Not many people read IT disaster recovery (DR) plans for pleasure but these documents are often far more insightful than the organisation’s annual report. That’s because the quality and scope of the DR plan instantly reveals the company’s relative priorities, levels of resource investment and commitment to business continuity planning.

At the very least, a robust, up-to-date and proportionate IT disaster plan shows not only that somebody cares enough to try and keep the wheels of industry turning but has also put adequate measures in place to minimise the risks of unexpected IT failure.

Of course, the interpretation of ‘adequate measures’ will always vary from organisation to organisation, according to local needs and resources, because there is no cookie-cutter model (one size fits all) for disaster recovery.

Nevertheless, some fundamental principles do apply, regardless of organisation size and scale, which means that Small and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs) face very similar DR challenges to those of their larger counterparts. Even the smallest SMB needs to take some steps to protect the integrity of its business systems when things go wrong.

A Freeform Dynamics study that focused on organisations with between 50 and 1,000 employees shows that SMBs generally care about IT disaster recovery and proactively establish DR measures, even if they don’t always describe them in such terms. However, the research also highlights some gaps and shortfalls in disaster recovery capability, which respondents readily acknowledge. Having said this, only 20% of SMBs indicated that investing in DR improvements would be considered as high priority spending:

The chart above is one of a number from the aforementioned research which tell us that a good proportion of SMBs are well aware of their DR challenges but most can’t afford to throw money at the problem areas, particularly in a difficult economic climate.

But that shouldn’t stop them taking a fresh look at their disaster recovery plans, not only to see if there are any affordable opportunities for incremental improvements in key areas, but also to check that any previous plans remain properly aligned with their systems portfolio and infrastructure. Chances are that some re-alignment may be necessary, particularly if business systems, IT infrastructure or services have been changed or introduced since the last DR review.

It’s also vital to pay specific attention to any changes in business priorities, working practices (such as growth of remote/mobile working), service delivery models or service providers, because these will all directly affect the business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.

Likewise a previously suitable mix of DR tools, techniques and technologies might now benefit from a rethink. SMBs may find that the falling cost of storage, the mainstream readiness of virtualisation technology and the maturation of third-party hosting services (including Cloud) offer real benefits of cost and timeliness, in terms of better IT resilience and recovery, when compared with a ‘traditional’ DR approach, such as offsite tape backup and recovery.

Perhaps, though, the biggest challenge for a smaller business is in knowing what ‘effective’ DR and good business continuity planning looks like in practice. This is where awareness of what works well elsewhere can be invaluable.

In an attempt to flush out some of the ‘best practices’ for SMB disaster recovery, our analysis of the research sample divided the interview respondents into two groups: a) those with comprehensive/ good IT DR, and b) those with inadequate/ poor IT DR capabilities.
On comparison of the two groups we saw some significant differences, with seven specific characteristics, or behaviours, that appear to stand out as ‘enablers’ of better DR performance.
Some of these enablers, such as inclusive planning (i.e. ensuring that IT disaster recovery planning is fully co-ordinated with general business continuity plans for people and process) and the prioritisation/ funding of DR investments, are hardly surprising because they represent the fundamental points of entry to effective DR anyway.

However, other enablers identified in the research may be less obvious to an SMB hoping to improve IT disaster recovery capability. These include the use of alternative storage media and advanced DR solutions, such as Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which facilitates rollback or recovery to a particular point in time – extremely useful if a key data store has become compromised, or otherwise invalidated by application or user error.

For a full discussion of the effective DR enablers and more information on this topic, you can download the full research report here.

Colin Beveridge, Principal Analyst, Freeform Dynamics

Last week was extremely busy, so the first I heard of Amazon’s Direct Connect service being available in the UK was when my colleague Tony Lock forwarded me a journalist request to provide an analyst comment. In a nutshell, Direct Connect allows an Amazon customer to hook up to the AWS cloud service via a dedicated comms link, rather than having to send all traffic over the public internet.


The journalist asking for input was Rosalie Marshall at Incisive, and the article she produced can be seen here – worth a read if you want a quick summary.


