Is VPN The Next Big Thing For Tablets?

Sander Biehn is an account manager with AT&T. You can find more blog content from Sander and other experts on mobility on the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog, where this post originally appeared. AT&T has sponsored the following blog post.

using tablet for business
How to get it all done – safely – on your tablet

It is only my second full week of working exclusively on my tablet, and I have been steadily and consistently surprised by what applications have been the greatest assistance to me. One of the biggest surprises has been the VPN client. By using the VPN and the resources attached to it, I have skirted many thorny issues that I experienced working on the tablet. These include printing, Microsoft document retrieval and manipulation, and access to such systems as our CRM platform, which does not have a mobile interface or login routine.

Klaus Brandstaetter blogged recently on SecurityInfoWatch.com about the increasingly important role of the VPN for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) users from the point of view of the IT team. He rightly explains the overwhelming desire not only for employees to access corporate data on a mobile device, but also for that device to be personally owned. Brandstaetter outlines the pitfalls for IT, which include security breaches and the effects of malware on the worker productivity. But many of these threats can be avoided by using VPN. This is Brandstaetter’s main point. While he addresses IT’s concerns, I thought the benefits to the end user were still vague.  I would like to add to his work by outlining the ways in which the VPN can assist a highly mobile end user. After all, for any strategy to work in the world of BYOD, it needs to be beneficial to both IT and the end user.

1. Getting it all done on the tablet

My first week and a half was full of frustration as I tried app after app to bridge the gap around documents. An inherent problem for tablet users is the lack of an easy way to store and manipulate documents. The solution came from a post on our Salesforce Chatter help desk about RDP Remote Desktop Lite. I downloaded it, and could securely see all the files on my laptop and was even able to manipulate, save, and send them. Here is the biggest news: I can send documents to the printer from this app too. The VPN solved more #tabletchallenge problems than any other single application. Who would have dreamed that was possible?

2. The big scare…not so scary

I spent the weekend in Miami at a friend’s wedding. It was extremely handy to have my laptop at the pool Friday night to catch up on the several hours I missed on Friday in transit. Upon arriving home, I couldn’t find my tablet! The normal panic started to subside when I remembered that there really wasn’t anything stored on the device. Unlike a laptop, I wouldn’t lose documents and files (of which there are quite a few) that were stored on the actual device. Luckily it turned out that my son had removed it from my bag and was looking at some of the photos I had taken at Miami beach. The sense of freedom I felt not being dependent on a personal hard drive was amazing. I knew I could access the things I needed from any device that I have VPN access on.

3. The VPN leading the cloud revolution

As witnessed above, we all have some letting go to do with respect to keeping files and work applications with us locally. I think we are still recovering from a time when the network was not always as reliable. With Cellular and WiFi networks at every street corner, we can now relax. Working each day with a mobile device — with no practical way of holding any document files at all — has made my reliance on the cloud complete and non-negotiable. I have to tell you that it is especially comforting, because I am often carrying my tablet outside the office (see the #tabletchallenge FreestyleFriday gallery) and I really don’t need to worry about my device being stolen, broken, or attacked by malware. I am therefore more likely to bring my device along which means I have the ability to be more productive.

Working exclusively on my tablet has really turned my world upside down. By using to the network and the cloud many of my initial problems have been solved. The one thing I am still getting used to is remembering to keep my tablet charged. I was just forced to leave a very comfortable chair to move to another spot closer to an outlet in order to finish typing this blog post!

Keep up to date with my progress under the Twitter handle @sanderbiehn and #tabletchallenge.

In what other ways might VPN help the mobile user? How do you think mobile VPN will affect BYOD adoption in the Enterprise?

 

NEC Terrain with Enhanced Push to Talk Available for $99 on AT&T

nec terrain with push to talkAfter dropping my iPhone this weekend (and being rewarded with a shattered glass screen on both sides of the device) it’s nice to know there’s renewed interest in marketing mobile devices that are designed to withstand a lot of damage. They’re generally termed “rugged” devices, and NEC’s new Terrain is one of the toughest out there.

More specifically, the Terrain is geared toward anyone looking for an indestructible device they can take in the field (literally or metaphorically). It features a large QWERTY keyboard with big buttons: big enough that you could use them with gloves, for example, a Gorilla Glass screen, and a bulky rubberized design that trades sleekness for sturdiness.

It’s also designed to work with AT&T’s enhanced push-to-talk. There are any number of reason businesses might be interested in push-to-talk, but chief among them is speed: like the walkie-talkies push to talk evokes, the speed of communication is about as fast as possible. It’s certainly more reliable and consistent than SMS, and can even be used over wireless for better consistency. You can read more about the new Push-to-Talk from AT&T here, to see how PTT can work for your business.

The Terrain isn’t just a rugged phone: it has a lot of the features we expect from a new device, like 4G LTE service and a MicroSD card to expand on the 8GB of storage.

It’s only $99 with a 2 year agreement from AT&T. For more information, visit the AT&T website.

5 Bring Your Own Software Tasks To Put On Your Business’s To-Do List

Manage the Chaos of BYOD and BYOS with Policies and Practices

John Cupit is Director of Cloud and Data Center Transformation Services, AT&T Consulting Solutions, Inc. You can find more blog content from John and other experts on mobility on the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog, where this post originally appeared. AT&T has sponsored the following blog post.

In a recent post, I discussed how Bring Your Own Service (or Software) is becoming an issue in many enterprise environments as organizations embrace the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). As with any transformative technology, it is still too early in the adoption cycle to have established industry-recognized best practices surrounding the security of BYOS.  However, there are five key tasks that should be addressed before supporting the use of BYOS in the enterprise environment.

1.  Adoption of BYOD and BYOS requirements within your acceptable use policy.

I am always amazed to see that BYOD and BYOS are often never mentioned in the acceptable use policy.  If you are deploying and supporting BYOD and BYOS (either directly or indirectly), what are the mechanisms and policies guiding the use of those devices and services within the enterprise?  The acceptable use policy should address how your employees can appropriately use these technologies within the context of their day-to-day work activities and it should specifically state which uses are prohibited and the potential consequences of unacceptable use.

2. Modification of employment contracts to provide lawful access to devices or services.

Is your contract of employment or employee handbook clear about your rights to inspect, modify and delete all and any data on any device or service connected to your network? It is unclear how far current intellectual property provisions within employment contracts can be extended to provide corporate access to employee-owned devices or services.  As such, it is prudent to include provisions within your employment contracts and employee handbook that provide you with the right to inspect devices and/or services and to modify and delete data that may reside in those environments.

3. Adoption of a process to define minimum requirements for BYOD and BYOS support.

What processes do you use to inspect and validate each device to ensure appropriate software licensing and virus protection?  Do you have the staff and requisite skills to execute these inspections?  How will you insure that corporate data is excluded from BYOS personal backups?  How will you meet certain industry regulatory requirements, such as the recording of customer conversations?  What are your minimum security requirements for BYOS services to support the storage of corporate data?  Many of these processes are not being implemented in support of BYOD and BYOS deployments.  In my opinion, the failure to define and deploy these processes and requirements is one of the primary risks of supporting BYOD and BYOS in the enterprise environment.  The level of risk increases exponentially with the number of devices and services present in the corporate infrastructure.

4. Adoption of security policies for BYOD and BYOS.

It is imperative that your corporate security policy covers the use and storage of company data on personal devices and in personal cloud services.  The sensible approach is to take the time to evaluate the security attributes of the devices and services generally available on the market and to carefully choose those devices and services that meet or exceed your security requirements.  This is also an opportunity to use additional encryption and tokenization technologies to provide additional protection for corporate data that may be stored on a BYOS service.

5. Don’t get sucked into the notion of supporting the world.

Until some of the challenges of the BYOD and BYOS phenomena can be resolved, we are recommending to our customers to choose one or two devices and/or services to support as opposed to boiling the ocean and supporting all comers.  No one has the staff and skills to support every smart device and cloud service available on the market today.  Carefully evaluate the smart devices and services available and create a corporate standard in order to address all of the challenges implicit in BYOD/BYOS deployments.

In the final analysis, the most important consideration is to insure the security of corporate data that may reside in the BYOD and BYOS environment.  While the environment is still admittedly chaotic, your primary focus has to be on securing corporate data.  Security amongst all of this chaos is quickly becoming the primary dilemma of BYOD and BYOS deployments.  As with most things in this world, simplicity and specificity, adherence to process and standards and good common sense are the best tools to tackle the challenges of BYOD and BYOS deployment and support.

How is your enterprise managing the chaos? What policies and practices has your company put into place regarding BYOD and BYOS?

 

Introducing Enhanced Push to Talk from AT&T

This just came across our desk: for all you iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 users out there, you can now Push-to-Talk (PTT) on AT&T with a new app and service. While Android and Blackberry users have been enjoying the service since this past November, you can now grab the app for you iPhone and get chatting!

More than just some walkie talkie app, the “Enhanced” part of AT&T’s offering means who can see which of your contacts are online, automatically join active talk groups, share calls within your organization, make and receive calls whether you’re on Wi-Fi or 3G/4G/LTE, and send data safely with enterprise-grade encryption.

Enhanced PTT costs $5 per phone line per month, and with it you get all of the features listed above.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be talking more about Enhanced PTT and how it benefit your business, but if you’re on your iPhone and want to try it out right now you can head on over here and download the app.

Facebook Adds Video To Instagram, Takes on Twitter’s Vine, Autodesk’s Socialcam

When Socialcam first launched, people were calling it the Instagram of video. Then Twitter came along and bought up Vine, a way to make artsy 6 second videos, and then they integrated it seamlessly so videos can be watched inside your twitter feed.

But today? Facebook is introducing Instagram version 6.0, available in the app store right now, and Instagram itself has become the next big video platform.

Here’s what you need to know: it’s the same old Instagram you know and love, but you can now record videos up to 15 seconds long. And of course, there’s a whole bunch of filters to go along with it, though these new filters are exclusive to the new video mode, with names like “Stinson”, “Ginza” and “Helena.” Black and white aficionados will love the new “Moon” video filter, which produces a lovely effect.

My feed is already blowing up with videos, and yours will be soon, so what are you waiting for—update that app and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Google Reader Alternatives and the Future of RSS

Google Reader AlternativesNo matter what industry you’re in, you can leverage Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds to gain a competitive advantage. Whether it’s simply by seeking out all of the best news sources within your field (both the big ones and the obscure) or keeping tabs on your competition, good RSS readers have helped businesses small and large to condense the net — with it’s millions of new news and opinion articles that are published every single day — down into headlines that can be easily skimmed and articles that can be read, archived, or saved for later.

For years, I’ve been using one RSS reader in particular, Google Reader. It has helped me keep up with the various blogs, authors, and websites I read not only to stay in the loop on the latest happenings in the tech world, but also to get the news first, as it happens. When I need to pitch HLN, CNN or the TODAY Show on a new segment idea, my Google Reader account is literally full of hundreds of ideas just waiting for me to sift through. When I need to know what’s happening on the web and across the blogs I respect, I turn to Google reader for information and inspiration. But this expands far beyond tech—no matter what industry you’re in, once you’ve done the work finding the best blogs and websites out there, and have subscribed to their RSS feeds, you’re able to stay on the cutting edge of new trends and be the first to know when major news impacts your business.

Two ways around the Google Reader shut down

In the 8 years Google has been running their extremely popular reader service they have virtually taken over the entire RSS industry. But the service, while the industry standard, apparently doesn’t do anything to help Google’s business model and the search giant announced recently that they’ll be shutting down the service on July 1st. Now, this doesn’t mean that Google Reader-style RSS readers are necessarily dead in the water, as countless other services have been working over the past few months to create strong platforms for Google Reader users to switch to. But it does mean that you no longer have to rely on RSS itself to serve as the glue behind how you read the news. In fact, this may be the right time to pick an alternative.

Keep Reading this Article at the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog –>

 

 

Apple’s New MacBook Air, Mac Pro and Time Capsule Announcement This Week

Earlier this week Apple made a whole bunch of announcement at their keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference (or WWDC). Most of the event was geared toward developers, so the focus was on software, but Tim Cook and company also revealed some hardware to get consumers excited. There’s a refresh of MacBook Air that’s already available in stores, plus promises of updates to the Mac Pro desktop, as well as the Time Capsule and Airport Extreme.

new Apple MacBook Air June 2013

New MacBook Air
The big news here is that the MacBook Air has a new processor, called the Intel Haswell, that promises both superior performance and better battery life. Apple promises both the 11″ and 13″ models will now have “all day battery life.” What this means in practice is that the 11″ MacBook should get 9 hours of battery life, while the 13″ will get 12 hours. It remains to be seen just how well that works in practice, but even if battery life isn’t quite as-advertised, it will still be significant improvement over current models (compare 9 hour for the 11″ to the previous model’s 5 hours). The new processor will also load programs and graphics faster. The best part may be that the new MacBook Air is already shipping, starting at $999 for the 11″and $1,099 for the 13″ model.

 

new Apple Mac Pro June 2013New Mac Pro
This was really more of a preview of the new Mac Pro than an announcement. We still don’t have all the nitty-gritty on technical stats, though we can expect to see them this fall as part of Apple’s usual hardware-centric event. The Mac Pro is Apple’s high-end desktop, beloved by video editors, graphic designers and other power users, and it hasn’t seen an update in quite a while (at least by Apple product cycle standards). The Mac Pro has been shrunken down and redesigned, and even though it is a traditional “tower” in the sense of the desktop computer, it looks more like an external harddrive from a few years ago, or even a very space-age bucket. What we do know is that the design is a new way of dealing with the tremendous heat put out by desktop machines, a very real engineering issue, especially for very powerful computers. The Mac Pro promises to be just that, with an Intel Xeon CPU and dual GPUs, plus dual Thunderbolt 2.0, 802.11ac wireless, dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, and support for 4K displays. It’s a serious upgrade from the current Mac Pro, but we’ll have to wait to get pricing till later in the year.

