This week I was invited to attend a multi-supplier strategy workshop with one of our clients.  The purpose of the workshop was to look at their future storage strategy and all the major industry vendors  were there to present. This style of workshop provides clients the ability to see consistencies and opinions from each supplier. When it was my turn to present , I decided to push things a bit and discuss how sourcing storage and technology would change in the next 5 years.  I started by suggesting that come 2017 the major vendors will not be selling hardware. This may seem a bit of a ridical theory, but by how much? If you follow my reasoning to come perhaps this statement Continue Reading

So, I have been at EMC for 9 months now (where has that gone!), after 15 years in IT on the other side of the fence as a consumer and customer, but have I really gone from being a gamekeeper to becoming a poacher? Not really. IT vendors are commercial organisations just as their customers are – they strive to increase revenues and deliver growth to their shareholders just like their customers do. IT vendors are all facing the same economic challenges as their customers; the need to do more with less, year on year budget reductions, and of course the demand for better use of technology to make staff more productive. Life isn’t that radically different in the technology provider camp. Granted I don’t have millions of dollars of budgetary responsibility and hundreds of staff but that makes a pleasant change after many years of management responsibility!

So if life isn’t all that different on the other side of the fence what am I doing here? Continue Reading

In light of another NHS trust being found to have broken the Data Protection Act (DPA), as a senior manager in the public sector, you may be concerned about how your body can avoid the same fate.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has revealed that Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust accidentally destroyed 10,000 records that were supposed to be archived.

Such documents should have been kept in a special storage area, but they were instead put in a disposal room and destroyed at the end of December 2010.

And while this would appear to be the opposite problem of losing personal details in the public realm, it still breaches the DPA because Continue Reading

Facebook's storage management could come under intense scrutiny, as the Data Protection Commissioner has launched an investigation into the website's handling of personal details.

Concerns have been raised about how much information the social networking site collates through functions such as the "Like" feature.

It is thought that Facebook – which has 800 million subscribers worldwide – can utilise this to track a person's movements on the internet.

Another issue that has been highlighted is the deleting of photographs, as some users Continue Reading

Are you an independent financial advisor (IFA)? If so, are you 100 per cent certain that you follow data security measures put in place by the Financial Services Authority (FSA)?

Even if you try your hardest to follow the rules, you could accidentally be leaving gaps in your information compliance procedures.

That is because according to a new study published in the Financial Times Adviser, 80 per cent of IFAs do not meet the FSA's criteria.

Less than a fifth of those questioned encrypted backed-up data to the FSA standard.

Are you guilty of falling into this percentage?

Meanwhile, data has been lost by 11 per cent of IFAs, while three per cent admitted to never backing up their data, the Durell Software poll reveals.

Of those who do back up, three per Continue Reading

Have you embraced tiering as part of your data storage management?

If not, it could be time to think again.

As Chris Mellor, writing for The Register, simply states: "One size does not fit all and valuable data should not be stored on slow-speed disk drives along with ordinary data."

The type of information needs to match its chosen storage method and this is where tiering comes into play.

Disk drive arrays help differentiate between last year's reports that perhaps only need looking at once – or not at all – month-old emails and sales order processing, for example. You will want the old reports kept out of the way and Continue Reading

The Guardian reports in an article that the Isle of Man Government has set up a cloud based infrastructure for its public services, moving more than 1,000 applications including email, financial accounting, customer relationship management and health services to the service.

This has helped them save 15% on costs and also better utilise their storage resources.

Many public organisations are looking to reduce costs due to increased budget cut pressures… So the Cloud could be a solution!

Businesses are encouraging personal devices to be used by staff in order to make them more efficient and flexible.

However, a new survey commissioned by Dell KACE has revealed that more than 80 per cent of IT managers are worried about the use of these items in the workplace.

A further 62 per cent are especially concerned about potential network security breaches.

The Consumerization of IT: A Survey of IT Professionals poll – which was carried out by Dimensional Research – found that nearly 90 per cent of employees use tablets, mobile telephones or laptops for work tasks.

It could therefore be a wise move for firms to include personal devices in data management and compliance policies to ensure risks to their IT infrastructures are kept to a minimum.

Study author Diane Hagglund explained that these personal devices are how businesses will be run in the long term, "especially in the small and medium business market, so it is critical that companies put policies and standards into place to support these devices to ensure the security of corporate and intellectual property".

A recent survey by Clearswift found that 57 per cent of managers are worried about the security of social media websites, especially when accessed at work.

It is important to get employee support for green business initiatives – especially as these are the workers who will be faced with any changes.

This is according to head of business at Global Action Plan Amy Wilson, who was speaking to founding editor of BusinessGreen James Murray during a webinar.

She explained that because the wider workforce deal with new regulations and processes, it is vital to have them on side for effective sustainability.

"Utilise motivated staff – find your environmental change agents, your green champions, those who are already enthusiastic and motivated about the environment and use that enthusiasm to engage others," Ms Wilson urged.

One way firms could increase their IT's efficiency is through unified storage, which enables applications and files to be run from a single device.

According to EMC, the capacity savings enjoyed by deploying its VNX unified storage products can be up to 50 per cent.

Walsall Council has breached the Data Protection Act (DPA) following the disposal of voters' postal statements in a skip.

An external contractor hired by the local authority disposed of the documents in March of this year, with 951 statements yet to be recovered.

It is thought the files – which contained information such as signatures, addresses and dates of birth – have since been destroyed or taken to landfill.

The data compliance error was reported by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), with director of operations Simon Entwistle saying: "While councils can hire contractors to process personal information on their behalf, they must remember that they are still ultimately responsible for ensuring people's information is kept secure."

As such, the DPA was breached as Walsall Council – which has since signed an undertaking – did not inform the contractor of data compliance requirements.

It was recently revealed by the ICO that the DPA was broken by the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust after a medical student lost a USB pen containing information about 87 patients.

Posted by Adam