The comment I provided, which is quoted in the article, was as follows:


“Relying on the public internet for core application connectivity introduces a degree of variability and uncertainty around bandwidth, speed and latency that is unacceptable to many large organisations, which are increasingly putting the emphasis on end-to-end quality of service management. Utilising dedicated links to cloud providers overcomes this and hooking up via incumbent communications service providers can also have benefits in terms of costs, monitoring, troubleshooting and support."


“While security, per se, should not be an issue when sending traffic over the public internet, provided it is appropriately encrypted, directly connecting to the cloud provider does take away a commonly perceived risk, which may make it easier to get sign off from non-technical stakeholders when making cloud-related decisions.”


These comments were based on various conversations with senior IT decision makers, along with, of course, insights from the extensive primary research we have carried out to explore the practicalities of cloud adoption. If you are interested in seeing some of this, a particularly relevant report is one that Freeform's Andy Buss put together a few months ago, entitled: “Cloud Connectivity; Carefully does it”, which can be downloaded from here.


You can check out that report at your leisure, but suffice it to say that one of Andy’s main conclusions from the research was that connecting to cloud services is a whole different ball game to enabling remote access. Just because you have the comms in place to handle the latter, doesn’t mean they will be up to dealing with the former.


Back to the AWS announcement, Andy later followed up with Amazon and arranged for the team here to speak with Robin Meehan, Chief Technology Officer at Smart421, Amazon’s launch partner for Direct Connect in the UK. Robin pretty much reiterated the points outlined above in my initial take, but we also covered some of the practicality.


Robin highlighted the importance of a one-stop shop for the entire service end-to-end (connectivity and AWS infrastructure services), pointing out that most enterprise customers want to use a specialist to outsource these kinds of activities as they are not core business.


This makes absolute sense. Picking up on the trend towards end to end service management in the enterprise space, one of the frequent snags is how to deal with parts of the chain for which you may not have the specialist skills in house – particularly for elements that are physically outside of the datacentre. More and more, there is a need for trusted partners to whom responsibility can be delegated, and that often means working with suppliers that offer a broader scope and more coherent service.


As Robin says:
 “We have deep connectivity skills and reach, as well as the application layer/IaaS skills, so when the customer says 'I can’t reach my Amazon EC2 instance', we are able to triage the problem effectively as we understand the entire architecture. For example, if it turns out to be an EC2 security group issue (aka firewall at the AWS end), we won’t blame the network.”

Of course none of this precludes Amazon customers piecing together the solution themselves, using their own expertise and general comms service providers, but as our research has highlighted, setting up the comms for business critical cloud services is not necessarily as easy as many make it out to be, particularly when more demanding applications and/or larger user bases are involved.


Anyway, the bottom line is that this recent announcement is welcome as it provides UK AWS users with choice that’s been available to US customers for a while now.

Dale Vile, CEO, Freeform Dynamics

If anybody attending the Adobe MAX conference had any doubts about Adobe’s commitment to Flash, these were firmly dispelled soon after the start of the event. Equally, anybody for whom Adobe is ‘the Flash company’ needs to think again. To answer my own title question: it’s very much Flash and HTML5. It’s obviously not all going to happen overnight, but based on the presentations I attended and my discussions with several of the executives, Adobe’s positioning at MAX was consistent, coherent, and firm.

Let’s start with Flash. Adobe’s commitment to Flash manifested itself in a variety of ways: a load of new features delivered with Flash Player 11; an amazing demo in the opening keynote of touch apps built in Flash and compiled using Captive Runtime for AIR (not that they said as much at the time); and an even more amazing set of potential new capabilities in the Sneak Peeks at the end of the conference (which may or may not turn into released product), as well as a detailed presentation on the Flash platform roadmap (features that are planned for release). If anybody is interested in more details on any of the announcements of technologies mentioned here, there’s a set of links at the end of this blog post to some of the MAX presentations, demos, and product pages on the Adobe site.

Back to the positioning of Flash: a key new feature, not to say the key feature that was announced at MAX is Stage 3D (formerly known as Project Molehill), to big cheers from the audience. Stage 3D is a set of APIs that introduces GPU hardware acceleration to Flash graphics. Right now, Stage 3D is only available for Windows-based PCs and Mac OS; given the variety of GPU chips in mobile devices, it’s taking a little longer to release it for mobile, but it’s certainly in the works.

