As I was planning my 2014 calendar over the past two weeks, I noticed that two storage conferences that focused on heterogeneous computing environments and
A recent report from Ferris Research estimates that the total number of business e-mails sent in North America alone will surpass 139 million in 2009 and 143 million in 2010. This volume of email growth continues to put pressure on IT staff in every size organization to manage its inflow, outflow and retention. While the mechanics of managing emails inflows and outflows can be fairly straightforward, when it comes to setting policies as to how long to retain these emails, the picture can start to get a bit hazy.
If somebody had told us that a relative unknown company had come out of nowhere to capture 20% of the small and midsize business (SMB) market in email archiving (according to Gartner) since 2006, we would have thought it a joke. But, that is exactly what we discovered when we recently spoke with ArcMail’s CEO Todd Gates. And while ArcMail has flown under the radar screen of most publications and analysts, once we spoke with Gates and began to understand the technology behind ArcMail, we immediately understood why SMBs like the way ArcMail archives email and why they are bringing ArcMail in-house for their email archiving needs.
Understanding legal hold and how to best approach this difficult topic can lead to a failure of the electronic discovery process for a company and put a company at considerable risk if it does not retain critical documents needed to answer an FRCP request.
In 1978 the Presidential Records Act (PRA) was passed which fundamentally changed the landscape of Presidential records by moving them from a classification of personal information to the public domain. The PRA is explicit in describing that retention of records created by the President of the United States as well as the Vice President is the responsibility of the President. The PRA guides the President in how records should be handled and guides the steps in the proper destruction of records and how they are retained to comply with this federal statute.
Over the past year there has been a lot of talk and speculation about Electronic Health Records (EHR). The topic started making headlines last year as President Obama and Senator McCain sparred over how to best fix health care with EHR touted as the single best way to control the ever increasing costs of medical treatment. Although it remains to be seen if this is actually the case, the recent stimulus bill passed by Congress on February 13th, 2009, has ensured EHR projects will be funded.
The risks inherent to the payment card industry (PCI) and the consumers using credit cards are well documented. High profile PCI data breaches such as the TJX data breach are a painful reminder of the importance of securing consumer information and the need for security standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). Originally created when Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express aligned their individual data security policies, PCI-DSS version 1.2 that was released in October 2008 provided clarification and updates to meet today’s payment card security challenges. One such example is anti-virus software will be required on all systems regardless of operating system.
Cross-platform security has long been an issue. If your network is like most, chances are you are tied to the Microsoft Security paradigm, which does not necessarily play well with non-Microsoft permissions and security. This is not a judgment, but an acknowledgement that a growing number of companies operate in a Windows-dominated world. Binding Windows Clients to a Windows Active Directory domain almost always works. Conversely, if companies need to support a mixed operating system environment for clients and then share files and folders between these different operating systems in a Microsoft AD environment, the experience may be less than pleasurable.
A few years ago, companies wondered “What if?” regarding whether the Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives found in consumer-grade PCs would eventually find their way into enterprise-class storage systems. Now, the question no longer is “What if?” but “Where will it stop?” SATA disk drives have found their way into existing SAN and NAS storage systems as well as emerging Cloud and Grid storage architectures. As this has occurred, SATA disk drives have evolved to keep pace with new demands that companies of all sizes are placing on them.
The Swiss Army Knife’s endearing legacy is that of a tool that has helped everyone from soldiers in the late 1800s to astronauts in the twentieth century deal with whatever situations they might encounter. Of course, part of its appeal is being a low-cost, lightweight, multi-faceted instrument that provides a multiple of options. Much of its cool factor comes from its design to handle whatever challenge an individual might confront. Today’s SMBs face similar challenges. SMBs are entering the largely unknown worlds of D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape) and network attached storage (NAS), for which they need their own version of a Swiss Army Knife to offset the complexities that these storage environments create.
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