Making the Rounds at Interop NY

We are here at Interop New York at booth #831, so feel free to drop by and say hello to the NCP engineering team — including many familiar faces and names from VPN Haus. Not only will you be able to see some cool product demos, but also, we’d be curious to know your thoughts on the show’s presentations, expos and keynote addresses.

The tracks at this year’s show deal with some of the most pressing issues of wireless & mobile and security and risk.  For instance, yesterday there was a session on BYOD essentials to give attendees an overview on how to construct effective BYOD policies, especially as organizational information finds its way to user handsets and other non-enterprise-owned devices. Today there’s a session on Information Risk Management and Security that looks at emerging threats to organizations from both a business and technological perspective.

A common theme throughout this year’s show is ending the cycle of IT being the “break-fix” department. Also, Google’s CIO Ben Fried took the stage to push IT managers to empower users with the right IT equipment they need to do their jobs well.  Implied in his address was the issue of teleworking, as Fried referenced that he’d prefer his employees to use the corporate laptop over their personal computers, even when working home. While inspiring, we can’t help but mention that in order to strike a balance between efficiency and security, companies will need to prioritize their security software alongside updated productivity hardware and software, especially in this mobile world.

For those of you not on the ground with us, continue to check in with here and on Twitter for more updates!

Interop 2011: Video Interview with Melih Abdulhayoglu, Comodo president & CEO

At Interop Las Vegas, we sat down with Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO and Chief Security Architect of Comodo.  We talked to Abdulhayoglu about the impact the cloud is having on SSL certificates, the emergence of Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates — and the limitations of padlock SSL technology.

Interop 2011: Video Interview with Joanie Wexler

At the show, we had the chance to speak to Joanie Wexler, a regular contributor to Network World’s Wireless Alert column. We talked to Joanie about mobile device management issues that are emerging at this year’s show, including the confusion surrounding the influx of diverse mobile devices into the enterprise.

Interop 2011: Q&A with Verizon’s Managed Mobility Principal, Cliff Cibelli

We’re here in Las Vegas, taking in the spectacle of Interop‘s 25th anniversary show. With more than 350 exhibitors and roughly 14,000 attendees — this year’s show is a dizzying array of product announcements, demos, and industry chatter. We had the opportunity to have a poolside chat with Cliff Cibelli, Managed Mobility Principal, at Verizon about the role that VPNs are playing in Verizon’s initiative. At the show, Verizon also announced an expanded agreement with SAP to jointly market Verizon’s Managed Mobility Platform.

VPN Haus: What role has “Bring Your Own Device” policies and the overall trend of personal devices becoming corporate-liable played in Verizon’s Managed Mobility Initiative?

Cibelli: If you take a look at almost any enterprise – or any CIO that I’ve spoken to — they all want to take a look at a “Bring Your Own Device” policy, because it doesn’t make sense for them to pay $70/month to a carry a device – especially because [employees now] probably carry a personal device that is extremely more powerful. If I’m going to spend the money to develop productivity-enhancing applications, I want to do it on a device that’s more sexy and attractive, like an iPad or a Zune tablet. That’s what Managed Mobility is about – taking those devices enhancing them and putting applications on them to give users access to their information, regardless of where it sits. It’s taking that big pile of data that might be sitting in a SAP infrastructure and turning it into actionable information that a sales rep can use.

VPN Haus: How are you approaching VPN for this?

Cibelli: So we take this from an enterprise perspective and look at the technologies that they want to adopt. Then, we look into how we can configure that client based on the enterprise’s wish and put it on the device.

VPN Haus: What trends are you seeing in VPN technology?

Cibelli: Over time, we’re seeing the trends in VPN technology becoming more prevalent on these devices, especially because most of these devices have both 3G and the coming 4G capabilities, as well as Wi-Fi capabilities. This means looking into tools that allow session persistency and maintaining that session on that backend as you may move from a 3G or 4G connection into a Wi-Fi type connection…And certainly, 5 GB of 4G access may be great. But if you consider the personal aspects of these devices, if I can quickly download a movie, I can eat up that data really quickly. So the ability to start taking a look at developing clients that can actually do that, in conjunction with VPN technologies to gain access to that corporate information across different spectrums of bandwidth, is increasingly important.

Live Blogging from Interop Next Week

Next week, VPN Haus will blogging live from Interop Las Vegas. As most of you know, Interop is one of the leading business technology events and covers a range of topics from virtualization and networking to cloud computing. We’ll be posting updates about what we’re hearing at the show, in addition to some rapid-fire video Q&As. Stay tuned for more…