IT Security

Data Center Knowledge – Most Data Center Outages aren’t Caused by Tech Failure

Many critical industries such as nuclear energy, commercial and military airlines—even drivers’ education—invest significant time and resources to developing processes. The data center industry … not so much.

That can be problematic, considering that two-thirds of data center outages are related to processes, not infrastructure systems, says David Boston, director of facility operations solutions for TiePoint-bkm Engineering.

“Most are quite aware that processes cause most of the downtime, but few have taken the initiative to comprehensively address them. This is somewhat unique to our industry.”

Boston is scheduled to speak about strategies to prevent data center outages at the Data Center World local conference at the Art Institute of Chicago on July 12. More about the event here.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Karen Riccio

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05
Jun 17

The Register – So your client’s under-spent on IT for decades and lives in fear of an audit

Infrastructure as code is a buzzword frequently thrown out alongside DevOps and continuous integration as being the modern way of doing things. Proponents cite benefits ranging from an amorphous “agility” to reducing the time to deploy new workloads. I have an argument for infrastructure as code that boils down to “cover your ass”, and have discovered it’s not quite so difficult as we might think.

Recently, a client of mine went through an ownership change. The new owners, appalled at how much was being spent on IT, decided that the best path forward was an external audit. The client in question, of course, is an SMB who had been massively under-spending on IT for 15 years, and there no way they were ready for – or would pass – an audit.

Trying to cram eight months’ worth of migrations, consolidations, R&D, application replacement and so forth into four frantic, sleepless nights of panic ended how you might imagine it ending. The techies focused on making sure their asses were covered when the audit landed. Overall network performance slowed to a crawl and everyone went home angry.

More of The Register article from Trevor Pott

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02
Jun 17

Continuity Central – Revamping the business continuity profession: a response

Recently, Continuity Central published ‘Revamping the business continuity profession’; an article in which Charlie Maclean-Bristol looked at challenges faced by business continuity professionals and offered his suggestions for revamping the discipline. Here, David Lindstedt and Mark Armour, developers of the Adaptive Business Continuity methodology, offer their response to the article:

David Lindstedt: Naturally, most folks starting to embrace Adaptive Business Continuity will agree that traditional business continuity methods are not working and it’s time for a change. I totally agree that ‘resilience’ will not be the ‘savior’ of business continuity. As Charlie correctly points out, resilience is an inter-discipline, not a discipline on its own. A business continuity practitioner could run it, but so could anyone from any of the inter-disciplines like ERM, EM, IT DR, etc. The chief concern with resilience will always be: what are the boundaries to what gets included (individual personal psychology to environmental sustainability to the entire content of a MBA program?) and how do you measure its effectiveness?

TechTarget – Enlightened shadow IT policy collaborates with users

A cloud-era shadow IT policy still needs to manage risk, but the era of “no way” is giving way to allow users quick access to the productivity apps they need.

Most IT departments have spent time rooting out the shadow, or non-IT-sanctioned, applications and systems in use within their organizations. Today, users find that cloud-based services not necessarily approved by IT enable them to quickly subscribe to applications and platforms that improve their collaboration and productivity. That advantage is prompting IT organizations to rethink how to work with users rather than have a shadow IT policy that is in full-out combat against apps that haven’t been fully blessed by the enterprise and could introduce security risks.

More of the TechTarget article from Sandra Gittlen

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15
May 17

CIO insight – Why So Much of a CIO’s Day Is Devoted to Security

65% of network and systems admins struggle to determine whether app issues are caused by the network, systems or apps, while 53% run into difficulties measuring latency and delay problems when troubleshooting apps.

A growing number of CIOs, other technology leaders and IT professionals are spending a considerable amount of their time troubleshooting security-related issues, according to a recent survey from Viavi Solutions. The resulting report, “State of the Network Study,” reveals that a significant number of survey respondents are spending a quarter of a standard work week on the detection and mitigation of threats. One of the trend-drivers is that email and browser-based malware has increased over the past 12 months, as has the overall sophistication of attack methods. “Enterprise network teams are [devoting] more time and resources than ever before to battle security threats,” said Douglas Roberts, vice president and general manager of the enterprise and cloud business unit for Viavi Solutions. “Not only are they faced with a growing number of attacks, but hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods and malware. Dealing with these types of advanced persistent security threats requires planning, resourcefulness and greater visibility throughout the network to ensure that threat intelligence information is always at hand.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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03
May 17

ZDNet – Cloud v. Data Center: Key trends for IT decision-makers

Cloud-based compute, networking and storage infrastructure, and cloud-native applications, are now firmly on the radar of CIOs — be they in startups, small businesses or large enterprises. So much so that, whereas a few years ago the question facing them was “Which workloads should I move to the cloud?”, it’s now becoming “Which, if any, workloads should I keep on-premises?”. While most organisations will probably end up pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy in the medium term, it’s worth examining this turnaround, and the reasons behind it.

