By some accounts, better than 50% of organizations are now deploying hybrid clouds — and for some very good reasons:

Improved security, because sensitive data can remain behind your private cloud firewall while less sensitive data can be permitted onto a public cloud.
Ability to specify where and under what terms and conditions your data is stored.
Effective workload balancing without breaking the bank, since using a public cloud to, say, handle peak loads can be far cheaper than keeping everything in-house or moving everything to a public cloud.

To get a hybrid cloud up and running , you need to begin with planning — specifically, a six-step planning process that, fortunately, you do not have to undertake alone. In this post, I’ll focus on the first two steps:

Most security experts — including ours at Quest — will tell you that it’s no longer a question of if attempts to compromise your data, apps, and/or technology infrastructure will happen, it’s now only a question of when.

So what can you do to protect your business in this age when it’s so tough to distinguish between trusted and threatening network traffic, when there’s no longer such a thing as a secure perimeter around your data, when the “attack surface” has never been greater?

Imagine discovering that for the last 12 months none of your company data had been backed up at your designated co-lo.

Worse, you only found this out because your corporate site has suffered a catastrophic failure. All your data has been lost — and you have no way to retrieve it.

You’re outraged, of course, and you want answers. How could your co-lo provider fail to back up your data? What about your provider’s vaunted disaster recovery service? Who is responsible for allowing this to happen? 

Information technology has become a business essential. We’ve reached the point where our ability to thrive and succeed depends on key software apps and the technology (wherever it may be) that runs them, our access-from-anywhere to the Internet, and our ability to gather and analyze troves of digitized data.

The easiest targets
So important are these capabilities that we often put them into use before we’ve figured out the myriad of ways they’re vulnerable to those with malicious intent. And while smaller enterprises used to be able to escape the worst of these vulnerabilities simply by slipping beneath cybercriminals’ radar, those days are gone. 

In my last post, I discussed how IT operations analytics can transform the masses of IT performance data into insight that provides broad, cross-tier network and infrastructure visibility so that …

Issues may be proactively recognized and resolved before they affect your business
Future capacity and provisioning requirements may be anticipated
A performance baseline built from multiple metrics can be established, reducing the time, money, and headaches associated with planning and deploying new projects, such as cloud deployments or virtualization.

But how should you go about choosing an IT operations analytics solutions? This is worth paying attention to, since such solutions are new, called by a number of different names (though likely not for long) and are available both as appliances and cloud-based services.

No doubt you’ve heard about “big data.” It sounds intimidating, invasive, and, well, way too big. But don’t be fooled — “big data” is going to save your IT infrastructure.

The first thing you need to understand about how this is happening (oh yes, it’s already well underway) is that “big data” is something of a misnomer. What we’re really talking about is analytics — automated mathematical tools that work in real time to sift through untold amounts of regular old data, in this case IT performance data, and produce actionable results that go far beyond legacy monitoring capabilities.