The Business Case for Organizational Resilience More than 3,500 IT risk and security professionals congregated outside of Washington, D.C., recently to attend the 2019 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit to gain the latest insights on evolving security trends and the ever-changing threat landscape. I was among the team from Expedient who were there to meet with vendors,...
Backups and Disaster Recovery: What’s the Difference? Modern IT departments need to be able to protect their mission-critical data and quickly respond in the event of a problem in their environment. This capability hinges on maintaining a strategy for both backups and disaster recovery. These two capabilities are often conflated with each other but this blog post will...
Most of the C-Suite professionals I meet with these days have moved away from the old “IT as a cost center” talk and more towards “IT as a business enabler” thinking. But C-Suite and IT leaders’ actions don’t always match up with words. From my perspective, here are the most common forms of incentivizing the wrong IT behaviors that...
Most of the organizations we meet with tell us that their IT complexity continues to increase. Infrastructure teams that continue to purchase and operate data center servers, storage and network infrastructure have dozens of choices at the beginning of each hardware refresh cycle. System software choices like hypervisors, management add-ons, automation, monitoring and predictive analytics are too numerous to...
For years, IT infrastructure teams have been designing, building, and maintaining a wide spectrum of disaster recovery (DR) solutions to recover critical information systems after an outage. Many of these do-it-yourself disaster recovery (DIYDR) approaches carry hidden risks that come to light at the worst possible time. Perhaps the biggest problem with a DIYDR approach is that it often gives...
Nearly 50,000 technology professionals descended upon 6 convention centers in Las Vegas for this year’s AWS re:Invent conference to connect with peers and cloud experts for collaboration and learning about Amazon Web Services (AWS). Several team members from Expedient attended the week-long event to meet with partners and customers. The team participated in a variety of educational events including keynotes,...
As data growth accelerates, finding smart and efficient ways to store, manage, access, and secure business-critical data becomes increasingly important. While keeping pace with constant data growth, a file storage solution must support the evolving needs of your business while meeting the rising expectations of your enterprise users who expect powerful search functionality delivered through an easy-to-use, web-based...
How to Mitigate Cybersecurity Risk As part of cybersecurity awareness month, IDG recently released its 2018 U.S. State of Cybercrime Study. The study underscored the reality that businesses of all sizes still struggle to effectively protect data and critical IT infrastructure from various cybersecurity threats – both external and internal. While most companies are steadily increasing the amount...
WHAT IS GDPR? The General Data Protection Regulation (effective May 2018) is a law designed to strengthen the data protection rights of individuals within the European Union (EU). GDPR applies not only to businesses located in the EU, but also to businesses that offer goods and services to individuals located in the EU. The expansive purview of the law...
We all know that recovery planning for disasters is an important task for organizations of all sizes and industries. This can be a time-consuming and complicated process, but many organizations do eventually create a plan that meets their recovery objectives. “Ahh, now we can sleep better at night!” these IT and business leaders tell themselves. The DR plan is...
The European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective May 25, 2018, and with it came a flurry of privacy policy notification updates from websites, other digital publishers, and more, all of whom are tasked with ensuring that any sensitive user data collected on EU residents – even as a sub-processor – is handled and processed according to...
The Healthcare Industry’s Requirements for a Cloud Service Provider While data security and availability is imperative for any organization, it is especially true for those in the healthcare industry, whose access to personally identifiable information (PII) such as birth dates and social security numbers requires strong data security measures – and can present security concerns and complexities as these...
On a recent episode of data center podcast The Hot Aisle, Mark Thiele of Apcera talked about the dangerous belief among some business leaders that IT is created to reduce the cost of IT. Sounds ridiculous, but it happens in so many organizations that this belief deserves more attention. Certainly, a good IT department has a responsibility for efficiency. But if...
TIC Gums is using Expedient’s On-Site Private Cloud with Disaster Recovery as a Service to meet several business objectives, including the modernization and migration of its aging IT infrastructure and the creation and implementation of a disaster recovery plan and solution. By placing an Expedient private cloud point of delivery (POD) on-site at TIC Gums’ premises, TIC Gums is...
DDoS Mitigation DDoS mitigation a focus of recent 451 Research analysis at 2017 RSA conference A March 2017 report published by 451 Research found that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks evolved in 2016, requiring security vendors addressing such threats to take proactive measures to increase their capabilities and capacities. The research cites Arbor Networks, an industry leading...
Disaster Recovery: The Technology & Strategy You Trust You’ve most likely heard the adage; it’s not a matter of if IT systems will fail–but when. So even if you are confident that your organization is equipped to handle failure, or perhaps has even recovered successfully from an outage in the past, having the right recovery strategy in place is...
