IT Security

CIO Insight – Do You Know Where Your Critical Data Lives?

Engage with others to assess needs from differing perspectives: business operations, customers, regulators/auditors and shareholders. Keep this list updated because it evolves.

In an era of continuous business operations, being offline has become unacceptable. Yet this drive for high availability, although exciting, also poses serious risks to the security of your data. Your data may be among the most important assets to your business. Any form of downtime can be detrimental to the livelihood of your business because it affects reputation and revenue, said Derek Brost, director of Engineering at Bluelock. “Don’t wait until a disaster strikes to take action,” he warned. “If you’re experiencing pressure to improve your current IT program, don’t fret. [These tips] should set you on the right path to a secure business environment, one with optimized recovery.” Bluelock provides Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service for complex environments and sensitive data to help companies mitigate risk with confidence. Confidence begins with a plan that works, Brost said. These tips should help the always-on business to proceed with confidence in the face of an intrusion.

More of the CIO Insight post from Karen A. Frenkel

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29
Mar 16

Baseline – Data Center Outages Result in Shocking Expenses

The average cost of data center outages has increased by tens of thousands of dollars in recent years, according to recent research published by the Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power. The accompanying report, “2016 Cost of Data Center Outages,” reveals that unplanned outages usually last longer than a typical two-hour movie and cost organizations thousands of dollars for every minute of downtime. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system failure and, of course, hackers account for most of these incidents, causing business disruption, lost revenue and a slowdown in productivity. With continued growth in cloud computing and the Internet of things (IoT)—which is expected to grow to a $1.7 trillion market by 2020, up from about $656 billion in 2014—the data center will continue to be crucial in leveraging business-benefiting opportunities. So IT departments are under pressure to reduce these outages. “As organizations … invest millions in data center development, they are exploring new approaches to data center design and management to both increase agility and reduce the cost of downtime,” according to the report.

More of the Baseline article from Dennis McCafferty

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28
Mar 16

IT Business Edge – CEOs Share Valuable Lesson: Be Careful When You Hire

It has become a common refrain among tech company founders and CEOs I’ve spoken with over the years: Failing to do an adequate job of vetting the people they have brought on board to help them build their companies has been a handicap that they would love to have avoided.

When I interview company founders and CEOs, I almost always ask them, if they could have one do-over since founding or becoming CEO of their company, what it would be. Occasionally I’ll get a CEO who claims there’s nothing he or she would do over, which, of course, is nonsense. On the other end of the spectrum, I sometimes get candid responses about a bad product development or other tactical or strategic decision made along the way. But if there’s one response I get more than any other, it involves having made far-reaching hiring mistakes.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Don Tennant

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18
Mar 16

SearchCloudComputing – Verizon Cloud joins casualty list amid public IaaS exodus

Why do YOU think the big guys are shutting down their cloud operations?

Verizon is the latest large-scale IT vendor to quietly shutter its public cloud after its splashy entry to the market several years ago.

Customers this week received a letter informing them that Verizon’s public cloud, reserved performance and marketplace services will be closed on April 12. Any virtual machines running on the public Verizon Cloud will be shut down and no content on those servers will be retained.

The move isn’t particularly surprising. Despite once-lofty ambitions, Verizon acknowledges its public cloud offering is not a big part of its cloud portfolio and, a year ago, the firm began to emphasize its private cloud services even before its public cloud became generally available. Other large vendors such as Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise similarly have been shutting down their public clouds.

More of the SearchCloudComputing article from Trevor Jones

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04
Mar 16

Baseline – Hybrid Clouds: The Long Road Ahead

The challenge facing IT leaders is that there are so many forms of hybrid clouds that they don’t realize how extended a journey their organization may be on.

When it comes to enterprise IT these days, just about everything involves some form of hybrid cloud computing. The challenge is that there are so many forms of hybrid clouds that many IT leaders don’t realize just how extended a journey their organization may be on.

