Food for thought. What is IT Consumerization?

IT consumerization (information technology consumerization)

IT consumerization is the blending of personal and business use of technology devices and applications.

In today's enterprise, the consumerization of IT is being pushed by a younger, more mobile workforce, who grew up with the Internet and are less inclined to draw a line between corporate and personal technology. Employees have good technology at home and they expect to be able to use it at work too. This blending of personal and business technology is having a significant impact on corporate IT departments, which traditionally issue and control the technology that employees use to do their jobs. Consequently, IT departments are faced with deciding how to protect their networks and manage technology that they perhaps did not procure or provision.

The label IT consumerization has been around since at least 2005 when Gartner Inc. pronounced consumerization "the most significant trend affecting IT in the next 10 years." Gartner traced the trend to the dot-com collapse, when enterprise IT budgets shrank and many IT vendors shifted focus to the potentially bigger consumer IT markets. The result has been a change in the way technology enters the marketplace. Instead of new technology flowing down from business to the consumer, as it did with the desktop computer, the flow has reversed and the consumer market often gets new technology before it enters the enterprise.

Risk vs. reward: Personal cloud storage services in the enterprise

Personal cloud storage services have benefits, but with data security concerns on the rise, organizations may want to consider alternatives that offer more control.

Internal, open source software such as SparkleShare and ownCloud offer some of the same synchronization capabilities and ease of use that have made Dropbox and other personal cloud storage services so popular. They also give enterprise IT departments more oversight regarding where and how users can store and access data.

User demand for personal cloud storage services is strong and growing, but every organization must decide which system of document sharing best suits its needs. Security, manageability and version control are all factors that IT decision-makers should consider before choosing a system.

Benefits of personal cloud storage services

Cloud and on-premise document management systems both hold a lot of promise. The biggest benefit of personal cloud storage services is that they’re easy to use. When a user saves files to his or her Dropbox folder, for example, those files are automatically synced in the cloud, where the user can access them from other devices and share them with others.

From an enterprise perspective, personal cloud storage services ensure that users are always working on the most up-to-date version of a document, and they offer support for a variety of platforms. In addition, a company doesn’t have to dedicate resources to implementing and supporting a document management system, and there aren’t many costs associated with planning, administration or equipment.

In-house document management systems also offer many benefits. SparkleShare, for instance, uses the Git version control system and lets IT administrators specify where users can store data. It only supports Linux, Mac OS X and Android now, but Windows and iOS versions are in the works.

Then there’s ownCloud, an open source project that lets organizations set up their own cloud storage services. Users can access the service from Mac, Linux and Windows desktops via WebDAV, an online collaboration service that offers many of the same features as Dropbox, including version control, file sharing, encryption and syncing.

Personal cloud storage security concerns

Neither personal cloud storage services nor in-house document management systems are a perfect fit, however. On-premise systems -- even using free, open source software -- bring planning, administration and equipment costs that organizations may not want to absorb. And personal cloud storage services eliminate the enterprise’s number-one priority when it comes to data: control.

With a cloud service, enterprise data is stored in a remote data center that no one in IT (or anywhere else in the organization) can access. Enterprise users just drop files into folders, and the inner workings remain a mystery, for the most part.

Earlier this year there was a security problem at Dropbox, when a programming error opened a four-hour window during which anyone could log on to any account with any password. There haven’t been many security breaches of this nature, but there could be, and that possibility raises concerns about control over corporate documents in personal cloud storage services. The fact that these services generally rely on simple sign-ins with a username and password, rather than more advanced authentication methods, can exacerbate the problem.

With all these challenges, it seems most enterprises would balk at using personal cloud storage services. But as the consumerization of IT grows, so too do users’ expectations that these services will be available. And the fact is, could services can help people do their jobs better, and they’re often more efficient than what’s available in-house. Organizations need to determine the service that maximizes data control and security while still providing the benefits of the cloud to both the enterprise and its users.

By: R.H. Sheldon

Storage without limits ~ The Aberdeen AberSAN ZXP

AberSAN ZXP (2U Head Unit / JBOD Storage Chassis) Expandable ZFS SAN Storage Subsystem

The AberSAN brings the simplification of a network attached storage (NAS) server to the SAN environment by combining Fibre Channel and iSCSI block level connections with multi-user network sharing. Aberdeen removes storage and partition size limitations to deliver ease of use and flexibility, while featuring more efficient cross platform collaborative editing and shared media storage for post-production, content creation and any business in need of cost effective, scalable storage.

