Jon Seals
What Makes a Great Risk Manager: Q&A With Michael Lopez of Booz Allen Hamilton
This Tuesday, May 14, marks the second annual World Risk Day—a global forum for those in the industry to discuss trends, challenges and best practices in risk management. One of the many speakers lined up for the event is Michael Lopez, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. To get his take on the role of the modern risk manager, we asked him a few questions.
Risk Management Monitor: Has the idea of the role of risk manager been lost? How so?
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http://www.riskmanagementmonitor.com/qa-with-michael-lopez-of-booz-allen-hamilton/
Bad news for CIOs: almost half of employees bypassing security
In news that certainly won't be music to the ears of the CIO, new research has found that as many as 46% of employees have admitted to bypassing security to get their jobs done.
This is despite the converse figure that 85% has said that security has added value to their company.
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http://www.publictechnology.net/news/bad-news-cios-almost-half-employees-bypassing-security/37776
Is 'fear the auditor' holding back real IT security?
Leo Scanlon, chief information security officer of the National Archives and Records Administration, has an information security question for federal CIOs: “Are you satisfied that where you are is good enough? Do you understand the risk?”
Too often, he says, federal C-level officials do not know if their security is adequate because they do not understand the risks they face and what the risk tolerance of their agencies should be. And too often, they are content to remain that way.
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http://gcn.com/blogs/cybereye/2013/05/is-fear-of-audit-holding-back-real-it-security.aspx
Cybersecurity Supply chain risks go far beyond fake parts
Concern over the government's IT supply chain typically have centered on issues like counterfeit parts or defective materials. But there's a "soft underbelly" to supply chain vulnerabilities, and it is becoming more critical as agencies increasingly purchase managed services often delivered via software. Officials warn that this risk is especially acute in critical infrastructure, where there is growing and interconnected reliance on cyber.
Cloud services, software as a service and service-oriented architecture allow the government to get out of businesses that are not core competencies. But they also allow agencies to believe they are handing over security responsibilities to outside providers, according to Joe Jarzombek, director for software assurance within the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Cyber Security and Communications.
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Plan for a disaster - but don't pay until it happens
The growing threat of cyber attacks has moved IT disaster recovery planning up the agenda for many businesses, but why pay every year for something you are never likely to use?
Developing an IT disaster recovery plan, with step-by-step procedures for recovering disrupted systems will identify business-critical IT systems and networks. It will assess the required recovery time and establish the steps to restarting, reconfiguring and recovering them.
Instead of outsourcing the entire responsibility for disaster recovery to external service providers, it’s possible for smaller businesses to plan and protect their business, but only pay if disaster strikes.
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http://www.businessrevieweurope.eu/technology/plan-for-a-disaster---but-dont-pay-until-it-happens
Why Your Next Big IT Project is Doomed
Network World — "The coming meltdown of IT; the out of control proliferation of IT failure is a future reality from which no country or enterprise - is immune. The same IT failures that are eroding profitability in the United States are impacting the economy in Australia. IT failures are rampant in the private sector, the public sector, and the not-for-profit sector. No place is safe. No industry is protected. No sector is immune. This is the danger, and it is real."-- Roger Sessions, CTO, ObjectWatch
Have you had a IT project go astray? Maybe you were lucky and it was a brief hiccup with minimal financial consequences. Or maybe you had a disaster of biblical proportions, such as the one that befell Levi Strauss in 2008.
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http://www.cio.com/article/733083/Why_Your_Next_Big_IT_Project_is_Doomed
Response to Sandy Demonstrates the Value of Training, Resiliency and Collaboration
During his keynote address at the 15th annual New Jersey Emergency Preparedness Conference in Atlantic City, the Honorable Tom Ridge praised emergency and first responders for their impressive response to Superstorm Sandy.
“The emergency management community in New Jersey gets it,” he said. “I’m fascinated by the stories I’ve heard about the response to Superstorm Sandy.” For example, the seamless communication between private and public sectors during the response demonstrated how well those in the state had trained and practiced together, he said.
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http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Response-to-Sandy-Demonstrates-Ridge-050913.html
A more transparent battle with bird flu
IN A STRANGE TWIST of evolution, the influenza virus seems to have endless capability to reinvent itself, infecting waterfowl, swine and humans over and over again with great power and destructive force. A periodic reassortment of its genes gives rise to new variants that have not been seen before. Each time, the new variant poses a potential threat to both man and animal. Another shuffle of the deck has just occurred, leading to a new outbreak of bird flu in China, where people and fowl are often in close contact.
