Recent Trends in Tablet Access

With the increasing numbers of tablet computers and e-readers prevalent in the market today, it is difficult to believe that it’s a new technology. Research studies reveal that consumers quickly embrace tablets as they did Smartphone’s, appreciating the technology for its mobility, simplicity of use, instant access to files, books, and the internet. According to Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker that is monitored by the International Data Corporation, global tablet shipment increased by 88.9 percent sequentially and 303.8 percent annually in the second quarter of 2011 to approximately 13.6 million units.

While mobile phone usage has been increasing for years and most Americans’ cell phones became Smartphones by 2012, tablet access is now overshadowing the Smartphone numbers three times with the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption. Hence, one can say that the computing platform along with our individual lifestyles is going away from desktops and even laptops, with users depending heavily on Smartphones and tablet access devices for staying connected with others, sharing information and even doing daily business. Increasingly, the high executives and the mobile workers too are giving up the laptop for a tablet access, Bluetooth keyboard and a suite of applications to get on with the day’s work while being a part of a conference or any other event. The consumer and end user expectations are very high in terms of browsing a website for data purposes, to finish a task and make a donation or purchase. They expect a browsing experience similar to the simple and perceptive navigation that is prevalent in purchasing a book on Amazon or experience the compact visual experience in a social networking site like Twitter or Facebook. On the other hand 16 percent of enterprises had a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy in 2011 as compared to 8 percent in 2010. The modern day employees want tablet access and most forward thinking enterprises are resorting to tablets for the workforce quickly.

Secure Tablet Access for Enterprise Desktop Applications

The security and the absence of native mobile applications for business are two critical hassles in the way of enterprise mobility. Though the native applications for businesses are rising in quantity, the majority of applications still operate in a conventional environment for instance laptops, desktops, terminal servers and virtual architecture. Today service providers of application delivery controllers have come up with tablet access solutions that help to mobilize the desktop applications with a remote RDP access (remote desktop) allowing companies and individuals to implement the solutions and leverage from the present infrastructure.

Advanced tablet access solutions publish the enterprise applications in a secure manner for it to be used on mobile devices. Regardless of whether your applications are functioning on desktop PC’s, virtual architectures, laptops or terminal servers these solutions offer identity-based access from any mobile device to certain enterprise application in a way that simplifies the user experience, enhances the security and functional efficiency.

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Server Load Balancing

Improve Security and Enhance Operational Efficiency with Tablet Access Solutions

Thanks to the consumerization of IT, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a concept that is getting popular these days. Since today technology progresses from customers to organizations, more and more employees want to work with mobile devices that they are comfortable with. BYOD is here to stay and is not a passing trend as it is believed to be. As per Juniper research, the number of mobile devices used in the enterprises worldwide will increase and may be it will be more than double at the end of the year 2014. According to them, the number will reach up to an approximate 350 million in the year 2017.

Many organizations are in support of Bring Your Own Device as it benefits them primarily in two ways. On one hand it helps to increase the satisfaction level of the employees while on the other hand, it helps to reduce the IT equipment acquisition costs considerably. According to Gartner, by 2014 approximately 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.

Today Smartphones and tablets are in huge demand among the employees and therefore there is the need for Smartphone and tablet access solutions to securely publish enterprise applications for use on mobile devices. It enables identity-based access from any mobile device to specific enterprise applications in a manner that streamlines the user experience while improving security and enhancing operational efficiency.

Security is an important factor that makes organizations hesitant in embracing the concept of BYOD wholeheartedly. However, with the new generation tablet access solutions, enterprises can ensure security and protection as these solutions guard against attack and data leakage by leveraging a reverse proxy architecture that keeps mobile devices off the network. Here is a look at some of the features of a best of breed tablet access solution.

* Mobilize any application

The solution enables tablet access enterprise-wide, without the need for additional hardware, software or application licenses.

* Eliminate Data Leakage

Proxy architecture and RDP over SSL helps to prevent the tablets from connecting directly to the corporate network. Since the tablets are kept "off-network", it not only maintains the security and compliance of office resources but also eliminates the potential for attack. Thus, the data never leaves the corporate network, never exists on tablets and never mixes with personal data thereby fully eliminating the potential for data leakage.

* Reduce Complexity

It reduces complexity by being an ideal complement to existing native mobile app solutions and supports any mix physical or virtual desktops and applications. This helps to maximize existing infrastructure, minimize the need for additional hardware and software and expand investments in native mobile apps and virtualization in an intelligent and cost-effective manner.