Storage without limits

The Expanding Digital Universe and continuing explosive growth of disk based storage means that limitations to legacy storage systems are going to be critically important in the months and years to come.

A storage system built upon 32bit addressing is never going to be as flexible and scalable as one built upon a 128bit system. So AberSAN Z-Series, thanks in part to the use of ZFS, has a number of advantages vs. legacy and Linux or BSD based solutions. These include:

Unlimited snapshots. With the exponential increase in the amount of data stored, snapshots need to become more granular if they are going to be able to be restored in a timely manner. Legacy solutions are limited to up to 255 snapshots. By comparison, AberSAN Z-Series can accommodate 2 to the 48th snapshots. This means you can run hourly snapshots, for example, on all of your data which in turn means that you can restore in a timely manner and that the incremental amounts sent over the network can be smaller than daily updates.

Unlimited file system size. Again, thanks to the legacy nature of many existing solutions, each file system is often limited to a relatively small amount of data stored. There are no such limits when you use AberSAN Z-Series.

Scalability

With AberSAN Z-Series you can scale performance the same way that you scale performance of other applications by adding to hardware performance by increasing memory available or CPU performance or the number of targets available.

Multi-level data protection

AberSAN Z-Series protects your organization's data with features and capabilities ranging from the most granular, per transaction data integrity checks to higher level backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

Every read or write made by AberSAN Z-Series utilizes ZFS data integrity. To avoid accidental and silent data corruption ZFS provides end-to-end checksumming and transactional copy-on-write IO operations. These operations eliminate the 'write-holes' and silent data corruption that have plagued storage solutions that are not based on ZFS.

Inherent virtualization

AberSAN Z-Series is built from the ground up on the revolutionary file system ZFS which means that virtualization is at the core of AberSAN Z-Series. This virtualization enables thin provisioning and also improves performance via I/O pooling. This means that when you add more disks or systems to AberSAN Z-Series the overall solution accelerates. Another benefit of AberSAN Z-Series is that it can run within VMware or other virtualized environments.

AberSAN ZXP-Series OS Highlights:

• Dual ported SAS drives and Expanders enable HA
• Shared pools of storage from any combination of storage hardware
• Unlimited snapshots and clones
• Unlimited file size
• Block and file based replication
• End to end data integrity
• Thin provisioning
• Integrated search
• Hybrid storage pools via automated use of SSDs
• L2Aarc and ZIL Cache SSD Options for added IOPS
• Virtualization management
• Cloud ready storage capabilities
• In-line Deduplication
• iSCSI Target Capable
• Multi JBOD expandable

Does the cloud need an app store? CA says yes with cloud marketplace

Imagine a world with iPhones and iPads, but no App Store.

That's the state of the cloud ecosystemtoday, according to CA Technologies, which recently launched its Cloud Commons Marketplace -- a cloud marketplace and communal hub where cloud buyers, sellers and developers can advertise, test and buy services.

"People who are not in the community of developers don't realize this is a key thing that's missing," according to Stephen Hurford, director of cloud services at DNS Europe, a London-based cloud provider that sells its CA AppLogic-based Cloud Control Panel service, a cloud application delivery and management platform, in the cloud marketplace.

About 25 software vendors and cloud providers have joined Cloud Commons since launching in mid-November. Although most of the products currently sold are based on CA's AppLogic application delivery platform -- because most of the market's current products are sold by CA -- it is a platform-agnostic marketplace. Like other app store business models, cloud providers and ISVs pay CA a percentage of any sales made through the Cloud Commons Marketplace. That percentage varies according to the type of service and deployment model.

By selling their services through Cloud Commons, providers enable prospective customers to procure cloud services just the way they shop for consumer goods at an online retailer -- comparing user reviews, rating products, selecting a service, adding it to the shopping cart and proceeding to checkout to pay. But instead of buying books or airline tickets, customers rent an independent software vendor's(ISV's) application and select the service provider cloud environment where they want it to run.

"That's practically all of our marketing done for us -- and with a much bigger global [audience] than we could reach on our own," said Hurford, whose company primarily targets developers buildingSoftware as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) products on AppLogic.

Cloud providers can also use CA's marketplace to do their own shopping and expand their portfolios by purchasing and pre-integrating cloud products from ISVs on Cloud Commons, as well as use cloud-based AppLogic appliances to convert traditional applications into cloud services, according to Andi Mann, vice president of strategic solutions at CA.