There was something for 2D as well: the Starling framework; this is an Adobe-funded open source project which brings GPU support to 2D games for the desktop. Starling sits on top of Stage 3D, and hides the complexity of the Stage 3D APIs from the developer. The demo of a digging mole spoke for itself when it came to demonstrating the difference: without Starling, the mole made stately progress; with Starling, it raced at 60 frames per second, and even filling the screen with moles didn’t slow the creature down. Oh yes, and Angry Birds is coming to a device near you as well in a Flash Player version, based on Starling.

The Stage 3D demos had something for (almost) everybody. I’m not a gamer, but I can see the difference that this technology can bring to browser-based game delivery; and even if you’re not a car nut, the Nissan Juke demo is impressive.

For good measure, it was announced that the Epic Games Unreal Engine for game developers is coming to Flash. For that demo, nothing less than a fully playable level from Unreal Tournament 3 would do. And very impressive it was, too.

So why does this matter? Because one of Adobe’s key positioning plays is for Flash to be the ‘games console of the web’. That’s not a bad place to aim for. If what was shown at MAX lives up to its promises (and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t), there’s a whole new world of gaming opening up. Not that Stage 3D is just about games – it opens up a load of other possibilities as well.

A second key announcement was Captive Runtime for AIR. This provides developers with the ability to ship apps without requiring a plug-in; it does this by compiling the Flash app into a native executable. Ok, so it means a bit more work for the developer, but makes apps more attractive to the user – no more “You must update your Flash player” messages.”

And last, but by no means least, Adobe announced the availability of ‘native extensions’ for AIR 3. Again, this is good news for Flash developers, as it enables them to make use of platform- and device-specific capabilities.

Time now to get onto HTML5. Adobe clearly isn’t going for a wholesale move to HTML5, but its commitment is clear. For starters, Adobe announced the acquisition of Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap. PhoneGap is an open source development tool for cross-platform mobile apps using HTML and JavaScript. At the same time as the acquisition by Adobe, it was also announced that PhoneGap had been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation. (It has since been accepted, and is now called Apache Callback). 

While we’re onto acquisitions: PhoneGap was the second acquisition announced at MAX. The first was Typekit, the web fonts company. This acquisition isn’t specifically about HTML5, but it’s very much about browser-based delivery of high quality fonts. It’s also Adobe’s first move into cloud-based delivery.

Talking of which: one of the major announcements on the first day was ‘Adobe Creative Cloud’. The intention is to build up an online community of creative designers and developers, for viewing, sharing and synchronizing their work. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops, and whether Adobe will launch other cloud-based services.

For now, back to HTML5. A key demo for me was CSS Shaders (CSS = Cascading Style Sheets). Yes, it’s cool. But more importantly, it’s a CSS3 module which Adobe has submitted to the W3C FX task force, in collaboration with Apple and Opera. Further demos included CSS Regions (also very cool), another proposed addition to the  W3C CSS modules, and which has already been adopted in IE10; Adobe Edge (aka Eg), a ‘motion and interaction design’ tool for HTML5, which is very much a work in progress, but aims to give more people the ability to create content; and HTML export from Flash Professional (to be included in the next major release). jQuery Mobile also got plenty of airtime. Adobe’s HTML5 direction is focused on WebKit (an open source project), which is not surprising as WebKit is used to allow HTML and JavaScript to run in AIR.

The obvious question arises from this dual platform strategy: when, in Adobe’s view, should a developer reach for Flash, and when for HTML5? As might be expected, a straightforward answer is not available. Roughly put, though, the dividing line is around richness. Clearly, not all of the capabilities of Flash can be replicated in HTML5. So if you’re a games developer, you’re going to be better off with Flash; equally, if you want to ensure that you have full control over the user experience, use Flash. If, on the other hand, you’re putting something together that’s essentially data driven, with less rich interaction, then HTML5 can be an appropriate choice, in particular as PhoneGap makes it easier to package your app for different devices. Two points to bear in mind in this context: HTML5 is very much a work in progress, and it’s too early to tell how exactly PhoneGap will fit into the Adobe puzzle.

