Juniper study: 80% of smartphones still unprotected from malware, attacks

Summary: Smartphones (and tablets) are just open hotspots for trouble waiting to happen if their owners don't take precautions immediately.

We all take risks for granted sometimes, but one place that nearly everyone seems to be doing that a little too lightly is on smartphones.

According to a new report from Juniper Research, more than 80 percent of smartphones (both for business and personal use) are unprotected from malware and other possible malicious attacks. Analysts expect that figure to hold true for at least the rest of 2013.

On the one hand, such an alarming figure might seem strange given how serious most people now take antivirus precautions and security on PCs.

But even that mentality took years to go mainstream, and it's still an ongoing process drumming that into people's minds in both the workplace and at home.

Analysts acknowledged in the report that a severe lack of awareness among consumers, in particular, is a major attributing factor as to why there is such a low level of mobile security software adoption.

Furthermore, analysts found that there is a "a widespread consumer perception that the price of security products is excessive," which might explain (at least partially) why people are more willing to shell out a few bucks for Angry Birds and not give a second thought about a mobile security app.

Essentially, the lesson to be learned from Juniper's latest report is that smartphones (and tablets) are just open hotspots for trouble waiting to happen if their owners don't take precautions immediately.

The full report, entitled Mobile Security: BYOD, mCommerce, Consumer & Enterprise 2013-2018, is available for purchase.

Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Study: 'Showrooming' going mainstream ahead of holiday season

Summary: At first glance, this might spell doom for brick-and-mortar retailers. However, there are some lessons to be learned and opportunities to be realized if they act quickly.

Have you ever walked into a store and seen a product you liked, but then instead of buying it there you compared the price and bought it online?

If that is true, then not only are you alone, but you are one of many contributing to a new trend heavily disrupting retail: "Showrooming."

Essentially, this is the practice of visiting a brick-and-mortar store but giving the real business to the likes of Amazon.com and other online warehouses with considerably cheaper prices, and sometimes no sales tax and/or free shipping to sweeten the deal.

A new study from mobile marketing firm Vibes suggests that the showrooming trend has gone fully mainstream in just one year, arguing that most consumers are doing this thanks to the ease of making price comparisons from mobile apps.

Based on a survey of 1,000 smartphone owners, researchers found that there has been a 156 percent jump with consumers who purchased a product from a competitor while in a retail store.

Furthermore, 44 percent of consumers are said to practice showrooming "frequently," while at least 36 percent utse their mobile devices as aides when shopping in stores than compared to two years ago.

At first glance, this might spell doom for brick-and-mortar retailers. However, there are some lessons to be learned and opportunities to be realized if they act quickly.

Vibes co-founder and CEO Jack Philbin suggested in the report that retailers could tap into another major trend going on in mobile tech: personalization.

The antidote to showrooming is creating contextually relevant and personalized mobile experiences that motivate and influence consumers to take notice and make purchases. If retailers don’t establish personalized mobile strategies, they’ll increasingly face unengaged consumers who will continue to browse in-store and buy online from competitors.

Given that it's already October, retailers would be wise to jump on mobile trends such as targeted ads based on location and personalized offers -- most of which don't seem to be slowing down in popularity just yet.

Topics: E-Commerce, Apps, Mobility, Tech Industry, Social Enterprise

Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Attend this live webinar on Tuesday, October 22 to learn processes and tools that will help you align your team's communication styles for effective collaboration.

How do you turn your team into strategic sellers that can deliver value and keep competitors at bay? Join this live webcast to learn the five steps to orchestrating the end-to-end buyers' journey.

Rotary turned to a private cloud in order to improve performance and reliability for mission-critical applications. Read this customer profile to learn more.

Case study: Sprout Social opt for IaaS from day one to support the growth of demand

Sprout Social offers a platform of management and participation social media for social enterprises. The putting into operation with headquarters in Chicago, IL wanted to focus on developing and refining its product, the founders was with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) of 1 day. The decision freed the company of a large part of the IT planning and predictions that consume resources in traditional environments.

