Data Center Virtualization- A cost-effective business proposition

Globalization and technological innovation have led to the growth of IT infrastructures in every business environment. With such apparent infrastrucutre growth, the  corporate houses as well as small and medium business enterprises are faced by the challenges of increased energy and power cost as well  operational overheads. Organization in an attempt to meet these challenges has turned to use data centers. The extensive use of data centers today demands that these organizations reduce their carbon footprints and global warming.

Data centers which came into existence to meet the growing need for information storage and faster retrieval across the  locations, were dense with computer systems, networking and telecommunication equipment. Further, with demands for a customized software and applications in all walks of the product life cycle, critical business data had to be made available to the IT outsourcing teams. This called the need for strong information security methods. Virtualization of the data centers were aimed  towards making  efficient use of available hardware and software resources. However, with the eco-friendly requirement integrated into the business systems,  the IT giants worked on developing datacenter virtualization models which would help in reduction of energy consumption by nearly 80-90%. 

With green computing becoming the buzz word today, organizations tend to use environmentally bio-degradable materials and sustainable resources rather than hazardous materials as components for the data center infrastructure.  Further, data center virtualization allows organizations to reduce the number of hardware installed which brings in cost savings in sizable forms. However, adopting virtualization was easy without the requirement of  any large investments.

The growing demands for datacenter virtualization paved way for leaders in the IT industry  to extend their experience in  IT operations and management to both small and medium business organizations as well as the as large corporate giants.  These IT service providers offer the client organizations virtualization-as-a- service, besides the traditional virtualization methods across applications, networks and systems.

The data center virtualization offered by the leaders in the industry segment  can be enumerated as a 5-phase  lifecycle process. This includes -

*        Assessment and analysis of the performance statistics of the existing infrastructure, applications, its related business requirement.

*        Defining the requirements for environmental changes and bring about architectural changes through  operational design

*        Implementation and integration of virtual infrastructure with application and network

*        Facility Management and

*        Transformation

The client organizations benefits with facilities of virtualization without any upfront investment. Correct implementation of virtualization will establish valuable efficiencies like agility, flexibility, better network capacity besides reducing costs.

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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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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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Need to develop Green Datacenters

With the growing expenses of power and an increased uncertainty in power accessibility, energy conversion today is a major issue for data centers. With the increase in computing power demand to satisfy crucial mission application as well as the advent of virtualization created drastic impacts on server density, making the requirement for an efficient energy management plan even more essential today.  When there is an in-depth knowledge of energy consumption attained through real-time monitoring within the data center, administrators feel safer of being able to make improved and energy conscious decisions. All these facts, had led to the need for Green Datacenters today.

Several companies hosting digital marketplaces and social networks present at the Green Grid Forum 2012 shared their initiatives for establishing green datacenters. The datacenters today consume more than 2 percent of the total electricity. It has been estimated that almost half of US’s electricity is generated by burning coal. The increasing datacenter energy usage will contribute to an ever increasing percentage of greenhouse has emissions unless we are able to decouple the expansion of data storage and processing from fossil fuel pollution.

Leading information security brands today have come up with a phased methodology to offer Green Datacenter solutions that are cost efficient in nature. This apart, they offer sustainability to business operations and guarantees a healthy bottom-line for an organization. 

The phases that are put to use are:-

·         Assessment Phase

This phase helps in setting up baseline of energy usage and carbon footprint of the present environment using an assessment framework which is also utilized to audit the present environment. This process is followed by Gap analysis and Feasibility study for identifying transformational initiatives, assess expense structure and conduct impact analysis.

·         Planning and Design Phase

This phase assists in setting up a detailed route map for certain Green IT initiatives like DC optimization, procurement, financial, recycling and resource planning.

·         Implementation Phase

This phase works towards selecting and implementing certain technologies data center transformation initiatives such as datacenter consolidation, virtualization, power and cooling management and IT infrastructure management. This phase also helps an organization to attain LEED certificate.