It’ll also be interesting to see at next year’s MAX whether the Adobe developer community has started embracing HTML5. As one would expect at this particular event, very few hands went up when the audience was asked how many people had actually developed something in HTML5.
All in all, Adobe did a credible job at staking its claim in the brave new HTML5 world, while remaining committed to its Flash heritage. And it must have got the balance right at MAX: some people complained that the event’s focus really was all on Flash, whereas others felt that it was too dominated by HTML5.

Martha Bennett, VP, Head of Strategy, Freeform Dynamics

Do you know what’s running in your network?

In this time of ever increasing security threats and hacking attacks, a recent meeting I was at brought home the old adage, “If you can’t manage it, you can’t secure it.” I was talking to a major web services company that provides large scale hosting (no prizes for guessing who). Because of what they do, security naturally plays a massive role in their service architecture.

A large part of the success of their security implementation comes down to a combination of knowing what to protect and how to protect it. Knowing what to protect comes naturally, because they have to bill customers for resources or services used. As a result they know – to a very high degree – what is running on their infrastructure at any point in time, and can also flag up when unauthorised or suspicious services attempt to run.

When it comes to the how of protecting applications and services, they have invested in developing security policies and frameworks – based around standards such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001 or HIPAA – that are regularly – and independently – assessed and audited.

This type of investment in management and security is natural for service providers because it is core to what they do (although some do this far better than others).  Yet when it comes to internal IT, our research shows that security and management are often areas that are a struggle.

A recent survey indicated that a large proportion of companies never have their security capability independently assessed, and even fewer undergo external auditing. Our on-going research into systems and service management continues to highlight that effective service and asset management – the foundations of good IT practice – are the preserve of the few rather than the domain of the many.

When it comes to improving the situation, one option of course could be to start to move applications into the cloud. But for many, this is not really a viable strategy in the short or even medium term. This means that any improvements needs to made to internal IT policies, processes and tooling.

Lessons can be learned from how the service providers approach security and management in service delivery to improve the situation internally. If we consider this at the fundamental level, this is really the right way to secure and run IT. This means that getting serious about investing in management. Too often management is neglected and the fallout is dealt with as an IT operations overhead. But with the changing and ever more serious threat landscape good management it is no longer an IT option, it is a business necessity.

Andrew Buss is Service Director at Freeform Dynamics Ltd.

I have now been an iPad user for 10 months, and despite the fact that the device has been in market for a long time now, I still often get asked whether it’s any good when people spot me using one.

But answering such enquiries is something I find very difficult to do in a meaningful way. The reason is because the iPad is in some respects very flexible, but in others extremely constraining. So, whether it’s ‘any good’ depends on the perspective you take, and whether it is right for any individual will depend on your lifestyle, working patterns and, above all, preferences.

Given this, I thought it might be useful to outline my own experiences and explain where my usage of the iPad has ended up, which is not at all how I expected things to turn out.

Before getting going, it’s probably worth saying that the device I have been using, and currently use, is the original iPad – specifically the 64Gb 3G variant. I have played with an iPad 2, however, and it’s pretty clear that it’s fundamentally the same device, just slightly lighter, slightly thinner, slightly quicker and with a couple of cameras added. Everything I am about to say is therefore not going to be any different.

So what’s my experience been?

Initial expectations and immediate disappointment

When I first got the iPad, it was with business use in mind, and to be honest it was more of a research exercise than anything else – I just wanted to explore where, if at all, it might fit into my typical ‘road warrior’ type of lifestyle. In this context, I could see the potential of something highly portable, with a decent screen size, good battery life and instant-on capability. I thought it might specifically be useful for reading and composing emails, doing lightweight office work, and browsing the Web to keep up with the news. The idea was that on days when I didn’t have anything heavy to do on the road, I could leave the laptop at home.

My initial experiences were promising. The email client was good, and despite taking up almost half of the screen in landscape mode, the soft keyboard was remarkably usable if the device was set down on a flat surface (using the standard cover folded back to support the machine at the appropriate angle). An immediate disappointment, though, was a lack of proper rendering of Microsoft Office documents sent to me as email attachments. With anything but the simplest of Word files, formatting was lost and some documents were pretty much totally unreadable.

