commonIT blog

gPartner positions itself as a new generation of consultant, distributor and integrator for the SaaS market. Based in Paris and Lyon (France), gPartner is one of Google’s leading partners in the French market for the Google Enterprise family of products and services, with the expertise to integrate Google technologies in the core of the enterprise IT environment.

Seeking new ways to accelerate customer migration to online services, gPartner has turned to commonIT. With our Virtual Browser solution, the enterprise retains full control over end-user access to Cloud services through full management of the browser. Whether the need is for access and content filtering for security reasons, support for diverse end-point platforms and application environments, or to deliver transparent connectivity for end-users, Virtual Browser delivers performance and affordability.

The partnership with gPartner reinforces our positioning in the Cloud Services Brokerage market segment, where Virtual Browser facilitates and accelerates enterprise migration to Cloud Computing.

On September 30th CommonIT’s Swiss partner Navixia brought together 90 IT managers and consultants for the third Navixia Forum, a half-day conference dedicated to information security solutions.

This year the program included five customer case studies, including a prestigious Geneva-based client of commonIT who shared their experience of a Virtual Browser deployment with the audience. Participants responded enthusiastically to the presentation, covering how Virtual Browser is used to deliver a secure Internet access service. We’ll be bringing you more details shortly.

The Virtual Browser solution offers an excellent alternative to traditional VPN-based technologies for remote access to web-based applications or remote desktop (Citrix/TSE) environments, or even for connection to the office PC. Virtual Browser delivers higher performance and security, and it’s simpler and less costly.

To accelerate the uptake of Virtual Browser as a solution for mobile and remote access, we’ve developed an OEM partnership program for security and mobility solutions vendors. OEM partners will be able to offer Virtual Browser technology under their own brand, with pricing adapted to their business model.

The solution is delivered using the SaaS model, hosted on our own servers or on the OEM partner’s infrastructure, with technical support from commonIT. Our objective is to make Virtual Browser available to the largest possible user population through partnering with software and hardware developers for whom the solution represents an opportunity to add value and generate new revenue streams in a market where demand is strong.

In addition to the recently announced partnership with Hermitage Solutions, we are currently in discussion with three other potential partners in Europe; we hope to see the results early in the new year. For more about the OEM program contact us at oem@commonit.com.

It’s nearly two years since we started commonIT, and with the Cloud Brokerage market fast becoming the new challenge we’ve decided we need to reorganise. The first phase in our development is coming to an end. We’ve successfully validated that our concept of virtualizing industry-standard web browsers to deliver more secure, less costly access to Cloud-based applications answers a genuine need in the market. This required a significant investment in R&D to develop and deliver a customer-ready product in line with our ideas. We’re now entering a new phase in which the key challenge will be to position our Virtual Browser solution as one of the pillars of what Gartner describes as “Cloud Brokerage”.

CommonIT needs to evolve to continue to develop successfully. We’re working on a new round of funding with the target of supporting a three-year development plan. In this context we’re sorry to have to announce the departure of Daniel, our CEO. Daniel leaves us for purely personal reasons which he felt he could not reconcile with the demands of the leadership role in this new phase of development for commonIT. The role of CEO falls to me, David, with Albino and Mathieu contining in their respective roles on the management team. Alongside this change we’ve decided to put in place a strategy committee composed of experts with significant strategy, legal and managerial skills. This “advisory board” will have a non-official role, guiding our strategy as we move forward.

During the summer a section of the R&D team was tasked with taking a closer look at video support in Virtual Browser.

Up to now Virtual Browser (like most remote display/desktop technologies) managed video display by sequentially transfering a series of static images from the server to the client, a process which consumes an excessive amount of bandwidth, puts an excessive load on the server, and delivers a frequently unsatisfactory result for the end user (jerky films, interruptions, and the like).

This wasn’t very satisfactory for us either. We attach a lot of importance to the user experience, so we decided to take a closer look at the problem of streaming and remote display technology. Thibault, one of our R&D engineers, analyzed the situation in depth, leading to us developing and implementing two modifications to our solution which will have a significant positive impact on user of experience of video streaming:

• Dynamic selection of lossy or lossless image compression algorithms according to the image type detected (photo/graphic, static/dynamic).
• On-the-fly identification of dynamic zones (especially videos) and the generation of an MPEG streaming channel to optimise transfer, instead of transfering sequential static images.

These changes are currently under test, and we expect to roll them out with release 2.1 at the end of the month.

In Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2010″*, analysts David Cearley, Benoit Lheureux and Daryl Plummer present the “Cloud Brokerage”. This market is focused on technologies and services that improve security while reducing cost and complexity in cloud services access and management. This market presents a high potential and proliferates as cloud services consumers seek to simplify and improve their consumption of cloud services across multiple cloud services providers. In its “Hype Cycle” Gartner identifies commonIT as one of the seven sample vendors.

*Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010, David Mitchell Smith, July 27, 2010.

The Cyberdefense security solution developed and introduced a few months ago by commonIT partner Hermitage Solutions is an outsourced SaaS-style “Security as a Service” offering. Targeting small and medium businesses, Cyberdefense offers a full range of security functions, resolving the increasingly complex technical challenges faced by SMBs with an end-to-end security solution delivering legal and regulatory compliance and even an insurance policy.

