There are several different ways your current employees can knowingly or inadvertently bypass your security; while all can wreak havoc with your systems and cause irrevocable damage, those with malicious intent in mind are by far the worst. Understanding the different levels of threat and what may motivate these insiders can help you create strategies that truly mitigate your risk.
Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a versatile, budget-friendly and dynamic architecture that allows IT managers to respond quickly to business demands and manage cloud networks in a central environment. It’s a new revolution in IT that can help propel your business ahead of the competition and deliver an impactful change. Surely you’ve seen that SDN can provide many benefits, but like any new IT project, you should make sure you are well-versed in the approach before deploying a new strategy.
Organizations are currently faced with a cloud computing dilemma: should you use big data solutions or stick with the traditional data warehouse? If you choose the wrong platform to handle your company’s workload, you may find yourself shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars in frivolous fees. Let’s take a look into what big data and the data warehouse can offer to help you determine which option is right for your organization.
Mobile technology is reinventing the workplace. As more and more companies institute a work from anywhere policy, and with the proliferation of mobile apps and interconnected devices, the workplace is moving far beyond the traditional office setting.
At least once a year, you can find a report on the web about what the most common passwords are based upon leaked data. Think of these lists as the worst passwords you can ever use. Typically, 123456 and password top the list. Coming up the path of popularity are passwords 123456 and 123456789, as people are required to enter in longer passwords. Need a mix of letters and numbers? You might want to avoid abc123 and trustno1, among many others. Nowadays, a password security alone isn’t sufficient to lock anything down. How best can you secure your system to keep the bad guys out?
Is your company leveraging the advantages of hybrid cloud? A “happy medium” between private and public cloud options, the hybrid cloud allows IT leaders to use services and resources from third-party cloud computing providers in a partial manner curated to fit their needs. They can design a custom strategy using only services they desire while gaining the benefits of both public and private models.
As malware continues to evolve at lightning speed, it’s getting more and more difficult to prevent and identify its existence. A computer attack from the APT virus is both insidious and crippling for enterprises. Its lifecycle, if well-masked, can do some real damage in just 12 months. An Advanced Persistent Threat attack on a bank revealed that it’s a methodical attack. Here’s how it unfolded. Seasoned cybercriminals mined the bank’s social media platforms and website to identify its hosts and senior personnel. Stolen data was then used to launch phishing email campaigns and launched malware on the bank’s executives’ laptops. Undetected by antivirus software, the attack expanded throughout the business. All of this took just three months. Over the next several months, the malware had injected a code into all of the infected systems. Slowly, it stole passwords, security policies and network diagrams. The organized crime ring used this data for a more offensive attack across the company’s network. The last two months of the malware attack entailed downloading the bank card information of more than 50 million bank customers.
At WEI, we pride ourselves on fostering strong client partnerships and truly believe that their success is our success. Our company was recently featured in an article by CVS Health, a longtime partner of WEI, for our assistance with the CVS Health and Target integration. We began working with CVS Health more than five years ago, when we were hired to replace keyboards and memory DIMMS in all of their 7,000 pharmacies.
IT strategies are known to evolve at a rapid pace, and over the years we’ve witnessed a handful of megatrends. Once there were mainly centralized mainframes, where every application including bookkeeping and payroll were customized and home-grown. Then there were distributed Windows-based client-server systems running mostly commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software with only industry-specific business process logic written in-house. Next we saw highly virtualized servers running multiple OSs, and finally we landed in the current era of the Cloud, mobility, and consumerization – where software and infrastructure can be offered on a subscription basis “as a service,” and there’s an app for… everything.
IDC Chief Analyst Frank Gens has hailed the adoption of “3rd Platform” technologies of cloud, mobile, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) as the key trends shaping the future of IT. IDC predicts one-third of all IT spending and 100% of IT growth in 2015 will be based on these tent poles.
