Online passwords are used for many critical aspects of our lives. They are needed when we communicate, work, transact and travel. We use them to access our most sensitive data, from banking to health records. Digital passwords are the keys to our lives. Yet we are surprisingly negligent about password protection, from our choice of passwords to the means we use to remember them, and troublingly, our willingness to share sensitive passwords with others.
Keeper Security’s survey of 4,000+ respondents in the US and UK unearthed negligent attitudes toward password protection, in which passwords are being shared with spouses, written down on bits of paper, changed too often, and forgotten over 50 times per year! The result: nearly half of our 2,000 US survey respondents had been hacked at least once, with an average of $378 stolen per cyberattack. The consequences of poor password protection can be disastrous in an era of growing online crime and identity theft. A hacked password can result in ransacked bank accounts, obliterated credit ratings, damaged personal lives and severed business relationships.

Our findings show a troubling disconnect between the value people attach to their passwords and the means they use to protect them. In the US, people would rather see a dentist than lose their passwords, yet safe selection, storage, and management of passwords were found to be severely lacking in this study.

It is of great concern to see passwords being shared and duplicated across multiple platforms. It’s equally concerning to see the use of overly simple passwords, relying on publicly-available data, such as names and birthdays. This will remain an acute challenge as we continue to use a range of devices and platforms to access the internet. The impact of poor password protection was evidenced by the number of people in the survey reporting they’ve personally fallen victim to a cyberattack, resulting in financial loss and compromised social media profiles.

• Hypervisor Integration: Seamless integration for better performance and scalability.
• Cost Efficiency:  Eliminates expensive server hardware and storage controllers.
• Built-in Deduplication: Core-level deduplication for minimal performance impact, maximum efficiency, and significant cost savings.
• Intelligent Hardware Failure Protection: Enhanced resilience with data copies across multiple nodes and drives.
• Advanced Snapshot Capabilities: Unlimited, efficient and independent snapshots.

Discover the Essential Guide to VMware Migration

Transitioning from VMware to VergeOS requires careful planning to minimize disruption. Our guide provides a structured process for a smooth migration:

Key Sections of the Guide

1. Evaluation of Alternatives
   - Research and Trial: Identify and test virtualization solutions for performance, compatibility, features, and support.
   - Cost-Benefit Analysis: Compare costs and calculate ROI to evaluate benefits over VMware.

2. Planning the Migration
   - Detailed Plan: Outline timelines, resource allocation, and risk management.
   - Infrastructure Preparation: Ensure hardware and network compatibility

3. Execution and Post-Migration
   - Pilot Migration: Start with non-critical systems to test the process.
   - Full-Scale Migration: Schedule during low-usage periods, back up data, and execute the migration.
   - Post-Migration Testing: Verify functional and performance standards in the new environment.

4. Phased Migration Process
- Backup/DR: Use VergeOS for cost-effective backup and disaster recovery of the VMware environment.
- NAS Replacement: Replace Network Attached Storage with VergeOS.
- Testing: Test workloads for compatibility and performance.
- Conversion: Incrementally convert virtual machines, starting with low-priority workloads.

Download the full guide now to optimize your virtualization strategy.

Cyberattacks and ransomware target backup data in 93% of incidents. Despite being primary targets for ransomware and data exfiltration, existing Zero Trust frameworks often overlook the security of data backup and recovery systems.
 
Zero Trust Data Resilience (ZTDR) is an innovative model that extends Zero Trust principles to data backup and recovery. Developed through a collaboration between Numberline Security and Veeam, ZTDR builds on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Zero Trust Maturity Model (ZTMM).  
 
This framework provides a practical guide for IT and security teams to improve data protection, reduce security risk, and enhance an organization's cyber resilience.
 
The primary principles of ZTDR include:

• Segmentation — Separation of Backup Software and Backup Storage to enforce least-privilege access, as well as to minimize the attack surface and blast radius.
• Multiple data resilience zones or security domains to comply with the 3-2-1 Backup Rule and to ensure multi-layered security.
• Immutable Backup Storage to protect backup data from modifications and deletions. Zero Access to Root and OS, protecting against external attackers and compromised administrators, is a must-have as part of true immutability. 
  

