2012 had been a phenomenal year for Android as explained in an infographic posted by a search monetization agency. According to the infographic, while there were about 425,000 apps in Google app during the start of the year 2012, the count nearly doubled to about 800,000 by the end of the year in Google Play store. The daily revenue of Google Play increased by about 43% within 4 month span between August – November 2012 and reached upto $3.5 Million.
Enterprises are also leveraging the benefit of Android application because of the availability of an ample variety of application. The cause of such a drastic change in the application deployment could be credited to third party application development practice of the Android community. Any developer with any application having any kind of utility can present an application in Google Play Store, as long as the app follows the guidelines and policies of the store.
IT department has also experienced a drastic shift in its operational practices as its workforce is not bound to stay within the campus of the organization anymore. Employees can remotely monitor, manage and administrate the IT related tasks and resolve issues from their Android device.
Here is a list of the best Android applications of last year for IT professionals:
- Linux Monitor: This app helps IT workforce to monitor and manage their Linux Server activities. Different tasks like monitoring the CPU load, RAM and disk usage, and even network/port activity can be tracked remotely through an Android enabled device. Though it’s a paid app, users can download the trial version to get a feel of the application and the way it functions.
- httpmon: To monitor http servers, specifically, this app is really helpful for IT managers and administrators. A user can customize a request URL with customizable conditions like content using substrings or wildcard characters and can also check the server with a simple ping. Notification actions like flash message, alert message, phone vibration or SMS can also be customized for the failure conditions using this app.
- ConnectBot: This is another free android app for working with UNIX based servers or any other network component which can work properly with SSH/Telnet connections. Administrators can remotely connect with the server and can perform admin, maintenance and troubleshooting tasks using the command line interface of this app.
- Cellica Database: Other than having roles and responsibilities on web servers, IT admins need to work upon the databases as well to create tables, to sort the selected tables and data filtrations. To conduct these database operations this application can be used, specifically for databases running on a Windows server. Moreover, this app provides an encrypted access to database location so its a secure mode of connection which protects the network intrusion.
- ActiveDir Manager: Working on Active Directory of an organization has been made easy with this Android application as it lets the IT personnel to view and manage the users, group and machine from the device. Policies and access can be set from their application, resetting password and other basic admin tasks can be performed with this app. It is available as a free as well as a paid version with the difference that paid version allows us save the changes in setting and option of LDAP connection.
Android has significantly influenced the working practices of workforce inside an organziation as even after being a deeply customized platform, it has evolved in terms of security. Android 4.0 completely wiped out the security loopholes of the architecture in its mobile OS and result of which is that Android is emerging as a platform for business oriented applications as well.