Skip to content

Archived CEO Blogs

Giving Thanks During the Season of Patching

As the nights grow longer and colder, giving thanks for all that’s warm and light-filled makes wonderful sense. We are, in effect, expressing appreciation for feeling secure and safe.

In fact, this is a time of year when it’s a good idea to pay particular attention to security — especially data security. With the season of holiday gift-buying underway, opportunities for data thieves, hackers, and malware abound.

This isn’t only a concern for retailers and credit card firms. We’re all vulnerable and we all have to continually tend to the security of our businesses. 

Tim Burke

Planning for 4 Key 2015 Technology Challenges

Four technologies will very likely impact your business in 2015 — whether or not you explicitly consider them in your planning. Which is to say, ignore them at your peril: 

Tim Burke

3 Steps to Closing the BYOD Gap

In my last post, I discussed the gap between business units that enthusiastically embrace BYOD and IT departments, where BYOD is regarded with more hesitation.

Yet it’s clear: BYOD is not only here to stay, it is quickly becoming a dominant force that IT departments must deal with. And in most circumstances “just say no” isn’t an option; BYOD offers employees too many rich opportunities to boost productivity, innovation, and collaboration.

So what’s an IT department — your IT department — to do?

Tim Burke

The BYOD Gap

What’s the state of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in your organization?

When I ask this of our customers I get replies aligning with industry research and other anecdotal evidence pointing to what I call the BYOD gap.

Business units are adopting BYOD – along with mobile apps and consumer-grade cloud services – pretty much as fast as they can, but too often such adoption is unsanctioned by their IT departments; there is no BYOD policy.
In the shadows
It’s a sizable gap, too: by some reports , almost 90% of employees use their own devices at work – but only about 40% of enterprises have committed to implementing BYOD policies, procedures, and infrastructure.

This is classic Shadow IT, and it’s on a scale unlike anything since the 1980s when corporate business units defied their IT departments to acquire PCs. It took mainframe-obsessed IT staff a good long time to grasp that forbidding PCs was a supreme waste of time, because whenever business unit managers find tools enabling them to boost productivity and achieve better results, they are enthusiastically embraced whether IT likes it or not. 

Tim Burke

The Recovery Gap – Part 2: A Short List of 5 Best Recovery Practices

In my last post, I shared some sobering numbers from a recent study by the DRP Council on how well – and not well – organizations recover from disruptions. Many of the problems revealed in the study can, I believe, be attributed to four causes:

Inadequate recovery plans that don’t anticipate the types of events that actually occur
Insufficient plan documentation and lack of compliance reporting
Not nearly enough recovery plan testing
Failing the recovery tests that do occur

All of this is eminently understandable – it’s hard to focus budget and time on what we prefer to regard as unlikely possibilities.

So here’s my first recovery best practice: think of your recovery plan as the best way to keep those possibilities unlikely, because when they do happen, they cost plenty.

Tim Burke

The Recovery Gap – Part 1: Online Presence and Prudent Preparation

Online presence has never been more important to your business – but behind it lurks immense technical complexity. The sort of complexity that produces things like software, network and power failures, and human error.

So, of course, it’s prudent to prepare ways to recover from such failures, mistakes and vagaries of nature, which is why so many organizations – a majority, according to a recent study by the DRP Council – deploy some sort of secondary recovery site. Though, less than 10% use cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) .

Tim Burke

Contact Quest Today  ˄
close slider