Hermitage Solutions has chosen our Virtual Browser technology as part of the Cyberdefense offering. Under an OEM agreement Hermitage and commonIT have integrated Virtual Browser as a component of the SaaS platform. The result for Hermitage is a simple, secure, and cost-effective response to customer needs for mobile and remote access. Cyberdefense users get remote Intranet and Windows desktop access (physical or virtual), using any available machine, easily and securely.

With the Cyberdefense offering Hermitage Solutions positions itself as a Managed Security Services Distributor (or MSSD), with Cyberdefense being offered through Hermitage’s reseller network.

The browser is an integral element in the corporate Cloud strategy. The broad take-up of web technology with standardized languages and protocols has resulted in the browser taking on the role of a universal client for end-user access to web-based and cloud-based resources. Browsers are free, and everyone knows how to use one. Pretty compelling arguments when budgets are tight!

But is using an industry standard browser really a zero-cost proposition for the enterprise? Let’s take a look at some of the issues.

Consumer-driven technology. The browsers we’re all familiar all obey one fundamental design principal: they must be as easy to use as possible for the greatest number of users. They must not hinder the user’s interaction with the web and the sites they want to visit – no matter what content those sites are hosting. In response to the Web 2.0 drive to increased user interactivity with rich internet applications, the browser transparently downloads and executes “helper” applications (Ajax, Flash, Java, ActiveX for example). In other words, the configuration of the browser is unstable and unmanageable. Is this really what you want from a key element of the corporate information infrastructure, the user interface to business critical applications?

Insecure design. Security professionals are increasingly aware that browsers are inherently insecure. The problems are threefold: (i) the browser, like any complex software environment, will always be exposed to bugs and vulnerabilities; (ii) the browser, connected to the internet, is inherently more exposed to external threats than software operating primarily locally on the machine, with local data; (iii) the browser’s self-modifying architecture (via plugins, for example – see above) multiplies the two preceding security risks.

No protection for confidential data. The end user connecting to enterprise Cloud services from home or from a cybercafé using the locally-installed browser is a threat to the enterprise. Business-critical processes and data may be exposed, via the browser, to a PC over which the enterprise has no control. Even if the user is sufficiently security-aware (and technically competent) to clear the browser cache and history at the end of each session – and how many of your users are? – sensitive data may still be stored locally (Flash cookies, to give just one example, without going into spyware and other threats).

If corporate IT management is to take full control of the cloud computing environment, we need to rethink the client-side connection. A new browser architecture is needed, secure by design, protecting corporate IT resources against web-based threats.

For more about the security issues of the browser and the Cloud, take a look at our White Papers.

Innovation is one of our core values; innovation gave birth to commonIT and continues to influence how we approach the decisions we make every day to develop our business. So it there was no hesitation when we decided to partner with the Telecommunications department of INSA Lyon as a sponsor of its “Projets Innovants” (Innovative Projects) program.

Three of the four co-founders of commonIT are graduates of INSA Lyon, one of France’s leading graduate engineering schools. But sponsoring the Projets innovants program is about more than just giving something back to the old school. The program, run by Stéphane Frénot (tutor/researcher) et Hugues Benoit-Cattin (head of department), targets engineering students in the 4th year of their studies. The objective is to give the students the tools and methodologies to drive technological innovation, and includes a 6-month project. As a sponsor commonIT will meet regularly with the participants to deliver practical recommendations drawn from our own experience. CommonIT will also be sponsoring a prize for the three most innovative projects with an awards ceremony when the program draws to a close in June.

Microsoft’s staged launch of Windows 7 during the latter half of 2009 has left enterprise system and network admins facing a dilemna. Is now the right time to migrate? And what are the issues?

Given the widely acknowledged lack of enthusiasm for Vista in the corporate network, this means migrating from XP — and the default browser in XP, IE6. For Microsoft, there’s no problem. IE8, integrated with Windows 7, offers “a faster, easier, safer web” (compared, we presume, to IE6 and IE7). The problem in the enterprise is that many applications were (naively) optimised for IE6, and are dependent on certain Microsoft proprietary “enhancements”… which were subsequently dropped in IE7 and IE8 as Microsoft moved to improve compliance with W3C standards.

Will migrating the desktop to Windows 7 mean re-writing enterprise applications to ensure compatibility? Is it cost-effective? Can it even be done? And if we do go through with it, can we be sure we won’t be faced with another costly re-write the next time MS updates IE?

Complicating the situation for today’s CIO even further, compatibility is now about much more than just following Microsoft’s roadmap for Internet Explorer. Your users are chosing Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome, with terminal devices become more and more diverse — user’s own PCs or laptops from home, mobile users running an unpredictable range of smartphones, netbooks and soon to arrive slate devices. As a system administrator, you no longer have the luxury of dictating the configuration of the end-point device. You’re expected to deliver a service irrespective of user choices of platform and browser. How many IT departments have the means to test and validate corporate web-based applications against multiple browsers running on multiple end-point devices?

Fortunately there’s a secure, cost-effective and future proof answer to the issues,. A solution which allows users running Windows 7 to access IE6 optimised applications and IE8, without the need to go through any sort of context switching or reconfiguration. The solution is Virtual Browser.

Virtual Browser allows you to migrate desktop PCs to Windows 7 while offering IE6 compatibility by virtualising the browser (IE6 — or any other industry standard browser), ensuring ongoing access to IE6-optimised applications, simultaneously with support for the most recent browser releases. In practice a fully optimised browser configuration (browser release, plugins, helper applications such as Flash and Java) is hosted by the Virtual Browser server and launched on demand for each user connection. Multi-browser support made easy — find out more from one of our customers here.