This variant, known as H7N9, has not reached U.S. shores, but it is a reminder of the unpredictable nature of influenza. It might cause a pandemic, or settle into a slow burn for years, or simply die out. At this stage, no one knows. The uncertainty ought to remind us of past lessons about infectious disease and globalization, which remain as urgent as ever.
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Colleges and Universities Increasingly Choosing ExaGrid to Achieve Better Backups
ExaGrid’s scalable, cost effective disk backup solution with deduplication makes the grade for higher education campuses
Westborough, MA — ExaGrid Systems, Inc. (www.exagrid.com) the leader in scalable and cost-effective disk-based backup solutions with data deduplication, today announced that higher education institutions are increasingly choosing ExaGrid’s disk-based backup appliances with deduplication to gain faster backups and restores and seamless scalability as data grows.
As a result of implementing ExaGrid, IT departments at a growing number of prestigious colleges and universities have reduced backup times by up to 90%, improved offsite disaster recovery capabilities, reduced or eliminated tape backup, and dramatically sped up their restores of files, objects, and virtual machines – while also avoiding costly “forklift upgrades” associated with other approaches that do not scale easily.
Higher education institutions are choosing ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication to meet their backup and recovery needs in large part because of ExaGrid’s unique approach to disk backup, which combines compute with capacity as data grows in a “scale-out” architecture along with a landing zone for rapid restores. Other disk backup solutions that expand in a “scale-up” architecture by adding just disk capacity without adding compute resources result in downstream problems including ever-expanding backup windows and expensive forklift upgrades. These other solutions also only store deduplicated data, resulting in slow system restores and tape copies, and slow recoveries of files, VMs and objects that take hours versus minutes. ExaGrid is the only solution that permanently shortens backup windows without expensive forklift upgrades, and also enables the fastest full system restores and rapid restore of files, VMs and objects in as fast as minutes.
The higher education institutions that have turned to ExaGrid to solve their backup challenges include:
- Keene State College: The Keene State College IT department selected ExaGrid to meet its need for shorter backup windows and greater backup reliability. After implementing the ExaGrid system, the team was able to reduce the backup time for the college’s main file server by 95%, from 20 hours to just 45 minutes.
- Furman University: Furman University turned to ExaGrid’s appliances to replace its aging tape library. ExaGrid offered the university a faster, more reliable backup solution that reduced the amount of time spent managing tape backups. Since implementing the ExaGrid disk backup with deduplication solution, Furman’s IT team reported a dramatic reduction in backup data by 22:1 and a 75% reduction in nightly backup times – from as much as six hours to about 90 minutes.
- Plymouth State University: The Plymouth State University IT department needed to move away from tape, and chose disk-based backup to make their data protection processes faster and more reliable. ExaGrid was an ideal choice as the appliance worked with the university’s existing backup application and made switching from tape easy. Since installation, the university has cut its backup windows in half and achieved data deduplication ratios as high as 20:1 with 30 days of retention.
- Sarah Lawrence College: Sarah Lawrence College’s IT team knew that it wanted to move away from tape, and even considered backing up to primary disk in a co-location facility. The team chose ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication as a way to reduce backup data volumes and the high projected cost of disk space, power draw, and rack space in the co-location facility. Since backing up to ExaGrid, the IT department has seen the college’s backup window reduced from between 24-36 hours per week to 10-12 hours.
Supporting Quotes:
- Marc Crespi, vice president of product management for ExaGrid Systems: “These education institutions experienced many of the same pain points that made ExaGrid’s unique approach to disk backup with deduplication an attractive solution. Most of these customers were experiencing rapid data growth, backups running outside the available window, long restore times, and the management headaches of tape backup. Each of these campuses solved their backup challenges with ExaGrid’s proven architecture built for backup and optimized for backup and restore performance and cost-effective scalability.
- Kevin Forrest, system administrator for Keene State College: “Decreasing our backup windows and the time the IT team spent on backups each night was a huge factor in why we chose to implement an ExaGrid appliance. Since installation, backup times have decreased significantly and we’re all able to sleep better at night knowing our data will be completely backed up by the time we arrive to work each morning.”
About ExaGrid Systems, Inc.:
ExaGrid offers the only disk-based backup appliance with data deduplication purpose-built for backup that leverages a unique architecture optimized for performance, scalability and price. ExaGrid is the only solution that combines compute with capacity and a unique landing zone to permanently shorten backup windows, eliminate expensive forklift upgrades, achieve the fastest full system restores and tape copies, and rapidly restore files, VMs and objects in minutes. With offices and distribution worldwide, ExaGrid has more than 5,500 systems installed at more than 1,655 customers, and more than 320 published customer success stories.