"[Cloud] providers have the ability to now be hosts for a range of software that is not [otherwise] available as a cloud offering," Mann said.

Aggregation model spells opportunity for cloud marketplaces

CA is hardly the only vendor to sponsor a cloud marketplace initiative. Equinix and Synnex launched cloud marketplaces earlier this fall.   VMware announced its intentions earlier this year to develop something akin to cloud marketplace, vCloud Datacenter Global Connect service, which would rely on cloud providers to partner with each other. Even NASA recently announced plans to build a cloud marketplace for the science community

.

Some of these projects, however, bear a closer resemblance to directories than marketplaces -- not actually selling anything, but instead prompting would-be buyers to submit a form with their contact information for the cloud provider's or ISV's sales representatives.

An open cloud marketplace that resembles a cloud aggregator model, such as Cloud Commons, will be a more rewarding opportunity for the cloud provider ecosystem, according to Steve Hilton, principal analyst at Boston-based Analysys Mason.

"It gives [cloud providers] an opportunity to sell a pre-integrated solution, which is something needed in the cloud world," Hilton said. "While cloud services are a large opportunity, the bundling of cloud services and other solutions like connectivity, security solutions and consulting [services] is an even better model."

Global cloud services revenue is expected to reach $40 billion by 2016, and about half of that (46%) will go to ISVs bypassing the channel to sell their own cloud services, Hilton said. Twenty-five percent of that revenue that will go to communications service providers, while 29% will go to partners, distributors and solution providers.

"The cloud marketplace gives sellers another channel-to-market for their cloud services that they wouldn't normally have," Hilton said.

Emphasizing that the Cloud Commons Marketplace is still in its infancy, DNS Europe's Hurford said he sees room for improvement in the cloud marketplace, adding that CA must shorten or streamline the certification process for cloud providers, and ISVs must rethink their pricing.

"A lot of vendors are setting their own prices for their products and -- perfectly honestly -- they're quite high, based on what we know the market is willing to pay," he said. "That's something [CA is] going to have to manage in the marketplace."

Developer's workbench adds to CA cloud marketplace

The cloud marketplace isn't the only expansion to Cloud Commons, which CA originally launched in 2010 as an online community for the cloud ecosystem. CA also opened the Developer Studio, which gives Cloud Commons members free access to project management tools and a cloud-based AppLogic test environment. Once tested and certified, the cloud service may then be loaded onto the cloud marketplace.

CA launched the Developer Studio to address the challenges that cloud providers and ISVs face when trying to rebuild applications and services for the cloud, Mann said.

"There's a lot of time and a lot of effort, and it shouldn't be that involved," he said. "We're a software vendor ourselves, and we see this every day with our own customers and our own solutions."

The ability to save, share and collaborate on programming templates will also be invaluable to smaller and midsize cloud providers, Hurford said. .

"Bringing a customer onto the cloud can be quite complex and can involve re-architecting or rebuilding a template from nothing," Hurford said. "Up until now, it was a case of rebuilding it [ourselves], as a service provider, or [getting] word of mouth contacts through CA salespeople or other partners in the community to see if anyone had done this before."

By: Jessica Scarpati

Balancing the Scales ~ Selecting the Right EHR for the Life of Your Practice and Your Patients

If we are at or approaching a technological tipping point in the history of healthcare, then it has never been more important for physician practices to select the right electronic health record (EHR) – and there are tangible reasons to believe so.

A recent survey of 400 providers by KLAS found that 35 percent are replacing existing systems, including one third of small practices within that number and 43 percent with 100 physicians or more ("

Ambulatory EMR: Win Rates, Replacements, and Provider Loyalty," Feb. 23).

The industry is regularly updated with financial analyses forecasting growth in the EHR market, such as the June, 2011 report from MarketsandMarkets expecting the U.S. EHR market to reach approximately $6 billion by 2015, up from about $2.2 billion in 2009.

At the same time, patients are increasingly becoming discerning consumers of healthcare and desiring more from technology, meaning they also will be seeking best practices. A recent Dell survey, for example, found 74 percent of patients share the expectation that EHRs should be able to link providers, healthcare institutions, labs and other facilities.

Taken together, as the implementation impact of the meaningful use initiative increasingly becomes evident, it is equally important to approach EHR selection as a starting point or a foundational aspect of long-term business strategy to navigate the future of healthcare and certainly accountable care, payment reform and new payer models yet to come.