The typical IT organization usually embraces cloud computing first with a few software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In that regard, the hybrid cloud scenario that emerges is relatively simple: IT leaders need to find ways to share data between existing on-premise applications and SaaS applications that are most often servicing the needs of a specific department or line of business.

IT leaders also find themselves trying to manage infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. IT usually starts out with a few developers taking advantage of platforms such as Amazon Web Services to build and test applications.

More of the Baseline article from Mike Vizard

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02
Mar 16

CloudExpo – Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT: What’s the Hype?

Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On one hand, hybrid cloud is all the rage. Adopting this option promises all the cost savings of public cloud with the security and comfort of private cloud. This environment would not only check the box for meeting the cloud computing mandate, but also position the organization as innovative and industry-leading. Why wouldn’t a forward-leaning management team go all in with cloud?

On the other hand, hybrid IT appears to be the sensible choice for leveraging traditional data center investments. Data center investment business models always promise significant ROI within a fairly short time frame; if not, they wouldn’t have been approved. Shutting down such an expensive initiative early would be an untenable decision. Is this a better option than the hybrid cloud?

Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT
The difference between hybrid cloud and hybrid IT is more than just semantics. The hybrid cloud model is embraced by those entities and startups that don’t need to worry about past capital investments. These newer companies have more flexibility in exploring newer operational options.

More of the CloudExpo blog post from Kevin Jackson

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01
Mar 16

Baseline – IT Security Teams Are Stretched to the Limit

The growth of virtualization and cloud computing—and the nimble and responsive architectures they enable—has brought companies unquestioned benefits, ranging from increased business agility to reduced application costs. But the heterogeneous environments most companies are now overseeing also have brought unprecedented complexity and vulnerability. With so many sub-environments and so much cross-application traffic to monitor—not to mention an increasingly sophisticated and fast-growing population of bad guys to safeguard against—it’s become difficult for enterprises to even detect a threat, much less respond in a timely fashion. Such is the inescapable takeaway from a recent survey that the SANS Institute conducted for adaptive security vendor Illumio.

More of the Baseline slide show from Tony Kontzer

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24
Feb 16

Baseline – What Worries IT Organizations the Most?

IT employees and leaders have a lot to worry about these days, according to a recent survey from NetEnrich. For starters, they’re spending too much money on technology that either doesn’t get used or fails to deliver on its promises, findings show. They devote too many hours to “keeping the lights on” rather than innovating. And the increase of tech acquisition decisions being made outside of the IT department (shadow IT) elevates existing risks about cyber-security and business app performance. Meanwhile, tech departments are still struggling with a lack of available talent to support agility and business advances. “Corporate IT departments are in a real bind,” said Raju Chekuri, CEO at NetEnrich.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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16
Feb 16

Data Center Knowledge – How Data Center Trends Are Forcing a Revisit of the Database

Ravi Mayuram is Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering at Couchbase.

Data centers are like people: no two are alike, especially now. A decade of separating compute, storage, and even networking services from the hardware that runs them has left us with x86 pizza boxes stacked next to, or connected with, 30-year-old mainframes. And why not? Much of the tough work is done by software tools that define precisely how and when hardware is to be used.

From virtual machines to software-defined storage and network functions virtualization, these layers of abstraction fuse hardware components into something greater and easier to control.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Ravi Mayuram

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08
Feb 16

Wall Street Journal – CIOs Say Focus on Customer Is Paramount

We asked chief information officers how they expect their role to change in 2016 and beyond. They said the “seat at the table” discussion is over, and that the CIO exerts greater influence inside the C-suite as technology permeates every line of business.

Many CIOs said they now shape corporate strategy, not just support it. While they still have a mandate to improve operating performance, keep costs down and drive productivity using technology, they also guide product development and user experience design.

“Regardless of industry, CIOs will have more responsibility directly to the customer,” said Bill Bradley, CIO at CenturyLink Inc.

While in the past viewed as mostly a technical position, “the CIO…is now considered very valuable in the ability to bridge the gap between IT and internal and external customer needs,” said Erika Lance, CIO at Nationwide Title Clearing Inc.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.