Sorry Support: Not Getting My Data

Recently, I made two interesting support requests, each to a different company. Both companies asked for the output of many different commands and log files. Both balked once I explained my organization’s security policy. The policy reads simply: No anonymized data shall be delivered to a 3rd party. It is a simple statement, but it has a powerful effect …

Moving to the Future: Strategies for Handling Data Scale

We are all moving to the future. The election has, hopefully, forced us to rethink basic fundamentals of society. Individuals are usually easy to deal with, but larger and larger groups are much harder. Data scale changes everything. Even Isaac Asimov had this in mind when he wrote the Foundation trilogy. In his case, scale …

Shock and Dismay: Cloud Cost Strategy

For half of the nation, it has been a day of shock and dismay. It may be that way for a while now. In the meantime, as you journey to the hybrid cloud, you need to get a handle on costs—and not just the costs of migrating to the cloud, but also those associated with training, documentation, …

Life During and After DDoS

DDoS happens. It happens quite a bit. It will continue to happen. Information on how to prevent DDoS is readily available, but information on how to survive is missing. DDoS is an outage. Do you have a business continuity plan that covers this sort of outage? Does your business close for the day, or do you keep running in …

Software-Defined Storage or Data Services

Software-defined storage (SDS) is about data services. Many think it is about automating storage. Yes, I can see that, but it is about what storage can deliver. So, what is the basis for SDS? There are four critical components. These components are analytics, augmentation, aggregation, and security. These four elements wrap storage to become data …