Press release: DCC and Targus deliver a new range of products to protect the iPad
6 October 2011
The era of mobility is upon us and technology is spawning more and more devices that keep us connected, working and entertained while on the move.
An example is the current tablet PC 'boom' that is taking the world by storm. One such brand that is making its mark is the Apple iPad. Before users got used to the iPad 1, the iPad 2 had been launched and we are expecting the next iteration in April 2012.
For these enthusiasts, there is nothing more frustrating than having to contend with scratches on their iPad. Many users have realised the necessity to protect this ever important asset - whether using their iPad for e-mailing, watching movies or browsing the Internet - but are overwhelmed with the choice of accessories, skins, sleeves, cases, covers and brands best suited for their iPad.
"The Targus range of products offer protection for ease, as we see many people identify their iPad as an investment and an everyday tool," says Heinrich Pretorius, Targus Product Specialist at distributors Drive Control Corporation (DCC). "Protecting your iPad is vital as it gives your iPad a longer lifespan, so whether you purchase a case, sleeve or slipcase, the Targus range will suit your lifestyle. The skin is so unobtrusive, that you could even slip it into your laptop case for added protection."
The Targus brand is synonymous with simple and stylish, yet functional products.DCC stocks a range of products specifically designed for the Apple iPad.These include the Targus Vuscape Protective Cover and Stand, Targus Z-Case, Targus Screen Protector and finally the Targus A7 Sleeve.
Targus Vuscape Protective Cover and Stand
The Targus Vuscape Protective Cover and Stand is an ultra-thin and lightweight case with the added benefit of multi-viewing. This allows you to view the iPad at three angles, with the lowest angle giving you the ideal space to type. The Vuscape is designed in the similar mould of a portfolio case, which makes portability a breeze.The exterior of the case is a hard shell providing sturdy protection, while the interior is made from soft 'suede' protecting your iPad from scratches. The Vuscape simply flips open and props up, so it allows you instant access to your iPad - always ready and operational.
Targus Z-case
The Targus Z-case is made with one thought, simplicity.The Z-case is easy to use and offers the touch of regal. The Z-case exterior is similar to that of the Vuscape and is made from a hard shell for protection.It also features a plush scratch resistant interior to protect the iPad screen from nicks and scratches. A secure magnetic strip is used to open and close the Z-case. Simply open the two-phased cover and zoom onto the web, knowing that your iPad is protected.
Targus Screen Protector The Targus Screen Protector not only protects your iPad from scratches, but also reduces the amount of fingerprints or smudges that appear on your screen. This clear plastic layer was designed with a specifically formulated adhesive, which leaves no residue and takes nothing away from your iPad.It simply offers better visibility of the screen.No solution is required to apply the Screen Protector, leaving you free of bubbles when placing the protection on your iPad.
Targus A7 Sleeve
The Targus A7 Sleeve is the quirky yet serious design of the Targus range.
The A7 protects your iPad not only from scratches and dust, but is also weather resistant, come rain or snow. The A7 is made from state of the art material, using a tri-cell cushion system; the exterior is made from neoprene which offers durability while the interior is heavily padded offering shock resistance and is quilted, providing ventilation.
Says Magdalena Britz (Max), National Sales and Development Manager at CSD Targus Distribution: "Targus develops products that are reputable globally, whereby quality and warranty are CSD Targus Distribution's priority.
Fulfilling the end users' requirement and product satisfaction in getting their money's worth is key for us, for it has become a business necessity tool, rather than a nice to have and the range for iPads is no different.
The product is developed to ensure maximum protection and enhances the user experience.Although the products are unique and feature a variety of designs, they offer one distinct feature and that is to ensure that your iPad is protected at all times."
New WD TV Live Delivers Premium Entertainment Experience with Quality Internet Services and Personal Videos, Photos and Music Streaming Wirelessly to your TV
07 October 2011
Western Digital, the world’s leader in external storage solutions and maker of the popular WD TV media player family, today introduced the next generation of its WD TV Live streaming media player, an easy to use Wi-Fi enabled media player. The new streaming media player easily connects to the Internet wirelessly or through an Ethernet connection, with the high performance 802.11n wireless connectivity supporting even the most demanding high definition video applications.
WD TV Live features WD’s newest intuitive user interface that delivers quality Internet content from video services to Internet radio and social networking from companies like YouTube, Facebook, Picassa Web Albums and TuneIn Radio, directly to your TV in Full-HD 1080p resolution. WD TV Live also includes Fun Spot Games, a casual gaming service that offers everything from arcade and card games to puzzles, strategy and quizzes, including Sudoku, Black Jack and Poker. Adding to the WD TV family’s current content offerings, WD TV Live will now include the Dailymotion video service. The new service offers quality video content from users, independent content creators and premium partners, including high-quality and HD video.
