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

Cyber security has long been a priority for CIOs, CTOs, and others in working in technology. But following a number of high profile attacks, and as IT becomes increasingly integral to everyday life, cyber is becoming a mainstream issue of concern, not just across the across the whole of the c-suite, but also among policy makers and wider society. New research released by the UK government last week found that 87% of small firms and 93% of large enterprises had experienced security breaches last year, with some attacks causing more than £1    million of damage.

Like many other countries, the UK has responded to the increasing cyber threat by developing a comprehensive national cyber security policy programme. The £650million, 4-year agenda includes actions to strengthen Britain’s cyber intelligence, defensive, and offensive capabilities; boost skills; and increase resilience in the private sector.  Continue Reading

Greetings from EMC World 2013! Another record year with nearly 15,000 people from 80 countries.   There is no shortage of news from the show including:

• The headline news from EMC World 2013 is the introduction of EMC ViPR, Software-Defined Storage.
• From my area of interest, we introduced the EMC Data Protection Suite, changing the way customers consume EMC backup and archive capabilities.
• There’s also news from Isilon, Syncplicity Continue Reading

The UK government identified cyber security as a key area of focus and new investment and in 2011 announced a budget of £650 million to shore up defenses in the UK.  So, after two years let’s examine where it’s been spent?

Here’s some of the good things that have resulted from the investment

-          SOCA took down 36 website domains that sold credit card data – this is probably a very small tip of the iceberg.

-          15,000 fraud websites were suspended

-          GCHQ announced a scheme to help companies deal with cyber attacks and give guidance on response to a compromise

-          8 universities have been given the Academic Centre for Excellence in Cyber Security and Research

-          CISP, the Cyber security Information Sharing Scheme

However, there are areas that need further investment

-          60% of the budget was spent ‘detect and defend’ – We hope that ‘response’ is also a large portion of this investment although it’s not  very clear 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

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

The Government ICT Conference 2013 in the QEII Conference Centre kicked off the event season with traditional gusto and the key themes were focused on delivering change, supporting the Government’s reform agenda and enabling the delivery of more efficient public services.  All worthy themes but the core challenge still seems Continue Reading

Like many many proud parents I am sure the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will treasure their first picture of their unborn baby. Medical images such as these are stored across the globe by hospitals as part of the ever growing patient record databases. You will regularly read blogs about the use of data deduplication to reduce the amount of data stored and transmitted, however patient records is one area where deduplication seldom helps. As an example and in no connection to the Duke and Duchess except by name, the Cambridge University Hospital in the UK has been using EMC Centera for a number of years to store such data.

Many hospitals now find that storing this data can be a major obstacle  while EMC Centera can store this data perfectly well, few hospitals have the data centre space to dedicate to such arrays. ESG research in 2011 indicated in North America that total storage Continue Reading

 Lady Backup is a stickler for tidy work, both grammar and formatting.  My employees can vouch for the amount of corrections and comments I make to everything that passes my desk.  So of course dotting every “i” is critical…

But in the case of retailer Arcadia Group, they removed tape in the backup of their IBM i environments.  These systems run the supply chain applications, along with other mission critical applications – in other words they supply the lifeblood data.

Acardia’s IT staff was finding that their tape-based backup Continue Reading

I’ve just spent the last few days as the guest of the New Frontier Group as one of the keynote speakers at their CEO retreat in Austria. The theme of the event was “Shaping Future – Delivering Results”. The two day session was designed to stimulate the attendees thought processes in relation to business innovation.

New Frontier assembled one of the most impressive set of business thinkers I have seen in the last few years. Knell Nordstrom from Finland, the author of “Funky Business Continue Reading