So as meaningful use stages progress, PQRS and other quality reporting programs evolve, ICD10, HIPAA 5010 and accountable care take hold, there are foundational criteria for selecting the right EHR solution that can set the right course even before the research begins or an RFP is sent out the door.

At the outset:

• Bring all parties in your practice together into the discussion. Physicians, practice administrators, physician assistants, nurses, medical assistants, billers, schedulers and other staff important to your institution should be heard.

• Assess practice goals that you want to achieve by adopting an EHR:

- Meaningful use incentives capture?

- Improved internal workflows and practice efficiency?

- Improved patient communication, engagement and satisfaction rates?

- The ability to better exchange data with referring physicians and other health facilities?

- The ability to exchange data with immunization registries and public health agencies?

- The ability to participate in clinical trials and research?

- A system that integrates clinical, financial and administrative tasks for operational simplicity?

- A premise-based or hosted solution?

- How best to position the practice for the future of accountable care and reimbursement model variances?

- All of the above?

It’s also important to ask yourself questions before they are asked of you. For example, do you have an equipped, in-house IT staff or do you require increased levels of support by your EHR solution provider? If you are replacing a system as many are, was it due to insufficient technology – the interfacing of legacy EMR and practice management systems, for example – or that the right system for your needs was not fully investigated on the front end during your last purchase?

Once you have an internal game plan underway, it’s time to start the external process:

• Seek site visits and references only from practices where more than 70 percent of care providers use the EHR solution daily.

• And of those EHRs that are in use widely, make sure they are being used at the point of care with patients.

• Seek like practices, specialties and workflows using the solution in the above manner.

• In accordance with specialty considerations, seek a solution’s ability for customization.

• Also during site visits, seek demonstrations where the exact software and version you are considering is in use.

• Usability is extremely important, so ensure you look for a system that can be flexible to your specific workflows.

• Examine the EHR provider’s long-term business plan, ensuring that a five-year or more outlook is in place providing a strategy and vision that is inclusive of your own growth and technological goals.

• Review independent assessments of EHR providers and technology in the areas of training, installation, go-live monitoring and support, service and certification:

- KLAS Research. The above-noted KLAS conducts a range of customer-driven evaluations and awards based on more than two dozen criteria such as sales and contracting, implementation and training, functionality and upgrades, service and support, again as ranked by healthcare providers and administrators.

www.klasresearch.com

- Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology

www.cchit.org. A long-time independent certification entity in comprehensive and specialty functionality, which also evaluates usability, CCHIT is also a certification entity specific to EHR meaningful use criteria.

- Industry membership organizations such as the Medical Group Management Association (

www.mgma.com) and the Health Information Management Systems Society (www.himss.org) also provide independent assessments in selection priorities and recommendations.

If the meaningful use incentives program and its provisions for up to $44,000 per eligible provider in the Medicare pathway and up to $63,750 in the Medicaid pathway is a motivating factor, then also begin with some foundational review:

• Assign a meaningful use assessment leader within your practice or facility.

• Make sure the EHRs you are researching are certified for meaningful use Stage 1.

• Use the core and menu criteria from Stage 1 as a checklist for a system’s functionality.

• Ensure that the meaningful use Final Rule data exchange language standards of CCD and CCR data are in place.

• Critically assess the knowledge base of the EHR provider as to future meaningful use readiness for Stages 2 & 3.

• Seek an EHR solution that includes a Meaningful Use Dashboard to easily track allowable and quality measures met.

• Ensure the product you are being demonstrated during the Sales process is the exact, Certified product you will be purchasing and installing.

Keep in mind there is still time to take advantage of the program. You can start quality measure reporting and attestation by Oct. 1, 2012 and still receive maximum incentives in the Medicare pathway, and by 2016 to maintain maximum funding in the Medicaid pathway, if you start the process today. I do not recommend you wait anywhere near that long to implement a Certified EHR because of unforeseen hurdles that occur in life that could cause you to miss your maximum incentive allotment but that timeline is good to know.

And there are tangible reasons to find confidence in the long-term availability of incentives, which are drawn from the Medicare Trust Funds held by the U.S. Treasury, and are therefore not subject to annual Congressional budget appropriations. However, with the debt ceiling debate, and as our wise forefathers and foremothers taught us, gather what is yours today as you never know what tomorrow holds. The EHR adoption incentives are flowing today and they are all front-loaded so you can achieve well up to half or more of the total incentive allotment in just the first two years.

