The Connect Pro team released today three new whitepapers addressing key topics of interest for its hosted and licensed customers. A first set of documents provide an updated security assessment for Connect Pro 7.5; another whitepaper focuses on our support for virtualized server environments.
Security - Collaborate in trust with Connect Pro
Leading organizations are increasingly using realtime collaboration tools, such as Connect Pro, to increase employee productivity and optimize their costs of doing business. While enhanced business velocity is the primary objective, systems security, data integrity and privacy protection are vital imperatives for systems administrators.
Adobe has for long acknowledged that software applications and services must be delivered in a secure and reliable fashion. As part of this commitment to transparency, Adobe released today an updated version of its security reports (one for its SaaS platform, one for its premise-based software). The new documents can be found at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/whitepapers/
Customers will find that, from design to systems deployment, Connect Pro implements best practices for software security at all stages of its engineering development and operations. All Connect Pro application components, whether delivered as a service or licensed software, go through a rigorous process of validation, conducted side-by-side by Adobe's dedicated, in-house security team and third-party security experts.
In addition to the techniques employed to ensure communications encryption and protection against security exploits, it is important to note that Connect Pro also offers leading features for compliance and control. They give systems administrators a tighter control over the functionality accessible to end-users and are useful to mitigate the risk of accidental sharing of sensitive information and ensure alignment with internal and regulatory policies. More details can be found in a tutorial published on our community website, at www.connectusers.com.
Virtualization - Optimize resources with Connect Pro
Server virtualization is becoming the norm across many data centers. The overall level of virtualization has increased steadily over the past years and is widely seen as a valuable avenue for cutting costs and improving resource utilization in the data center.
Four main reasons are driving this uptake:
- Server consolidation and data center optimization: by consolidating several workloads on a single, partitioned server and running them each in their own VM, more efficient utilization can be achieved while still allocating sufficient resources to execute each workload. This also allows for substantial savings on data center costs and space.
- Business continuity: the deployment and management of applications on virtualization software offers more cost-efficient options for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
- Encapsulation and isolation: by creating separate operating environments for multiple applications, virtualization technology mitigates the risk of conflict, facilitates the troubleshooting of runtime problems and achieve security isolation.
- Dynamic utility computing: virtualization can turn previously discrete IT resources into an internal utility grid that saves energy, reduces cost and increases reliability.
To take advantage of the benefits of virtualized server architectures, Connect Pro 7.5 has been certified in a virtualized server environment running VMware ESX Server.
The new whitepaper, published at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/whitepapers/, offers benchmarks and data points about the application's performance in a virtual environment, under different configurations (single server setup, clustered three-server setup). It was found that Connect Pro performed on par with an equivalent physical installation and that the user experience was comparable.
This whitepaper also advises customers on the best way to set up and configure Acrobat Connect Pro on VMware ESX Server.
