The recent Amazon Web Services outage that took out huge swaths of the Internet a couple of weeks ago has been an eye opener for companies who rely heavily on the cloud. If you ever hope to avoid a similar multi-hour downtime in the future, it would help to pay attention to the crucial lessons we’ve learned from that incident.
Most managers and executives don’t spend too much time thinking about backup and recovery services. They trust that when they log into their computer, their data will be there just like it was when they left it the night before. However, this can be a dangerous way to approach business continuity with all of the different threats and issues that an organization faces these days.
When it was passed in 2010, Jones Day called the Standards for the Protection of Personal Information of Residents of the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) “the most comprehensive data protection and privacy law in the United States.” The law, known as 201 CMR 17.00, was created to protect Commonwealth residents against identity theft and fraud. It requires any companies or persons who store or use personal information about a Massachusetts resident to develop a written, regularly audited plan to protect personal information. This applies to both paper and electronic records.
In today’s digital business landscape, technology is driving both innovation and operational efficiency in new and unprecedented ways. It’s no longer enough for CIOs, CTOs, and IT specialists to stay abreast of these emerging changes. Now the entire business—including the entire C-suite, as well as key management across the enterprise—must stay in touch with IT changes and challenges.
Gone are the days when antivirus software was enough to protect digital assets against IT security risks. Today, you need more effective defenses against the large majority of malware, zero-day, and other threats that are out there. But with a limited budget and/or in-house (cybersecurity) talent, it’s not always easy to determine which security solutions should be given top priority.
Using virtual machines (VMs) in your infrastructure makes sense from a cost perspective, because physical server costs are lower and resources are used to their capacity. If additional resources are needed, a new server is simply spun up. The ease of maintenance also makes virtual servers attractive to most IT departments. If a VM should fail, you simply spin up a new one. However, in order for true continuity, you will need to ensure that the new server is restored from the one it replaced exactly.
Office 365 offers substantial benefits in business collaboration, agility, productivity, and cost efficiency. However, before you can realize those benefits, you’ll need to go through Office 365 migration - a complex and arduous process that requires careful planning and preparation.
Virtual networks and infrastructure differ in many ways from their physical counterparts. Increased flexibility, ease of provisioning and lower cost are some of the attributes that make virtualization a practical choice for many types of businesses. A virtual infrastructure requires a shift in thinking, though, especially when it comes to network security.
OpenStack boosts business agility, availability, and efficiency by providing a platform with on-demand, resource pooling, self-service, highly elastic, and measured services capabilities. If this sounds like cloud computing, that’s because it is. OpenStack is basically your key to building your own cloud infrastructure.