The amount of data the world processes and stores will go on expanding fast. EMC, an esteemed information infrastructure solutions enterprise predicts that the amount of global data will expand to approximately 35 zetta bytes by 2020. If there is no focus given on datacenter efficiency and renewable power usage, then the climatic impact of datacenters will also expand exponentially. To aid this situation, eminent IT solution providers are offering Green Datacenters methods to their clients and end users.

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Managed Security Services: Simplifying security operations for global organizations

Today's global organizations are so dependent on technology for their communication, that the IT infrastructure and computer networks form the backbone of its growth. However, with offices and customers spread across geographically distant locations, security of critical data and information becomes a cause of concern while managing such vast networks turns into a herculean task. To overcome such hurdles in the path of growth, organizations thus tend to outsource these functions to experts in the field of network security and management.

With the rise in demands for IT outsourcing and security enterprise and asset management, number of IT organizations have forayed into providing network security. However, the leaders in the field of managed security services provide their clientele significant cost reduction and business benefits through the use of advanced management tools and remote delivery models.

The managed security services offered by the IT giants include cutting edge networking solutions which have been developed through the design-implement-consult-engineering model for optimizing and managing the network, both local area and wide area, besides the unified communications IPT and VoIP. In today's business scenario, when global expansions and technological innovations are the focal point to beat the competition, there is little room for information security of enterprises. The managed security service partners takes of this issue for the global enterprises.

The security services include information security monitoring both on-site and remote. The 24/7 security monitoring services alerts the organization of any security threats that are prevalent in and around the infrastructure environment. Further the security devices installed in the locations includes firewalls, network and host IDS/IPs, VPN, proxy as well as multifactor access controls. The managed end-point security services takes care of virus and malware monitoring and prevention of its outbreak in the network environment. With regular signature updates and compliance management, it uses various tools to provide organizations with fundamental control of security status.

Anti phishing being one of the major threats faced by the modern global organizations, these leading network giants under their managed security services offer anti-phishing services which provides the clients with comprehensive solutions to mitigate the impact of phishing incidents. By monitoring proactive domains and phishing URLs, reporting and forensic analysis, ensures reduction in brand damage and maintains customers trust in the networked channels. The anti-malware services enables website administrators of the organizations a constant vigilance of security breach. The web application malware monitoring along with malicious code sandbox analysis and forensic and malware reporting helps organizations to know beforehand and be prepared before the websites are used for malware attacks.

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Benefits of Information Security Solutions

What is that one key element that drives your business? The answer is “information”. That is because most enterprises are not able to operate without this essential ingredient. Hence, the availability, confidentiality and integrity of information are of great importance. It is thus essential to have an idea that whether your company is taking proper care of all the data that it has acquired over all these years.

Every manufacturing, sales, financial, and customer records are stored on computers. In today’s highly networked world, you can have access to them from anywhere through the internet. However, it is tough to be certain that all the digitized data is safe and secure. All confidential and personal records will be kept with insurance, finance companies or banks. Things like medical records stay with laboratories and hospitals, credit cards needs to be tendered when you purchase online. The question that often comes to mind is that whether there is any assurance that all these data are kept safe and confidential? This is where information security services come into play.

Given the present day circumstances, it is essential that organizations look out for partners that can work to establish a business aligned information security framework and enhance the ROSI, i.e. Return On Security Investment. Today eminent service providers having the capacity to server their clients on an ongoing basis are fast becoming the choice of the most enterprises.

The wide range of security solutions offered by these service providers makes them more of a partner than a mere provider. The difference can be experienced from the unique and varied customer insights backed up by strengths and validated by a unique customer experience. Some of the information security benefits are listed below:-

* Information security solutions helps to establish business industry vertical aligned Information Security Framework

* Lesser investments on new technology

* The solutions have the capacity to manage intricate multi-vendor and heterogeneous client environments

* Helps to minimize operation expense and leads to hassle free handling of domain experts

* There is no affect of attrition and there is increased profitability and efficiency

These service providers have the capacity to cater to all the information security requirements across all industry verticals, along with an excellent partnering approach and quality delivery. These service providers also specializes in a wide range of service portfolio’s that include Identity and Access Management, Information Security Consulting, Cloud Computing Services, Managed Security Service and many others.