In addition to premium Internet content, WD TV Live allows users to enjoy personal media such as photos, video and music on their home entertainment systems by supporting a wide range of file formats for streaming content from any connected USB drive like the WD My Passportand My Book product families, digital camcorder or camera, network drive such as the My Book Live personal cloud storage, and any networked PC or Mac computer in the home.
“WD is committed to providing our customers with a premium entertainment experience that includes seamless streaming of personal media and the best of the Internet directly to the highest quality screen and sound system in the home,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager for WD’s Branded Products and Consumer Electronics groups. “By marrying advanced features of the new wireless WD TV Live with quality content from service providers, we are excited to deliver on that commitment.”
Availability
The new WD TV Live streaming media player can be purchased at select retailers worldwide and online at wdstore.com
About WD
WD, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company designs and produces reliable, high-performance hard drives and solid state drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. Its advanced technologies are configured into applications for client and enterprise computing, embedded systems and consumer electronics, as well as its own consumer storage and home entertainment products.
WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital® and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.
Leading Microsoft Exchange Server resource site, MSExchange.org, announced today that Metalogix Archive Manager was selected the winner in the Email Archiving category of the MSExchange.org Readers’ Choice Awards.
“Our Reader’s Choice Awards give visitors to our site the opportunity to vote for the products they view as the very best in their respective category,” says Sean Buttigieg, MSExchange.org manager. “MSExchange.org users are specialists in their field who encounter various solutions for Exchange Server at the workplace. Their vote serves as a solid peer-to-peer recommendation of the winning product.”
MSExchange.org conducts regular polls to discover which product is preferred by Exchange administrators in a particular category of third party solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server. The awards draw a huge response per category and are based entirely on the visitors’ votes. MSExchange.org users can submit their votes for the current Readers' Award poll in the site’s left-hand bar.
“We are ecstatic to receive this peer-nominated award from MSExchange.org for Metalogix Archive Manager,” says Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix. “This honour is further validation from our peers and over 5000 customers worldwide that realize the benefits of our comprehensive content lifecycle management solutions for SharePoint, Exchange and legacy content.”
Says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa, a specialist in Archive, Migration and Messaging services, “This accolade reinforces our commitment to the South African market by partnering with a Tier 1 brand that has gained market recognition with the people that actually use the product on a regular basis, rather than salesmen and analysts.Having Metalogix as a technology partner has provided us with the confidence to assist our customers with their archiving and migration requirements, saving them time and money and simplifying the process.”
About Metalogix Archive Manager
Archive Manager provides comprehensive management, storage optimization, eDiscovery and retention features for SharePoint, Exchange and files.
Archive Manager - Exchange Edition (formerly named Professional Archive Manager for Exchange) is a multi-award-winning email archiving software solution used to reduce email storage costs by up to 80 percent and reduce backup and recovery times by 50 percent. Exchange Admins get the job done faster and with minimum disruption of staff time and priorities. Archive Manager has successfully archived billions of emails and has made thousands of customers happy by simplifying their jobs.
2007/2003/2000 resource site. It is the leading Exchange site, attracting over 350,000 Exchange administrators and specialists a month. The site provides the latest Microsoft Exchange Server news, articles and tutorials by leading Exchange experts, message boards, software listings and product reviews.
Metalogix is a leading provider of content lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Exchange, and legacy enterprise content environments. We enable organizations to scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and protect enterprise content whether on-premises or in the cloud. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, privately held, and backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. For more information, please visit:
Soarsoft Africa has specialised in Archive, Migration and Messaging services for over a decade, leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex implementations around the world to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions. Soarsoft Africa remains product independent, but supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet specific customer requirements.
Soarsoft Africa continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best advice when assessing products and solutions that will match their requirements.
Soarsoft Africa has offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.
The evolution of technology and communication has enabled people to communicate faster and more conveniently, but it has also invited individuals, and now syndicates, to exploit these channels with malicious intent.
"The term spam is well known, and has been around since the days of 'snail mail' where individuals would receive letters asking them to send money and stamps to receive something that would never be delivered. When fax machines gained popularity it was common for people and organisations to receive junk mail over this medium as well," says Martin Tassev, MD of LOOPHOLD Security Distribution. "However spam really took off with the growth of e-mail, as it offered a cheap way of targeting many people effectively and quickly.
Unfortunately, many Internet users are not well aware of the dangers of spam e-mail and its threats."
While spam e-mail is still sent out in droves, a new threat has emerged, once again due to evolving technology - the use of social networking sites as a tool for malware. More and more viruses are using social media to propagate, and due to the nature of this medium that encourages sharing, many individuals and companies are exposing their assets -- PCs and networks
-- to this new threat.
