The iPhone unleashed mobile computing and allowed users who care to work on a small screen to do a lot of what they used to need a laptop for. The iPad completed this transition and has helped incorporate handheld compute devices into the workflow at thousands of organizations. FedEx pioneered the real use of mobile computing devices by spending millions to develop its own package tracking handhelds for drivers and processing center workers. Now, I’ll bet the company is porting much of this functionality to off-the-shelf tablets.

For IT practitioners (your customers), this means integrating user-supplied mobile devices into the corporate networking, data protection and, especially, security infrastructure. In a short period of time, even by IT standards, a different kind of “sprawl” problem has cropped up. Backup software now has to have a comprehensive mobile device capability, and security products need to accommodate handhelds and smartphones. Networking faces a particularly daunting task. Similar to the way the cell phone explosion doubled or tripled the need for phone numbers, employees bringing tablets and other mobile devices to work has multiplied the need for wireless connectivity in campus networks.

Your IT customers are facing new pressures from users whose expectations have been elevated by their experiences with powerful, easy-to-use personal electronics devices. They’ve had a slew of line items added to their whiteboard to-do lists as they struggle to get their infrastructure “arms” around the mobile devices people are bringing to work. These line items include upgrading the network, checking the compatibility list on their backup software for a dozen new handhelds and reworking their security strategy to protect gigabytes of potentially sensitive corporate data that’s being carried out the door in every employee’s pocket.

For VARs, these customer pain points can represent opportunities. Identify how the products on your existing line card supports mobile devices, get some new ones if you need to and go steal some business from your competitors who are missing the impact that Steve Jobs really had.

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Backup and recovery solutions that are comprehensive and include an effective dedupe functionality meet these requirements. In the data protection space there are a number of options for capturing a backup, from application-specific tools to products that are designed for a specific platform, like VMware. Obviously, point solutions are something to avoid, as they typically result in more management overhead, and IT managers turn to full-featured backup applications that can handle the vast majority of an organization’s data sources for this reason.

‘Progressive deduplication’

Deduplication has become a must-have feature in data backup, as a way to reduce the impact that backups can have on an IT infrastructure, especially storage. While the original dedupe solutions were implemented as target-side appliances, the shift is being made to source-side products. Doing the dedupe process on the client server reduces data upstream from the backup server and compounds the benefits of deduplication throughout the infrastructure. In addition to where the dedupe process is run, how it works is also important. Arkeia’s “progressive deduplication”[1]  is a source-side solution that uses specific block sizes for each file type, a process the company developed through extensive empirical research. This technology also handles data insertions to large files, something common in VMware environments, to produce a new level of dedupe performance.

Mobile devices

On the issue of data security, mobile devices (PDAs, smart phones and tablets) are the focal point as IT managers try to get their arms around a flood of new potential vulnerability points. At Symantec Vision last month, the topic of data protection and security around mobile devices was discussed by a panel from the industry. Several points were made that bear repeating. First, the “traditional” security method of storing a list of known threat profiles on each device is not possible with many mobile device types, since they don’t have the capacity that computers do.

Another issue is how to handle personal devices, like smart phones, that employees bring to work and expect to use with company data. While organizations can certainly restrict the use of these devices, there’s a growing concern about the need to allow this practice in order to attract and retain the best people. Personal mobile devices have become a part of everyday life, and people expect to use them at work. For example, who’s going to carry two cell phones? Part of the solution rests in education, a practice the government is certainly familiar with. Employees need a better awareness of the vulnerability their mobile device use can represent, simple things like the amount of data they hold and how easy they are to lose and steal. Also, taking a more holistic approach to security was advocated, like data loss prevention (DLP) methods that take a “content and context” approach to securing data itself, instead of simply making devices harder to penetrate.

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