when accessing the internet or using corporate defined machines as well as their own and making sure that we have got technology that can support those policies.  I think from an external hacking perspective, they will continue to utilise technologies that work until organisations get a better handle on protecting themselves from those techniques and then we will start to see some changes in the way those techniques are used.  Right now a lot of the techniques are still working as they were working 2 or 3 years ago.

Atos recently launched their study entitled “Ascent Journey 2016: Enterprise without boundaries. It’s a unique report written by Atos’ Scientific Community – a grouping of 90 of the companies leading experts. It presents their predictions and vision for technology that will influence business through to 2016 and beyond. One of the major debates this report challenges is the idea around whether a Cashless Society is just around the corner.

Here to discuss this is Guy Lidbetter, CTO of Atos Global Managed Services.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Firstly Guy, give us an outline of how this study came about?

With Ascent to Journey 2016, we looked at and identified 4 global trends that we believe will have an impact on society. Also we looked at trends within the way IT is delivered and consumed by enterprises and by consumers alike. We addressed four trends around business and technical challenges.

There were demographics around the shift in which people are interacting with each other and the influence they are having on a much wider basis than ever before. This is through the connectivity of social networking etc.

Closely aligned to that is trust, because the more people are engaging and the more activity that is going on in a digitally connected world then the greater the amount of thought needs to be given to trust and the associated topics of privacy and security.

We have looked at economic sustainability, which really brings sustainability into the commercial area in saying that sustainability in itself is important but we believe that it has to be viable.

Finally if you bundle all those together we see a growing influence of what we call globalisation, so all this stuff is happening now on a macro level rather than maybe the local level that it started at. So, if you take the 4 drivers, demographic, trust, sustainability and globalisation within that one of our topics of research (and we have 13 different tracks that address different elements of that model) was cashless society.  

In particular cashless society that is driven by mobile payments and the emergence we believe, in different markets of different demographics of people that we believe will feel far more natural in utilising the technology to do things that have historically been based on more traditional methods of payment like cash, cheque and credit card etc.

Also what we will see in an emerging economy where there is maybe less of a cultural adherence to a particular payment method. I believe, and I count myself in this, that we quite like having the pound and we still quite like having the use of cash and the adoption of mobile payments and NFC near field type payments has not been as fast as it might be. We believe the adoption will be faster in emerging economies where they don’t have those cultural barriers.

What are the main areas of technology that will be driving this move to a cashless society, you mentioned NFC payments which most of us are familiar with now but what else might push the change?

NFC near field communications, where you can just brush your card against a payment machine for a micro payment of perhaps £10 or less is one area because what you are doing obviously is improving the speed of the transaction. We have moved to chip and pin, which is quicker than signature, but you still need to do the pin. Whereas if you can get it to more of a swipe and go type behaviour then you are creating the user experience that can or might encourage adoption.

My observation is that I have seen terminals in shops and I have even tried to use them and it still doesn’t come naturally both to the people to pay using that method and to the people in the shops that are actually offering that payment, you know  “Oh well it doesn’t work I don’t know why that is, just use your card in the normal way.”

We saw those sorts of solutions come in a number of years ago so it shows that it can take a slow burn time before it becomes acceptable and natural as a standard way of payment.

The other one is really around mobile. Mobile can mean a mobile phone but an example I use here is almost like mobile payments by stealth. I don’t say that in a nasty way to pull the wool over people’s eyes, but it is because people are using mobile in a natural way to acquire a service.

An example we use is the Kindle, where people have associated their payment details to their accounts and quite naturally download books it pay for them by hitting the button, go, done. That has created a much more fluid means by which that payment can take place when you compare it with maybe 20 years ago, go to book shop, buy book, write cheque etc etc.

How about the importance of the emerging Asian markets, how is the growth in these areas affecting this argument?

We observed that you will have less ties to traditional payment methods and also Asia is known to be a very early adopter of new technology. Put those together and we see that the use of mobile and cashless are being easier to deploy into those markets. You also have emerging economy’s which traditionally have not had heavy infrastructure already deployed and in place. If cashless becomes the only method of payment that they have then obviously they are going to use it more naturally.

There is an element here of human nature at play surely. We do like to have something tangible, in our hand to exchange for something else don’t we?

I think in terms of the way that we have presented it we have shown the demographic trends between a more reticent western culture and those digital natives coming through and adopting the cashless sort of payment method more naturally. These digital natives, once called the Generation Y are becoming the new generation of the workforce in companies that we all work with. They are far more in tune to social networking, to the ways in which they interact, they are less interested in email and more interested in social interaction with each other on the web etc. We feel this generation will be far more in tune to making these sorts of payments in the future.

What are the benefits to the economy of a cashless society? For example, I’m thinking about the situation we have had this year in Cyprus and earlier Greece. Both of those are very cash driven societies – could a cashless society have eased these situations?