Thus with a good tablet access solution, enterprises can embrace BYOD securely and efficiently.

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DesktopDirect Mobilize Your Business

Array Networks is a global provider of networking solutions that improve application performance, availability and security. Our solutions connect users and applications – providing access for any user, anywhere, on any device to applications, desktops and services in the data center or the cloud.

Mobile devices and mobile working are driving major changes in the enterprise. More users must be able to work from anywhere and more users want to use tablets and smart phones as business productivity tools. The challenge for businesses lies in finding an approach that provides full application availability from remote devices, tablets and smart phones, while making sure that sensitive data never leaves the corporate network.

Desktop Direct addresses challenges faced by enterprise organizations in the areas of tablet access, remote access, productivity and business continuity. Desktop Direct is an on-premises remote desktop solution, capable of extending physical and virtual office desktops to any user on any device anywhere. Moreover, Desktop Direct is fully secure and delivers unmatched ROI as compared to alternative remote and mobile access solutions.

Tablet Access & Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Zero data leakage because “data never leaves the network”
• Access to physical and virtual office desktops from iPhone, iPad and Android devices for full application availability
• Enable BYOD that provides freedom of choice in a secure manner while minimizing the cost of mobile device management (MDM)

 Reduce the Cost, Complexity & Risk of VPNs
• The expense of VPN hardware and licenses, laptops, security software, bandwidth and training does not scale cost-effectively
• Every laptop with sensitive data is a security risk and every VPN connection creates an attack vector to the corporate network
• DesktopDirect is not a VPN; it is a fully secure and cost-effective remote desktop solution that is a better choice for many users 

 Increase Worker Productivity Enterprise-Wide
• Securely and cost effectively enable the majority of office workers to be productive before and after work and on weekends
• Guard against productivity and revenue losses caused by unanticipated occurrences such as a sick child, deliveries, repairs and car trouble
• Address the need for next-gen remote and mobile access from a common platform 

 Mitigate the Impact of Business Disruptions
• Scales to support thousands of concurrent users on a single system with zero IT intervention
• Ensures compliance is maintained during business continuity events and provides a seamless experience for first-time business continuity users
• Contingency license certificates cost-effectively address burst business continuity usage 

 Conclusion
Array’s DesktopDirect™ remote desktop solutions are transforming the way businesses think about remote and mobile access by rapidly and cost-effectively enabling full application availability to any device anywhere without the risk of data leakage. 

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Managing Risks with Business Continuity Planning

Every business enterprise is created with the sole aim of gaining profits from the business. However, this legal entity is a risky affair and is prone to disruptions. Business disruptions can come in from various sources including natural ones. In the technology driven world today with radical environmental changes, the risk to the continuity of business is even more. The unplanned events may leave lasting impressions on both small and medium enterprises as well as global organizations. The brave heart entrepreneur and business enterprise thus needs to be always prepared to face the disruptions and keeps options ready to ensure business continuity come what may.

Today, as part of   smart business operations, enterprises opt to have in place strategies for business continuity as part of operations management.  The business continuity planning (BCP) is meant to identify an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and prepare the assets to provide effective prevention and recovery mechanism for the organization, while maintaining a competitive advantage. Wikipedia defines the business continuity plan as a road map for continuing operations under adverse conditions irrespective of this being natural or man-made.

For enterprise that are totally technology dependent any small system errors and bug in the complex programs can bring their entire business to a standstill.  Thus the business continuity strategy works to provide a framework for resilience building and tends to protect the interest of key stakeholders. Traditionally what the business continuity plans looked at is methods to protect the business in face of physical damages to equipment, products and disruption of services. However, with the globalized business world so driven by technology, even the absence of the key staff can cause equivalent effects on the business.

Today the business continuity planning strategies should be one that would help global enterprises face emergency situations without loss of productivity and profit. The technological innovations have paved way for new age enterprises to provide remote desktop  access to their distantly located employees and key personnel. Such remote access solution is best if it can facilitate enterprises with:
 

• Anytime, anywhere access for employees to familiar workstation  and business critical resources

• Real-time and secure access gateways to the corporate network and critical data  for the partners and vendors

• Performance consistency for the entire workforce

• Automated VPN provisioning

• Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

Enterprises make use of remote access and BYOD solutions to increases the mobility of the workforce and ensure business continuity. But along with the increased mobility they also need to cater for cost-efficient performance of the corporate network infrastructure. Load balancers play a major role in disseminating process requests of the workforce across the wide networks irrespective of the device and location.  The modern day innovative load balancers help enterprises to leverage on the multi-core processing and ensure a scalable business continuity planning through cost-efficient performance. 

