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Data Breaches at Outsourcers Impact Many
February 12th, 2012There have been major data breach impacting Google employees and patients of the Unniversity of Utah.
The data breaches did not result from cunning hackers penetrating a vulnerable corporate network. It is just another case of computers getting up and walking as a result of an old-fashioned burglary.
It was reported that Google employees hired before Dec. 31, 2005, received notices that their personal data, including Social Security numbers and birth dates had been compromised by a break-in at an Outsourcing Services, a payroll and human resources outsourcing company.
The break-in occurred at Colt Express and Google informed employees on June 9 about the breach. As a result, employees are getting a free year of identity theft protection.
Google employees looking to get an explanation from the outsourcer will find the company's Web site is no help. The site only reports that the "home page will be reconstructed."
The likely reason for the site being down is that Ceridian, the giant payroll processing and human resources company that serves more than 25 million employees, announced in early February 2008 that it had acquired "certain assets" from the outsourcer. Ceridian's benefits services division is now providing services to outsourcers' clients.
In the case of University of Utah the backup tapes were taken from an employee of another outsourcer.
This latest cases demonstrate again that poor physical security is a more common cause of data breaches than remote hacking attacks. Most of the biggest data breaches reported over the past couple of years have resulted from laptop computers being lost or stolen.
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Small and mid-sized business disaster and business continuity planning
February 3rd, 2012Many small to medium business cannot afford the complex infrastructures that are required to create full-fledged protection mechanisms for business continuity. They try to rely on backup tapes, backup software and offsite vaults, but everyone knows that backups arent any good unless they are tested and that takes a lot of time, effort and resources, most SMBs just don't have. That's where the Janco Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template comes in.
With the template and the electronic forms that it has it is much easier to implement a Cloud solution. Cloud service providers can easily store duplicates of all your data and content, and all for a fraction of the cost it would take to manage the process yourself. Relying on the cloud in this way is the easiest and fastest path to recovery in the event of a situation. Given the maturity of the cloud today, you can safely and securely rely on this environment to protect all of your business assets; in fact, it is the future of business continuity and the core of disaster recovery.
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Are salaries on the rise for IT Pros?
January 26th, 2012
Technology professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to the 2012-2011 Salary Survey from Dice, a career site for technology and engineering professionals. After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than two percent, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327 from $79,384 in 2010.
There was also a jump in both size of average bonuses, up eight percent to $8,769, and the number of technology professionals receiving bonuses: 32 percent in 2011, compared with 29 percent in 2010 and 24 percent in 2009. The industries most likely to pay out bonuses were telecom, hardware, banking, utilities/energy and software. While salaries are on the rise among technology professionals, entry-level salaries continue to be pushed downward, according to the survey. The professionals who generally saw their wages increase were those with 11 or more years of experience in their field. The survey was administered online with 18,325 employed technology professionals responding between September 19 and November 21, 2011, according to Dice.
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Disaster Planning for Datacenters
January 8th, 2012
Business continuity is vital to business success. It can no longer remain the concern of the IT department alone. How do you determine the continuity and recovery requirements of your business to protect against a disaster? How do you identify and integrate critical business and IT priorities into a comprehensive continuity program? Where do you start?
Janco's data center disaster recovery plan for business continuity includes:
- Identification of the business units and operational objectives.
- Identify & inventory and rank assets based on criticality to the business objectives.
- Rank the threats that pose risks to the critical assets.
- Identify the severity of vulnerabilities in the critical assets.
- Prioritize risks by focusing on assets affected by credible disaster threats and existing vulnerabilities.
- Develop strategies that minimize risk of disaster and maximize ROI.
Janco's Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template directs you in creating data center disaster recovery plans and providing cost estimates to adapt your facility and technology resources for continuous availability:
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- Backup and recovery options for your multi-vendor information technology.
- Internal and external disaster recovery site options.
- Recoverability of your critical infrastructure.
- Protection of your critical business processes.
Spam down in 2011
December 19th, 2011Criminals shifted away from building up botnet armies in favor of launching targeted attacks on specific corporate networks in 2011, according to security researchers.
The overall number of networks and computers hijacked by criminals globally and commandeered into a botnet army has declined each year since 2009, Cisco said in its 2011 state of security report, released Dec. 14. The Global Adversary Resource Market Share Index, which tracks the number of compromised systems, has dropped over the past few years.
Attackers also changed how they distribute malware in 2011, as they realized it could be used for "far more nefarious purposes" than just stealing bank accounts. Malware that is stealthy and "siphoning off" personal information, which can later be sold on underground markets, is potentially a more profitable approach. Facebook spammers took advantage of users' tendency to click on links posted by "friends" to launch clickjacking scams or download malware.
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IT Investments for 2011
November 8th, 2011It looks like tablets are going to be a area of focus in 2012 according to Baseline.
With the explosion of technology into every facet of the day-to-day business environment there is a need to define an effective infrastructure to support operating environment; have a strategy for the deployment and technology; and clearly define responsibilities and accountabilities for the use and application of technology.
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Disaster Planning - Business Continuity
October 29th, 2011Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
To succeed and thrive, today's organizations must create network environments that enable them to continue operations or recover in the shortest possible time.
