CEO Blogs

If you’ve gotten this far through 2013 without an information security breach , count yourself fortunate. According to a recent survey by PwC , CIO magazine , and CSO magazine , security incidents have increased 25% over the last year. The financial costs of these incidents have climbed, too — by 18%.

The PwC/CIO/CSO survey points to three culprits: new hacker strategies, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend and cloud computing. And it warns that too many organizations have not changed their security stances, leaving themselves dangerously vulnerable to new kinds of threats.

Late last month, LinkedIn launched a new service called Intro that, in a matter of days, has added plenty of fuel to the convenience vs. security-and-privacy fires.

You see, LinkedIn Intro dangles the carrot of public cloud convenience: By showing LinkedIn profiles in the iPhone/iPad Mail app, Intro instantly delivers up all manner of info about the unfamiliar name appearing in your inbox — what the sender looks like, what he does, where he’s based. And it works both ways — for mail received and sent.

As the virtues of cloud-based data backup and disaster recovery/business continuity become increasingly apparent, it’s important to remember that moving some or all of your backup and DR functionality to cloud services involves more than a quick signup.

Here are eight cloud disaster recovery best practices that can make the difference between success and failure:

If you’re turning to cloud services to handle your data backup and disaster recovery needs, you’re not alone.

According to one survey conducted a few months ago by TechTarget and Computer Weekly, the adoption of cloud services for DR and business continuity will jump from just under 18% of enterprises to more than 28% in a mere six months.

Last year, disasters in the United States caused more than $60 billion in damage . And the future promises plenty more of the same, says a recent report from Swiss reinsurer Munich Re — especially in North America, where weather-related loss events have quintupled in the last 30 years.

Now add in concerns about inadequate backup of the data on employees’ smartphones and tablets, wayward virtual machines, cyberattacks and other security incidents …

As the end of Windows XP support looms ever closer, I’m getting more questions about DaaS — desktops as a service.

And for good reason: With cloud-based desktops as a service , you can tick several boxes at once and save money in the process — as much as 20%-to-30% over five years when you move from a physical desktop infrastructure to DaaS.

Of course, since DaaS is a hosted service, you avoid the upfront CapEx of a homegrown virtual desktop infrastructure. But three other major benefits may be even more important to some organizations: