Why is that iPhone on my network?
Using Ravica environmental monitoring products can help protect your network from the physical world but what about the new mobile world? Can your protect your network from the Smartphone cloud? Smartphones are all around us. The advent of the iPhone had brought their use to the forefront of the IT department. As a result there use has burdened the corporate network and become a big security risk. You can’t ignore the growth, recent surveys show that smartphone use is rising and should grow by 25% in the next three years.
So what do you do?
The influx of smartphones also creates a host of challenges for any IT pro seeking to manage that rapidly growing portion of the enterprise. Armed with the right information and tools, you can make sure that the true potential of a highly mobile workforce is realized.
Dawn the correct armor.
A smartphone can operate inside and outside of your firewall, similar to a laptop. Since you are using smaller operating system, and in some cases unique, your job becomes a little more difficult. So that means making sure your smartphone connections are secure is priority number one. I found a great article that explains how to secure your smartphones and the data that they access. Here is a similar white paper from ZDNET.
Manage your army:
So how do we manage smartphones when they are on and off of your network? Matt Bancroft from Smartphone Security Magazine tells us that, “like the laptops of remote workers, smartphones need to be catered to as a part of the network and subject to corporate management and security measures. It is essential that companies have a corporate IT management policy in place that takes these smart mobile devices into account.”
Three things IT departments must consider when smartphones are running enterprise applications are:
- Operational Continuity: Once employees are trained and start to rely on the applications on their phones, you need to make sure that they are running all the time. This means controlling the phone’s firmware and the other applications that run on it to ensure that it has 100% up time.
- Reducing Support Costs: You need to be able to take control of phones remotely or push files when needed. This can be extremely helpful.
- Security and Compliance: This includes backups to ensure data can’t be lost, and encryption or remote device wiping to protect data when a device is stolen or misplaced. It may also include communications controls, such as archiving SMS messages or preventing them altogether.
Management tools include Sybase with iAnywhere (for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Symbian), Logmein (for Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry shortly), and Microsoft with its Mobile Device Manager 2008 module, which is part of its System Center family of management products for devices running Windows Mobile 6.1.
Here are some items that you want to look for in your management application.
- Active Directory/Group Policy domain join
- Mobile VPN with dual-factor authenticated access
- Application allow and deny
- SMS, Bluetooth and camera disablement with Active Directory Group Policy-based targeting
- Over the air device provisioning and software deployment
- Device inventory and reporting
- Help desk console and role-based administration
- Device wipe
It’s clear that smartphones are becoming a more integral part of most enterprises. Today’s technology workers are more tech-savvy than ever The influx of smartphones also creates a host of challenges for any IT pro seeking to manage that rapidly growing portion of the enterprise. But armed with the right information and tools, you can make sure that the true potential of a highly mobile workforce is realized.
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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
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5 tips for an energy-efficient data center
Designing a data center is much like designing a nursery for a newborn baby. You want your pride and joy to be happy and thrive in a room that’s not too cold, not too warm, and have the correct humidity. Below are five top tips to a happy data center. The tips are taken from the Green Grid‘s recently released whitepaper Fundamentals of data center power and cooling efficiency zones.
1. Blowing hot and cold: Having parallel rows of equipment racks facing forward may look neat and tidy but it could make a sauna out of your data center. IT equipment sucks in cool air via the front and pushes out hot air from the back. If a machine is spewing out hot air the device behind it is sucking that in when it should be taking in cold air. Imagine how hot the air must be in the last row of machines. The ideal placement for rows of equipment would be to have the front of the servers facing each other. The backs of the rows should also be facing each other to create a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration.
2. Place cables overhead: If the space underneath the raised floor is a spaghetti junction of cables cool air won’t be able to do its job in the data center. Cables should be distributed overhead and unused raised floor cutouts should be blocked to eliminate unwanted air leakage. The Green Grid recommends that perforated tiles, with a design of about 25% open area, should be used to ensure uniform and predictable airflow distribution in lower density areas.
3. Recommended temperatures: The recommended range of temperature for critical enterprise server and storage environments is between 64.4° to 80.6° F (18° to 27° C), according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), as cited in the whitepaper. ASHRAE also specifies a dew point value of about 5.5° C (41.9° F).
4. Set air conditioners to the same levels: Computer room air conditioning units with humidifiers are a great addition to ensure optimum humidity of the data center but if you have more than one, be sure that they are set to the same settings. If not, they could be operating at odds with one dehumidifying the air while the other is humidifying it.
5. Cool the source. The white paper recommends using row and rack-based cooling to address dynamic hot spots that can form as workloads are constantly shifted from one server to another. Cool air has a much shorter path of distribution, so bringing cooling closer to the heat source is key.