Green Datacenters, a Healthy Bottom Line for Enterprises

As years pass by, data centers are getting more common and essential. Data centers are indispensable for the smooth functioning of business processes, information management, and communications functions.

As years pass by, data centers are getting more common and essential. Data centers are indispensable for the smooth functioning of business processes, information management, and communications functions. Hence, today every sector of the economy use and operate data centers. Several factors are responsible for the rapid increase in the use of data centers. Let's look at some of these factors.

* Accelerated growth in the use of the Internet

* Increased use of electronic transactions

* Shift from paper-based information to digital based

* Government regulations requiring digital records retention

* High performance scientific computing

The growth in the number of data centers led to increased use of energy. The result of which is

* Increase in the emission of greenhouse gases especially from electricity generation

* Increase in the demand for electricity which the existing power grids are finding difficult to meet

* Increase in the energy costs for both business and government

* Increase in capital costs as a result of expansion of data center capacity and building of new data centers

This led to increased interest in developing solutions for energy efficiency in the data center sector. As part of it, Congress passed public law 109-431 in 2006 entrusting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to carry out a study through its Energy Star program to "analyze the rapid growth and energy consumption of computer data centers by the Federal Government and private enterprise." The result was startling and predicted a bleak future in this sector. This accelerated the concept of green datacenters.

A green datacenter is "a repository for the storage, management, and dissemination of data in which the mechanical, lighting, electrical and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact." Building a green data center is quite expensive, as it requires low-emission building materials, carpets and paints, installation of catalytic converters on backup generators, alternative energy technologies such as photovoltaics, heat pumps, and evaporative cooling, and so on. However, cost savings do come in the form of energy savings, reduced carbon footprint, datacenter virtualization, lower operating and maintenance costs, and reduced environmental impact.

With several service providers offering effective green datacenter solutions, enterprises can now easily realize their objective of a healthy bottom line and a healthy environment. These service providers follow different methodologies to provide companies with solutions that are cost effective and sustainable.

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Making Data Center Virtualization Work for Your Business

Virtualization technology is rapidly becoming the foundation of modern data centers. Not long ago, virtualization was all about server consolidation. Virtualization today is enabling businesses with greater agility. Before considering a virtualization project for your data center, it is important to first confirm if your facility can even handle the transition.

With data center virtualization, there is a direct impact is on the expenses and on wasted processing power and leans towards creating a green datacenter. There is no need to create a huge datacenter, just install powerful virtualized servers or running a huge number of servers can make a difference. Virtualization is an ideal tool for data center improvement. But if not designed and built correctly, newly virtualized systems can cost the company time and resources, creating confusion among departments. That is why it is important to take the time during the planning stage to look critically at your IT environment.

When implemented correctly, data center virtualization establishes valuable efficiencies and that can help contain costs. In a virtual IT environment, it helps businesses to increase utilization of their existing hardware by running virtual servers on fewer, highly scalable enterprise-class servers. Use of a virtualized datacenter tackles major space constraint in many organizations. Control costs, increase utilization, more responsive IT green initiatives. While the benefits of virtualization can sound impressive, getting there may present challenges without adequate planning. Many datacenter virtualization solutions ensure competency in hardware requirements, by enabling an organization to utilize lesser hardware to perform the same jobs.

To ensure that datacenter virtualization in your business is a success, ensuring security is critical. As with any implementation, the virtualized environment should follow the same stringent security controls as a physical one.  A good virtualization plan is tied to a good storage plan. Backup is highly essential.  Virtualization is growing because it can provide business continuity capabilities. Any Virtualization solution should provide a flexible architecture and the tools needed to help you manage capacity and include load balancing to ensure performance and fast response times and redundancy.  With datacenter virtualization, it is possible for enterprises to centralize IT management, outsource IT management and reduce the size of IT departments.

Datacenter virtualization empowers the IT department with tools for resource scheduling, data protection, and disaster recovery. It can help enhance your infrastructure performance. Team up with the best service provider with a service desk support who can combine security and reliability to accomplish an enabled enterprise.

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Identity Access Management Critical in Today’s Unstable Business Environment

Today’s business environment is highly competitive, complex, and volatile. This has put tremendous pressure on organizations to increase their accessibility to customers, partners, vendors, suppliers, and employees. Hence, enterprises are deploying an ever-increasing number of applications with multiple, often mutually incompatible, proprietary identity systems, or security models, inconsistent management of identities and different auditing mechanisms. However, in their haste to enhance their accessibility they forget to look at the security aspects, which leads to inefficiencies, increased risk of identity theft and unauthorized access, and failure to meet regulatory compliance.

In today's work environment, passwords and password resets are one of the most widely used measures to ensure information security. A recent research showed that on an average each employee accesses around 16 applications and systems. And as part of the security measure, each employee has to remember five or more passwords, which the employee has to change five or more times per year. It results in multiple repositories of identity information, multiple user IDs and multiple passwords. 