The general background, as ZDNet has explored in recent special features, is the competitive pressure for organisations to undergo a digital transformation based on cloud-native applications and methods such as DevOps, in pursuit of improved IT and organisational performance.

More of the ZDNet article from Charles McLellan

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01
May 17

Arthur Cole – The Reality of an Intelligent IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) may be barely off the ground, but developers are already looking for ways to imbue the technology with high degrees of intelligence.

On one level, an intelligent IoT is a reason unto itself given that the scale and complexity of the data environment is beyond the capabilities of today’s management tools. But ultimately, the expectation is that much of the IoT will govern itself, and that includes the basic interactions between systems and users.

Zebra Technologies’ Tom Bianculli gave eWeek a good overview of all the ways in which intelligence is likely to affect the IoT. From the intelligent enterprise itself, capable of dynamic data streaming, real-time analytics and self-managing applications, to advances in health care, transportation, retail and virtual every other industry, the intelligent IoT has the potential to revolutionize the way we live, work and play.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

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28
Apr 17

IT Business Edge – Perception or Reality: Your Security System Is Probably Weaker Than You Think

How confident are you about your cybersecurity operations? If you are like the vast majority of respondents in Arctic Wolf Networks’ recent survey, you are highly confident in your cybersecurity defenses.

However, the perception of cybersecurity operations doesn’t match the reality for these mid-market companies. While 95 percent of the respondents think their security posture is well above average and 89 percent think their security systems are combatting attacks, large majorities also admit that they aren’t able to stop certain types of threats and they are so overwhelmed with the breadth of overall IT that security isn’t given the attention it deserves. In a formal statement, Brian NeSmith, CEO of Arctic Wolf Networks, said:

Most mid-market enterprises believe they are safe because they have the traditional perimeter defenses in place. This falls far short of what’s needed for rigorous security in today’s complex threat environment. The challenge smaller enterprises face is that they have all the same security issues as large enterprises with only a fraction of the budget and less specialized personnel.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Sue Marquette Poremba

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10
Apr 17

ZDNet – VMware shifts away from public cloud hosting with sale of vCloud Air to OVH

VMware exits the public cloudinfrastructure game as it shifts focus onto hybrid and cross-cloud software.

VMware is selling its infrastructure-as-a-service offering vCloud Air to global hyperscale cloud provider OVH.

VMware launched vCloud Air Network in 2014 with the aim of providing greater flexibility to users of VMware technology. Three years on, its public cloud business is set to be bought by French cloud computing and web hosting company OVH.

In an interview with Fortune, VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger said the sale will include vCloud operations and sales staff, datacenters, and customers. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and the buyout is expected to be completed during the second quarter of this year.

More of the ZDNet article from Danny Palmer

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07
Apr 17

CustomerThink – Do CMOs Really Spend More on MarTech Than CIOs? A New Study Says No

Like many people in the marketing technology industry, I was tickled in 2011 when Gartner predicted that CMOs would soon have bigger tech budgets than CIOs, and even more tickled when Gartner said in 2016 that it had happened. But my recent pondering of the relationship of marketing and IT departments had me rethinking the question. On an anecdotal level, I’ve never seen or heard of a company where the marketing technology group was anywhere near the size of the IT department. And from a revenue perspective, there’s no way that marketing technology companies make up half the total revenue of the software industry.

But just as I was working myself up for some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the good people at International Data Corporation (IDC) announced a report with authoritative figures on the topic. Actually, the study estimates spending on 20 technologies and 12 corporate functional areas across 16 enterprise industries in eight regions and 53 countries, comparing the amounts funded by IT departments and by business departments.

More of the CustomerThink article from David Raab

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.