The Blurring Effect

As many of you know firsthand, the small-business owner can little afford to put time restrictions on when and where work is done. On the flip side, I think all of us are beginning to value more highly the precious downtime that we can find. In my mind, this will have two specific impacts during the upcoming year—maybe not in the enterprise market, where selections might be more tightly controlled, but certainly among more entrepreneurial companies.

First, as small businesses get around to updating notebooks and desktops, “consumer-type” features and ergonomic factors will become more important. Wi-Fi wireless is a given, but wide-area options will become more common. Their heft and ruggedness will come more into play, and as planes become tightly packed with passengers again, wide-screen notebook models will find a larger following. They fit on the tray table better, not to mention the fact that they&'re better for playing DVDs when you can&'t stand staring at spreadsheets or an e-mail inbox anymore.

An even more profound impact of the blurring effect will come in security. How many people do you know who manage their iPod or portable music player on what is technically their business system? Or who synchronize their PDA with same? Or who mix business and pleasure communications on their BlackBerry? What that means, essentially, is that anyone developing a data protection or management plan for a small business needs to take all this personal data into consideration.

For this reason, I found SonicWall&'s acquisition last week of storage appliance vendor Lasso Logic forward-thinking. SonicWall CEO Matt Medeiros said his company plans to integrate the Lasso technology into its appliances in about six months, creating a device that can analyze data, storing and protecting only what is critical. It&'s another indication that as our personal and professional lives continue to blur, so will the security and backup/recovery disciplines.

Is your vision blurry? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, welcomes your commentaries and letters at [email protected].