 

new Apple AirPort Extreme June 2013AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule
The AirPort has a brand new look: tall and rectangular, at 4 inches by 6 inches. Apple says it has been completely redesigned, but what’s probably more important to power users is the 802.11ac Wi-Fi. 802.11ac Wi-Fi is also available in the new Time Capsule models, which will still sport 2TB or 3TB of storage space depending on the model you purchase. The 2TB Time Capsule will be $299 and the 3TB will be $399, while the new AirPort Extreme will cost $199. Both are already available from Apple.

 

 

Highlights from Apple’s WWDC Keynote, Including a New MacBook Air and New Mac Pro

Tim Cook at Apple's WWDC Conference Announcing New Macbook Air, Time Capsule, iOS7 and more
Tim Cook at Apple’s WWDC Conference Keynote Announcing New Macbook Air, Time Capsule, iOS7 and more

We’ll be talking more in-depth about Apple’s announcements today, but for now here are the highlights from the keynote at the World wide Developer Conference:

New iOS7:
Apple announced a new operating system, iOS7, with a complete design overhaul. All of Apple’s apps, including Photos, Safari, weather, calendar and Game Center, have all been redesigned with a sleeker, more modern feel, including a new font choice (Helvetica) and completely updated color palette.

iOS7 also offers keychain storage through iCloud (which will communicate with OSX Mavericks), AirDrop, smarter multitasking, easier access to device settings, and the ability to update apps in the background. iTunes will now offer radio, a la Pandora or Spotify. Plus Siri’s got a new voice and some new search tricks. Activation Lock, a new security feature, will build on the ability to remotely erase your iPhone. Basically, if someone steals and wipes your iPhone, or you wipe it after it has been stolen, whoever has your phone will be unable to unlock the phone and activate it with new service unless they also know your Apple ID and password.

iOS7 was made available to developers today. Everyone else will have to wait until the fall, when it will presumably ship on new devices.

New MacBook Air
The new MacBook Air starts shipping now. Apple promises all-day battery life, improved CPU responsiveness from updated Haswell processors and much more affordable flash memory prices. 11″ models start at $999 with 128GB of flash storage, 13″ models at $1099 with 128GB of flash storage.

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Create, Edit & Share Documents in the Cloud with AT&T Mobile Workplace

AT&T Mobile Workspace Cloud Computing SolutionCollaboration and workflow when you or your coworkers are highly mobile can be tough: accessing documents and keeping them in a usable, standardized format still presents a challenge, especially when you start to have multiple users and multiple devices. The good news is that lots of big organizations have recognized the problem and going for solutions. AT&T recently announced their cloud-based document sharing system, AT&T Mobile Workplace, in an effort to address these exact accessibility and usability issues.

The basic idea behind Mobile Workplace is that anyone in your organization should be able able to access the same document anywhere and from any device. But it’s especially important to keep documents synced and current for the entire company so that no one is working from an old version or overwriting anyone else’s changes. Mobile Workplace’s cloud-based solution takes care of that, both as a desktop client and a mobile app.

Maybe the best feature though is actually just document editing, which can still be laborious or downright impossible on a mobile device. Mobile Workplace makes editing possible and streamlines the process. Plus once documents are synched, they can be edited offline and synched later once an internet connection is available – perfect for flights without WiFi or train rides.

Pricing starts at $6/month/user for the Basic package. There are also enhanced and premium services available depending on which features are right for your business; to learn more about AT&T Mobile Workplace visit the AT&T Small Business site.

The Future of Kickstarter, and Some Crowdfunding Alternatives to Kickstarter

Boddie smartwatch
Renderings of the Boddie smartwatch, the project rejected by Kickstart (and picked up by IndieGoGo)

A recent article on Quartz by Christopher Mims about Kickstarter brings up an interesting point about the present (and future) nature of Kickstarter projects: Kickstarter recently rejected a smartwatch project that was very similar to the Pebble, perhaps the most famous Kickstarter project ever. The Pebble, an iPhone-compatible smartwatch, raised over $10 million on the site, meaning that Kickstarter as a business made a good chunk of money too. In rejecting the Pebble analogue (called Boddie) Kickstarter is committing to a certain set of company values that aren’t money — at least in the short-term.

Boddie’s rejection can most easily be attributed to new standard for products: Kickstarter is no longer accepting gadget campaigns that only have a rendering as proof of concept. That makes sense, given how many fully-funded gadget projects failed to deliver to backers in a timely manner, or in some cases, failed to deliver at all. It was a source of a lot of online outrage and probably the first truly bad publicity to which the site has ever been subjected.

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