Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Recovering from a ransomware attack doesn’t have to take days

It’s one thing for a user’s files to get infected with ransomware, it’s quite another to have a production database or mission-critical application infected. But, restoring these databases and apps from a traditional backup solution (appliance, cloud or tape) will take hours or even days which can cost a business tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Dean Nicolls, vice president of marketing at Infrascale, shares some tangible ways disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) can pay big dividends and quickly restore systems in the wake of a ransomware attack.

Quickly pinpointing the time of infection

With a cloud backup, it takes a while to determine if your application has been corrupted. Admins must download the application files from the cloud (based on your most recent backup), rebuild, and then compile the database or application.

More of the ITWorld post from Ryan Francis

Replicating the production security infrastructure at a disaster recovery site can be a problem: Professor Avishai Wool looks at how organizations should approach security policy management in their disaster recovery planning.

When it comes to downtime and cybersecurity attacks, despite many high profile incidents in the past year many businesses are still stuck in the mind-set of ‘it won’t happen to me’ and are ill-prepared for IT failures. And with IT teams facing a broad range of unpredictable challenges while maintaining ‘business as usual’ operations, this mind-set places organizations at serious risk of a damaging, costly outage. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have plans for responding and recovering as quickly as possible when a serious incident strikes. As the author Franz Kafka put it, it’s better to have and not need, than to need and not have. In short, effective disaster recovery is a critical component of a business’ overall cybersecurity posture.

Most large organizations do have a contingency plan in place in case its primary site is hit by a catastrophic outage – which, remember, could just as easily be a physical or environmental problem like a fire or flood, as well as a cyberattack. This involves having a disaster recovery site in another city or even another country, which replicates all the infrastructure that is used at the primary site. However, a key piece of this infrastructure is often overlooked – network security – which must also be replicated on the disaster recovery site in order for the applications to function yet remain secure when the disaster recovery site is activated.

More of the Continuity Central postCon

Family firms aren’t typically thought of as particularly innovative. More often, they’re viewed as risk averse, traditional, and stagnant.

However, many family-owned businesses are among the most innovative in their industries. Consider Herr’s Potato Chips and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. There are countless other examples of family firms that have brought innovations to market. We wanted to determine how family firms actually compare to their nonfamily counterparts when it comes to being innovative. Our research, conducted with Patricio Duran and Thomas Zellweger, suggests the answer is not simple.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Nadine Kammerlander and Marc van Essen

Over the last couple years, the term “cloud-native” has entered the collective consciousness of those designing and building applications and the infrastructure that supports them.

At its heart, cloud-native refers to a software architecture paradigm tailored for the cloud. It calls that applications 1) employ containers as the atomic unit for packaging and deployment, 2) be autonomic, that is centrally orchestrated and dynamically scheduled, and 3) be microservices-oriented, that is be built as loosely-coupled, modular services each running an independent process, most often communicating with one another through HTTP via an API.

Dissecting those characteristics further implies that modern applications need be platform-independent (e.g. decoupled from physical and/or virtual resources to work equally well across cloud and compute substrates), highly elastic, highly available and easily maintainable.

More of The New Stack post from Lenny Pruss

Before transitioning to the cloud, admins often need to address many questions related to everything from SaaS apps to DR and capacity planning. Here are some tips to get started.

Whether you use the cloud for bursting, disaster recovery or a number of other capabilities, a cloud computing deployment affects everything from IT capacity planning to workload management. Here are some tips for data center teams transitioning workloads to the cloud, and considerations for future cloud use.

More of the SearchDataCenter article from Tim Culverhouse

In 1942 the author and professor Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics, one of the most well-known attempts to establish workable rules integrating artificial intelligence, or AI, into society. Since then, many science fiction writers, philosophers, scientists, and others have grappled with the pros and cons of AI.

This attention has only increased. Just this September, five of the largest tech companies teamed up to create a coalition, the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, to assure people that AI was not about creating killer robots. And earlier this month, under President Obama’s leadership, the White House issued a report, “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence,” discussing AI’s possible applications and how it is likely to impact society, for better or worse.

What we have heard less of, however, is what everyday consumers think about AI’s potential and pitfalls, about whether AI will help or hurt the world. We decided to ask.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Leslie Gaines-Ross

Giving up control is probably the best way to develop more competent employees and happier customers. And those outcomes add up to professional success for you.

People need a sense of control. Understanding this fact helps you make better management decisions, career choices and products. So many fraught circumstances can be explained or understood by the human need for control.

Why do supervisors micromanage? And why do the people being micromanaged hate it so much? In both cases, the culprit is control.

When tasks are assigned or delegated to a subordinate, the manager feels a loss of control. This out-of-control feeling is interpreted as, “They can’t do it as well as I can.” Or “They’ll get the credit for this instead of me.” Or “I don’t understand what’s happening with the project.” So they try to regain a sense of control through micromanaging.

More of the Baseline article from Mike Elgan