Information Technology Navigator

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On February 9, 2020, Infinidat rolled out some major enhancements to its InfiniGuard enterprise data protection platform. The announcement themes revolved around enhanced data protection, faster recovery and overall cyber resilience.

Here are some key takeaways and features worth noting:

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Ransomware has rapidly become the single largest cyber threat we face today and if the first half of 2021 was any indication, things are only going to get worse. Colonial Pipeline, Kia Motors, JBS Foods, Kaseya and CNA Financial have been some of the more notable, high-profile attacks this year. In the case of the Colonial Pipeline, the attack impacted over a dozen U.S. states and cost the company $5 million. Colonial Pipeline was able to recover ~$2.3M of the ransom, but that is often not the case. CNA Financial was not as fortunate and needed to pay an estimated $40 million to retrieve the encryption keys for their data. And ransom from the Kaseya attack, which impacted an estimated 800 to 1,500 businesses, is said to be in the range of $70M which would make it the largest ransom ever paid (should Kaseya decide to pay).

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The CDC recently requested all businesses to dust off their pandemic preparedness plans amid the spread of the Coronavirus also known as (COVID-19). The global threat has already had a major economic impact in a very short time, as is evidenced in the recent stock market plunges, worldwide flight cancellations and travel bans, and the clothing manufacturing sector to name a few.

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For many of us, a rock-solid business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan can mean the difference between a good night’s sleep and living in constant fear of impending doom. Hyperbole aside, many BC/DR plans are under-tested, under-architected, and misunderstood by businesses. Sure, you may have a copy of your data at a secondary site, but how do you know it’s accessible to applications in the event of a failover? How do you ensure your most business-critical applications (complex interdependencies and all) come online properly and quickly? How do you automate and orchestrate changes to networking or startup scripts when your VMs fail-over? Just as importantly, how do you effectively test that all of this will work when it matters most? 

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Lacking confidence in your disaster recovery (DR) strategy is not a situation any CIO wants to be in, particularly in the Financial Services sector. In this Q&A interview Daymark consultant, Matt Trottier, shares his experience of helping a financial services client re-architect their DR strategy to ensure failover if a real disaster were to occur.

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Data protection. Storage professionals have been worrying about securing, backing up, and restoring data pretty much since computers came into use. And just when you think you’ve got it figured out, there’s a new wrinkle – a new regulation, a new data source, a shorter backup window, and endless new technologies to manage it all. Here are answers to some of the most frequent questions our customers ask in the never-ending battle to protect data and manage data growth:

Q. What’s the most common missing element in an enterprise’s data protection strategy?

A. Two things come to mind – First, an active and consistent review of backup success, as indicated by the ability to perform an effective and timely restore. And second, a lack of policy based backup that mirrors the enterprises’ document retention requirements.

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Dealing with anything related to Disaster Recovery (DR) carries a certain amount of stress with it, frankly the name says it all. There’s nothing good about a disaster of any kind. The word is reserved for the worst case scenarios and recovery or getting back to normal after a disaster conjures up a feeling of the utmost urgency, maybe even a little panic. After a disaster questions from nearly every corner of the organization start pouring in. “What were we backing up? “What is our recovery point?” “How long until we can get back to operational status?” “Can we prioritize certain applications for recovery?”

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It happens all the time – a customer has a problem that’s tough to solve. I was recently asked how to best protect a virtual environment – stretched between two data centers. The customer wanted all administration through vCenter with instant recovery and the ability to meet stringent RPOs and RTOs. And the catch – they wanted the backed up data to be stored on a different vendor’s array utilizing a different protocol - NFS instead of Fibre Channel (FC) block storage.

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