Concorde Solutions

Concorde Solutions have launched their forum solution for clients and potential clients to chat about anything regarding software licencing, IT Asset Management, their pains, their joys… Anything.

Concorde Solutions can be found here www.concordeuk.com

DeviceWall Wins Endpoint Security Group Test

27th April 2007:  Centennial Software today announced that its endpoint security solution, DeviceWall, has fought off competition from a range of products to win SecureIT magazine’s endpoint security group test.

Product reviewers from the magazine highlighted DeviceWall’s user experience and encryption capabilities as key factors in determining the result of the test.  As Holly Talman, editor at SecureIT explained: “DeviceWall really impressed our testers.  It installed easily and quickly and really goes the extra mile with its extra features.  Administrators and end users in organizations of any size will love it.”

Launched in 2005, DeviceWall is today used by a wide range of private and public organizations to prevent data leakage from company-owned PCs and ensure that only authorized staff can copy data to or from the network.

Matt Fisher, vice president at Centennial Software, commented on the test: “The timing of this review is very pertinent, as we continue to see a raft of internal data theft cases such as the recent conviction of two ex-Ferrari Formula One engineers for taking designs to a rival team.”

In addition to the latest accolade from SecureIT, DeviceWall is also the holder of TechWorld’s award for “Security Software solution of the Year”.

A free 30-day evaluation of DeviceWall is available from www.devicewall.com.

Is Superglue your idea of USB Security..

Strange But True

We know the idea of using glue to secure system ports on expensive laptop and desktop systems is silly. Did you know this is actually a technique that has been used by some IT administrators to deal with the endpoint security threat of removable media devices? Yes, seriously.

Centennial DeviceWall

For real endpoint security use Centennial DeviceWall, which provides IT administrators granular control over wired and wireless PC connections without wrecking hardware.

Here are just a few reasons Centennial DeviceWall beats USB Glue as an effective safeguard against internal data leakage:

Software-only solution, remotely deployed from central server Automatic integration with Active Directory user groups Automatically encrypt data copied from the network Device connection and data transfer audits

Block or allow connections from iPods, USB sticks, PDAs, etc Granular read / write access control Block or allow Wi-Fi, Infrared and Bluetooth connections Protects PCs both on and off the network

To see how Centennial DeviceWall could help protect your data and systems, download a free 30-day trial today or learn more about DeviceWall.

But if you still feel that gluing your ports is the best available solution, click here to learn more about USB Glue.

“Ecosystem” Partnerships…

During their recent UK Partner Event, Centennial Software coined the phrase “Ecosystem Partnerships”.   Anything4aEuro has been providing technical resources for partners of Centennial Software for some time now.

It was good to see familiar faces at the event and some new faces too.

Anything4aEuro provides technical resources and now experienced sales teams to existing (new and established) partners of Centennial Software – Worldwide!  We don’t offer our services directly to customers and we don’t sell Centennial Software’s Discovery or DeviceWall solutions – We are not focussed on that, we are focussed on providing excellence in terms of experienced technical resources to ensure you can deliver your solutions to your customers.

For more information, visit http://www.anything4aeuro.com.

Note:  24th – 26th April we will be at InfoSec / Servicedesk exhibitions, Olympia, London.  We aren’t exhibiting but we can be found around the Centennial Software’s stands in both Exhibition Halls.

25% of Software is unlicensed and 30% is unused…

… But don’t take our word for it, or even Gartner, or joe bloggs from down the road.   Visit www.anything4aeuro.com and learn how to get to grips with your software licensing…

Ensuring compliance and effective asset management requires comprehensive, up to date and accessible information about IT infrastructure, a concept recognised as vital by best practice frameworks such as ITIL and ISO 19770.

Turn Off Your Computers and Save Yourself A Fortune…

PC Pro Labs & Microsoft recently published a document stating that an organisation could save £46 per year per PC in electricity bills and on estate of 200 machines reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 45 tons a year – The catch was that people needed to use Vista.

Not every organisation has moved to Vista yet, and in fact, due to public pressure DELL have re-introduced XP as an optional operating system.

Anything4aEuro knows of a solution, coming soon, that can help reduce your organisations electricity bills and carbon emissions even if you aren’t using Vista.  XP has many of the power saving features as Vista, the problem is how to do you set it on every machine you have. 

Green IT is on its way!

For more information reference Gartner documents G00147534 and G00146422

New Issues for Software Compliance….

The original article can be found here …. http://www.it-director.com/business/content.php?cid=9431

For many companies, software compliance is just about making sure that all copies of a particular application in use have a valid vendor licence. There’s plenty of software around to try and ensure that all licences are valid and all users covered, to stop organisations like the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) from claiming damages on behalf of its members for fraudulent use.

However, something that is far more insidious and dangerous is being seen as developers start to use chunks of reusable code in creating their own applications, composite applications and mash-ups.