Investigating workarounds for document authoring, editing and review

I invested a lot of time and effort looking for ‘apps’ to help with the Office document compatibility issue, and while some improved the situation, none got anywhere near fixing it. I went through a period of asking people to resend Office documents in PDF format so I could read them properly on the iPad, then using various tools that support PDF mark-up for review purposes, but all this ended up creating work for not just me, but everyone else in the team I work with.

It also became pretty obvious to me that the touch screen slate format is fundamentally not suited to routine editing, review and mark-up tasks. Using your fingers to position the cursor, highlight text, cut and paste text, etc, is certainly doable (if you have the right combination of document type and app to allow it), but it’s so incredibly slow and tedious compared to using a mouse and keyboard.

I generally gave up trying do such things after a while, and on occasions when I absolutely had to review something when I didn’t have the laptop with me, I’d get the document sent in PDF, then read it on the iPad while typing comments and corrections into a separate email on the BlackBerry. I still use this technique from time to time, and assure you it is much quicker and easier than trying to mark up a document directly on the iPad. It’s also less fuss for the author when they get the output of the review back to act upon.

Definitely not a laptop or smart phone replacement

Mentioning the BlackBerry brings me back to the question of the iPad’s soft keypad. As good as it is, is still represents a compromise compared to a physical keyboard. Even today, after a lot of practice on the iPad, I can still type a lot more quickly and comfortably on my BlackBerry Bold 9700. I have also discovered that while I receive a lot email, the vast majority of the messages that really matter are actually quite short, so the larger screen of the iPad is not as much of an advantage for routine mobile email use as you might think if you already have a decent handheld device.

As a result of these factors, I gradually found myself going back to using the BlackBerry for anything to do with email while out and about, so I don’t really think of the iPad as an email device any more.

It’ll come as no surprise that I have also given up trying to use the iPad for writing, except in emergencies, for the reasons previously mentioned. I did try using a separate Bluetooth keyboard for a while, and while this made things better, I realised that I had drifted back into laptop territory, and that a proper laptop was actually a lot less fuss and a lot more comfortable and efficient.

So, the iPad has not allowed me to leave the laptop at home at all when going out and about on business, but I still do take it with me most places. Why?

Discovering the value beyond traditional use cases

Well because it really comes into its own in other ways, beyond traditional office and email type activity.

I now, for example, carry around much less paper. It used to be that I would print off reports and research slide sets before setting off for the day that I would need for discussion or illustration during meetings. While in theory you can use a laptop to talk around in a meeting context, I have always found it to be clumsy and intrusive. This is particularly true in a relatively informal setting where talking around (and potentially passing around) a sheet of paper or document is much more natural and conducive to open and free flowing conversation.

As it turns out, you can use a slate to achieve the same effect – i.e. as a direct paper replacement. I will quite often, for example, pull up a research chart on the iPad to illustrate a point I am trying to make, then hand it to the person I am speaking with so they can look at it closely. It can even be passed around for a small group to take a look. People also have no problem when you tell them to “flick backwards” or “flick forwards” to page through the document or presentation – they know what to do intuitively. Using this technique, I can also show samples of our work, whether it’s documents or something we have published online that I can pull up from the relevant web site.

With a combination of the iPad, a PDF library containing all of our current research and deliverables, and an always-connected web browser, I can metaphorically ‘create’ any piece of paper I need on the fly, even if I didn’t foresee needing it before the meeting. While sceptics might argue you could pull up the same content on a laptop, believe me when I say it is not anywhere near as effective as using a slate – indeed I can introduce material into a discussion via the iPad in situations where it would be totally unnatural or inappropriate to open my laptop. This is not a benefit I expected, by the way, I just discovered it by accident.

Web browsing and access to cloud apps

The benefit I did expect, and that the iPad has delivered on, is around web browsing. In my job, I need to stay reasonably well up to date with what’s going on in the IT industry, so I spend quite a bit of time on news sites and vendor web sites. The slate form factor is perfect for doing this comfortably, whether on the train, in a coffee shop between meetings, laying on your bed in a hotel room, or even sat on the sofa at home. I also discovered a nice cross-platform utility for caching web pages offline so you can read them later, e.g. while sat on a plane.

