The Difference Between a Converged and Hyper-converged Data Center

Today, the terms converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are finding their way into more architecture discussions as well as management meetings. The trend is supported by efforts to build internal cloud services for applications or data that cannot move to a public cloud as well as the ongoing drive to squeeze costs out of IT.

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Preparing for an Unknown Cyber Threat

It seems that the cyber security conversation is never-ending. Topics, ideas, insights or just about any other constructive thinking inside your organization, has cyber security sprinkled into it. As they should, security teams are watching the warning networks, requesting tools to better secure data, patching and praying, as well as trying to imagine what’s next.
Unfortunately all of the confidence scores around stopping the next cyber attack or closing the next security breech assume the next one will be of the same type or kind as prior attacks. But what if it is not? What if the next security attack is of a totally different kind? What if the prior 37 attacks and cleanups have all left little pieces of code in places you may not think of, such as router cache, and the next attack will assemble those 37 bits of code into a completely new thing? Is your organization ready for that? How do you know? If not, how do you prepare?

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Bring Your Own Device, Not Your Security Threats

As with all technologies, the biggest security threat emerges from end users’ device management habits. The best security ever devised can fall apart if a user writes their ID and password on the side of a two-factor key and then drops it in the hall. Security can also fall apart if end users visit malicious websites. Sure these threat conditions have existed since the first days of the Internet, but Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has focused security attention on devices once again.

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Building Resilient Systems

In all things data, resilience is a real thing. The current business focus on data includes big data, moving data to a cloud and a drive for mobile data. Each of these approaches addresses a different view of the same data by first adding context to understand what the data means, then processing and storing it efficiently, and finally making the contextualized data accessible everywhere. All of these actions sound good and look good in a presentation, but they also introduce security and system failure points. To reduce the failure points as you do something big, something cloud and something mobile with your data, you need to add resilience to your data systems.

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­So You Want to Buy a Cloud

Your application developers have been saying they can increase performance by moving your application to the cloud. Your boss is saying, “We should be doing some of this cloud thing I keep hearing about.” Your peers have moved at least one critical piece of information processing to a cloud services provider. Sound familiar? Today it seems everyone at every level begins or ends every conversation with the word “cloud.” So you think it might be time to buy a cloud, but where do you begin?

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