psilva's prophecies: mobile device

Showing posts with label mobile device. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

MWC 2015 – Getting Work Done on the Go (feat Carovano)

Ron Carovano, Manager, Business Development, joins us from the F5 kiosk in the AirWatch Connect booth at #MWC15. Always a fun and informative guest, Ron fills us in on the F5/AirWatch partnership and how our joint solution helps an employee with their brand new personal mobile device connect to business applications. Out of the box to productivity with granular control and true enterprise mobility management for the mobile workforce.

Technorati Tags: f5,mwc15,mobile mangement,mdm,mobile,airwatch,video,silva,barcelona

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MWC 2015 – How LTE Roaming Works (feat Nas)

Peter Nas, Sr. Solution Architect, explains what happens when the many MWC attendees from all over the world arrive in Barcelona and need to connect their mobile devices to a carrier network. Peter does a great job walking us through what happens when a mobile device connects to a foreign network and how F5’s Signaling Delivery Controller (SDC) helps route the user and the data roaming traffic back to the home carrier.

Technorati Tags: f5,mwc15,lte,roaming,signaling,sdc,mobile,carrier,video,silva,barcelona

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Tuesday, August 26, 2014

VMworld 2014 Partner Spotlight – BIG-IP & AirWatch Integration (feat AirWatch’s Berenato)

Andrew Berenato, AirWatch Business Development Manager, does a great job explaining the many enterprise mobile device management challenges that the BIG-IP & AirWatch integration solves. BYOD, secure corporate apps, maintain compliance and employee privacy are all covered. True enterprise mobility management.

AirWatch by VMware simplifies mobility for organizations, while empowering end users. With AirWatch, organizations can easily deploy, configure, secure, manage and support smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices across multiple mobile platforms and operating systems.

Technorati Tags: vmworld,vmware,policy,f5,sddc,airwatch,mobile,mdm,video,silva,cloud,byod

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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Fear and Loathing ID Theft

Do you avoid stores that have had a credit card breach?

You are not alone. About 52% of people avoid merchants who have had a data breach according to a recent Lowcards survey. They surveyed over 400 random consumers to better understand the impact of identity theft on consumer behavior. 17% said they or a family member was a victim of identity theft over the last year with half the cases being credit card theft. 94% said they are more concerned or equally concerned about ID theft. They estimate that there were 13.5 million cases of credit card identity theft in the United States over the last 12 months.

These concerns are also changing the way some people shop.

Over half (56%) are taking extra measures to protect themselves from identity theft. Some of these behaviors include using a debit card less (28%), using cash more (25%), ordering online less (26%) and checking their credit report more (38%). These are all reasonable responses to the ever challenging game of protecting your identity and is important since 89% of security breaches and data loss incidents could have been prevented last year, according to the Online Trust Alliance's 2014 Data and Breach Protection Readiness Guide.

The game is changing however, and mobile is the new stadium. Let's check that scoreboard.

Most of the security reports released thus far in 2014, like the Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report and the Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2013 show that threats to mobile devices are increasing. We are using them more and using them for sensitive activities like shopping, banking and storing personally identifiable information. It is no wonder that the thieves are targeting mobile and getting very good at it. Kaspersky's report talks about the rise of mobile botnets and the effectiveness since we never shut off our phones. They are always ready to accept new tasks either from us or, a foreign remotely controlled server with SMS trojans leading the pack. Mobile trojans can even check on the victim's bank balance to ensure the heist is profitable and some will even infect your PC when you USB the phone to it.

Distribution of exploits in cyber-attacks by type of attacked application

I guess the good news is that people are becoming much more aware of the overall risks surrounding identity theft and breaches but will the convenience and availability of mobile put us right back in that dark alley? Mobile threats are starting to reach PC proportions with online banking being a major target and many of the potential infections are delivered via SMS messages. Sound familiar?

Maybe we can simply cut and replace 'PC' with 'Mobile' on all those decade old warnings of:

Watch what you click!

Technorati Tags: mobile,shopping,breach,malware,idtheft,behavior,silva,trojan,security

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Monday, July 14, 2014

Apps Driving Attention

The mobile platform, meaning tablets and smartphones, now account for 60% of total digital media time spent according to comScore. This is a 10 point jump from 50% just a year ago. On top of that, mobile apps accounted for 51% of all digital media time spent in May 2014. Many of the content categories like radio, photos and maps are becoming almost exclusively mobile. Digital radio and photos both generate 96% of their engagement from mobile while maps and instant messaging get 90% of interaction from mobile devices.

You might be wondering, like I did, where do social networks come in since it seem like almost everyone updates their social feeds through mobile. Social is actually the #1 category for overall digital engagement taking about 20% of overall digital time spent and gets 71% of it's activity from mobile. It, social media engagement on mobile, has grown 55% over the last year and has accounted for 31% of all growth of internet engagements.

So who is driving the mobile app explosion? Teenagers. About 60% of 12 to 17 year olds had a smartphone in 2013, topping even the 45+ crowd for smartphone ownership, according to Arbitron and Edison Research. The app money makers are not the initial charge for the program but all the in-app purchases along with the ads attached to the app.