The lack of Flash support on the iPad is irritating, and I found it particularly noticeable when getting into more research type activity. I find watching video clips quite handy when you want a quick hit overview of someone’s view of a problem, or their high level proposition, and there is some great pre-recorded webcast material out there. A lot of useful content on IT vendor, consulting firm and publisher web sites is Flash based, however, and therefore not accessible. To be honest, though, for this kind of more proactive research, I tend to use a PC anyway, harvesting links and segments of text as I go into Office documents, so the Flash thing is arguably moot.

The one thing that’s changed considerably over the course of my iPad use is accessing some of our intranet and cloud based apps. To begin with, I had problems with some of our Microsoft stuff, but today accessing Outlook Web Access and SharePoint is not bad. The one I still have a problem with is Salesforce.com. There is no iPad app, the iPhone one is not brilliant, and Mobile Safari is still not properly supported – all of which is ironic given that Marc Benioff was waving an iPad around on stage about a year ago claiming that such devices were transforming the way customers were accessing their service. As an aside, if anyone out there has found of way of getting a decent iPad experience with Salesforce.com, I would love to hear from you.

Great for reading and personal use in general

Building on my use of the iPad for browsing news sites, etc, I have got so used to using the device for reading stuff that I take advantage of it routinely for pretty much all of the written content I consume on the road, whether it’s business or technically oriented papers, IT vendor literature, or business books or novels. There are lots of ways of reading a PDF on an iPad (I generally favour the ‘GoodReader’ app), but I have settled on the Amazon Kindle app for eBooks as this is portable across devices and syncs both content and current position in books across all registered clients (via ‘Whispersync’). In fact, I now rarely read physical books anymore, even at home on the sofa or while lying in bed. The only real limitation of the iPad in this respect is reading it in bright sunlight, so with the Summer coming, I may be looking at a dedicated Kindle device at some point for more domestic/holiday use.

Talking of entertainment, I have found that the portable video capability of the iPad has become quite an important part of my life. I tend to download TV series from iTunes so if I have an hour to kill and don’t fancy working or reading, I can pull up an episode and relax – great for train journeys home after a long day, on short haul flights, and for those dead periods you occasionally get when staying in hotel rooms. If I have a decent WiFi connection, I also use streamed content in the same way, and even do this around the home. It’s now pretty natural for me to watch BBC iPlayer content, or the BBC or Sky news channel, for example, while shaving in the bathroom, cooking in the kitchen, sitting in the back garden, or whatever.

Interestingly, I don’t tend to use the iPad much for music though. While out and about, the BlackBerry or iPod (1st gen Nano in my case) is generally more convenient with a headset (and the BlackBerry has better sound quality).

Conclusion

Standing back and reviewing all these experiences and learnings, I would sum it up by saying that the iPad is an ideal prosumer device that genuinely cuts across the business/personal divide and delivers significant value on both sides of the equation. From a business perspective, it is certainly not a laptop replacement, however – partly because the slate form factor is inherently not suited to some types of activity (e.g. authoring and reviewing), and partly because neither Apple nor Microsoft seem interested in making Microsoft Office documents properly accessible on the iPad (and there probably isn’t enough money in it for third party app vendors to move much beyond the capability they currently offer). However, the iPad is very useful as a laptop companion and paper replacement in the way I have explained.

The last point I would make is that most of the benefits and constraints I have mentioned would be common to any credible slate offering – e.g. based on Android, WebOS or Windows. The only consideration might be MS Office compatibility for business purposes (which may ultimately be better on other devices), and the role of iTunes on the personal front (which others may find difficult to match). iTunes is very convenient for managing video content, and while I am not a big game player, I would imagine that if you were into this, the sheer volume of titles available for the iPad would be a consideration.

So, is the iPad any good? I personally think so, but it really does depend what you are looking for, and other options are emerging very rapidly.

Dale Vile is research director at analyst Freeform Dynamics