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.
According to a recent Office 365 Adoption & Risk Report, Office 365 has eclipsed all other cloud providers to emerge as the most widely used enterprise cloud service by user count. The report from Campbell, California–based cloud security firm Skyhigh Networks analyzed some 27 million employees across countless businesses to deliver the statistic. Despite that result, moving from on-premises Office services to their cloud equivalents can be easily misunderstood at all levels of an organization without the proper communication.
With 2017 just about to get up to speed, New England businesses are getting set to launch small and large technology implementations that will further the business in the coming year. Equally important for all businesses (particularly small businesses) is the ability to further their general knowledge base about a wide variety of subjects that are fundamental to keeping the business strong and growing.
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.
While moving to Office 365 can be a transformative experience in terms of productivity, collaboration, and mobility for your business and its workforce, the migration process must come first. Deciding how to handle the overall migration process can be a significant undertaking that includes dealing with domain names and Active Directory, group and user identification, and migration methods. The primary challenge is the process of how to migrate public folders to Office. 365.
When organizations are contemplating an Office 365 migration, there are many questions that must be answered. Is Office 365 right for my organization? What will it cost to migrate to Office 365? How long will it take to complete the migration?