But whatever your motivation for implementing an EHR, the process can and arguably should be time consuming, but does not have to be intimidating. On your side is a wealth of EHR adoptions available for clinical, workflow, usability and ROI outcomes evaluation.

Once you make the right EHR selection for your practice, you will realize returns well beyond the incentives, and will be providing your patients with the most advanced care possible while helping to create a smarter, more sustainable healthcare system in America and globally.

This tipping point is not a tripping point, but by definition a point at which what is previously rare becomes common, and therefore an opportunity to balance the scales of practice and patient needs.

By: Justin Barnes is chairman emeritus of the national Electronic Health Record Association (EHR Association), and is vice president of marketing, industry affairs and government affairs for Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc.

Addressing HIPAA privacy compliance on hospital wireless network

Health care CIOs are caught between a rock (technology) and a hard place (regulation). On the one hand, demanding patients and increasing numbers of wireless medical devices are requiring they open up their wireless networks. On the other, tighter rules for HIPAA privacy compliance are forcing them to lock networks down with encryption and tighter access control, lest they find their facility's name posted on a government website in connection with a data breach.

For John Cameron, computer technical specialist and wireless technician at the 121-bed Milford Regional Medical Center in Massachusetts, accommodating guests while maintaining HIPAA privacy compliance on the facility's new wireless network begins with three technology measures:

Partitioning the network and keeping patient data and guest activity on separate partitions

Limiting guest activity to the browser -- that is, no virtual private networks, or VPN, or other applications

Using public domain name servers, or DNS, for the guest partition, not the hospital's own

HIPAA guidelines also should be taken into account when the hospital's medical equipment buyers order new wireless gear, Cameron recommended. Not every monitoring device or wireless intravenous pump has the capacity to encrypt the bits of data that HIPAA protects, such as name and date of birth. That reality should be factored into buying decisions whenever possible. On the same point, all the medical devices in use on a hospital's wireless network should be evaluated and the security settings maxed out, he added.

"Work with the [wireless and biomedical equipment] vendors on getting the highest security level you can get with what you have," Cameron said. "Biomedical gear is a couple years behind in the wireless field. Eventually, when they come on to the wireless, we need to make sure they can withstand a certain amount of encryption . . . and make sure it's within the HIPAA guidelines."

For Robert Mann, manager of information technology for Westminster Canterbury Richmond, a continuing care retirement community in Virginia, the HIPAA wireless compliance problem is especially thorny. The community's three-floor, 158-bed facility uses the network in delivering health care, but its 900 residents also access it for their personal use. That represents 900 more vulnerable points in the network for malware or other unauthorized access that hospitals with more transient populations might not have. Yet the facility chose to offer Internet to residents via Aruba Networks Inc. wireless gear because wiring the community's 1970s-vintage buildings would have busted the budget.

"We decided this would be a great place to kick off our great enterprise wireless initiative," said Mann, whose network recently was further upgraded to accommodate physicians and nurses accessing Westminster Canterbury's electronic health record (EHR) system via laptops and bedside workstations on wheels. "This is going to give us real-time documentation," he said.

To do that and maintain his compliance with HIPAA and with Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, his team first set up virtual LANs on Cisco Systems Inc. switches to cordon off certain areas of the network and beef up security, Mann said. To keep patient data locked down, the team then set up a policy enforcement firewall on the wireless side. Then they slowly rolled out the wireless in the health care buildings and tested for vulnerabilities.

Secure, HIPAA-compliant health care wireless networks begin with a locked-down wired network, stressed both Mann and Scott Vachon, manager of network services for the Laconia, N.H.-based two-hospital LRGHealthcare system. Once access to those areas is properly limited and secured, wireless security with encryption and traffic routing and policies can be tackled.

"My CIO and I both come from financial companies, so we're schooled in PCI," Vachon said. "[PCI and HIPAA] are not so different. We practice defense in depth, so everything we do, we start at 'no,' then work our way out and say, 'What do we need to open up to meet your requirements?'"

Mann stresses that HIPAA privacy compliance is an ongoing process. After the hospital wireless network becomes operational, the work has just begun. Maintaining security is a matter of testing and retesting, as well as going over areas where maintenance operations could affect wireless gear and its function.

"For us it's not a case of 'set it and forget it,'" Mann said. "It's something that we've brought along, something we've grown. But we continue to monitor it, we continue to have third-party vendors come in and do testing on it."

By Don Fluckinger, Features Writer

Top 10 iPad business apps and what they mean for IT

iPad business apps can be invaluable tools for end users, as long as IT administrators keep tabs on their usage.