To IaaS day 1

Aaron Rankin, co-founder and director of Sprout Social, explains why the company chose IaaS.  "From the beginning we had a startup recruitment. When you pay your own money, you don't want to have to spend more than you have to. We did it for the type of flexibility that it offers. Day 1 we didn't want to predict exactly what our needs would be 1 day or even a month. If you don't have to plan something, then it is not to have to do and is happy to meet demand - that is what gave us the infrastructure as a service offering. Basically we are all in demand." Another reason cited for choosing IaaS as a solution: HP regarding how much you pay.

Technological solutions

Sprout Social started with cloud (formerly Mosso) sites. According to Rankin, "back then 3-4 years, there was nothing with the amount of scale for the cost and turn-key as it is. So it is something like plenty of room in a box, and you don't have to worry about setting up all components."

From the outset increase exceeded Social Sprout systems scalability, to move databases in large dedicated systems was the fastest solution available. The Social platform sprout now relies on a flexible infrastructure hybrid of Rackspace. The infrastructure includes:

Hybrid files hostingDedicated serversRackConnectPublic cloudCloud block storageCloud backupCloud

Because the Sprout Social platform processes and stores large amounts of heterogeneous data at different frequencies. By design, the system keeps similar details together, making it easy and cost-effective to deal with complex storage and performance requirements.

"In our company, we have two engineers who manage all of our servers," said Rankin. "It turns out that they are former employees of Rackspace. We have an account manager at Rackspace, a technical leader and some other people who are dedicated to our account. If we have a serious problem, beam took absolute hours. Call Conference very early in the morning when the hardware has failed and that sort of thing".

Best growth through IaaS

Rankin talks about the company is a little early days, "so, as a technology startup, we don't think much about infrastructure. We focus on the product and the people to use it all. As it is typical, we knew that we had passed the hardware that we were staying because the site was constantly slow."

Adds, "it was clear from our own use of the site and the follow-up that we had reports from users who we needed to grow our infrastructure. "Back then, weren't very calculated respect - only crept upon us". Sprout Social now has more formal control of sites and processes mechanisms in place.

Vs cost-saving opportunities

"We have not done anything to draw our operational savings, but that is something that I'm beginning to think now, especially in the last year," said Rankin. "Our growth has been great, and our accounts have remained with that. For the moment, we are beginning to look at Rackspace private cloud offering, because it would give us much more control. "It should really help us cut our Bill enough."

Adds: "the logic behind us using [IaaS] was not saving directly. If we know exactly what needed and bought it and attempted to hardware ourselves and made a capital expenditure or even leased from Rackspace, we could probably save money, but we're in this because we want to change things on demand. A team of developers of my morning you can tell me that we need ten machines for something with cloud servers that you can literally rent. We can do so immediately. There are no deadlines or procurement process. Just turn them, and are ready to go. There are, of course, the value for the business. It's more than the creation of opportunities for cost savings."

Lessons learned

Rankin and his team have learned many lessons from IaaS to go first. It begins with "the cloud is not perfect. "People love to make cloud as always if the thundercloud."

Rankin continues, "unless you are actually using running on all the physical machine and how much it takes to do it, because it is not transparent, then you have neighbors." Don't know who they are their neighbors and do not know you. Things could be misbehaving. When that happens, it will affect."

"Should always build their systems to be tolerant even more, even more resistant, even more if it would have full competence of [it] was their situation of hardware and systems are running along with other systems." "We have bitten the cloud so many times, but we have only built for it, and we have taken some technologies that were built technologies that expect hardware to fail or obtaining and explanation on the fly".

"The cloud is not a silver bullet," Rankin recalled.

Conclusion

Rackspace cloud platform hybrid allows Sprout Social to focus on product development and its core business, allowing implementation underway expand its infrastructure to meet the demands of its growing customer base.