Disaster Recovery, Featured, Network, Network Infrastructure, Storage, Unified Communications, VoIP

Huh? What’s the Network Have to Do with It?

By Nate Schnable, Sr. Solutions Architect

Having been in this field for 17 years it still amazes me that people always tend to forget about the network.  Everything a user accesses on their device that isn’t installed or stored locally, depends on the network more than any other element of the environment.   It’s responsible for the quick and reliable transport of data. That means the user experience while working with remote files and applications, almost completely depends on the network.

However, this isn’t always obvious to everyone.  Therefore, they will rarely ask for network related services as they aren’t aware the network is the cause of their problems.  Whether it is a storage, compute, virtualization or IP Telephony initiative – all of these types of projects rely heavily on the network to function properly.  In fact, the network is the only element of a customer’s environment that touches every other component. Its stability can make or break the success and all important user experience.

In a VoIP initiative we have to consider, amongst many things, that proper QoS policies be setup –  so let’s hope you are not running on some dumb hubs.  Power over Ethernet (PoE) for the phones should be available unless you want to use bricks of some type of mid-span device (yuck).  I used to work for a Fortune 50 Insurance Company and one day an employee decided to plug both of the ports on their phone into the network because it would make the experience even better – not so much.  They brought down that whole environment.  Made some changes after that to avoid that happening again!

In a Disaster Recovery project we have to take a look at distances and subsequent latencies between locations.  What is the bandwidth and how much data do you need to back up?   Do we have Layer 2 handoffs between sites or is it more of a traditional L3 site to site connection?

If we are implementing a new iSCSI SAN do we need ten gig or one gig?  Do your switches support Jumbo Frames and flow control?  Hope that your iSCSI switches are truly stackable because spanning-tree could cause some of those paths to be redundant, but not active.

I was reading the other day that the sales of smart phones and tablets would reach approximately 1.2 billiion in 2013.  Some of these will most certainly end up on your wireless networks.  How to manage that is definitely a topic for another day.

In the end it just makes sense that you really need to consider the network implications before jumping into almost any type of IT initiative.  Just because those green lights are flickering doesn’t mean it’s all good.

 

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Big Data, Data security, Data Warehousing, Guest Post

Big Data Without Security = Big Risk

Guest Post by C.J. Radford, VP of Cloud for Vormetric

Big Data initiatives are heating up. From financial services and government to healthcare, retail and manufacturing, organizations across most verticals are investing in Big Data to improve the quality and speed of decision making as well as enable better planning, forecasting, marketing and customer service. It’s clear to virtually everyone that Big Data represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations to increase both their productivity and financial performance.

According to WiPro, the leading regions taking on Big Data implementations are North America, Europe and Asia. To date, organizations in North America have amassed over 3,500 petabytes (PBs) of Big Data, organizations in Europe over 2,000 PBs, and organizations in Asia over 800 PBs. And we are still in the early days of Big Data – last year was all about investigation and this year is about execution; given this, it’s widely expected that the global stockpile of data used for Big Data will continue to grow exponentially.

Despite all the goodness that can stem from Big Data, one has to consider the risks as well. Big Data confers enormous competitive advantage to organizations able to quickly analyze vast data sets and turn it into business value, yet it can also put sensitive data at risk of a breach or violating privacy and compliance requirements. Big Data security is fast becoming a front-burner issue for organizations of all sizes. Why? Because Big Data without security = Big Risk.

The fact is, today’s cyber attacks are getting more sophisticated and attackers are changing their tactics in real time to get access to sensitive data in organizations around the globe. The barbarians have already breached your perimeter defenses and are inside the gates. For these advanced threat actors, Big Data represents an opportunity to steal an organization’s most sensitive business data, intellectual property and trade secrets for significant economic gain.

One approach used by these malicious actors to steal valuable data is by way of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). APTs are network attacks in which an unauthorized actor gains access to information by slipping in “under the radar” somehow. (Yes, legacy approaches like perimeter security are failing.) These attackers typically reside inside the firewall undetected for long periods of time (an average of 243 days, according to Mandiant’s most recent Threat Landscape Report), slowly gaining access to and stealing sensitive data.

Given that advanced attackers are already using APTs to target the most sensitive data within organizations, it’s only a matter of time before attackers will start targeting Big Data implementations. Since data is the new currency, it just makes sense for attackers to go after Big Data implementations because that’s where big value is.
So, what does all this mean for today’s business and security professionals? It means that when implementing Big Data, they need to take a holistic approach and ensure the organization can benefit from the results of Big Data in a manner that doesn’t negatively affect the risk posture of the organization.
The best way to mitigate risk of a Big Data breach is by reducing the attack surface, and taking a data-centric approach to securing Big Data implementations. These are the key steps:

Lock down sensitive data no matter the location.

The concept is simple; ensure your data is locked down regardless of whether it’s in your own data center or hosted in the cloud. This means you should use advanced file-level encryption for structured and unstructured data with integrated key management. If you’re relying upon a cloud service provider (CSP) and consuming Big Data as a service, it’s critical to ensure that your CSP is taking the necessary precautions to lock down sensitive data. If your cloud provider doesn’t have the capabilities in place or feels data security is your responsibility, ensure your encryption and key management solution is architecturally flexible in order to accommodate protecting data both on-premise and in the cloud.

Manage access through strong polices.

Access to Big Data should only be granted to those authorized end users and business processes that absolutely need to view it. If the data is particularly sensitive, it is a business imperative to have strong polices in place to tightly govern access. Fine-grained access control is essential, including things like the ability to block access by even IT system administrators (they may have the need to do things like back up the data, but they don’t need full access to that data as part of their jobs). Blocking access to data by IT system administrators becomes even more crucial when the data is located in the cloud and is not under an organization’s direct control.

