FullArmor's AppPortal/PolicyPortal and improving lives using technology

How FullArmor, Microsoft, and the Ethiopian government came together to use technology to improve lives.

A couple of weeks ago, I learned about a very interesting technology project that was going on in Africa. In short, the Ethiopian government was trying to improve the quality of life for their citizens by advancing the effectiveness of their education system. One of the paths they had chosen was to deploy laptops to all of their primary and secondary school teachers and to find a means to both centrally manage those laptops and to distribute applications and information to the teachers.

However, there was a small hang-up. From their estimates, the number of laptops that would need to be deployed was around 250,000. Even in the U.S. this would be considered a major effort and most likely subject to any number of issues. Throw in the fact that Ethiopia is an emerging market with tons of infrastructure problems then the lofty goal of this project seems almost unattainable.

Now, this is where the story gets interesting. You have a technology project that is being held back because of the harsh operating environment. When in steps more technology to save the day as a combined effort brought forth by FullArmor's PolicyPortal/AppPortal and Microsoft's Azure and Windows 7.

Intrigued... I was and needed to learn more. Luckily, I had a friend at Microsoft (the one that told me about this project) who also introduced me to Danny Kim (FullArmor's CTO). Late last week, using the wonders of VOIP, I virtually sat down for a short discussion with Danny about what was going on Ethiopia.

Note:

The following is not a direct line-by-line dictation of the discussion. Instead, I'm highlighting the main points of the conversation mixed in with my own comments. Also, I'm breaking this post into a two part series. Sorry, but as I started dictating the interview, things got a bit long. However, I really wanted to include as much detail as possible from Danny. He tells a really good story, and I thought others might want to hear it.

Naturally, as with most discussions, I first asked Danny to give me some background information about himself and FullArmor.

"The best way to describe our company, is that we are a twenty-two year old startup. So, we have been around the industry for quite a while. I was actually, one of the first three founders of the company and the technology guy. So we started developing back in the DOS 2.X days. Doing hard drive encryption, file encryption, lockdown and security. We have grown over the years obviously into different technologies. Our first customer was Walmart, we protected the computers in the Walmart stores. We eventually took over the demo PC market, protecting those machines. Eventually we then went into the corporate market, and when Windows 2000 and Active Directory came out. We did a ton of stuff on Group Policy to secure end-points using Group Policy.

So it has been a long journey. I would say every three to five years we almost reinvent ourselves. That is kind of the entrepreneurial nature of our company. Where we create new technologies on the latest platforms, latest technologies that Microsoft and the others are releasing. And, our business model overall is that we create these technologies, we sell it to the broader market, and then we actually license or sell the assets of the product off. So, every three to five years we are almost starting clean with a new set of technologies and products. And, our latest stuff, as you have probably seen on the Web site is all around cloud based computing and scalable end-point management. This is of high interest to us, so cloud based computing combined that with virtualization and really effect use of the client operating systems."

For myself, I found the background information very interesting. After all, I had heard of FullArmor, and even worked with some of their past products over the years. What I didn't know was that they operated kinda of like a think-tank that came up with really good ideas, pushed them into the market place as solutions, and then moved on to the next great thing. However, what intrigue me the most was the shift in direction into the cloud based arena. After all, they have been in the centrally managed end-point arena for some time now. So the change seemed like a point A to point Z move considering that their AppPortal and PolicyPortal places FullArmor as very early adopters (and committed to) Microsoft's Azure.

"Well actually, PolicyPortal was developed four years ago from a joint project with Microsoft. To help out Microsoft, who at the time was donating what was called Technology Rooms into the children's hospitals in New York. Essentially this was a room full of machines that were connected to the Internet so that sick children could stay in touch with their family and friends. They needed a way to lock down these machines without requiring a server or an IT admin. So obviously, at the time there wasn't a notion of the cloud, so it was kinda like could you manage these machines over the Internet. Using Group Policy, and an internet based ASP.NET service we created PolicyPortal that allowed us to remotely monitor, manage, and secure these machines such that things like Web site filtering was is in place and kids couldn't not destroy the machines , and so on.

So that is kinda of where we started, and we thought, "this is a great technology lets see if we can sell it to the broader market". We called several other children's hospitals and a couple other customers. However, we were hosting the servers ourselves and we quickly learned that in order to scale the number of customers we would have to scale the number of servers, which means we would need to scale the number of IT People and everything started exponentially expanding. We kinda of said, "this is not right, this is not the right model, we are not in the hosting business". That is not our expertise, so we were looking for a way to expand and scale our service, but without having to build the infrastructure out ourselves.

That is kinda where we sat down and said, "you know what someone is going to do this". To have a scalable and hosted infrastructure sitting in the cloud. Essentially a cloud based hosted infrastructure, we waited and actually ported a portion of our app to salesforce.com. We had it up and running, and said this is great, and then shut down. For one it's not Microsoft and it required us to change our development expertise to their infrastructure. We didn't want to do that. So we waited and about a year ago Windows Azure came out and we were one of the first companies to be invite. Because we had been telling Microsoft this what we want to do, and they kind of said so ok, "Let's put FullArmor on the short list of companies to notify."

So, when Azure came out, it was exactly what we were hoping it would be as far as the development environment was concerned. Because, we were hoping if Microsoft does this, it's going to be on a .NET platform, its going use ASP.NET as the front-end and it's going to use a simplified database in the back end. So we had designed our product to be already running in that type of mode. So once we got hold of the bits, the Azure bits, and the SDK. I think we took about a month and a half to do the full port."

Wow... Kind of interesting how FullArmor started down the cloud path by creating a product that really needed the cloud to make sense even before the cloud really existed. Then once Microsoft emerged with Azure, they were in an excellent position to port their application over. Naturally, I was amazed and also commented on the short timeframe it took to get things moved.

"Well 80% of our code compiled out of the box, and that is probably a-typical. I'm sure that is a-typical because we had been planning for four years. So, the bulk of the effort that we had to actually put into the conversion was around the storage. And, obviously we ended up re-writing eventually most of it, or enhancing most of it because we then changed the UI to be Silverlight, we used their scalable storage and what not. Thus a month and half to get the first service up and running then over time we were incrementally updating and enhancing our stuff. By the time, eight months to a year later we had probably rewritten most of the code. But, the fact of the matter is we had something running in a month and a half which gave us the opportunity to go close a customer like the government of Ethiopia."

Phew... that is a lot of typing. Ok, tomorrow I will finish the dictation. As you can see we are starting to get into how FallArmor came to be part of the solution in Ethiopia.

If you like this, check out some other posts from Tyson:

• When a computer science degree matters, and when it doesn't
• Since when did cloud computing become/need a manifesto?
• Why would one phish using a Certificate Authority (CA) as bait?
• Would I trust you, if everyone else trusted you?
• Here is a good question: Is scripting programming or just systems administration?
• PowerShell boy and the case of the missing cmdlets!
• Fun with PowerShell 2.0 Eventing!
• Creating a custom 404 page to handle link redirection for ASP.NET web applications

Or if you want, you can also check out some of Tyson's latest publications:

• Windows PowerShell Unleashed (2^ndEdition)
• Windows Server 2008 Unleashed (Yes, I did help on this book)

Lastly, visit the Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, and opinions from around the Internet. Or, sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert)

• Microsoft
• AppPortal
• Azure
• FullArmor
• PolicyPortal