Quest Blog | Quest Technology Management

Your Guide to All Things Quest @ Fall Cloud Partners Expo 2013

It’s that time of year again! That’s right, next month the Quest team will be at Cloud Partners Conference & Expo in Chicago.

The week kicks off on Tuesday, September 10th with Cisco Powered Cloud Connections – a one-day interactive session on becoming a successful Cloud Services Reseller. You will hear from industry leaders, Cisco experts, and leading Cloud Providers, all in the same room for a day of networking. Mike Dillon, Quest CTO will be participating in the Cisco Cloud Providers Roundtable. Want to attend? Register here .

Adam Burke

Application vulnerabilities: Closer than you think

Consider: Last year, according to Verizon , 54% of data breaches began as attacks on web applications, and for years one type of attack — SQL injection — has been the means by which 83% of stolen records were extracted. Meanwhile, says Gartner , 25% of all DDOS attacks this year will be application-based, and an increasing portion of these attacks may actually be diversions in which the bad guys use remotely accessible malware to target user accounts (for personal data or, in the case of financial institutions, for money).

Tim Burke

Flexibility Was Never Goliath’s Strength

No matter what sort of reseller niche you’ve occupied, it’s been upended by the cloud. The question is no longer whether you should find a way to offer cloud services. The question now is, what kind of cloud services should you provide?

Adam Burke

Virtualization, cloud services make a new network/app management world

In my last post, I pointed out that today’s speedy, low-cost connectivity is impacting network and application management. This time I’ll concentrate on the other significant trend changing network and application management: Virtualization and cloud services.

Today’s datacenter environments are not only quickly becoming hyper-connected, most have also undergone at least some degree of virtualization and use of cloud services. The combination results in new kinds of business applications and, ultimately, a new kind of network infrastructure that exhibits…

Greater traffic volume, notably storage traffic
A shift in traffic flows from top-down/bottom-up to peer-to-peer, server-to-server, and virtual machine-to-virtual machine (now as much as 80% by some estimates)
Increasing amounts of synchronization and replication data across the network
A flatter network hierarchy

Tim Burke

Security Risk and Reward

Market experts love to talk about Information Security. And why wouldn’t they?! It is a beautiful market of evolving requirements and according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts , it’s projected to surpass $125 billion by 2015.

Market research and revenue projections aside, what does the growing need for security practices at all levels mean for the Channel? What does it mean to the SMB space? Even large enterprises get breached, and they’ve invested billions of dollars in information security and have CIO’s and Directors overseeing teams of security admins, network security professionals, and quality control processes for application delivery.

Threats can come from any level, Cisco projects that 50 billon devices will be connected to the Internet of Everything (IoE) by 2020. Applications, email, networks, remote workers, Cloud hosted databases. If your clients’ business has touched the internet, it’s likely that automated malware and botnets are searching their systems for vulnerabilities. The motives behind these infected emails, watering hole attacks and zero day threats are not always known until it is too late. Corporate databases are breached, users personally identifiable information (PII) is lost and regulators penalties and damaged consumer confidence is inevitable.

Adam Burke

Fast, cheap connectivity opens up network/application management options

As 2013 begins, I notice plenty of commentary about mobile devices but less talk about the implications of mobility and other current events on business network and application monitoring and management requirements.

I see two key trends impacting network and application monitoring and management in the coming year: Fast, cheap connectivity and virtualization/cloud services . In this post, I’ll focus on the first of those — connectivity, which is most apparent in the current push toward (you guessed it) mobility.

Chicken or egg: Mobility ↔ connectivity
These days, your employees’ desktop functions are shifting to increasingly powerful mobile devices . At the same time, cloud services make the connectivity of those devices pretty much ubiquitous. So the value of much of your traditional infrastructure diminishes because it costs too much, is too complex, takes up too much space — and, too often, it doesn’t get the job done anymore.

Tim Burke