9 out of 10 companies that participated in the IDC study think having both Disaster Recovery and Backup is redundant. Do you agree? Read the report and benchmark against your peers.An independent study by analyst firm, IDC, confirms the importance of IT resilience within hundreds of global organizations. The survey report spotlights the level of IT resilience within these companies and where there are gaps. Their findings may surprise you.
• 93% surveyed find redundancy in having both disaster recovery and backup as separate solutions• 9 out of 10 already do or will use the Cloud for data protection within the next 12 months• Nearly 50% of respondents have suffered impacts from cyber threats, including unrecoverable data, within the last 3 years
Use the report findings to benchmark your data protection and recovery strategies against your peers. Learn how resilient IT is the foundation to not only protect, but to effectively grow your business.
Download the IDC report to benchmark your data protection and recovery strategies against those of your peers. Learn how Resilient IT is the stepping stone for business growth and transformation.
IT security has always been a major concern for businesses that accept online credit card payments. They hold sensitive information that malicious hackers are after: cardholder data. This is why such businesses are legally obliged to build IT systems and networks that are PCI DSS compliant.
What Is PCI DSS?PCI DSS is a security standard developed by the PCI Security Standards Council. Designed for businesses that do online transactions and hold customers’ payment records, it helps them build and maintain secure IT systems and networks, ensuring the privacy and security of their customers’ credit-card details and cardholder data.
The set of standards defined in the PCI DSS are the minimum required level of computer systems security that must be in place when processing credit-card data. These standards apply to merchants, processors, financial institutions, service providers, and any other entity that store, process, or transmit credit-card and cardholder information.
Why Businesses Need to Be PCI DSS CompliantThe challenges of building and maintaining a PCI DSS–compliant network are many and depend on several factors—for example, the type of software used, the network setup, and the procedures in place. If organizations that process credit-card payments and store cardholder details fail to build PCI DSS–compliant networks and computer systems, they risk being fined up to $500,000 per month—or even worse, having their trading licence revoked.
This white paper explains how using Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) can help organizations build scalable PCI DSS–compliant networks and also save on costs and administration overheads.
One of the toughest problems facing enterprise IT teams today is troubleshooting slow applications. When a user complains of slowness in application access, all hell breaks loose, and the blame game begins: app owners, developers and IT ops teams enter into endless war room sessions to figure out what went wrong and where. Have you also been in this situation before?
Read this white paper by Larry Dragich, and learn how you can combine and correlate performance insights from the application (code, SQL, logs) and the underlying hardware infrastructure (server, network, virtualization, storage, etc.) in order to:
Many organizations have turned to virtualizing user endpoints to help reduce capital and operational expenses while increasing security. This is especially true within healthcare, where hospitals, clinics, and urgent care centers seek to offer the best possible patient outcomes while adhering to a variety of mandated patient security and information privacy requirements.
With the movement of desktops and applications into the secure data center or cloud, the need for reliable printing of documents, some very sensitive in nature, remains a constant that can be challenging when desktops are virtual but the printing process remains physical. Directing print jobs to the correct printer with the correct physical access rights in the correct location while ensuring compliance with key healthcare mandates like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is critical.
Healthcare IT needs to keep pace with these requirements and the ongoing printing demands of healthcare. Medical professionals need to print effortlessly and reliably to nearby or appropriate printers within virtual environments, and PrinterLogic and IGEL can help make that an easy, reliable process—all while efficiently maintaining the protection of confidential patient information. By combining PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management software with centrally managed direct IP printing and IGEL’s software-defined thin client endpoint management, healthcare organizations can:
A2U, an IGEL Platinum Partner, recently experienced a situation where one of its large, regional healthcare clients was hit by a cyberattack. “Essentially, malware entered the client’s network via a computer and began replicating like wildfire,” recalls A2U Vice President of Sales, Robert Hammond.
During the cyberattack, a few hundred of the hospital’s PCs were affected. Among those were 30 endpoints within the finance department that the healthcare organization deemed mission critical due to the volume of daily transactions between patients, insurance companies, and state and county agencies for services rendered. “It was very painful from a business standpoint not to be able to conduct billing and receiving, not to mention payroll,” said Hammond.
Prior to this particular incident, A2U had received demo units of the IGEL UD Pocket, a revolutionary micro thin client that can transform x86-compatible PCs and laptops into IGEL OS-powered desktops.
