Enron changed how U.S. public companies audit and report their financial data. There is also an opportunity to use the Equifax data breach to create a framework for better protection of our data in future.
The credit reporting agency reported one of the largest data breaches in the history. Hackers were able to steal sensitive information from its internal servers. The stolen data include name, Social Security Number (SSN), date of birth, and also credit card numbers and driver license numbers in some cases. A massive breach like this can haunt the victims for years to come.

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As more CIOs and CTOs prepare for the data deluge that’s driving demand for enterprise storage solutions, savvy IT infrastructure vendors are already offering next-generation systems that meet the evolving requirements of their customers’ digital transformation projects.

Software-defined storage (SDS) is one of several new technologies that are rapidly penetrating the IT infrastructure of enterprises and cloud service providers. SDS is gaining traction because it meets the demands of the next-generation data center much better than legacy storage infrastructure.

As a result, International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts the worldwide SDS market will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.5 percent over the 2017-2021 forecast period, with revenues of nearly $16.2 billion in 2021.

Enterprise storage market development

Enterprise storage spending has already begun to move away from hardware-defined, dual-controller array designs toward SDS and from traditional on-premises IT infrastructure toward cloud environments (both public and private) based on commodity Web-scale infrastructure.

SDS solutions run on commodity, off-the-shelf hardware, delivering all the key storage functionality in software. Relative to legacy storage architectures, SDS products deliver improved agility — including faster, easier storage provisioning – when compared to traditional storage system constraints.

“For IT organizations undergoing digital transformation, SDS provides a good match for the capabilities needed — flexible IT agility; easier, more intuitive administration driven by the characteristics of autonomous storage management; and lower capital costs due to the use of commodity and off-the-shelf hardware,” said Eric Burgener, research director at IDC.

According to the IDC assessment, as these features appear more on CIOs and CTOs list of purchase criteria, enterprise storage revenue will continue to transition to software-defined storage solutions.

Within the SDS market, the expansion of three key sub-segments – file, object, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) – is being strongly driven forward by next-generation data center requirements.

Outlook for enterprise SDS solutions

Of these sub-segments, HCI is both the fastest growing with a five-year CAGR of 26.6 percent and the largest overall with revenues approaching $7.15 billion in 2021. Object-based storage will experience a CAGR of 10.3 percent over the forecast period while file-based storage and block-based storage will trail with CAGRs of 6.3 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively.

Because hyperconverged systems typically replace legacy SAN- and NAS-based storage systems, all the major enterprise storage systems providers have committed to the HCI market in a major way over the past 18 months.

This has made the HCI sub-segment one of the most active merger and acquisition markets, as these vendors prepare to capture anticipated SAN and NAS revenue losses to HCI due to enterprises shifting toward more cost-effective SDS solutions.

Disaster recovery plans exist to ensure business continuity when the worst happens. They allow organisations and individuals caught up in life changing events such as natural disasters to focus 100% on protecting people from harm, without the distraction of worrying about data and IT systems. Recent events – both climate related such as the hurricanes in the US as well as manmade events such as ransomware attacks –  have brought disaster recovery to the top of mind, and organisations are looking to boost their preparedness. As they do this, they should also consider some of the useful ways that cloud-based disaster recovery solutions can contribute to everyday business operations – even before catastrophe strikes. 

We all know that geographic redundancy and replicating critical workloads can keep businesses up and running during catastrophic events, but there are many more everyday use cases for DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) that can drive additional value from the investment. A key use case is maximising the value of the test environment created as part of the DRaaS provision. Every DR plan needs to be regularly tested to provide assurance that it is fit for purpose, but beyond readiness there are a few other key reasons why testing can be important for your business.

When delivering Zerto for cloud-based DR solutions for our customers, iland creates an environment on our Secure Cloud with preconfigured networks for both live and test failovers. The test environment is completely isolated, and can serve as a sandbox for all of your DR and out of band testing needs, all without any impact to production or replication. That isolated environment can be used in a number of ways:

Code development/quality assurance

These days, almost all organisations do some level of internal development. Many have also adopted agile development principles along the way. Unfortunately, not everyone has adopted Test-Driven Development (TDD), whereby you write tests before you write code. You simply refactor the code until the test passes. Boom, automatic quality assurance – in an ideal world, that is.