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Laptops and Blackberry's are on the way out
October 20th, 2011
The BlackBerry may not be dead, but it's dying. New research from Enterprise Management Associates says that 30 percent of BlackBerry users in companies with more than 10,000 users will move to a different mobile platform in the next year. That would move Research in Motion's standing in large enterprise into that of a minority OS. Today, 52 percent of users in such organizations "actively" use a BlackBerry for work purposes, EMA reports; a 30 percent reduction would bring that total to 36 percent.
At a SIM conference for big-company CIOs, more than half had iPhones and about half had BlackBerrys. There were also a couple Android smartphones in use. (Some CIOs had multiple devices, thus the totals coming to more than 100 percent.) All but one had an iPad with them. In the last 18 months the shift away from the BlackBerry has been dramatic, going from 100 percent to about 50 percent. And most still using BlackBerrys expected to drop their RIM devices in the next two years.
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Disaster recovery plans depend on working backups
October 16th, 2011Disaster recovery plans are impacted by data encryption. Encryption continues to be the topic on every CIO and IT person's lips nowadays. No one wants to end up in the news as the next victim of a privacy breach or the next company that did not protect its customers' information. If you conduct a news search using the words personal data breach, you will be alarmed at the number of instances where personal information such as social security and credit-card numbers have been exposed to possible theft. In a recent breach, a state government site allowed access to hundreds of thousands of records, including names, addresses, social security numbers and documents with signatures.
Whether it is government agencies, research facilities, banking institutions, credit card processing companies, hospitals - or your company's computers - the risk of compromising private information is very high. The relationship business has with technology. -- business relies so heavily on technology today, business risk becomes technology dependent. The possibility of litigation is part of business. It has always been a risk of doing business, but because technology and today's business are so intertwined, business risk has a higher threat level. This has prompted many to encrypt workstations and mobile computers in order to protect critical business data.
If you have rolled out encryption, how do you maintain your IT service quality when the hard disk drive fails? How do you plan and prepare for a data loss when the user's computer is encrypted? These are all issues that should be considered when putting together a data disaster plan. In addition, data recovery, one of the more common missing elements of a disaster recovery plan, should also be factored in because it can serve as the "Hail Mary" attempt when all other options have been exhausted.
IT organizations of all sizes contend with a growing data footprint with more data to manage, protect, and preserve for longer periods of time. Online primary storage, has focus a on fast low latency, reliable access to data while near-line secondary storage has a focus on low cost and high capacity. Long-term data retention requires a combination of ultra-low cost, good performance during storage and retrieval, and reduced footprint in terms of power, cooling, floor-space and economics (PCFE) - also known as a small green footprint - for inactive data.
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Grim outlook for jobs
October 10th, 2011In the past week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that the economic recovery is "close to faltering," Goldman Sachs predicted unemployment to push past 9.1 percent in 2012, and the Occupy Wall Street protests against job cuts and underemployment are gaining national attention.
Yet, despite this pressure, 'middle market' firms say they can't fix the problem right now.
"There's a permanent reduction in the workforce, due to productivity gains. There will be no short term reduction in unemployment," says Jeffery Weiner, Managing Partner at the public accounting and advisory services firm for Marcum LLP.
In a fiercely competitive sector, productivity and revenue among mid-sized companies are making headcount a secondary consideration, because a lower headcount hasn't meant a lower bottom line, he said.
"Worker productivity is at an all time high. People have figured out how to do more with fewer people. We could do even 20 percent more revenue with our current workforce. I think there are a lot of companies that could pull in more revenue with the current workforce they have," adds Weiner.
The ability to get 'lean and mean', and survive the recession, is actually considered a mark of accomplishment in this corporate circle. And it's no secret; the current international ad campaign from consulting firm Accenture is "How do you get more out of the same resources?"
This message runs contrary to the jobs problem economic policy makers are working to solve. And the problem is dire. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS, 58.8 percent of unemployed people in the US labor force have been unemployed for longer than 15 weeks - longer than in previous recessions.
Mid-size companies say they're trying to do their part. Some are opting to reduce hours, rather than resorting to layoffs. "Employees are willing to work 32 hours. They'll work four day weeks with benefits because they want to stay employed. We hope that when the economy comes back, we'll be able to ramp up pretty quickly because they're still staff," says Nicholas Cavalaris, General Counsel to MS Consultants, Inc.
A private engineering company, MS Consultants has around 375 employees and operates in five US states. Seventy percent of their budget is devoted to public infrastructure projects. When state budgets collapse, it directly impacts their headcount.
Executives say time and time again that they wish they could hire. One argues that the US needs to take a hard look at its shortage of technically skilled workers.
"We've had more than 20 vacancies for the last six months. It's a problem. There's a shortage of trained technicians in the US. In our business, we sell technicians' time, so there is little if any demand to hire back office employees. That's the sad part," says Alwyn Smith, President of the US division of the multinational capital equipment dealer, Barloworld Handling LLC.
What will it take to start hiring?
"Until the economy can expand year on year, you won't see broad based hiring," adds Weiner.
Indeed, Real GDP in the second quarter of this year came in at 1.3 percent, which economists say is much too low to boost hiring.
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