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Tablet Access

Optimize Data Transfer Efficiency with WAN Optimization Controllers

WAN Optimization Controllers are appliances that optimize data-transfer efficiencies across a wide area network (WAN). It is a collection of techniques that optimize bandwidth to improve the end user's experience. WAN optimization controllers use a combination of techniques such as compression, latency optimization, forward error correction, caching / proxy, deduplication, traffic shaping, application acceleration, network acceleration equalizing, protocol spoofing, connection limits, simple rate limits to accelerate applications and reduce the cost of delivering applications over wide area networks.

Normally enterprise users experience great performance when using applications and services over a LAN. However, they face problems when accessing remotely the same applications and services over the WAN. Accessing applications across a WAN introduces network congestion, latency, and packet loss that can dramatically slow remote end user response time. Many IT organizations increase their spending by adding more network bandwidth to address these issues, only to find that poor application response time over the WAN has not changed. Moreover, with the addition of Virtualization, many enterprises are consolidating servers into corporate data centers. However, the consolidation of applications out of the branches and into the data center puts even more strain on the corporate WAN. In some cases, this degrades end user response time even further. That is where WAN or network optimization appliances come useful. The following are some of the benefits of using the best of breed WAN optimization controllers.

* Reduces remote application response times by up to 95%

* Reduces network bandwidth utilization by up to 95%

* Purpose-built to reduce the impact of network congestion, latency and packet loss which combine to dramatically slow end-user response times

* Application-specific WAN optimization blueprints and specific protocol optimization eliminates redundant, chatty protocol traffic

* Stream-based differencing avoids transmission of content already in the local data store, while compression techniques reduce the amount of data on the wire

* Window resizing, persistent connections and small packet aggregation dramatically improve overall TCP performance

* Supports 50% more accelerated connections as compared to alternative appliances

* Virtual appliances use minimal system resources, can reside with other applications and scale linearly with the addition of CPU cores, memory and disks

* Enables easier management of virtual and physical deployment, transparent addressing, statistical performance dashboard and auto discovery

* Provides centralized provisioning and management through integration with Virtualization management systems

Thus by deploying WAN optimization controllers, enterprises can ensure a premium application experience for all users and achieve rapid ROI by lowering overall bandwidth costs.

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Load Balancers for the New Age Corporate Environment

The business world today makes use of every available technology to withstand the aggressive competition prevalent in the environment.  With the growth in the use of various applications, across corporate environment, the IT departments have explored the possibilities of using dedicated servers. These are computer systems which are part of the corporate network and are kept apart for specific jobs so as to fasten the access and processing time. However, with the increasing demands on the part of the customers and business, every application adds up to more loading of the servers.

As technology moved ahead to provide the globalized business world anytime anywhere access to the corporate network through BYOD options, the possibility of the servers being overloaded only increased.  Such overloading of the servers would lead to  network getting clogged leading to reduced  speed in  performing the functions with a reduced access rate to the entire systems in the network.  This calls for the need of load balancers with a specific significance for busy Internet services wherein a software program helps tracking the clients access services and forwards requests to the "back-end" servers thus enhancing the performance of the website.

Wikipedia defines load balancing as "a computer networking methodology that distributes workload across multiple computers or computer clusters, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. This increases the performance of servers and  leads to optimal utilization while  ensuring  that no particular server is burdened. Corporate networks of global enterprises, with vast data and application storage and data transfer activity,  small and medium business enterprises  and e-commerce websites resort to  load balancers.

In an era of technological innovation with remote desktop access available to increase the mobility of the workforce,  load balancers are an important element in a network and helps in evenly disseminating service or processing requests across numerous devices within the  network. Dedicated hardware, software and servers carry on these functions.

Depending on the factors such as speed of the network and server response time, load balancers requires work distribution between two or more dedicated servers. The new age load balancing solutions offered by leading service providers helps organizations leverage on the parallel multi-core processing with cost-efficient performance. Further these appliances offer the client organization a number of advantages which include :

• Aids in global and local server load balancing with  datacenter scalability.
• Facilitates swift implementation of optimized arrangements with application specific configurations and certifications guidelines
• Provides a  high-end application compatible  traffic management while catering for optimized delivery IP services and crucial business applications
• Safeguards applications without influencing performance with the help of firewalls and proxy designs.