"It is not social media itself that is the problem, it is the lack of delineation between people's personal and professional lives that is causing this type of malware to be a threat to organisations," says John Yeo, Director of Trustwave's SpiderLabs EMEA. "We now have multiple devices such as tablet PCs, laptops and smartphones that allow us to access these social networks.It is even impacting companies that do not allow access to these devices in the office.They are falling victim to the malware spread because employees use their personal devices to access social media sites which then spreads the viruses to corporate networks."
One issue that is making social networking a threat to corporates is the lack of security awareness by employees, which increases the potential exposure of malware to companies whose employees use social media. Many social networking users feel that they are in a private space and, as a result, feel secure in divulging information that they would not dream of providing via e-mail or telephone.
"The reality is that any social networking site is very much in the public domain, and the information users so readily divulge can actually be used against them and their companies. Spear phishing, as it has become known, uses personal information such a names, e-mail addresses and other facts that are available on the Internet to target companies with the intent of gaining access to sensitive information, which can then be used to compromise security and banking accounts, steal money or data that can then be sold," says Tassev.
Another problem with social media is that because it links friends and associates, people tend to trust it too highly. This trust is exploited by cybercriminals in a new threat, termed clickjacking, which links into highly popular news search terms and events and encourages users to click on links in social networking sites that promise to give new information on these topics.
"These links often lead to infected sites that will attach to the user's contact list and automatically send out the same link to each of them, installing tracking cookies along the way and potentially turning each of these machines into part of a botnet. Being part of a botnet enables hackers to compromise your machine, use your bandwidth and access your e-mail for the purposes of sending out spam, all of which have potentially dire consequences for business users," Yeo adds.
The communications landscape has changed dramatically from a technology perspective, but the mindset towards security is lagging behind. Smartphones are a threat to the corporate network because although they are regarded as a 'work resource,' users can still access social sites and run applications on these devices that have not been assessed by security, which may lead to a compromise of the corporate network.
"Securing corporate networks against these new threats requires a shift in mindset. Delineation between personal and work resources has to be made, and a formal, all encompassing security strategy must be created that includes multiple devices such as smartphones along with the network, applications, wireless, etc. The old threats have not gone away, the problem has just become broader, and needs to be dealt with from a larger number of angles,"
says Yeo.
Tassev adds, "Having the right security strategy and software in place can go a long way towards protecting users and corporate networks, however, software alone can only do so much. Education and awareness on the nature of the threat is vital to ensure people understand what they are facing and can arm themselves against it, making sure they are not easy prey for unscrupulous cybercriminals."
A combined approach of a comprehensive security strategy that extends to social networking, with policy and procedure on what is acceptable and what is not, along with standard protection such as anti-virus, intrusion detection and prevention and anti-spam, as well education into the risks involved, is the best approach when it comes to combating this new threat and any that may emerge in the future.
The South African National Roads Agency SOC Limited (SANRAL) is tasked with financing, improving, managing and maintaining the national road network in South Africa. This mandate requires the use of extensive databases in order to store and provide access to the relevant data at all times, and when the company relocated its office from Hatfield to Val De Grace in Pretoria, they called on RDB Consulting to assist.
The relocation of the office also meant relocating the entire existing IT infrastructure to the new premises, including an extensive centralised Oracle database containing all of SANRAL's technical data. RDB Consulting assisted by ensuring that the database was shut down correctly and that offline backups were conducted for the entire system. Once everything was moved to the new location and all operations were started up, RDB Consulting verified that the database was still operational and had not experienced any issues as a result of the move.
Aside from assisting SANRAL with the relocation of their IT infrastructure, RDB Consulting has been providing the company with level two and three Oracle database support since 2009, ensuring the health and continuous uptime of the database and delivering the required skills on demand to address any problems that may occur.
"When our in-house database administrator emigrated, we took the decision to outsource these services and began to look for an organisation that specialised in Oracle database support. We selected RDB Consulting through a request for proposal process based on the sound reputation of the company, cost-efficient pricing, their impressive existing client base and the extensive pool of skills available within the organisation. With RDB Consulting we have access not just to one person, but to a whole team of specialists who can support our database," says Louw Kannemeyer, Road Network Manager at SANRAL.
"SANRAL uses an outsourced model for all level two and three IT support and RDB Consulting fills this role for our Oracle database. The workload simply does not justify having a full time in-house employee on board, and when employees leave the company we have to embark on the long process of procuring another resource. We are a small organisation in terms of headcount, and outsourcing our Oracle database to RDB Consulting enables us to access specialised and often scarce skills as and when we need them, without having to deal with the risk of employee churn," he adds.
The Oracle database is a crucial aspect of SANRAL's business, and if this database goes down the organisation will not be able to access any of their technical data, including traffic information. This has an impact on the strategic decision making of the organisation, so uptime of the database is vital. Using RDB Consulting's services provides SANRAL with peace of mind with its Oracle environment and administration of the database as there is always a high level resource available to maintain the health of the database.
