How much did you pay for the drywall in your house? How about the bricks? The doors? What about the windows, how much did those set you back?
Some people might have answers to these questions. I do not.
At the end of the day, I want to buy a house that is in a desirable neighborhood and within my budget. And I see IT and our customers in the same light.
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.
Game of Thrones recently kicked off its fourth season. And as a devoted fan, I cannot help but see the similarities between the battle for control of Westeros, the Iron Throne and the capital city, King’s Landing and the current gamesmanship developing in the IT Channel for control of the end-user experience, the IT infrastructure backbone, and the datacenter.
Much like the Channel, Westeros the fantasy realm of the HBO hit show, Game of Thrones, is made up of different families and kingdoms. For those who remember their Western Civilization courses, it is basically a feudal system under the mercurial rule of a corruptible monarchy, bordered on the north by snow zombies and hordes of non-allied “wildlings” and to the south east by dragons and a very angry ex-pat, who is raising an army to kill everyone back home.