However, the fact of the matter is most employees finding it impossible to manage multiple identities. This is proved by the number of password related calls that help desk receives. Moreover, juggling multiple identities lead to chaos and confusion, which is put to good use by the criminals. This calls for a comprehensive and focused approach that would enhance efficiency, achieve compliance, and improve the security of the organizations. That is what identity and access management offers to do.

Identity and access management helps organizations to manage access to scattered information and applications within the organization without compromising security or exposing sensitive information. Hence, identity and access management can be defined as a set of policies, processes, and technologies for the creation, management, and use of digital identities. The objective of identity access management is to provide right access to the right people at the right time. It comprises of four important aspects namely

●        Authentication

It is the process of verifying and proving the claims of an identity for gaining access to an application system or resource.

●        Authorization

It is the determination whether to allow an identity to perform an action or access a system or resource.

●        User Management

It refers to the process of creating, propagating, and maintaining user identity and privileges. An important component of user management is user lifecycle management, which refers to the lifecycle of a digital identity from creation to termination.

●        Enterprise Directory

It is the repository for securely storing and organizing the digital identities and its credentials and attributes.

In today’s unstable business environment, identity access management is important to secure the organization and to protect confidential and personal data and thereby achieve compliance, business growth, operational efficiency, and cost savings.

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Information Security Solutions for The Digital World

Information being the essential ingredient in the success of  any business, organization today has made technology  an indispensable part of the  business environment.  Storage of information as well as exchange of  data between employees, supplies and customers has become easy with technological involvement. However, the exponential rate of data growth takes the IT professionals through a challenging task of providing efficient data security solutions.

Information security thus is a major concern in an environment where the entire process of storing, distribution, accessing of every single sensitive and confidential data is done digitally. All organizational data ranging from personal details, to client lists, bank details, marketing strategies, sales information, and any other organizational details need to be well protected from both external and internal threats.

Over the years a number of software applications have been developed to provide firewall protection to ward away threats and virus scanners to protect against data damage. However, today's dynamic business environment with involvement of a number of IT outsourcing companies, large amount of digital data transfer and storage requires a competent information security system that would involve the elements of risk analysis and risk management.

The globally networked world has made data and information accessible from any location and any device irrespective of the distance. Further, with the every single detail pertaining to the organization and the global workforce stored on computers, organizations need to have a continuous process of identifying, assessing and managing security risks while responding to the ever changing customer demands, legal and industry requirements. 

Though there are number of service providers in the arena, organizations look forward to partner with service providers who can establish a business aligned information security framework along with an enhanced Return on Security Investment. The wide range of security solutions offered by these service providers include:-

·         Ability to establish a Security Framework for business verticals.

·         Call for lesser investments on new technology

·         Ability to manage intricate multi-vendor and heterogeneous client environments

·         minimizes operation expense with hassle free handling of domain experts

·          increased profitability and efficiency

 Further to cater to the ever increasing demands for accessibility across various horizontal and vertical layers, the leading service providers offer a wide spectrum of services that includes Identity &  Access management, Information security consulting and  Managed Security Service. All these cuts through the diversified information security products, technology and compliance requirement of the organizations at large.

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An Optimized IT Management Process with the Cloud Technology

Cloud computing is the technology that is in high demand right now. With the help of the cloud platform you can easily avail services from anywhere anytime with the help of a mobile device or a thin client. All the processes that are deployed on the cloud are easy to use and manage and this reduces your time and costs. In a world rife with competition you have to act wisely and promptly. The cloud services are quick which gives you an advantage to make critical business decisions accurately based on the real-time updates on the latest changes in the market.

The cloud computing technology has proved to be a boon in managing the IT costs. There is no requirement for any additional infrastructures or facilities. The infrastructure is highly integrated and leverages collaboration amongst the various IT processes and frameworks. Since compatibility between the processes is high the costs are reduced and efficiency is enhanced resulting in increased revenues and profits. The technology provides you with excellent network support services such as consistent and uninterrupted network connectivity and all latency issues are eliminated thus delivering an advanced and highly effective model.

The cloud computing technology deploys best ITIL asset management practices that produce optimum results. It contributes productively towards asset discovery, creation and maintenance of hardware and software libraries, physical asset tracking, configuration management, procurement management, request and approvals, contract management, vendor and supplier management, re-deployment and movement, retire and disposal management. The cloud provides you with standardized and comprehensive IT security consulting services for prevention of data leakage. You are provided with secure SDLC design and coding practices, source code reviews, regular audits and reports that help you in modifying your security strategies for more effective protection.

The cloud technology helps in the enforcement of a streamlined, automated, centralized IT management process that reduces all complexities and risks, and leverages performances. It provides you with consistent server monitoring service and enhances the visibility of the process. The processes that are deployed are energy-efficient and based on the lean management model that eliminates all wasteful procedures and helps in saving costs. You are also provided with superb service desk support that facilitates you to easily create requests, resolve incidents, reports incidents and review the status of your submitted requests.

The cloud help desk helps to restore normal operations without delays to avoid any adverse impacts on your business. With such profound capabilities you can expect high returns on investment in business and minimal damages and losses.

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