"The main benefit for us with an outsourced model is that RDB Consulting works with other clients' database environments, especially Oracle, and their resources have gained a wealth of experience in this niche field. This allows them to identify issues quickly and resolve them before they impact uptime. By the time we experience a similar problem, the consultant has often already discovered the solution. This helps us to resolve issues quickly and gives us the surety that all of RDB Consulting's resources are highly skilled and experienced because they have been exposed to a variety of different environments," Kannemeyer says.
Using outsourced services from RDB Consulting gives SANRAL the ability to access resources and skills on tap, pulling in more resources when demand is high and then tapering these services off when the workload decreases. This model is ideal for the project based environment at SANRAL as it enables the company to effectively manage supply and demand and make more efficient use of available skills.
"Our services to SANRAL are conducted on an ongoing basis, and we are working with them continuously to ensure that their Oracle systems are optimised for better performance on their servers," Gerrit-Jan Albers, Service Delivery Manager at RDB Consulting, concludes.
About RDB Consulting
Established in 1995, RDB Consulting is an outsource and consulting company that specialises in four areas: Relational databases, Operating Systems, Monitoring and Enterprise Resource Planning. The organisation also offers project management, solutions architecture, on-going maintenance and support. Our services are designed to provide businesses access to expert technical resources whether full time, part time, co-managed or via remote administration. This allows companies to focus on their 'core' business and leave their ICT issues to the experts.
The proliferation of mobile devices and applications has changed the way we buy and use business today. And interestingly, it is employees that are driving this trend, not IT.
Cloud Computing is also directly impacted by the above trend and according to Juniper Research more than 240 million business customers will access cloud computing services via mobile devices by 2015.
The mobile cloud is set to become an important cog in the cloud computing engine particularly with the explosion of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets that make simplified accessibility to information a major business consideration.
This said, the mobile cloud also comes with its own particular set of challenges that companies should be aware of from the get-go to ensure that they are fully abreast of what it takes to adopt the mobile counterpart of the information strata.
Demystify the mobile cloud
Mobile cloud computing is not mobile computing. Mobility in the cloud is fundamentally a hosted, centralised offering that runs mobile enterprise extensions and services in a virtualised environment.
Like its cloud computing counterpart, the mobile cloud is made available through various structures including the pay-per-service or pay-per-use model and is aligned to industry best practices for the provisioning of these services.
These devices are managed – particularly within the context of the private cloud – securely by a hosted environment that is governed by industry standards and up-to-date security solutions.
Also, it offers a flexible, shared service that delivers critical benefits such as saving costs on physical infrastructure implementation and footprint.
Importantly, it also allows for greener IT practices as these numerous mobile devices are now able to access corporate information residing on the cloud remotely.
It therefore takes the spirit and known benefits of cloud computing and adds a layer of mobility to it which extends IT services and accessibility to both corporate workers and private users across the globe. Indeed, it allows for device proliferation in an environment that is secure and managed.
Familiarise yourself with the challenges However, with the mobility also comes a set of challenges and questions.
How do you manage accessibility to your corporate intellectual property within the cloud while at the same time ensuring that the privacy of these mobile devices is not infringed upon?
At the heart of the above is security and policy orchestration which is also a hot topic in discussions on general cloud computing challenges.
For one, companies should establish a clear mobile cloud policy which can be based on available best practices and guidelines. The orchestration component of this policy will ensure that regulatory, governance and information protection criteria are met which pertain to both corporate
(cloud) and personal information (residing on the device).
These policies must be mandated to ensure that information residing within the organisation and on devices are effectively accessed, managed and protected.
Without effective security and management, mobile cloud computing will not enjoy adoption and the resultant benefits it promises to deliver.
Private or public?
Whilst they do function as relatively removed offerings, the private and public cloud will always be connected, one way or another. The same goes for the mobile cloud.
As some stage, service providers will have to integrate the private and public cloud to ensure accessibility to all information residing within the cloud. Quite obviously, this raises a security challenge to the private cloud offering; however, with strong integration and management mechanisms in place this can be overcome by a cloud computing expert.
The mobile cloud is not going anywhere, it might be a way off for some but as with cloud computing it will be driven by the consumer.
The evolution of technology and communication has enabled people to communicate faster and more conveniently, but it has also invited individuals, and now syndicates, to exploit these channels with malicious intent.
"The term spam is well known, and has been around since the days of 'snail mail' where individuals would receive letters asking them to send money and stamps to receive something that would never be delivered. When fax machines gained popularity it was common for people and organisations to receive junk mail over this medium as well," says Martin Tassev, MD of LOOPHOLD Security Distribution. "However spam really took off with the growth of e-mail, as it offered a cheap way of targeting many people effectively and quickly.