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Network Consulting Services: New Trends in Global Business Management

The advent of globalization and the demands from the customers for better facilities and technically high end products places vast responsibility on the management shoulders top of the line managers need to work out strategic methods for effective operations more so in a widely networked organization. However, in a technologically sound era, the management of networking services involves wide area communication devices, data storage mediums, tools and procedures, for a smooth functioning of networked systems. A network management is characterized by its faults, configuration, accounting, performance and security.

In the present business environment wherein there is a lot of dependency on the electronic data transfer and storage, data security over a globally wide network becomes a major concern. To maintain such a technological lifeline, needs the expertise of the network consulting service providers. With the expert help at hand, organizations can spring back quickly from issues such as network downtime, intrusions, disruption of service and can effectively manage the network to ensure high level of productivity and profit revenue. The managed network service providers' remains accountable for the functions and performance of the network.

The network consulting services provider being from an Information technology industry is well equipped with the knowledge of the various computer systems, server, storage devices, and networking equipments. the leaders in network consulting services, with their team of engineers with expertise in LAN/WAN design, network security, IP communications, business process development and technology implementation, offer services in the filed of Data center consulting services including migration , WAN consolidation and optimization, Network readiness and unified communication optimization services.

Further, since information security is also an issue that most of the technologically enabled organizations struggle with, choosing a network consulting service provider with expertise in the field of providing high level network security over bandwidths will prove beneficial for the global organization. These service providers with their expertise, understanding and analyzing skills offer customized solutions for routing, switching, security, wireless and Voice over IP. Such client specific solution helps both small and medium enterprises to expand their business to new markets while the large business houses can capitalize on market trends.

With expertise of having designed and developed secure networks customized as per client requirements, the service providers also manage virtual private networks in green datacenter environment. Besides providing bandwidth management, server networking, remote access configuration, net meeting, host connectivity they also offer a 24/7 support and online status check as a wholesome package, making network consulting services a new trend in the business world.

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Network Security Is The Backbone Of Organizational Growth

Global organizations with the help of the Internet and the technological innovations have created a network of enterprises that are geographically separated but closely knit. With computers and technology becoming an integral part of everyday business operations, information and critical data are dependent on technology for its storage and transfer to various locations. However, with this fast method of information sharing comes the fear of data loss.

In a networked organization, the security of data and information is based on its network security. Network security which is complicated has been from historical times been handled by experts who managed network services. With the business expansion, an everyday scenario in most business establishments, new members get wired on everyday. Hence, a clear understanding of the information security services is required for managing the network security.

Wikipedia defines network -as any set of interlinking lines resembling a net, an interconnected system, or a network of alliances. A computer network then can be defined as a system of interconnected computers, wherein the interconnections can be in a number of ways. Networks are subjected to attacks from malicious sources. These attacks can either be passive (intercepted in the network) or active (initiated) to disrupt the networks operations.   When large volume of mission critical data is transferred and communicated through these networks, its security is a matter of grave concern.

Network security being the backbone of organizational growth, the process starts by authenticating the user with a username and a password. Authentication can be based on a single factor or multiple factors.  The password is an example of a single -factor authentication system. The authentication paves way for a firewall to be put in force that states the policies to access the network by the users. Effective for an unauthorized access, these firewalls fail to check the virus such as computer worms and Trojans that enter the network. Under such circumstances, the organizations tend to make use of antivirus software and intrusion preventive systems to detect intrusions. For cases like denial-of-service - a network threat, an anomaly-based intrusion detection system will be effective in monitoring the network. Further, encryption of the communication between tow hosts is done to maintain privacy and safety.

Leaders in network consulting services, also make use of honeypots to decoy the network accessible resources. These managed security services provider offer real-time protection to the organizations and reduces the risks involved in an ever-changing threat environment. A techno centric focus, proactive security posture, a flexible delivery model and a balanced approach, by these security service providers ensures that the enterprises are safe from cyber threats, malware infections, phishing attack and web application attacks besides being regulatory compliant to global standards.

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