Not that we needed another reason to love Starbucks here at Virtual Computer, but they are quickly emerging as a poster child for why a better management and security approach is needed for laptop PCs—something we are a bit passionate about here.  After a lot of Internet buzz, leaked internal memos, etc. over the last couple of days, Starbucks has confirmed that a laptop containing personal data on nearly 100,000 employees has been stolen.  Not only that, but they are the first high profile “repeat offender” I have seen in a while.  They actually lost four laptops in late 2006 that also contained sensitive employee data.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more information on what is another unfortunate example of stolen data and hardware leading to expense and, frankly, embarrassment that could have been avoided.

Our recent post on laptop theft statistics goes into detail on not only how many laptops are stolen and how often (one every 53 seconds – think about that) but also how we are designing NxTop to help companies avoid this problem in the future.

Rick Faulk, who we announced yesterday has joined our Board of Directors, sent us a pointer to a very interesting article in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.  It included some data points that I found a bit staggering:

• A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds.
• More than 12,000 laptops disappear each week from U.S. airports alone.
• Only 3% of laptops are ever returned.

The article went on to describe some of the technologies out there for tracking and recovering stolen laptops as they come up on a network somewhere “in the wild.”  This is innovate technology, and it seems like it is getting some very positive results.  However, in my view, it is only a partial solution.  With NxTop, we provide a similar ability to remotely “kill” a laptop and wipe away its data.  This throws up some pretty big obstacles to the run of the mill thief.  However, a criminal can counteract this through a variety of methods ranging in sophistication from simply not connecting the laptop to a network to pulling the hard drive out and accessing the data through other means.

For most companies, the monetary loss of the laptop itself is nearly meaningless.  The two bigger concerns are security of sensitive data and lost productivity of employees due to missing data and time spent without a functioning PC.  So, in addition to remote kill, we have layered additional measures such as:

• Trusted boot to protect against tampering with our virtualization layer.
• Encryption by default for all data on the laptop.
• Policy-based controls governing how often the laptop needs to “phone home.”  (For example, if the laptop does not check in at least every X days, it becomes inaccessible.)
• Transparent backup of user data to the central server.
• Hardware abstraction that presents a common set of “virtual hardware” to Windows regardless of the underlying PC hardware.

None of these things is a silver bullet by itself.  However, if a NxTop-enabled laptop is ever lost or stolen, the company has assurance that they have multiple measures working in concert to make it a non-event.  For example, even if someone was going to take a run at cracking encryption, the ticking clock of the “phone home” policy dramatically shortens the window they have to do so.  Additionally, the combination of hardware abstraction and user data backup allows IT to just pull a new PC off the shelf (even using an HP to replace a Lenovo or vice versa) and restore to a complete user-customized PC in minutes.

A government laptop containing personal information was stolen in North Carolina. The laptop contained personal information of people receiving services from the North Carolina Division of Aging and  Adult Services. Here’s the story.

While the data on the laptop was password protected, there is no guarantee that the personal information stored on the computer can’t be accessed. Now, there’s hassle and expense all around:

• North Carolina must contact all of the potentially affected people
• These people are asked to place a fraud alert on their credit report and to regularly monitor their credit report
• Additional people were notified to be alert (presumably, contact information was on this laptop but not social security numbers)
• The end user needs a new laptop and hopes their data is backed up (not just the consumer data but anything they’ve had on the laptop)

As you can see, this is a real problem for many people and, rightfully, there is real concern. In a situation like this, you hope it’s just the hardware that will be used by the laptop thief and not the data on it.

This scenario is one we are solving with NxTop. We realize that laptops will be stolen and that dealing with the follow-up in any situation is a pain. In most cases, it is the data on the stolen laptop that causes problems and not the hardware itself.

The solution we’ve come up with combines use of disk encryption and data leakage protection with the ability to remotely “kill” the PC from NxTop Center with a few mouse clicks.  Plus, all of the user’s data, applications, and settings are seamlessly backed up on the central server.  Simply register a new PC with NxTop Center—even a completely different laptop from a different vendor—and within minutes the user is restored to their personalized environment.  I don’t mean a base Windows image with collection of files from a backup server.  This is their desktop environment, right down to the settings and the wallpaper picture of their cat.

For more information, see this post: How Do You Deal With A Stolen Laptop? and this web page: Laptop Management and Mobile User Management

Stolen laptops are a real problem. Whichever statistics you choose to believe, the numbers are staggering and growing every year. Granted, this is no great surprise since laptop use is growing every year (side note: I haven’t seen anything but it would be interesting to compare the growth of laptop use with the growth of laptop theft).

With today’s solutions, a stolen laptop causes many problems and headaches:

• Confidential data may be lost
• User isn’t able to work until new hardware can be provisioned
• In a best case scenario, there is a recent backup of user data that can be restored to a new machine
• Employee wastes time re-customizing machine to their liking
• IT needs to build the laptop…best case, this involves an updated image
• Employee hunts down license keys for user-specific programs, wasting more time
• Depending on data on laptop, may need to communicate loss to customers which can be costly and embarrassing

What if there were a better way? What if you could simply “turn off” the laptop remotely?

