Warning! This blog starts out with some techy jargon but it’s well worth your time if you have data that needs to be secured. I promise this blog has a business focus. “Security requirements for cryptographic modules.” That’s the official title of the Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 140-2, otherwise known as FIPS 140-2. This US Government standard specifies the security requirements that will be satisfied by a cryptographic module utilized within a security system protecting sensitive but unclassified information. It was written for the government and any organization doing business with the government, and businesses have adopted it as a computing standard regardless of government interaction. Wait! Don’t stop reading.

Ask yourself these questions – If your data center crashed at this moment (for any reason)… How would your company recover? Who would you call to recover your data and resume operations? How would you keep the doors open? How much data would you lose? Be honest with your answers – your business depends on it. If your answer is “I don’t know”, it’s time to worry because you haven’t assessed the potential damage nor ways to mitigate them. It’s worse to have NOT assessed your disaster recovery risk than to have assessed it and found your plans to be lacking. In the latter scenario, at least you have some level of awareness and a minimum understanding of your risks.

Effective change management is required to ensure the integrity of the IT operational environments and an outsourced DR environment.  The most basic premise of DR testing and recovery is that the combination of application/infrastructure systems protected in a DR environment can be restored to the customer’s operational environment and IT WORKS!

PRWEB July 14, 2017: Migrating to the public cloud can be a significant challenge for organizations with existing infrastructure. Moving data and applications from legacy systems can take months and cause slowdown and service interruption. CloudSAFE has teamed up with ZeroNines to offer organizations a secure, uninterrupted migration to the cloud. Leveraging the power of ZERODOWN™ Software Always Available™ technology, organizations can realize their cloud strategies with no interruption to applications. No longer is cloud adoption and infrastructure migration a long and cumbersome process.

Another global cyber attack is all over the news today. I'm sure you've heard or read about it. Petya, or NotPetya as security researchers are calling it, is wreaking havoc around the world. And, this ransomware is worse than WannaCry from last month. According to David Kennedy, former NSA analyst and cybersecurity entrepreneur, as quoted on Forbes.com (read the article), "the ransomware finds passwords on the infected computer to move to other systems. It does that by extracting passwords from memory or from the local filesystem, he explained."

Many seasoned system administrators have found them themselves in tough places when trying to recover system images and data. You know the feeling; it is awful – everyone wondering when the system is going to be “normal” again, persistent help desk calls wanting to know what to tell customers, living in the ops pressure cooker of everyone trying to help you and, oh yes, those recovery objectives that management is holding you to deliver. There are many scenarios that can sabotage even the best plans for consistent system and data recovery – system upgrades that go awry and leave one in no-man’s land; merger of apps and data under one storage management umbrella resulting from that new company you’re merging into your enterprise; moving storage management to a public cloud provider and losing control of configuration management of data changes; changing security permissions on files and watching the process goes south on you; etc. Yes, it’s easy to view the world from a deep hole during these trying times.

Recently, we have seen several instances when IT failed both customer and business expectations, the most visible being Delta’s IT outage that occurred on August 8, 2016. The business impact to both the customer and business was detailed on the front page of most business newspapers. As an IT leader, this is NOT the place you want to see the negative results of your IT strategy and investments reviewed and scrutinized.