One concern with allowing users to get work done on smartphones: the possibility of the devices being lost or stolen.

That’s the driver behind new mobile device management options for Google Apps, which the company announced recently. The new features give IT greatly control over Apple, Nokia and Windows Mobile Devices used on the company’s Google Apps account.

Companies running Google Apps Premier and Education will now be able to:

• require devices to use data encryption
• automatically wipe devices after a set number of failed password attempts
• disable the phone’s camera, and
• require passwords to be changed after a specified length of time.

Google plans to extend these features to other devices, including Google’s own Android phone, later in the year.

That fact was made clear by some recent news stories:

• Google has been collecting passwords and e-mail messages, it is claimed. Apparently, Google’s roving Street View cars that present neighborhood views of locations across the world, have been intercepting local Wi-Fi communications. A lawsuit has been brought in France, but the practice goes on in a number of countries. Google’s response: Yes we collect the info, but it’s fragmentary, and we don’t use this stuff. Trust us.
• Twitter recently settled a suit with the Federal Trade Commission, admitting that allowed hackers to take control of several Twitter accounts, including those of President Obama and Fox News. The agreement sets up an independent security auditor that will assess how the company is doing, The company has vowed to take measures to prevent “unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers.”
• Social networking giant Facebook faces a number of class-action lawsuit over its callous disregard for customer privacy, by making so-called private information on user accounts easily available, both to the general public and to marketers. The controversy was inflamed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s public pooh-poohing of anyone’s privacy concerns, the company’s default setting of having the default set at no privacy at all and its policy of making that hard to change.
• AT&T is, for now, the sole mobile source for iPad 3G users in the United States. Well, it didn’t take long. A group of hackers easily obtained the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad owners, using a security hole in AT&T’s website. Fortunately, in this case the hackers were part of a group that it specializes in exposing security vulnerabilities, and they quickly informed AT&T, who fixed that vulnerability. The conclusion: AT&T should have a lot of expertise on board, but they left a door wide open. How many more are there?

Google has been steadily implementing a new operating system policy, according to a report in the Financial Times. While Google has not publicly acknowledged the move, the paper found a number of Google employees willing to talk off the record.

It is migrating almost all of its 10,000 worldwide employees to either Macintosh OS X or Linux operating systems, due to concerns about data security. The loser here: Microsoft Windows.

Also in the mix is Google’s own Chrome OS, due to be officially released in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The move began after a major malware attack on Google’s Chinese division earlier this year, with major loss of data to hackers. Google, which retains search histories for the majority of worldwide computer users, is extremely sensitive to any data loss.

According to one source, Google workers who want or need to stay on Windows (for testing or development) have to get approval form the corporate CIO at Google.

Windows has had, and still has, the reputation of being the most vulnerable of operating systems, despite security upgrades to the current version. What is not clear is whether the vulnerability is inherent to the basic architecture of Windows itself, or that its domination of the market attracts the most talented hackers, who might otherwise dream up more clever assaults on OS X or Linux if they had a bigger share of the market.

It is true that Google has become more and more of a competitor with Microsoft, in the area of search engines, browsers, applications, and soon, operating systems. Is that influencing its policy? And if it is, Google is also at odds with Apple in a number of product areas, so why is it sending so much new business to another rival?

Meanwhile, Microsoft is counterattacking the unconfirmed rumors, Windows supporters are boasting that even hackers acknowledge that Windows security is better than ever, and that Google itself has some serious security issues — and Apple is not so great either, and getting more vulnerable as it gains market share.

Can’t we all just get along? In our opinion, a big shakeup in the operating system world — and a move away from a Windows near monopoly along with some real competition — should improve data security for everyone.

The market share for Internet Explorer (IE) has dipped below 60% for the first time, falling to 59.95%, according to the most recent report by Web analytics company NetApplications.

Chrome’s useage rose to 6.73%, a gain of 0.7% from the last report — about equal to the share lost by IE.

Google’s browser has gotten a fair amount of good press lately on account of its report speed and strong security features.

However, as ComputerWorld reports, the latest preview version of the new Internet Explorer 9 has also impressed experts. Though that browser will not run on XP, Microsoft has confirmed.

Recently the company announced that it is developing a method for printing making use of the Internet cloud. To put it concisely, users will send jobs through the cloud, where the print instructions will either be sent to Chrome-compatible printer (none exist yet) or converted using a specific driver on the cloud and sent to the printer. Since Chrome is primarily intended for mobile devices, the thought is that this will make it far easier to print on the go.

Google Cloud Print, as it is called, has already gotten some negative reactions. The most basic one is that the proposed Chrome-ready printers don’t exist nor do the cloud drivers, and there is no idea of when they will be developed and no announcements from manufacturers.

A second objection is that new network security systems would be needed for a print job to pass through a company’s firewall, and even then there would be worries about remote users never picking up their print jobs or addressing print jams or paper out messages. Third, there are big security worries for the user whose print job might get intercepted along the way. Moreover, if you lose Internet connectivity for some reason, you just won’t be able to print.

On the other hand, some say that since this application is best suited to netbooks, smartphones and tablets, the ability to print without a cable would be a plus for many users, especially when security is not a major issue. Another issue where this approach could help is in the overall driver problem. While some manufacturers (notably HP) have developed universal drivers, for many Windows users there is a tangle of separate drivers for each different device on the network, and for mobile users, getting access to a printer in another location may involve a time-consuming download of a driver that is used only one time. Google may be leading the way to the demise of the proprietary printer driver — all-in-all, a very good thing.

Keeping in line with its push to provide more services to enterprises, Google recently launched the Google Apps Marketplace, a collection of apps that integrate with Google’s own application.

Similar to the model Apple uses for its app store, the applications are developed by third parties and submitted to Google for inclusion.

The store started with 50 apps, covering categories such as Document Management, Workflow, Project Management, and Security & Workflow.

Google has announced the end of support for several old Web browsers out there. IE6 is one of them, along with AMozilla’s Firefox 2.0, Apple’s Safari 2.0 and Google’s own Chrome 3.0.

The likely reason: recent hacks that have targeted some of Google’s popular services.

The move by Google comes after other service and site providers have asked users and businesses to get rid of the nearly nine-year-old IE6.

Even Microsoft itself has been urging users to make the switch.

Researchers at Google published a paper not long ago that showed servers failing at a much higher rate at 59 degrees than at 122.

The paper’s authors used data from more than 100,000 SATA and PATA drives with 80-400 GB capacities.

While Google’s data centers dwarf those of the average small or mid-size firm, the company’s using servers similar in size and type, shunning the pricey RAID-class disks.

To read an abstract of the Google research paper or to download a PDF of the whole study, click here.

Web mail is often free, or offered at low-costs with features tailored to small businesses. But e-mail may be too important to entrust to a free or cheap Web-bases system, warns Roger Matus, CEO of e-mail archiving firm Inboxer.

Potential pitfalls include the risk of downtime. For example, Google’s Gmail made headlines after a few recent outages lasted several hours.

Also, most of these services give users little recourse if messages are lost — which can hurt the bottom line if, for example, messages to and from potential customers or clients don’t get through. Gmail’s service agreement says Google is not responsible for “any damages or loss of profit or harm to business reputation that results from use of the service.”

Our conclusion: Gmail (and others like it) are fine for home use, but if e-mail is critical to your business, you may want to spend the money for a more strictly managed system.