Manufacturers love buzz words. And, it’s true, most of us are susceptible to catchy phrases. One that’s caught my attention is ‘bleeding edge’ — used to describe the very, very latest technology product or service. It’s a heady feeling, being at the forefront of technology, and the urge to acquire the newest and best can be downright irresistible, as evidenced by sales of the iPhone 6. Yet there are times when you should resist. Being on the bleeding edge can
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