Thinking about the Cyprus situation, which is obviously a terrible situation for people to be in if you put your money in what is supposedly a safe place you end up in various discussions. I think these are not new discussions they have gone round many times, cash under the bed is worth more value to you than putting it in the bank.  I can’t speak directly as being an expert on the particular specifics of the Cyprus situation but obviously we read the papers and look at the news.  Benefits I believe are that it just makes the whole economic process simpler and easier and it should be possible to keep more on top of what you are spending, where you are spending, how you are spending. There are benefits to governments in terms of may be taxation and there must be a basic cost of maintaining a cash based infrastructure.  The whole infrastructure of printing, distributing, collecting and destroying money represents a material cost. Also, consider the fraud and thefts that can take place with physical money.

Looking at that situation from a consumers point of view, if you have a situation like we had in Cyprus and you’re living in a cashless society – you can’t very well run down the cashpoint and pull out all of your money to save yourself can you?

You can’t but I think you make the point that even though we are cash based society I don’t think many of us walk around with more than a fraction of that cash actually in our pocket and it is still electronically held in the bank until we release it. So I don’t see how that changes. In the cashless Cyprus situation instead of not being able to go to the cash machine they just wouldn’t be able to make any on-line payments but what is really different is that the bank still will not let it go for whatever reason.

Well it’s a fascinating subject and it is interesting to imagine a culture using money through technology in different ways. What sort of timescales is your report putting on the cashless society?

I think in terms of us talking in the emerging economies I can foresee that happening in a generation window. Are you going to come back to me in 2060 and check whether I was right, I guess not probably but I can see it happening and may be even quicker, you know sometimes these things can just take off and we have seen that in various quote on quote on technology based revolutions n the last 20 years.  Twenty years ago there was not internet, no email, no social networking, look where we are today. Things can move very quickly when you get a momentum behind them.

On this podcast we have another company spotlight for you on Testplant who specialise in test automation tools. Anthony Edwards, CTO of Testplant talks us through their products including the new ‘Eggplant’ product to help mobile app developers automatically test, improve and assure their applications before putting them to market.

For related articles and podcasts visit http://www.itproportal.com

Firstly Anthony set the scene for us with some background on Testplant?

We started off 4 years ago looking at test automation. The objectives that we have had on test automation over the last 10 to 15 years include the idea of repeatable tests with low incremental effort each time. Better quality and getting products out faster. That was a great goal but we didn’t see a lot of people achieving that goal really well. We had people frustrated with the existing set of tools which were largely object code based tools and we decided that there was a space there for innovation in a new approach on testing, and we came up with Eggplant.

Eggplant is a test automation tool that is based on image search and image capture. Whereas traditional tests would go in on the code framework level where they interpret the code and they look for buttons or test fields at the dot net or the piper level.

Eggplant interacts with the system exactly how the user will, it looks at the screen and it identifies objects through recognition and search techniques. So to clarify it is not a coordinate tool, it doesn’t go through a pre-determined coordinate to look for your okay button, what it will do is it knows what a button looks like on your screen and it will search for a button that looks like the okay button and then it will interact with that so this approach has a lot of benefits.

Firstly it is a much more intuitive way for testing rather than have a test case that describes the user story and then having to translate that into object properties. Testplant allows you to execute a test case to fit exactly as the user story would.  It is also independent of the technology underlined so one of the questions we always get when we first start talking to people is they ask us questions like, does it work with dot net? Does it work with flash? Does it work with objective C? And our answer is always yes as long as it is rendering to the screen, as long as it has got some sort of user credentials to act with then we can test it. We came up with this approach about 4 years ago and we have had a lot of success.

Let’s set the scene for this then, what is the size of the market we are talking about here currently and where has the growth in mobile apps come from?

I think that this is a really interesting time in terms of apps because we are in almost a second wave of app development and I think about 4 or 5 years ago when the iPhone 1 really hit the streets then came the big surge of interest. Most of that interest came on the wave of advertising, media apps and a lot of apps that were really just about giving people phone access to existing websites also novelty apps and games. I think this was the first wave.  I think we saw a decrease in that about a year and a half ago.  I think that initial wave started to decrease especially on the media and on the advertising side of things; games and some of the novelty applications kept going. 

The really interesting thing over the last 12 months is that enterprises have really started going into more the implementation phase with their apps.  I think about 3 years ago enterprise software companies got a bit of a wakeup call when everyone had to have a mobile strategy, they had been thinking about that and they had come up with their plans and they have now hired their teams and they are really getting going.

So a lot of the people we are talking to are enterprise software companies or traditional software companies who are now building their mobile applications and their mobile client rather than pure mobile app development shops. I think this is really interesting because we have got a lot of new companies coming in which is leading to a big surge in the number of mobile apps.

