For years, traditional siloed IT has been so rigid that even cast-in-concrete, one-size fits-all cloud services offer important improvements. This IBM study from last year shows where those improvements are: In flexibility, scalability, and efficiency — as well as reducing costs and providing the ability to ensure business continuity in the face of unanticipated disruption.
The siloed nature of traditional data center architectures has produced “you-can’t-get-there-from-here” IT environments. Too often applications, data, and storage devices don’t interact , resources are wasted (e.g., one workload per server), and complex management hassles often lead to risky administrative lapses that result in security vulnerabilities.
The result: IT infrastructures that are too unwieldy, too expensive, and too slow at a time when agility and responsiveness are essential for success.
We’re seeing more and more interest in Cloud Computing of late — and some lingering confusion about both what it is and what Cloud options a small-to-midsize business really has these days.
So buckle your seatbelts. I’m going to discuss Cloud, and in the process, I’ll lay out what I see as the benefits of Cloud Computing — especially when it’s done right. (And yes, I’ll get to that, too, so keep dropping by…)
OK, so in the beginning there was Cloud Computing. Last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was kind enough to offer up a definition , which has since become something of a standard:
The data discovery and identification aspect of data loss prevention (DLP) capability is just the beginning. Once you know what data you have and where it lives, you’re finally in a position to accomplish two crucial things:
Data loss prevention (DLP) is a powerful security tool. So powerful that it’s tempting to try a broad, pervasive implementation. But this can backfire into a flood of false alerts — unless you first think through your DLP strategy:
The first part of a data loss prevention (DLP) implementation involves inventory. Of your data, that is — because, quite simply, you can’t protect it if you don’t know it’s there.
So the first thing DLP does is discover where your sensitive data resides. The right DLP capability can sift through file servers, databases, documents, email, and Web content to discover sensitive data wherever it resides and tag it so it can be tracked wherever it goes.