The problem lies within the various licencing agreements that there are around software made available for public usage. As well as the main ones, such as the General Public Licence (GPL), the Apache Software Licence (ASL) and the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL), there’s a whole host of others, such as the Common Development and Distribution Licence (CDDL), the Fair Licence and the Beer Licence (where you undertake to buy the licensor a beer if you ever meet him).

The majority of the public use licences are not particularly restrictive, but there are conditions in some of them which can lead to nightmares for companies further down the line. Let us take as an example the GPL licence in its current version 2 form. Essentially, under section 2 of the Terms and Conditions of Copying, Distribution and Modification, if you happen to utilise a piece of code that has been distributed under the GPL—just one piece—then the whole of the final released code that includes that GPL code in it also has to be distributed under the GPL.

Consider the ramifications of this—as a commercial entity, you want to create functional software as rapidly as possible. Functions which are deemed as “commodity” are available from the web, and it makes sense to utilise these functions to speed up overall development. Your developers then come up with the next “killer application”, and you start selling it on the open market. Just as you’re going for IPO, someone in the community points out that 100 lines of code used within your 1 million lines were licenced under the GPL. All of a sudden, all your 1 million lines of code have to be covered by GPL—the code has to be made available to anyone, and you cannot apply restrictions on the redistribution of such code—or its modification. You still own the copyright—but that’s no use when your customer base and those who you were hoping would invest in you are deserting you in droves.

Even if you are in the Open Source movement yourself, you may want to utilise a different licence for the final code—but you may find that you are forced into a specific one through the code chunks that have been utilised in one part of the overall application. As the move towards utilising more of these publically available pieces of functional code to speed up development accelerates, there’s the risk that we spend more time either checking through all the different licences that have been used—or fighting various actions in court.

So, what can be done? Prevent your developers from using pre-written reusable code chunks? Not really—such usage means that time to capability and to market is much enhanced. Ensure that all code is held against a copy of the licence, and then distribute each chunk under its own licence separately? Not viable, and anyway, the developers won’t read the licences.

A small US company, Black Duck, seems to have a solution. It provides a capability for code to be searched at both a string matching level and at a pattern matching level to identify code that has come from an environment where the code is licenced. It can then flag all of these pieces of code and ensure that the developer or legal department is aware that this may raise issues. The developer and/or organisation concerned can then make a decision as to how this is all rolled up—does the overall code go out under a specific licence, does the intellectual property code get packaged separately to the open code so as to maintain the fidelity of the commercial code, or is the code that has been utilised to be replaced with in-house code so as to by-pass the possible ramifications of the other licenced code?

All of these are valid options, and knowing what code is problematic, what all the various licences are, and what the ramifications are means that time to capability and market are not compromised, while the business value of the code is maximised. Also, end users are safeguarded against claims against licence misuse—a point that has taxed many who were originally caught up in SCO’s patent and licence claims around Linux.

For many, running such a capability at the end of development may be sufficient, but Black Duck’s tooling provides the best return by integrating it into the whole development process, so that a licence audit trail can be kept—and so that any possible issues can be dealt with as soon as possible.

Black Duck could take this approach further to look at areas such as digital rights management (DRM) around picture, sound and video, increasingly sensitive areas as such content proliferates on the internet. Although the domain skills would need to be built up, the approach of scanning files for direct copyright notices and for pattern matching against known copyright content will be similar. That Black Duck has chosen to focus for the moment, and not to stretch itself too thin is probably sensible, but OEM deals for the underlying technology should not be too far off.

All told, the area is a minefield for the unwary. For software developers, whether in the ISV community, within end-user development groups or the open source community itself, such a facility has solid value, and a product like Black Duck’s is well worth considering.

There is not only a case for understanding the major vendors policies towards software licensing, understanding your entire software library and the potential issues further down the line.

At Anything4aEuro we understand these issues and in conjunction with Centennial Discovery we are able to produce effective documentation which ensures you understand your position.

Visit www.anything4aeuro.com for more information.

IT Helpdesk & Security – Olympia 24th – 26th April 2007

Anything4aEuro will be at the show hoping to meet as many partners as possible during the event.  Any resellers of Centennial Discovery and DeviceWall please get in touch with us to make an appointment – We can help you sell, deliver and support these solutions.

Mail: olympia@anything4aeuro.com or visit our website: http://www.anything4aeuro.com for more information.

Centennial Software UK Partner Event…

If you are a UK partner of Centennial Software and are attending their UK Partner Event next week, then we at Anything4aEuro look forward to meeting you.   We can provide you technical and sales resource for Centennial Software’s Discovery 2006 and DeviceWall solutions.

With almost ten years technical experience of Discovery and three years with DeviceWall we are able to deliver solutions first time, on budget and deliver want the customer requires!

We have recently added a sales team to assist you -  IMPORTANT:  We do not sell direct!  We are not competition!

Visit www.anything4aeuro.com for more information!

Sales Support…

If your organisation needs a couple of extra sales guys, who know their stuff, to generate extra Discovery and DeviceWall leads then visit here www.anything4aeuro.com for more information.  Our Canadian based partner runs sales lead generation programmes, event promotional services and tailored programme to fit requirements and budget.