Backup Bet II

In continuation of the last month's post on the Backup Bet, where there is a gap in small and medium business segment for data protection, this month we will see some interesting info on why many don't use data protection or don't think about data protection.
There is an interesting discussion in Slashdot about why people don't use data protection

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/04/2154227/Vendors-Say-Data-Protection-Software-Too-Complicated-To-Use

<Snip>
"With a series of major data breaches over the past few months, you'd think more and more companies would be investing in data protection software, which can help keep data secure even on systems that have been compromised. Unfortunately, even organizations that have paid good money for this software often don't use it, because, as one of the vendors admits, it's often too complicated to use."
</Snip> 


http://www.itworld.com/data-protectionrecovery/161959/apps-stop-data-breaches-are-too-complicated-use

This complication issues is what we spoke about in the first article, we need to get innovations about making this more intuitive and easier. It need not be a software innovation, since there are lots of good backup vendors, but there needs to be process innovation or service innovation that makes data protection being adopted across segments.

Recent news about Google losing gmail users data, a snip courtesy CNET News.

<snip>
Treynor explained that, even though Google keeps multiple copies of the data in multiple data centers, sometimes "software bugs can affect several copies of the data." As a safety measure, the company backs up data on offline tapes, which makes restoring the data more time consuming than transferring requests between data centers, Treynor said.
</snip>

 Many organizations use tape backups and send it offline, this makes restore time consuming and lot of manual resource is needed. We need online backup technologies that replaces tapes and get the data, may be from cloud!!!

Nanny Robot

It is really a joy to have an addition to one's family especially a new born. Working mom's though take off from work for few months to take care of the baby, it gets them to a point where they feel that they are getting more lazy and missing on the outside world.

 It becomes more difficult when the mom cannot even leave the baby for a while and do some home work or prepare food or take bath, since you don't know when the baby will cry and may be even start moving to unsafe location. With a new born/toddler who starts to move, every location in your house feels unsafe and you need constant monitoring.

Japan, China and may be many other countries have been researching and have working products of Robot Nannies that take care of the baby and one can monitor the robot and the baby via their video phone or laptop.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3343667/Robot-nannies-threat-to-child-care.html

http://dvice.com/archives/2010/04/family-nanny-ro.php

 But is it necessary to solely depend on the robot nanny? Doesn't this break the bonding of baby with the parents? Doesn't the baby start thinking the robot as a human and change the mental state?

 With advancing technologies and organizations allowing employees to work from home, wouldn't it be great to have a robot nanny, that can just take care of the baby in your control area, while you are working and doing some other work. This enables the parent to have care for the baby as well as monitor the robot, thus have a greater bonding with the baby and have a very good robot friend for the baby.

 Babies should be made to think that these robots are like their daily playing toys which help them while the parents are little away from them (not visually/ but physically). These robot nannies can feed the baby, make baby to sleep or even bath the baby while in the presence of the mom or the dad. This makes the parents feel they are with the baby and also get to work and do other things.

 May be we want the robot to carry the baby things while we carry the baby during a walk or outing and not the other-way round as the robot nannies are getting developed.

Backup Bet

Organizations having critical data have a backup plan to ensure that they get data back at any time they need. Many have backup policy to backup to a local tape library and store it in a vault or some safe place to ensure that they have access to the critical data when there is disaster.


This kind of strategy needs both man power and infrastructure, which inturn costs more to the organization. This discipline is followed in organizations which can afford such a cost. There are lot of organizations who have critical data but could not afford such an infrastructure, this is the place were cloud based backup emerged.

 But this again has its own cost of subscription and support for the kind of environment the organization is might be limited. This also needs a discipline to be followed on having the data organized and setup for backup.

Now there is a new trend of software is emerging, where the vendor himself helps the customer to  perform the initial setup personally. Other vendors send a hard disk via mail and ask the customer to connect, so there is auto backup of the first set of data(which in general huge and reason for downtime). The customer mails back the HDD and the backup schedule is setup. This helps the customer to cut-short on the downtime and it is more automated. Some do a combination, where they get the initial data in a HDD and also setup the backup folders for the customer as per the customer's need, so that the customer need not even touch the software CD.

Customer service is going heights now-a-days due to huge competition and also to tap the market where there is a need for customer, but the customer does not have time/resource to do it.

There is a World Backup Day being celebrated (on 31 March) every year to create awareness about the importance of backup.
http://www.worldbackupday.net/

There are many small business organizations that do not worry about backup, mainly due to resource constraints and are actually unaware that there can be a catastrophe and data can vanish. These segment of people need protection and there are few who concentrate on such organizations.

Also consider people like me, who just has a laptop and never bothered to backup, thinking my flash drive will save me or my hard disk will never fail. I would like to have a daily backup of my laptop and desktop, but do not have time and infrastructure to perform a tape backup (time/resource constraint). Even though I am online most of the time (internet is getting cheaper day by day and we get unlimited for few $10 or less) I just bet on my luck that nothing happens.

If I have something like an online backup being done while I type this and know that I can access my data via web whenever I want and however I want, wouldn't it be cool. I can spend another couple of $10 for such a solution every month and have my data safe, rather than being lazy.

There are solutions like
SpiderOak, BackBlaze, CrashPlan etc, lets hope more such solutions come to various regions and share the market.

Days are not far away for such facilities, are there any such customer centric ones?

A recent poll by Slashdot

Touch Pad and Phone

The way touch pads are competing is getting crazier, Apple always know how to get people attracted and make competition look like dust.

http://mashable.com/2011/03/04/samsung-galaxy-tab-pricing/

Going forward I expect Apple to create an iPad 3 version(or whatever it might be), which when folded is an iPhone, since iPad2 is so thin, that when folder will be as good as an iPhone size and more usable as a phone and a pad (when open).

