Information Technology Navigator

To say the cybersecurity community is a buzz over the recent news of the highly-sophisticated data breaches at many U.S. government agencies this month due to vulnerabilities in the SolarWinds Orion IT management platform is an understatement. Experts believe that Russian government hackers are behind this global espionage which may have started as early as last spring. The threat actors conducted a supply chain attack on SolarWinds Orion Platform with a backdoor through a FireEye software update. The SolarWinds versions impacted are 2019.4 HF 5, 2020.2 with no hotfix installed, and 2020.2 HF 1. Agencies affected include the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of the Treasury.

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I haven’t met an organization yet that isn’t interested in saving money and optimizing their cloud spend. That’s where Azure Reserved Instances (RIs) come in. Properly leveraged, Reserved Instances, particularly Virtual Machine Reserved Instances can result in some significant savings. In fact, it was the topic of discussion at one of our recent Daymark Cloud Clinics where our technical cloud consultants offer free technical training and tips on a wide range of Azure and Office 365 features.

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Every IT professional already knows that the proliferation of log files generated by Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions can be overwhelming to manage. There are multiple SIEM tools that analyze and automate this tremendous amount of data to provide alerts that help troubleshoot network issues, quickly remediate threats, and identify potential non-compliance vulnerabilities.

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As the IT mandate shifts to innovation, many CIOs are seeking ways to offload operational tasks. Some plan to get out of the data center business all together. Partnering with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) has proved to be an effective strategy that allows IT organizations to provide more value to the business and frees IT staff to focus on digital transformation initiatives.

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Daymark consultants are on the front lines every day listening to our customers’ pain points and then architecting and deploying solutions to help solve some of their toughest IT challenges. They have amassed a wealth of knowledge from these real-world experiences and are happy to share them. Today we sat down with Matthew Mansell, Senior Network Consultant at Daymark, to talk about a recent networking project at a pharmaceutical company with 400 employees and a multi-building campus.

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When virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) first hit the market, the appeal of application control and security benefits were compelling, but early adopters found the stress on the backend infrastructure frequently caused performance issues and ultimately complaints from end users. Today, however, we’ve found that VDI can finally live up to its promises! We recently installed VMware View at a research lab in a major university. In this blog, Michael Chen, Daymark’s Senior Hybrid Datacenter Consultant, provides candid answers on The Lab’s deployment of VMware View.

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Healthcare providers today are continuing to rely more and more on the efficiencies of the public cloud to store, send, and manage sensitive data. But it’s challenging to leverage the benefits of the cloud while managing the increasing complexity of healthcare security, compliance and regulatory demands.

That’s where HITRUST comes in. The HITRUST Certification is the most widely recognized security accreditation in the healthcare industry.  HITRUST incorporates healthcare specific security, privacy and regulatory requirements from existing regulations such as HIPAA/HITECH, PCI, ISO 27001 and MARS-E as well as industry best practices. Microsoft has recently announced that Azure is one of the first hyperscale cloud computing platforms to become HITRUST CSF Certified.  It’s a valuable addition to Azure, providing a single framework for healthcare organizations to leverage the efficiencies, availability, and scalability that Azure provides.

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IT teams in most Life Science organizations have an unending To-Do list of projects to tackle. Their hands are full with various initiatives to support growth mandates while adjusting and keeping up with constant change in this highly competitive, fast-paced industry. While maintaining an eye on industry trends is necessary, fundamental IT work remains. This is the keep-the-lights-on type of work that falls under the not so sexy, but very important category of “data governance.”

Keeping IT’s Head Above Governance Waters. . .

For IT teams struggling with growth initiatives, mounting and ever-changing regulations cannot be ignored. Data privacy, security and compliance must still be assured. Protection from potential data breach is critical and efforts to ensure proper data audit trails, unquestioning data integrity, and effective data lifecycle management are ongoing. 

This includes the sorting and classification of all your dark data with proper controls, where needed. This includes unstructured or semi-structured data still lurking about in your company’s file shares, SharePoint servers and email system.

How can IT achieve the right balance between its long list of growth and data governance projects? And, how far is far enough when it comes to governance?

We don’t presume to have all the answers. But, our experience with Life Science organizations gives us some perspective as well as a few, proven governance rules-of-thumb to help keep your IT team sane.

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Fans of the latest Mission:Impossible film might question how close any IT team could get to the high stakes, world-in-the-balance job of Impossible Missions Force (IMF) Agent Ethan Hunt and his team.

Granted, IT folks might not see themselves clinging gamely to the side of an ascending airplane anytime soon. But, based on some of the missions you’re tasked 

with—especially for those in regulated industries like Life Sciences—the idea of being part of your own IMF might have some appeal.

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