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What is it that you want to protect from data loss the most?

December 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

This can be a very difficult question.  A question that has created many products and solutions (inside and outside of IT…think insurance.)  Other than the people, the most critical asset we have in most organizations is the information.  If it were not for that information we wouldn’t need all of the switches, routers, servers, and storage.  If we aren’t protecting the data that we value most as a starting point then what are we doing?

DLP (Data Loss Prevention) has been one of the dirtiest words over the last ten years.  It may be even considered worse than cloud, at least in security circles.  What made this term so unpalatable is the fact that it somewhat implies that without these solutions branded Data Loss/Leakage Prevention that we are losing and leaking data.  It implies that these solutions are the silver bullet.  The end all to be all.  Obviously marketing gone wild.  There is definitely some merit in this though.  And applied correctly with other technologies can actually provide a fantastic last line of defense, which used to be endpoint anti-virus.

If the attack traffic got through the firewall, then the Network Intrusion Prevention System, then hopefully the endpoint anti-virus software would pick it up.  But what happens when it doesn’t?  What happens when the system has been compromised without detecting for a while.  This is where the data starts to get pulled out of the network, or exfiltrated.

Assuming there is a compromise, let’s delve into our solutions that make up a DLP strategy and provide some examples of when each of them is used.  Ideally you’ll find which of these following solutions fit best in your environment today. [Read more...]

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Assessing the challenges of your cloud computing journey

December 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Chicken and eggs and clouds (Oh my) 

If your organization isn’t already dipping its toes into the cloud, it inevitably will in 2012. Quicker speed to market, universal availability for users, improved flexibility and ability to free up resources, with reduction in total cost of ownership, make cloud computing a no-brainer.

At least that’s the hype most business leaders have bought into.

The truth from an IT perspective is a bit more nuanced. The cloud is not, for lack of a better metaphor, heaven on earth. There are risks, hiccups and complications that every organization will experience with a profound transition like this. But the truth also happens to be that cloud computing can benefit your company – and your competitors – in a variety of very real quantitative and qualitative ways (In other words, sometimes a lot of the hype turns out to be true).

Cloud migration is serious business with major capital investment. And as with any change of this magnitude, you’ll need to understand the risks, develop business and IT strategies, scope technical feasibility and costs, put together impact assessments and develop an air-tight business case, long before your cloud project is ever launched.

At Softchoice, our team can separate hype from reality on the ground, guide you through the entire decision-making process, help initiate conversations within your organization and perform due diligence to create a roadmap that makes it all unfold as smoothly as possible.

Here’s how we see the journey taking place as well as some helpful tips and thought-starters to consider along the way.

Step 1: Where to begin? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Servers, Storage and Networking Tagged With: ,

A Softchoice IT forecast: Hot technologies to watch in 2012

December 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

As 2011 comes to a close, Softchoice customers are evaluating the success and challenges from the present year, and planning for the year to come. The Softchoice Advisor sat down with our Manager of Category Marketing, Bryan Rusche, to understand the opportunity organizations should expect to encounter while continuing to mitigate risk and maximize efficiencies in 2012.

What are the key IT priorities that Softchoice and other organizations will be focusing on in 2012?

I think the big theme is continued economic uncertainty and the need to continue driving greater efficiencies within IT. Using that as the backdrop, I think there are four big areas where we will see our customers investing. One is going to be on providing efficiencies and better management tools on client infrastructure and helping organizations deal with some of the dynamics around new devices and operating systems. The second thing is driving greater efficiencies in the data center through greater density, more efficient use of power and cooling and better utilization. Unified Communications is the third area, particularly people-driven processes and creating efficiencies by reducing travel expenses as an example. Lastly, cloud – which remains the most
hyped term in the industry, will play a growing role. Spending on public cloud as an example is expected to grow four times faster than IT spend in general.

The evolving client infrastructure continues to be a hot topic. What challenges are organizations facing today and what solutions are they going to look to in 2012? [Read more...]

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Where Did My Data Go?

December 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It seems that as we find newer, faster and more efficient ways to store, access and manipulate data, we can’t seem to keep up with the growth of the data itself. Even worse, we seem to be at odds with finding ways to successfully protect that data from being lost in the abyss.

Backups exist for one function, (No, it’s not to cause a nightly headache for your storage admin), it’s to facilitate the ability to restore data in the case of its disappearance. This can happen in many ways, and whether it’s from accidental user deletion, data corruption, failed disks, power outage or natural disaster, the result is the same… users scream “Where did my data go?!?!?!”

Many companies have complex backup schedules which utilize technologies such as disk staging, data de-duplication, virtual tape libraries, and physical tape libraries. But if the data itself can’t be restored, what good are the underlying technologies? Not much at all.

Many of the organizations I talk to focus all their attention on the “backup” process, but very few ever want to discuss the “restore” process. They spend thousands of dollars on nifty software that supports things like:

  • Data De-duplication – The ability to reduce data sets by only storing 1 copy of each block of data or file
  • Object Consolidation – The ability to create and amalgamate different data sets from different dates into one “synthetic/virtual” backup job. This allows them to run an “incremental forever” policy
  • Granular Recovery Functions – Very important within virtual environments as this allows administrators to recover full VM hosts, VM’s within a host, folders attached to a VM, or even single files within a VM folder
  • Zero Downtime Backup – Which is the ability to integrate onsite storage arrays with the application and backup stacks to provide fully application consistent  backups through the use of array snapshot technology.

All these tools help client reduce backup windows, add flexibility, speed and even granularity to their backups. They also increase automation and reduce user intervention. So isn’t technology a wonderful thing? And haven’t backups come so far over the years? The short answer is YES. But unless you can restore that data successfully [Read more...]

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