Ensure ongoing visibility into user access to the data and IT processes.

Security Intelligence is a “must have” when defending against APTs and other security threats. The intelligence gained can support what actions to take in order to safeguard and protect what matters – an organization’s sensitive data. End-user and IT processes that access Big Data should be logged and reported to the organization on a regular basis. And this level of visibility must occur whether your Big Data implementation is within your own infrastructure or in the cloud.

To effectively manage that risk, the bottom line is that you need to lock down your sensitive data, manage access to it through policy, and ensure ongoing visibility into both user and IT processes that access your sensitive data. Big Data is a tremendous opportunity for organizations like yours to reap big benefits, as long as you proactively manage the business risks.

CJRadford

You can follow C.J. Radford on Twitter @CJRad.

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Part 1 | Understanding the Impact of IT on Business

Part 1 – of a two part series looking at the journey enterprise IT departments take as they increasingly seek to understand the relationships and impact of IT infrastructure performance on application performance and business services.
As a product manager at Netuitive, I’m often put in a position to explain how my product works. This question usually refers not just to the nuts and bolts of the technology, but also to the more specific question: “How do I make it work?” To get to the heart of the answer, you need to understand the underpinnings of today’s monitoring solutions and why most of them don’t represent a complete solution.
To help illustrate this, I’ll look at the problem from the perspective of Fred, an operations manager for “Acmecorp.” Fred is responsible for keeping Acmecorp’s key E-Commerce platform, BuyThis.com, up and performing under stringent 24×7 SLAs.

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VMware sees software defined data centre as the future for IT as a service

Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT

The recent VMware Forum 2013 in London provided a platform for VMware EMEA chief technologist, Joe Baguley, to reveal how VMware is addressing the challenges of transforming IT to an as-a-service paradigm. This transformation is based on three key pillars.

First, it is about making the entire data center more agile, and the software-defined data center (SDDC) is the vehicle that VMware sees as being a major disruptive technology to enable the delivery of IT in this way. Second, it is about open standards to support the hybrid cloud. Finally, it is about the way in which customers access these services is changing.

For VMware this signals a shift from a virtual desktop policy to a multi-device strategy that supports the concept of enablement, not control. Ovum believes that this shift does not represent a radical rebirth for VMware, but instead is the result …

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Cloud Expo New York | Breaking Out: An Introduction to OpenStack Cells

OpenStack Cells is one of the most anticipated features in Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software that offers more block storage options and scalability. It has been running in production at Rackspace for more than a year.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Wayne Walls, OpenStack Developer Advocate at Rackspace Hosting, will discuss nova cells and how it is changing the way you design your cloud applications and infrastructure. He will explain how OpenStack Cells gives added flexibility in application and infrastructure design. He will also enlighten attendees on how it is similar to “zones” at AWS, and how OpenStack Cells helps enable the hybrid cloud and allow specialized workload distribution.

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BeyondTrust, Infographic, Security controls, Virtualization

Survey Infographic: Customer Relying on Virtualization Vendors For Security

BeyondTrust has released a survey, Virtual Insecurity, that reveals organizations are relying heavily on virtualization vendors for security if for any security at all. Key survey takeaways from the 346 respondents that participated include:

  • 42 percent do not use security tools regularly as part of their virtual systems administration
  • 34 percent lean heavily on antivirus protection as a primary security tool
  • 57 percent often use existing image templates for new virtual images
  • Nearly 3 out of every 4 respondents say that up to a quarter of virtual guests are offline at any given time
  • 64 percent have no security controls in place that require a security sign off prior to releasing a new virtual image or template

Here’s an infographic based on these results:

Virtual Insecurity Infographic FINAL

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Zetta.net Introduces New MSP Lead Generation Program

Zetta.net, provider of 3-in-1 hybrid cloud backup, archiving and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), has unveiled its new Managed Service Provider (MSP) Marketing Enablement and Lead Generation Program. Designed to accelerate partner success, the program offers multi-tiered support for MSPs based on Zetta.net’s proven methodologies for increasing inbound leads, conversion rates and customer acquisition.

«Marketing practices are experiencing disruptive change,» said Gary Sevounts, vice president of marketing, Zetta.net. «Older techniques such as cold calling, spamming and trade show exhibits yield increasingly less results, require large budgets and waste valuable resources. A majority of IT decision makers are increasingly using search engines, IT communities, peer and media reviews. Zetta.net has embraced the new inbound marketing model, which leads potential customers to our web site through the availability of relevant, educational content – and then they contact us when ready. This approach has generated strong results and we look forward to sharing many of the inbound marketing techniques and best practices responsible for these results, with our partners. We’re confident the program will help them generate interest and strong repeatable leads when marketing and selling Zetta.net’s 3-in-1 Cloud Server Backup and Disaster Recovery service.»

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Cloud Expo New York: The Who, What and How of Selling Cloud to SMBs

Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how.
In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMBs are through market segmentation; understanding what cloud services they will consume; and understanding how best to sell to SMBs and from which channels.

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Streamlining Online Payments

New cloud-based service leverages applications and insights within Ariba Network to streamline and enhance settlement and reconciliation of business commerce.
Ariba, an SAP Company, and Discover Financial Services has unveiled Ariba Pay. The new service, to be offered by Ariba, is expected to transform B2B payments by eliminating paper transactions, providing better visibility into cash flow, and producing rich remittance information that improves reconciliation processes for buyers and sellers.
AribaPay will provide a way for buyers to create purchase orders, receive invoices, and send payments, while sellers receive more-detailed remittance information in a fast, secure, electronic environment.

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