With this newfound agility, however, comes the temptation to release code a bit too prematurely. Why not test in an isolated environment? By performing a test failover of your development systems, you can begin to run those applications in a pseudo real-world environment. Often, it’s not until the services are live that you find errors. Debugging in this sandbox allows for your development team to clean up what otherwise might have gone undetected until launch. This practice will save you from having to issue patches down the line and will ultimately result in higher quality code releases that are less likely to have negative impacts on your employees or customers.

Application changes/patching

Speaking of patches, back to my “in a perfect world” comment: they’re going to happen. Knowing that’s the case, it makes perfect sense to test the patches, or any other code changes for that matter, in a secure environment. We’ve had a number of customers find this test environment conducive to finding issues and bugs much sooner.

Security/penetration testing: Overcoming the fear factor

Let’s face it, as fearful of security events as we all are at this point, many organisations are also nervous of impacting critical systems by performing security checks on their production systems. Having an isolated environment to conduct security tests is invaluable.

Within this isolated test environment, you’re able to perform test failovers of the workloads you’d like to audit without impacting production. Now that you have a test bed established, you can start by performing penetration tests. There might be unknown critical vulnerabilities present on those systems, but you’ll be able to run a vulnerability scan, identifying chinks in your systems’ armour.

Following that, you could inject sample malware into the environment to put the system’s detection capabilities to the test. Other tools worth checking would be malicious file detection, intrusion detection and prevention, and URL filtering. There are many open-source tools and publicly available utilities for simulating malicious activity. Many iland customers have found security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their IT systems by deploying DR security testing in this way. In other words: “Hack” away my friends!

As you can see, I’ve identified a few, pretty cool, use-cases for DR testing that go beyond its primary purpose. While the occurrence of natural disasters may well be the prompt that starts organisations looking more closely at cloud-based disaster recovery, once they do I think they’ll find some seriously compelling reasons to build regular testing using DR test environments into their core business processes.

Disaster recovery as a service offers so much more than peace of mind for when the worst happens, and savvy customers are really starting to make it work in their favour.

General Electric (GE) has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider, according to an Amazon announcement.

In a short note, Amazon said GE ‘continues to migrate thousands of core applications to AWS’, and that many of its cloud apps on businesses such as aviation, healthcare and transportation, run on Amazon’s cloud. GE began an enterprise-wide migration in 2014 and has migrated more than 2,000 applications in that time.

GE’s focus on digital is crystal clear. As Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, pointed out in a speech last year, it is the only company still standing from the original 12 listed on the original Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. Writing on LinkedIn last month, GE CEO and chairman John Flannery said the decision to go ‘all-in’ on digital was an easy one.

“We have fully embraced the digital industrial transformation, and we believe in its potential to change the world,” he wrote. “For our customers, digital is bringing new levels of innovation and productivity – and they are seeing real, tangible outcomes. Now, we are taking these outcomes and transferring what we have learned directly to our customers.”

GE’s commitment to cloud has similarly shone through. Alongside AWS, the behemoth had previously inked deals with Microsoft in 2015, moving 300,000 employees over to Office 365, and Box in 2014 for content sharing and collaboration.

“Adopting a cloud-first strategy with AWS is helping our IT teams get out of the business of building and running data centres and refocus our resources on innovation as we undergo one of the largest and most important transformations in GE’s history,” said Chris Drumgoole, General Electric chief technology officer and corporate vice president in a statement.

“We chose AWS as the preferred cloud provider for GE because AWS’s industry leading cloud services have allowed us to push the boundaries, think big, and deliver better outcomes for GE,” Drumgoole added.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Taica will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Taica manufacturers Alpha-GEL brand silicone components and materials, which maintain outstanding performance over a wide temperature range -40C to +200C. For more information, visit http://www.taica.co.jp/english/.

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High-velocity engineering teams are applying not only continuous delivery processes, but also lessons in experimentation from established leaders like Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. These companies have made experimentation a foundation for their release processes, allowing them to try out major feature releases and redesigns within smaller groups before making them broadly available.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Brian Lucas, Senior Staff Engineer at Optimizely, will discuss how by using new techniques such as feature flagging, rollouts, and traffic splitting, experimentation is no longer just the future for marketing teams, it’s quickly becoming an essential practice for high-performing development teams as well.

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