Mobile is clearly the new way we consume digital content and continues to grow. We are also interacting with specific apps rather than browsing and those apps are growing at an amazing pace. Today's infrastructure needs to be even more flexible, intelligent and resilient to handle the surge. And ultimately, the apps and the content/experience they provide need to be highly available and delivered quickly and securely to the person...just like any other typical application.

Technorati Tags: mobile,apps,tablet,smartphone,social media,humans,society,silva,security

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Infrastructure as a Journey

I see and read a lot of IT articles almost demanding that organizations must do certain things to ensure that some piece of their infrastructure is secure, highly available, fault tolerant, agile, flexible, scalable, recoverable, cloud'able, whatever the silo needs or face the dire circumstances. I'm guilty of it too over the years. Organizations must have a WAF for PCI compliance or Remote employees need to have an encrypted tunnels to the corporate network or any other command pertaining to the health of your infrastructure.

Life is a Journey, Faith is a Journey and by golly, Business is a Journey. IT is tasked with supporting the business objectives, so why not Infrastructure as a Journey? We've seen part of this journey play out over the last 5 years as organizations first tried to understand the cloud, it's various definitions/deployment models and the true business benefits. The cloud journey continues as more organizations test the waters, so to speak, and distribute their content over a hybrid infrastructure.

Workplace mobility is and continues to be a journey for many organizations. This started over 10 years ago with the first bricks, Palms and Blackberry's making their way into employees hands. iPhones and Androids later, VDI, MDM, MAM and a host of other infrastructure solutions have come along to help with the mobile BYOx journey.

Security has always been a journey. Assessing, managing and mitigating the risk to the business. Security is probably an area that gets the most insistence to do something. For years the ever popular Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt has been used to urge companies to protect something in a certain way. With all the media coverage of data breaches and the reported mistakes (intentional or not) made along the way, it is easy to jump on the 'you must do' bandwagon. But all companies are different.

Also, organizations might not be able to obey all the mandates and accomplish everything they must. They might have tight budgets, limited staff, different priorities, varying risk or other variables that could prevent complete infrastructure bliss. And over the next 5 years, there will probably be even more change that adds even greater hills and valleys to navigate. Just like life. I can also guarantee that your infrastructure will probably look nothing like it does today.

Your body's infrastructure is what keeps us humans going day to day and your IT infrastructure is what keeps the business going. The infrastructure journey to a high performance, flexible, agile, application focused fabric with the ability to apply services across that fabric and the tools to manage it, is just beginning.

I realize there is incredible pressure to do more with less and have it done yesterday on top of dealing with the daily fires. Much easier said than done, but if you can think of your infrastructure as a journey, it might help prioritize the needs of your business and see what forks in the road are approaching rather than scrambling when the big one hits.

Journeys can take you to some interesting places as you progress from one stage to another. You try stuff, make mistakes, learn and make adjustments to address those and hopefully come out better on the other side. Just always remember to exhale and smile when you get there.

Technorati Tags: infrastructure,cloud,security,mobile,journey,it,synthesis,challenges,change,f5,silva,fud

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Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Mobile Malware Milestone

Did you celebrate or castigate?

You might not know but last week was the 10 year birthday of Cabir, the first mobile malware. It spread through Bluetooth after infecting the Nokia Series 60 phones running Symbian. Also last week, Kindsight Security Labs (Alcatel-Lucent) released the results of a study (pdf) that found more than 11.6 million mobile devices are infected by mobile malware at any given time and that mobile infections increased 20% globally in 2013.

This, obviously, increases risk for stolen personal and financial information, can lead to bill shock resulting from hijacked data usage, or extortion to regain control of the device along with allowing bad guys to remotely track location, download contact lists, intercept/send messages, record conversations and best of all, take pictures.

About 60% of all mobile infections involved Android devices that downloaded malicious software from the Google Play store and 40% were Android phones that received malicious code while tethered to a Windows laptop. Both Blackberry and iPhone combined to represent less than 1% of all infected devices. 4G LTE devices are the most likely to be infected and the number of mobile malware samples grew 20X in 2013. This will only get worse as new strains are released, like the proof of concept code that is capable of tracking your taps and swipes as you use a smartphone. That's right, monitor touch events. Say a phone has not been touched in a while and suddenly there is 4 touch events. Well, that's probably a PIN, according to Forbes contributor Tamlin Magee. Add to that a screenshot, now you can overlay the touches with the screenshot and know exactly what is being entered.

You know it and I know it: The more we become one with our mobile devices, the more they become targets. It holds our most precious secrets which can be very valuable to some. We need to use care when operating such a device since, in many ways, our lives depend on it. And it is usually around this point in the article that I chastise mobile users for careless behavior but in this instance, there are certainly times where there is nothing you can do. You can be paranoid, careful and only visit the branded app stores yet the risk is still present.

Ten years in and we're just getting started.

Technorati Tags: malware,mobile,smartphone,andriod,iphone,security,privacy,identity theft,silva,f5

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