For more information, contact ExaGrid at 800-868-6985 or visit www.exagrid.com. Visit “ExaGrid’s Eye on Deduplication” blog: http://blog.exagrid.com/.
Emerson Network Power Identifies Vital Signs of a Healthy Data Center
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE:EMR) and a global leader in maximizing availability, capacity and efficiency of critical infrastructure, today released five vital signs of a healthy 5,000 square-foot data center. Just as there is renewed focus on health and physical fitness by many people in the summer months, so too should data center managers assess the health and physical fitness of their critical systems.
“Today’s data center is one of the most dynamic and imperative operations of any organization, and understanding its vital signs is key to getting the right kind of service at the right time, ensuring efficiency, reliability and availability,” said Dave Saliaris, vice president of life cycle management services for Emerson Network Power’s Liebert Services business.
Complexity and criticality continues to increase as data centers experience steady growth in capacity and density. According to Emerson Network Power, data center managers can begin assessing the state of their own data center by examining the current performance of the following vital signs.
1. Effective Cooling: Cooling accounts for approximately 40 percent of total energy used within the average data center. Smart design and implementation of mechanisms can help improve efficiency and lower total cost of operation. According to the white paper “Seven Best Practices for Increasing Efficiency, Availability and Capacity,” properly designed supplemental cooling has been shown to reduce cooling energy costs by 35-50 percent compared to perimeter cooling. In addition to proper cooling equipment, proper temperature can result in savings. The white paper showed that a 10 degree increase in cold aisle temperature can generate a 20 percent reduction in cooling system energy usage. As a best practice, keep temperature and humidity within the ASHRAE recommended range.
2. Flexibility and Scalability: Healthy data center designs should incorporate well thought out floor layouts, systems and equipment to meet current data center requirements, while ensuring the ability to adapt to future growth and demands. According to the Fall 2012 Data Center Users’ Group Special Report, 40 percent of respondents expect to run out of data center capacity by 2014, while another 29 percent expect capacity constraints by 2017. Additionally, the survey showed data centers are running out of power and cooling capactiy before they run out of physical floor space.
3. Reliable and Cost-Saving Power and Energy: According to the white paper “Understanding the Cost of Data Center Downtime,” UPS system failure accounted for 29 percent of data center outages in 2011, and the average UPS-related failure cost $687,700. Ensuring that the UPS, capacitors and batteries are all properly working is the best way to ensure the sustainability of critical operations and avoid data center downtime. Likewise, maintaining energy efficiency can create similar savings. “Energy Logic” showed that 1 W of savings at the server component level can create 2.84 W of savings at the facility level.
4. Routine Service and Maintenance: For established facilities, preventive maintenance has proven to increase system reliability. For example, “The Effect of Regular, Skilled Preventive Maintenance on Critical Power System Reliability” showed that the UPS Mean Time Between Failures for units that received two preventive service events in a year is 23 times higher than a machine with no preventive services events per year. When correctly implemented, preventive maintenance ensures maximum reliability of data center equipment by providing systematic inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures that can lead to costly downtime. A Ponemon Institute study of U.S.-based data centers reveals that data center downtime costs businesses more than $5,000 per minute.
5. Proper Planning and Assessment: Preventive maintenance should be supplemented by periodic data center assessments, which can help identify vulnerabilities and inefficiencies resulting from constant change. Not only can assessments indentify potential problem areas in the data center before they become costly issues, but they can also ensure the proper resources and space necessary for maximum efficiency and future growth.
For additional insight into the health of your data center, and for more information on data center assessments and services from Emerson Network Power, visit www.EmersonNetworkPower.com.
About Emerson Network Power
Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE:EMR), delivers software, hardware and services that maximize availability, capacity and efficiency for data centers, healthcare and industrial facilities. A trusted industry leader in smart infrastructure technologies, Emerson Network Power provides innovative data center infrastructure management solutions that bridge the gap between IT and facility management and deliver efficiency and uncompromised availability regardless of capacity demands. Our solutions are supported globally by local Emerson Network Power service technicians. Learn more about Emerson Network Power products and services at www.EmersonNetworkPower.com.
About Emerson
Emerson (NYSE: EMR), based in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), is a global leader in bringing technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions for customers in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets around the world. The company is comprised of five business segments: Process Management, Industrial Automation, Network Power, Climate Technologies, and Commercial & Residential Solutions. Sales in fiscal 2012 were $24.4 billion. For more information, visit www.Emerson.com.