The white paper "Zero Trust and Enterprise Data Backup" details these principles and offers practical steps for implementation. 
 
What You'll Learn:

• Security Enhancement: Core Zero Trust principles applied to data backup.
• Implementation: Best practices for infrastructure segmentation and resilience zones.
• Applications: Case studies on mitigating ransomware and cyber threats. 
  

Download the white paper and start your journey towards Zero Trust Data Resilience.

• Why on-premises data centers still relevant, and how can they be more cost-effective
• How VergeOS integrates server virtualization, networking, and storage into a single unified code base, surpassing traditional HCI while supporting external storage.
• The three pillars of UCI are a unified code base, three-dimensional scaling, and virtual data centers.
• How VergeOS’s common sense, per server, licensing model saves you money.
• How VergeIO’s multi-layered approach to ransomware resiliency and data protection provides the fastest recovery options with the least data loss.

Your organization's identity and access management systems hold the keys to your IT landscape, so protecting them is crucial to maintaining operational security and data integrity.

Manual backups and outdated scripts are slow and expensive. You need a solution that automates your backups and helps you recover data within minutes. HYCU offers robust data protection for Microsoft Entra ID, enhancing security for identity and access management.

Key Highlights of the 3-Minute Demo:

• One-click restore of critical configurations: Whether accidentally deleted or breached, you’ll se how you can restore your entire Microsoft Entra ID tenant or single users, groups, roles, custom domains, app registrations, and more.
• Safe, ransomware-proof copies. Learn how to store off-site copies in safe, immutable public cloud storage targets owned by you and only accessible to you – no one else.
• Autopilot backups with ‘backup assurance’. Find out how to assign flexible ‘set and forget’ backup policies that run 24/7 with logging and notifications. Save time, resources, and risk by avoiding manual or scripted exports.

Watch this quick demo and take the first step towards a more secure, streamlined identity management solution.

There are many misconceptions about data deduplication, and making decisions based on those misconceptions can produce undesirable (and unplanned) results. For instance, deployment of the wrong type of deduplication typically results in:

•    Excessively high disk usage and using as much as three times the bandwidth for offsite replication, and the resulting impact on short and long-term costs
•    Slower backup storage ingest due to inline compute-intensive data deduplication that greatly slows backups down and expands the backup window
•    Slower restores, VM boots, and tape copies that can take hours or even days due to the time-consuming rehydration of deduplicated data
•    Backup windows that continue to expand with data growth

Choosing a Tiered Backup Storage solution will have a major impact on the cost and performance of your backup environment for the next three to five years because backups are written to a disk-cache Landing Zone for fastest backup performance, and then tiered to a deduplicated data repository to reduce storage and resulting storage costs.

Enterprises facing rapidly growing backup demands and ever shrinking windows of opportunity need to rethink their data protection strategies. ExaGrid is the ideal solution as the Tiered Backup Storage systems deliver a smart scale-out solution, and the latest EX189 model takes density into the stratosphere with an industry-leading 12PB of raw backup capacity in 64U of rack space.

ExaGrid’s EX appliances are a natural choice for enterprise data backup and disaster recovery as they deliver an easily deployed, highly flexible and high performing scale-out storage solution. Their innovative data protection features keep ransomware attacks at bay and ExaGrid’s flagship EX189 appliance offers a huge backup capacity that defies belief.

• Why VMware’s approach to SDN stalled adoption due to licensing fees, complexity, and hardware overhead.
• How VergeFabric, built into VergeOS, eliminates the need for dedicated SDN appliances or controller VMs.
• The advantages of VM-level segmentation and VDC-level security without VLAN sprawl or manual firewall rules.
• How VergeOS extends cost savings beyond the hypervisor by integrating compute, storage, and networking into a single platform.
• Why multi-site connectivity and disaster recovery are simplified with built-in SDN.