I used to travel with a Dell 9300, which is a 17" monster, but since I rarely traveled and I wanted lots of screen real estate, that worked out well for me. However when I was looking for new laptops last year, I decided to go a bit smaller and got a Toshiba 15" Qosmio, which is a great machine for my video work. However it's still big, heavy, and it's valuable. It's not the laptop that I really want to lug around to keynotes and seminars and use to make notes. There's a risk I'll break if every time I carry it (not a huge one, but it adds up), plus it's not exactly easy to carry around.
So I've been considering getting a netbook, one of these very small, light notebooks that doesn't have a lot of anything in it, but it travels well. I talked with my partner at End to End Training, Andy Warren, and he was looking at one as well. Something that isn't too expensive, but fills a niche need that many of us have when we travel.
More and more companies are looking at these, and in one sense that's great, but there are some potential security issues to be aware of. The article talks about less security on these machines, mostly because they lack to horsepower to run the latest OS and security software, which can include encryption software. That means that many of the issues that we've seen with laptops over the last few years haven't been solved, or are going to be reintroduced with this new generation of small devices that may be widely deployed to those people that need protection the most: executives and sales people.
Between these devices and the ever-rising capacities of smartphones for data storage, I can see a whole net set of risks that are going to be affecting businesses over the next few years. Lots of companies have been starting to require encryption or preventing data from being carried on laptops, but what happens when newer, smaller, more capable devices access things like email that might have sensitive information? How can you prevent an email that you send to a user from being accessed or stored on a small device but be stored on their desktop in the office?
I like the new devices, but I can definitely see the location and security of data becoming an issue as these computers are used more and more. I just hope that security vendors are working on solutions that can help limit the risks being introduced by all these advances.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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