I am privileged in my job to meet many people, in different industries and cultures. Despite having being born in Somaliland and traveled widely in Africa, I had never been to Nigeria. I recently remedied this, on an assignment to develop an information management strategy for a major client there.

I suppose it was not surprising that friends and colleagues greeted me with a lot of raised eyebrows and worried looks at news of this trip: “Nigeria! Isn’t that dangerous?” or “You won’t get me going there!”.  I had to explain I was going to the south west (showing Green on the FCO web-site) not the north east (which is showing Red, and always in the news), and that Nigeria is a large country with a population of 160 million; that is, 20% of Africa’s population. Continue Reading

Last week Mandiant produced their report entitled ‘Mandiant APT1 report’ you can download a copy here.  The report was covered by media globally and essentially exposes a ring in China responsible for APT attacks.  This in itself should be startling news and there have been many stories pointing the finger at China.

However, on reading the report an interesting statistic about how long APT1 were in organizations stands out. We know from the Verizon Data Breach Report 2012 that breaches lead to compromise Continue Reading

Most of us have grown up with a form of authentication – one factor or two factor and it’s become part of our everyday lives from accessing corporate resources to our personal bank accounts.  However, two factor is no longer enough and the cybercriminals are always ahead of the game.

As today’s IT infrastructures become more fragmented across cloud-based applications and mobile devices, enterprise network boundaries are all but disappearing.  At the same time, Continue Reading

Government ICT 2013 – Part 2

(For part 1 click here)

The Government ICT 2013 Conference was completed with equal gusto by Mike Bracken, who admitted hot footing it up Whitehall to be at the QEII centre in time to give a dynamic and challenging insight into the Government’s drive to deliver digital by default.  His four key objectives as leader of the Government Digital Service are:  the creation of the Government Digital Service (now complete), fixing Government’s online publication of information by building a Continue Reading

Meet the EMC team at Cisco Live 2013!

EMC are proud to be Platinum sponsor at Cisco Live, London this year. The event runs from Jan 29-31 2013, at London’s ExCel Centre.

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In my last blog I talked about the key technologies breaking done our doors in 2013.  The four key areas were Cloud Computing, Social Media, Big Data and Mobile Devices.  None of these should have come as a surprise to anyone in the industry today. These are all topics that are discussed and debated around tables of Security teams in most enterprises.  So, what can we do today to ensure we are prepared for these challenges and how do we start re-enforcing our doors so that we allow these new technologies but have greater control and visibility and provide transparency for the user.

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Sitting in London looking at the television pictures of the storm that is hitting the East Coast of America, makes me realise just how vulnerable we all are to situations we may find ourselves in where we have absolutely no control over the outcome. Floods, fire, power cuts and building damage will take weeks if not months to repair. Then I start to wonder just how many data centers have been affected. A quick “google” tells me that there are at least half a dozen major websites down because of the lost of two major data centres due to power outages and flood. So if we cannot control the weather what can we control?

Data is probably the most valuable asset in a data centre, it’s invisible, contained on thousands of spinning spindles and constantly changing. Power may be restored in days, restoring data may take weeks if at all. However I am suggesting you can control you backups, and you should be able to recover all your lost data.

A recent survey run in Europe and the Middle East however found that three out of four IT administrators did not trust they could recover after a disaster. Technologies such as tape certainly do not help with the levels of confidence, with 80% of these users stating

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We caught Andrew Maclaren, head of Big Data for EMC EMEA in the corridor and asked him for a sneak peak of what he will be talking about during EMC FORUM in London on September the 11′th. Don’t miss out, register now!

This year, we’re bringing back EMC Forum to the UK and Ireland. This essential one-day event shows you how cloud and Big Data are transforming our industry — and how you can transform your business to stay competitive.

At EMC Forum you can learn, connect and network. You will hear local and international insights from high calibre keynote speakers and presenters, and case studies featuring the latest integrated solutions from EMC and our partners. A hand-picked selection of partners, such as Cisco, Computacenter and MTI, will be exhibiting their products, and our VLab will offer technical training from EMC engineers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the latest solutions, products and services direct from EMC specialists and partners, network with the EMC Community and
discover our vision for the future. Continue Reading