The new age server load balancing appliances  which are designed for the modern data center, cloud and virtual environments help to boost application performance for both small and medium enterprises as well as large service providers.

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Tablet Access

Ensure Complete Secure Remote Access with SSL VPN Solutions

Quickly gaining popularity as serious contenders in the remote-access marketplace Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Networks are driving corporate success and increasing employee productivity and remote connectivity. As a remote access tool, it provides remote workers with a secure access to enterprise resources via the Internet by encrypting all communications between company networks and remote user machines. As VPN is the easiest place malicious attackers to get into a network, it is therefore important to have an effective VPN security policy to protect your company's critical technology assets.

Prior SSL VPN, remote desktop access needed administrators to install, configures, and maintains special software on the users’ computers. With VPNs being expensive and complicated to operate, remote access was only offered to a few corporate employees earlier. With SSL VPN all the limitations and concerns of remote access were done away. Offering security and control with unmatched safeguards for taking care of business-critical information, SSL VPN allows any computer with a Web browser to be used for remote access, with the SSL VPN technology

How it works

The next generation of VPN service, SSL VPN (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network) is available primarily for system administrators. SSL VPN functions to a great extent like traditional VPN, but adds additional connectivity and compatibility, utilizing the same encryption technology used by web sites to protect sensitive information. SSL VPN transmits data through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN concentrator, giving the appearance that the user is on the local network, regardless of the user's actual location. With integrated compression, connection pooling and hardware-accelerated encryption, there is fast performance for each user, even under the heaviest load.

Secure Remote Access

A secure RDP remote access VPN extends the perimeter of your network to the remote endpoints. An SSL VPN has been an entry point for security threats to enter the network. The ubiquity, versatility, and clientless nature of the SSL VPN provide significant business benefits and cost savings. With VPN or virtual private networking, there is a safe way for mobile workers to connect to the company's local area network to access their essential resources.

SSL VPN provides secure, protected access to resources, and ensures that the only traffic that goes through the encrypted tunnel is traffic that is approved by system administrators. The SSL VPN technology facilitates easy migration and makes it easier to deploy remote access solution than IPSec. Its balance of flexibility and function makes it exceedingly competitive.

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Tablet Access 

Tablet Access to Business Applications For Better Productivity

With their potential to provide immediate access to applications, tablets are making significant inroads in the enterprise. Besides being a winner in the consumer market, they have the capacity to provide access to information in a number of business situations. Businesses can undoubtedly gain a competitive advantage by mitigating business disruptions, completing work on time, making better decisions more often and strengthening customer loyalty, by providing remote access for all employees. These days many workers want tablet access to business applications, often from personal devices. With a good appliance solution it is possible to provide Remote Desktop access that will make employees more productive and generative. With effective remote desktop access there is no necessity to stay put at your workstation to complete your work.

As tablets and remote devices are “off-network”, security and compliance policies on office PCs are extended and maintained. Data never leaves the network, never mixes with personal data and never exists on remote devices. Selecting the right approach to providing tablet access may not be an either or proposition, but might, in fact, include a mix of the approaches. Tablet remote desktop connectivity from an efficient solution to end-user iPad and Android devices should be encrypted using SSL. Choose an application based solution that can enable workers to access physical and virtual office desktops from any remote location whether they are at their home office, a customer or partner site or on an iPhone, iPad or Android Remote Desktop. It must uniquely leverage proven and scalable technologies to deliver the industry’s most secure enterprise-class solution for remote desktop access and control.

In a tablet access environment, the solution must be installed in the corporate network and integrate with Active Directory or similar to establish user credentials for secure access. As an enterprise organization can have several applications, the security and cost implications of mobilizing every application can be quite formidable. The time and expense of developing native applications or deploying server-based computing is huge, which is why it is important to zero in on a solution that is highly cost-effective. It should be as little a few hours and be capable of achieving ROI in the time it takes to set up alternate solutions.

With the right solution, tablet access to business applications can be made more secure. An efficient solution has the ability to ensure remote access for productivity and business continuity, allowing users to log into their office desktops from any remote device, anywhere.

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