Peer to Peer Magazine

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted that the density of integrated circuits would double every two years. The world has since benefited doubly from Moore's Law as PC costs drop while processing power skyrockets. But, just as important, the physical size of integrated circuit chips and their power consumption has plummeted. This has given rise to a new generation of smaller, more mobile devices that rival the computing power of high-end PCs. With dual-core processors, gigabytes of data storage and RAM, high-end video options and now voice recognition, the term pocket PC is no longer marketing hyperbole. How Did We Get Here? Laptops, tablets and smartphones enable a mobile-professional lifestyle. Tethering these devices to traditional networks seems so '90s and may be impossible — they don't have network jacks! Production of tablets and smartphones will be twice that of laptops this year, and nearly all of them will incorporate Wi-Fi access. An office would normally have close to a 1:1 ratio of network connections to workers — 3:1 or greater is becoming typical. Almost everyone has a smartphone and/or iPad in addition to their desktop PC or laptop (which, of course, causes great angst for network designers and managers). Keeping pace with Moore's Law, hard-drive technology has evolved too. The cost to store 1GB of data has fallen from about $4 to under $0.10 over the past decade. And even smaller, more power-efficient devices, called solid-state devices (SSDs), that eliminate pesky moving parts, are here now. Storage density and economy will surely match that of traditional hard drives in another 10 years. High-speed Internet service, once the preserve of big corporations, government and the military, has become a commodity and socialized. Everyone demands to be online everywhere. From Starbucks to subways, from classrooms to hotel rooms, we have become a culture that expects to be connected 24/7. The 1985 song lyric "I want my MTV" could be rewritten as "I want my VPN." Finally, mammoth data centers built by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and others can process more data, faster and so cheaply that many services, such as email messaging, photo sharing and calendaring, are offered for free. Centralized management has economized many per-user support costs like software provisioning, updates, backup and security. In a drive to reduce software costs and support variables, developers have sought to eliminate them completely. The browser has become the user interface. And thus have evolved the programs that live on the Internet, out there in the cloud. You can see where this is going. You will soon be able to dock your smartphone in a workstation at your desk that links it to multiple touch-screen displays, including human input devices (like a keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc.), printers, scanners and more. Your mobile device will be your office. Your work product will be synchronized onto anonymous servers in the cloud. Where you work will be irrelevant. The Dark Side of the Cloud Wired connections may have constrained mobility, but they were a harness that bound critical data to a place. In a virtual world, we have free data — not in the sense of cost, but in the sense that they can roam. Indeed, cloud vendors invest huge sums designing their networks to be sure that applications and data can be replicated among multiple facilities to balance loads or defend against hardware or connectivity failures. This works — except when it doesn't. Take for example the outage at Amazon that lasted four days and resulted in irrecoverable data loss for some customers. To be sure, Amazon is better prepared to defend against mayhem than most law firms or vendors. But when someone so big falls, the point is reinforced that even the brightest minds might not be able to illuminate the consequences of a cascade of small problems in such highly complex systems. Customers of Research In Motion recently experienced the failure of critical messaging services connecting their BlackBerry mobile devices to the BlackBerry global network. For three days, the information "drug" to which millions are addicted was withheld. Some reportedly missed appointments and had to postpone business deals. Legal action is expected. A wireless infrastructure typically broadcasts its digital welcome message indiscriminately. While security and capacity have improved, there are many offices still burdened by the limits of second-generation access points (2.4 GHz spectrum) and exposed to simple hacks based on outdated encryption technology. Consider that putting an antenna on your network brings with it consequences for incompetence that running your own CAT5 cable didn't. Easy to Carry, Easy to Lose Desktop PCs might be clunky, but they are rarely lost. The drive to miniaturize anything with a transistor means that we can now lose them more easily (just like your keys!). Apple, considered fanatical when it comes to protecting designs for its upcoming generation of iPhones, has suffered more than once the embarrassment of finding photos of unreleased products exposed on popular websites before their scheduled announcement. A prototype of the iPhone 4 was left on a barstool. Over half a million laptops are lost every year. Over 10,000 per week are lost at airports alone! The content of the laptops might include personal information, and the news is full of reports of sensitive material being breached in this way. But so much more information is accessible when using the laptop to access cloud-based systems. Most users click the "remember me" button on websites or programs that connect to banking, shopping and office networks. Our laziness — or just our poor memories — makes all that information ripe for pilferage. Network designs that counted on wired connectivity, depended on desktop operating systems — with their highly integrated/centrally managed security — and relied on Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 51

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