This isn’t a problem with NxTop.

NxTop’s architecture separates the four main components that make up a PC: the hardware, operating systems, data and applications. This presents a very unique way of dealing with laptop theft: since all four components are separate, you can simply stop a piece of hardware (a stolen laptop) from accessing the other four components. Without that access, the stolen laptop is no longer a real problem.

As for the user, simply get them a new piece of hardware and provision a new NxTop to them. A few mouse clicks is all it takes to get them up and running on a new laptop, complete with their previous configuration (including any customization they’ve made), all of their user data and applications, and virtually no loss of productivity – and less of a headache for the IT administrator.

Sure, you still lose the hardware (assuming it isn’t recovered or found) but that’s much less of a loss than it could be otherwise.

Want to try NxTop for yourself? We’re still perfecting it but take a moment to register and we’ll let you know as soon as NxTop is available for download.

As all of us who use PCs know, sometimes things just go south. Each PC user develops their own set of rituals to attempt to recover.  When all else fails, we sound the alarm to the IT team. In some cases, they show up with a silver bullet. In other cases, we end up with a fresh install of Windows and spend the next two weeks trying to get our data and settings back to the way we knew and loved them.

NxTop makes those days obsolete. Blue screen of death? No problem. IT can still establish network connectivity to the PC and restore a fresh Windows environment, complete with your data and settings as of the last time you were connected to a network.  Lost or damaged PC. Not to worry. IT pulls another machine off the shelf and within minutes you are back to you – not back to square one.

Even IT teams that are sophisticated enough to have central Windows image management struggle with image bloat. They start off with one master corporate image for Windows XP. Over time, they create one-off images of the same operating system to account for department-specific application needs and hardware compatibility requirements such as special drivers. Before long, they wake up one day and find that their “master” copy of Windows XP is really 50 master copies of Windows XP.

With NxTop, IT teams can install applications that are common to all users directly into the base image but employ application virtualization to deal with user or group specific applications. Also, because Windows is talking to NxTop’s virtualization layer instead of the physical PC hardware, managing driver and other hardware compatibility issues becomes orders of magnitude easier.

Today, most people are protecting Windows from within Windows – or, perhaps I should say, trying to protect Windows from within Windows.  The very first thing that most malware does is disable all of the security protections within Windows.

NxTop allows security functions to be performed outside of Windows.  It also has an innovative feature that allow Windows to “self clean” on a reboot.  Those pesky rootkits and keystroke loggers that are so good at hiding themselves within Windows are automatically shed.

IT folks and end-users don’t agree on much, but they both share a common dislike of agents in Windows.  They are everywhere these days:

• Need to distribute software?  Install an agent.
• Patching?  Here’s an agent.
• Backup?  Agent.
• Security?  Used to be an agent—now it’s a six-pack of agents.

The purpose of Windows is to run productivity applications.  You deserve its undivided attention.  By moving management and security functions into a virtualization layer outside of Windows, NxTop creates an agentless PC management model that allows Windows to focus on what it was intended for.

In today’s corporate environments, PCs often start with a master image of the Windows operating system, but as soon as an individual begins using their PC the image takes on a life of its own. If you have 10,000 PCs, you have 10,000 variants of Windows.  Microsoft “patch Tuesdays” have become a dreaded pastime for many desktop administrators. Even though many utilize central patching tools, they never really know for sure what is going to happen when a patch hits a PC. In most cases, everything goes fine. However, in those cases when it goes badly, it goes very badly.

The IT pros we have spoken with have told us that a failed patch is often a desk side visit. This is painful proposition when it is a frustrated end-user down the hall. It’s a “career limiting” proposition when the user is the CEO in a hotel room in Beijing. NxTop takes the pain and risk out of patching in a couple of different ways:

• Instead of applying a patch to 10,000 divergent copies of Windows, the IT person applies the patch to a single Windows virtual machine that is not in use by an end-user. They test it. They publish it. That’s it.
• The next time the end-user reboots their PC, they boot into a patched image. They never saw or felt the patch. They still have all of their unique data and settings. In the unlikely event that there are complications with a system update (say, in a Beijing hotel room), the PC boots into the last known good configuration.

We are unique from many startups in that the problems we are trying to solve are not new.  The challenges and pitfalls of maintaining and securing PCs are well documented, and there are many existing companies attempting to tackle different aspects of the problem.

The advantage we have as a new entrant is that we are in no way limited by “the way things have always been done.”  Since we have no stake in the status quo, we bring an entirely fresh perspective, as well as an architectural approach that was not technically feasible prior to recent advances in virtualization software and hardware technology.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll post some thoughts on how age old PC management challenges can be tackled in a completely different way using NxTop, our PC management platform.

These thoughts are around the top five PC management challenges we’ve been hearing about:

1. Complex patch management
2. Too many agents
3. Flawed security model
4. Image bloat
5. Tough to recover from problems

(Note: This post has been updated with links to all five PC management challenges.)