How to Protect Your Company’s Data
As a computer systems network manager and member of the nonprofit High Tech Crime Consortium, Kevin McDonald has seen all manner of data disasters: the medical company whose patient treatment records were lost in a warehouse fire; the police department whose website host vanished overnight; even the careless employee whose leaky liter of Coke ruined a computer server. “If you are a small business and you have a catastrophic loss of data, more likely than not you will never recover,” says McDonald, executive vice president at Alvaka Networks in Irvine, Calif. “Data storage is so cheap now, if you can’t afford it you should shut your business down and do something else.”
Larry Bonfante Says “Being A CIO Is Not About You.”
At the Best of Breed Conference on October 25-26th, I had the privilege of listening to Larry Bonfante, CIO of USTA discuss how the position of IT has shifted from utility provider to the role of "trusted advisor/business enabler.” He mentions how to utilize technology to drive brand, revenue, and engage consumers. This topic points to the fact that CIOs must be business leaders and just not technologists. So, how can you make a difference? He answers, “By understanding your
Balance of Sensitivity and Marketing Without Crossing into Self-Indulgence or Gratuitous Promotions.
Comedian Gilbert Godfrey lost his job with Aflac for making a joke about the Japanese tsunami. So too did an aide to Mississippi Gov. Hayley Barbour for the same reason. And some government officials and activities are catching criticism for using the crisis to grand stand on their favorite environmental and energy causes.
Orange County Register. Alvaka Networks’ EVP, Kevin McDonald Named President of Tech Coast Venture Network (TCVN)
Irvine-based Tech Coast Venture Network has named Ciaran Foley chairman of the board, replacing Bart Greenberg, who has been chairman since August. 2005. Kevin McDonald is the new TCVN president, a position Foley held for the past year and Greenberg held before that.
Warning – Know Thy Back-Up
Know what you are backing up and know what you need to back-up.
They are not always the same thing.
During the course of writing this series of blogs on backup and disaster recovery I thought I would throw in a few anecdotal stories along the way. I just got out of a meeting with one of my key managers. We were talking about a long time client and a huge backup problem that was just uncovered.
Why The Interest In The VCIO?
We are winding down 2010. As I look back at the recent months to assess the trends for 2011, one thing stands out most prominently. That one thing is the VCIO or the Virtual Chief Information Officer. While I don’t particularly like that term, it is perhaps the most intuitive description for someone who serves in a part-time contract role as the CIO for small to mid-size businesses.
From my vantage point, I see three primary drivers behind the increased demand for IT experts serving in the role. Those three drivers are...
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.