 With the dual display concept getting more relevance, this is not far away. Also the display is getting thinner while the clarity exponentially increases with better technologies.


http://www.unidym.com/press/pr_101208.html

 Carbon Nano tubes and the flexible glass technology will make display a reality in near future, where the mirror we use, the glass gas top, etc can be displays.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38


  It might go to an extent where our wall will be painted with a display to watch our Television, so no need to bother about buying a television and debate about the size with family (at least in INDIA the price increases drastically with size).

With these advancements in display technology a foldable touch pad is reality, may be even a foldable gadget that can be used as a phone, pad & a projector, making collaboration much simpler and easier.

It is more like during my college days where I used to take a single rollable note for all the subjects, made life more easier, compact and I get to travel light.

P.S. I am not an Apple supporter, these are just my views.

Making sense of stored data

Organizations have been generating data for years now and don't have enough space to store. Space optimization is one area where some create solutions, while the others create bigger and larger storage in terms of hardware and a better file system to handle this hardware in terms of software.
Data Mining is an area which is getting hotter, since new gen customers want to make sense of data that is being generated. We would have studied that Walmart uses its sales data to find the right place to position a commodity (for eg: Placing Shaving kits near Jam/Ketchup bottles), thus increasing sales of certain commodity based on consumer actions.
This leads to structuring the un-structured data as the first step, while the real usable/valuable information comes out of this structure when it is mined.

Future data collaboration

Collaboration is no more File/Folder Sharing, it is more information sharing. If I can share a industrial drawing as a drawing and not as a file, it is collaboration. File as a medium has to move out and contextual object should become the medium.Twitter changed the mail as a medium for sharing message to the message itself as a medium.

Found one supporting link to my view
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/35077/?mod=related

Today everyone thinks collaboration is done if I have a tool like teaming (in general teaming,not related to Novell Teaming) or a software to share files seamlessly with others. Those are just tools and these tools existing even before collaboration became a hot topic by itself. Today we are just enhancing the existing IM/Mail/traditional file share/wiki/blog to makes things more automated and integrated. Having a team space in a teaming site is not going to solve the collaboration problem or having a video conference is not a solution. Every organization does this kind of software, thinking that is the future. Agreed that those tools eases certain manual process. Is a meeting via teaming site as effective and productive as a meet-room one? Why do still me prefer a meetroom to discuss stuff, is it privacy? Why do we still have conferences held by various organizations and people travel?
Face-time is more valuable than an online meeting. We need tools to aid the collaboration and not be the way to collaborate.

In past and current present everyone end up creating an appointment, selecting a meeting place, send across documents via mail/appt, wait in the meeting room till everyone turns up. If not, call them and remind them to come to meeting once the meeting is started. People might state that the attachment was too big and mail was not received. People might have made updates to the presentations, attached documents post the appt was sent and may more issues.

Today with teaming, the originator has to create the teaming site, invite people, upload files etc. The members invited might have to get used to teaming site, be online or subscribe to feeds, download files, update and upload etc. New tools have to be learnt. Teaming site doesn't provide any face time, whoever is online gets information that is updated or can update. And today team changes, people work on various assignments, assignments changes, within team the team structure changes, there are dynamic teams. Lets take BBC, it has journalists who travel every day to collect news and have to interact with sub-teams in each place/city they travel to. Forming a single teaming site or multiple teaming site/workspaces do not work on dynamic nature. Change will always be there - forever.

Tomorrow, For example, Kalis wants to call for a meeting @9am, the only thing Kalis has to do is to use his smart phone, select the list of people who needs to know about the meeting and just select "MEET". The collaborator system should automatically generate calender events for the people (no email tool here) in their smart phone, set reminders, send SMS, select a place to meet and book that place. Selecting a place is interesting, as the place selection in real-world should a place where the people are more comfortable meeting or a place where most people could reach in time.
I If the meeting is in between a set of team members and a set of partner team members, then the place will be a common official recommended location (for ex: a common board room)f Kalis selects a set of his friends for meeting, the system should ideally select a place like a restaurant and book a table, while if it is a set of team members, then it should book a meeting room which is available at that time in the office. Basically the idea is to auto select a place where the meeting will run comfortabily.
If the meeting requires certain data to be available for the members, then it should automatically generate a share area and give exclusive access to those people. Here Kalis doesn't need to create a teaming site and invite people, upload files etc. The meeting just happens in the designated place. The common data area is editiable and everyone gets the latest data before and after the meeting.
If members have back to back meetings, then the collaborator should select a place where everyone could reach in equal time and may be delay the meeting time by few minutes, like 9:03 or 9:05 based on the distance of the next meeting destination and the current one.
The place selection becomes more interesting if a sub-set of members are not in the same place. Here based on the GPS location of the members, the collaborator should either decide to start a video conferencing (real-time) to the meeting room or to the smart phone of other sub-set itself (now-a-days smart phone come with a camera on the screen side).

Day-after, if the user is not available at the meeting place, then provide an optical illusion of the person. The person might be driving, but is still present in the meeting room explaining stuff (better to pull-over, if driving - hah, day-after we have computer controlled driving, so no need to pull-over).

Collaborator(if I have to call one) is an fuzzy service that makes decisions leveraging various available technologies. Here messaging, calender events, reminders, conferencing, data sharing are just tools which aid the collaboration and they are not collaboration by themselves.

This might be totally funny or wierd as of today...