It is leading to much more complicated mobile apps, these are not just loading an HTML page and then really letting the browser framework to do all the work, they are actually real applications and they have got business logic in there. They have sometimes got more sophisticated UI techniques in there.  It also means that they are not entirely applications in their own right so to test the mobile application you are not just testing the mobile application you have maybe got to interact with a backend and may be you have got to interact with a desktop as well. This is particularly relevant to the test industry because for the last few years I think tests for mobile apps have evolved separately to traditional testers on the desktop. This means that a lot of teams have their mobile testing app and their desktop testing app. This of course creates problems if you are trying to test one application which has a mobile part, a server part and a desktop part. These are a lot of the dynamics that are making testing mobile applications interesting and a challenge.

What are the types of testing that all apps must go through before going to market?

It is less about the skills required to test the mobile application I think it is more the mindset that strikes me as being really different because if I think about traditional enterprise desktop software then I am thinking about SAP, Oracle, ERP systems where the focus is very much on functional testing. It was all about: “I am inputting these values and I am pressing a button and that gets the database sorted correctly and then when I retrieve it to get the right information.”

As a result of the fact that the first wave of apps was about advertising and media and also because of what influence Apple have had. Mobile applications are more about user experience and a lot more about the interaction with the device than maybe performance and just usability. So when people come to test mobile applications there is of course the functional testing but there is a lot more performance testing. Most teams I know testing mobile applications have proper performance responsiveness criteria and that is not something I see on the desktop. There is also a lot more behaviour driven testing so testing from the users story and user experience rather than function points.

This is what Eggplant does quite cleverly isn’t it, mimicking human behaviour?

Exactly this is why we think we are seeing a lot of success in mobile because the fact that we are a visual tool and we are based on exactly replicating how the user works rather than looking at the code I think that is a very natural thing for us. It is also not just about encoding what a user would do, it now means you don’t have to be a developer to use Eggplant whereas to use  some of the traditional heavy weight tools you have really got to be quite a scripter and understand how UI frameworks work.

The way it uses image capture technology means that you no longer need any additional hardware anymore either?

Absolutely not we mostly run over Wi-Fi and some people run us over USB but that is all the equipment you need.  The other thing is we are really not invasive as in some of the testing solutions we have seen especially on mobile. Because of the signing restrictions they usually need you to compile something into your application or modify your application in some way or they need you to jailbreak the device and of course a lot of people are uncomfortable with that.  You really need to be testing in the environment the software is going to run in, so we spend a lot of effort trying to make sure that we have a solution that does not require you to modify your application in any way or jailbreak the device.

An obvious question then would be: why not get a bunch of people to sit around for a bit testing these apps manually on the devices that they are intended for?

There are 2 or 3 reasons for that and the main one is just time and effort.  I was talking to a company the other day doing mobile development and every time they make a release they like to test across at least 3 or 4 different iPhone variants and then 10 android variants.

What the development manager said to me was he has actually got to a point where he can’t really make changes to his applications so they get feedback and it would be one line code change for a developer but they are not doing it because it would be two weeks to test it with manual testing to get that release.

I think the original test automation was a more a progression test from release to release whereas in mobile testing and I guess with the more platforms we have it is not just from release to release but also across these different platforms and the test matrix is really expanding and if you are doing manual testing just your time for releases and getting the releases out regularly and rapidly is going to be incredibly difficult. Then there is the cost of course because that is relevant and having an army of people to test every android variant is just not practical. Then finally there is the reliability of the whole thing, there is certainly an argument that test automation is more reliable and is more thorough and more repeatable than human testing. Test scripts don’t miss things even the hundredth time they test. I think it is all about cost, time to market and quality.

App developers are quite rightly protective over privacy around their applications in the testing stage – how do you ensure this through Eggplant in comparison with some of the concerns over web based testing systems?

Eggplant is primarily a product rather than a service. We deliver Eggplant to you and you run that within your own environment, within your own firewall and you never send your applications to us. The more people we talk to not only do you have the concerns around the IP of the application itself but especially when you go into the finance industry, retail, Ecommerce, people have legal restrictions around sending that data to a third party from say sending their customer data for example to a third party for testing so we basically provide a product that runs inside the customers firewall and that seems to keep everyone happy.

You must have to keep a close eye on the mobile app market, what developments will we see across the market over the next few years do you think?

The current trend going on all around extending existing software and existing products onto the mobile I think that will continue, I think that integrating mobile devices , lifestyle apps are going to be the obvious next thing so the smart house is very much a topic coming up at the moment so the ability to integrate your phone with your television with your stereo and then with your fridge I guess it is the internet of things and I think the mobile phone is really at the centre of that as peoples primary computing device. I think it is all about mobile apps just becoming more integrated with the environment around them.