The iPad is so popular because it provides an easy way to browse the Internet, play games, watch a movie or listen to music whether you’re in bed, at the dentist’s office or in an airport. But thanks to an increasing number of iPad business apps, more people are using Apple’s tablet for work as well. In this article you'll get to know the top 10 iPad apps for business users, and you'll learn how these apps will affect your work as an IT administrator.

Keynote
Price: $9.99The iPad is an excellent tool for giving business presentations on the go, and Apple's own Keynote is the de facto standard in this area. Keynote users can create presentations and import presentations from other applications, using either iTunes or iCloud. For IT administrators, Keynote is an easy application to manage; once it’s installed on an iPad, it doesn't interfere with the existing IT infrastructure at all. The only additional thing an employee might need when using this iPad business app is an adapter to connect the tablet to an external projector.

Skype
Price: FreeWhen it comes to iPad apps for business users on the go, Skype is an excellent choice. This app supports Skype-to-Skype calls, which are free, and offers low-price Skype-to-telephone calls. Users can also take advantage of more advanced ways of communicating, such as video conferencing and conference calls. Although the Skype app itself is free, users must purchase Skype Credit or a Skype subscription to make calls to external telephone numbers. Skype is hassle-free for IT administrators because it doesn't interfere with current IT infrastructure, and in certain cases it could actually help organizations save on communications costs.

Dropbox
Price: FreeThere’s a whole category of iPad business apps that synchronize data across the tablet and other devices, and Dropbox is an extremely popular choice. The Dropbox iPad app allows synchronization of files without using iTunes; a user can create a document on his or her work PC and then view or edit it later on an iPad, for example. But this defining feature of Dropbox is the main challenge for IT administrators, because Dropbox users can easily store and access corporate data outside the firewall, posing a potential security threat.

Numbers
Price: $9.99Numbers, like Keynote, is part of the Apple iWork office suite, which contains several different iPad business apps. This app doesn’t replace the typical spreadsheet programs used on PCs, but it does allow business professionals to make quick calculations and analysis of data, which is useful when working with clients on the road. Numbers is an ideal application for IT professionals because it synchronizes its data only through iTunes, which admins can secure by enforcing Windows policies.

TeamViewer HD
Price: FreeTeamViewer is a perfect remote desktop iPad app. IT professionals can use it to provide desktop support to users from their iPads, and end users can connect to their corporate PCs when they’re away from their desks. Access to the remote desktop and its data is contained to the app itself, so there is no means of transferring content to the iPad itself -- which makes TeamViewer a safe iPad business app that doesn't require additional security measures. As an added bonus, TeamViewer requires only a free desktop client and does not tie into your back-end IT infrastructure.

WebEx for iPad
Price: FreeCisco Systems’ WebEx is a popular tool for organizing Web meetings. The WebEx for iPad app lets users receive audio and data simultaneously, and it has extended document- and application-sharing options. IT administrators should monitor this iPad business app closely, because the document-sharing feature can open the door for unauthorized users to access sensitive corporate data.

PDF Reader Pro
Price: $5.99PDF readers are some of the most important iPad apps for business users. They let employees handle documents electronically, reducing the amount of paper that has to be carried around. PDF Reader Pro lets users read, mail and print documents, plus make notes. The good news for IT administrators is that this app does not let users handle documents that come from unverified channels, such as direct downloads.

FileApp Pro
Price: $3.99The iPad’s native file management capabilities leave much to be desired, but there are several third-party iPad business apps that fill in the gaps. FileApp Pro lets users organize documents just as they are used to doing so on a PC. Like other safe apps, FileApp Pro imports documents through iTunes, lessening the concern about potential threats.

SSH Term Pro
Price: $2.99SSH Term Pro is a very useful app for IT professionals who need remote access functionality for Linux and UNIX servers. SSH Term Pro is much like TeamViewer, except that it connects via the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. Once logged in, you have full shell access, which allows you to work as if you were sitting right at the machine. Admins can perform all common tasks, such as changing configuration files, starting or stopping services and shutting down the server, from the SSH Term Pro iPad app.

FTP on the Go Pro
Price: $9.99The FTP on the Go Pro iPad app lets users access FTP servers to browse for, upload and download files. Users can edit files directly from the FTP on the Go Pro interface, but because they can also upload and download files, the app does raise security concerns. As an IT administrator, you may have to deal with unknown files entering your infrastructure via FTP -- and protected files leaving it.

By: Sander van Vugt