“We had been having a discussion with this client about re-imaging their PCs, but their primary concern was maintaining the integrity of the data that was already on the hardware,” continued Hammond. “HIPAA and other regulations meant that they needed to preserve the data and keep it secure, and we thought that the IGEL UD Pocket could be the answer to this problem. We didn’t see why it wouldn’t work, but we needed to test our theory.”
When the malware attack hit, that opportunity came sooner, rather than later for A2U. “We plugged the UD Pocket into one of the affected machines and were able to bypass the local hard drive, installing the Linux-based IGEL OS on the system without impacting existing data,” said Hammond. “It was like we had created a ‘Linux bubble’ that protected the machine, yet created an environment that allowed end users to quickly return to productivity.”
Working with the hospital’s IT team, it only took a few hours for A2U to get the entire finance department back online. “They were able to start billing the very next day,” added Hammond.
The public cloud has unleashed an unprecedented wave of creativity and agility for the modern enterprise. A great cloud migration has upended decades of established architecture patterns, operating principles, and governance models. However, without any replacement for these traditional controls in place, cloud spend inevitably rises faster than anticipated. If not addressed early in the cycle, this is often overlooked until it gets out of control.
Over the course of a few decades, we have created a well-established model of IT spending; to arrive at economies of scale, procurement is centralized and typically happens at three- to five-year intervals, with all internal customers forecasting and pooling their needs. This created a natural tendency for individual project owners to overprovision resources as insurance against unexpected demand. As a result, the corporate data center today is where the two famous laws of technology meet:
With its granular and short-term billing cycles, the cloud requires a degree of financial discipline that is unfamiliar to most traditional IT departments. Faced with having to provide short-term forecasts and justify them against actual spend, they need to evolve their governance models to support these new patterns.
Having a well thought out AWS strategy is crucial to your long-term cloud gains. Taking the time to understand and pick the right instances for your apps is well worth the time and effort as it will directly impact your AWS pricing and bill.
We hope these ten strategies help inform and support you as you navigate the sometimes-turbulent waters of cloud transition. They are here for you to consult and rely on as best practices and cost-saving opportunities.
Given the virtually uncountable number of combinations, we have tried to identify the most practical and reliable ways to optimize your deployment at all stages and empower your end-users while insulating them from temptations, assumptions and habits that can cost you some unpleasant surprises when the bill arrives.
With the onset of more modular and cloud-centric architectures, many organizations with disparate monitoring tools are reassessing their monitoring landscape. According to Gartner, hybrid IT (especially with IaaS subscription) enterprises must adopt more holistic IT infrastructure monitoring tools (ITIM) to gain visibility into their IT landscapes.
The guide provides insight into the IT infrastructure monitoring tool market and providers as well as key findings and recommendations.
Get the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools to see:
Key Findings Include:
This eBook explains how to identify problems with vSphere and how to solve them. Before we begin, we need to start off with an introduction to a few things that will make life easier. We’ll start with a troubleshooting methodology and how to gather logs. After that, we’ll break this eBook into the following sections: Installation, Virtual Machines, Networking, Storage, vCenter/ESXi and Clustering.
ESXi and vSphere problems arise from many different places, but they generally fall into one of these categories: Hardware issues, Resource contention, Network attacks, Software bugs, and Configuration problems.
A typical troubleshooting process contains several tasks: 1. Define the problem and gather information. 2. Identify what is causing the problem. 3. Fix the problem, implement a fix.
One of the first things you should try to do when experiencing a problem with a host, is try to reproduce the issue. If you can find a way to reproduce it, you have a great way to validate that the issue is resolved when you do fix it. It can be helpful as well to take a benchmark of your systems before they are implemented into a production environment. If you know HOW they should be running, it’s easier to pinpoint a problem.
You should decide if it’s best to work from a “Top Down” or “Bottom Up” approach to determine the root cause. Guest OS Level issues typically cause a large amount of problems. Let’s face it, some of the applications we use are not perfect. They get the job done but they utilize a lot of memory doing it.
In terms of virtual machine level issues, is it possible that you could have a limit or share value that’s misconfigured? At the ESXi Host Level, you could need additional resources. It’s hard to believe sometimes, but you might need another host to help with load!
Once you have identified the root cause, you should assess the impact of the problem on your day to day operations. When and what type of fix should you implement? A short-term one or a long-term solution? Assess the impact of your solution on daily operations. Short-term solution: Implement a quick workaround. Long-term solution: Reconfiguration of a virtual machine or host.
Now that the basics have been covered, download the eBook to discover how to put this theory into practice!