Articles

NetApp helps Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust consolidate its servers and rationalise its infrastructure

30 Jun 2011

Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust was formed on 1 April, 2006 after East Kent NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust and West Kent NHS and Social Care Trust merged. The trust provides mental health, learning disability, substance misuse, and other specialist services for 1.6 million people across Kent and Medway. It is committed to providing high-quality clinical services, innovation, and partnership working. It is one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK, covering an area of 1,450 square miles, employing over 3,600 staff, and operating from over 140 buildings across the locality.

Five Ways to Get Yourself Fired

30 Jun 2011

Standfirst

A colleague of mine last Christmas declared 2011 as The Year of Living Dangerously for Information Technology (IT) Security Officers. He said that he could see many pitfalls looming this year for the unwary in IT security and that many would end up on the dole. 2011 has indeed unleashed a wave of unprecedented security breaches that have left many people reeling – Epsilon, Sony, WikiLeaks, PBS.org, RSA Security and HBGary Federal to mention only some of the victims. So to put this all in context, and provide a cautionary tale of the challenges facing IT security professionals, I have drafted a fictitious scenario to illustrate the 5 best ways to get yourself fired so that hopefully you never do! Happy reading.

LawWare - Case Study

27 Jun 2011

LawWare has grown by 20% since working with hosted infrastructure expert Rise to launch LawCloud, a hosted version of its practice-management software.

Is Your Exchange Secure, Responsive and Constantly Available?

23 Jun 2011

This article examines the challenges Exchange presents and provides a tick list so you can confidently answer yes to the questions posed

As the most widely adopted messaging platform and semi-structured data repository in the world, Microsoft Exchange is the go-to cross-functional collaboration system for many organisations. Administrators are under enormous pressure to ensure that Exchange is secure, responsive, and constantly available. So, how do they do that? This article examines how an automated data governance program can provide the answer, expedite Exchange-related management tasks and improve the controls that protect the critical data contained in mailboxes and public folders.

eBay - Case Study

23 Jun 2011

Real-Time Energy Optimization and Best Practices In a Mission-Critical Data Center

As one of the world’s largest Internet commerce platforms, eBay demands extreme data center reliability; any downtime would impact transactions worth more than $2,000 a second. Thus its global data center team must excel simultaneously in delivering uptime and flexibility, while keeping costs down – a truly complex challenge, requiring constant innovation to be successful.

Radley + Co. - Case Study

22 Jun 2011

Radley + Co is a market leader in handbag and accessory design. Its products are designed in the UK, manufactured largely in China and on the Indian sub-continent, and distributed to retail outlets from its UK and US warehouses.

Global produce labelling leader Sinclair International achieves cost-savings, rationalisation and performance improvement via virtualised storage

21 Jun 2011

Having pioneered the development of automatic fruit labelling systems nearly 30 years ago, UK firm Sinclair International now operates in 35 countries worldwide. With a 100% focus on the global fresh produce sector, Sinclair provides customers with an unmatched combination of fruit labelling equipment, labels and service - all from a single, reliable source, with its network of subsidiaries and partners all linking to one global data centre/ERP system in Norwich.

Opening for business: your new cloud?

20 Jun 2011

Transform your infrastructure into public or private cloud with ten tips for choosing a cloud management system

Cloud computing is high on the agenda for all UK businesses, particularly for companies with substantial IT infrastructure – hosting providers, and large enterprises.  

Raising the security bar By Ray Bryant CEO Idappcom Ltd, authors of Traffic IQ

20 Jun 2011

In today's fast-changing world of security threats, the need to raise the security bar - by enhancing an IT platform's ability to detect and prevent malicious code from `breaking through' the network perimeter - has never been greater.

But how do you tackle the process in a modern IT department? Idappcom's CEO Ray Bryant provides some thoughts ….

Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability

20 Jun 2011

With roughly 70 percent of its consultants working from client sites or from home, A.T. Kearney depends heavily on email, instant messaging, VoIP, and other unified communications services. The company needed to ensure that these tools are secure and available to users from any location and on any device.

Thermal Optimisation in the Data Centre

16 Jun 2011

Best Practices for achieving optimal cooling performance and significant energy savings in your data centre

Data centres contribute significantly to world-wide energy consumption. Analysts from IDC and Gartner state that two percent of total energy consumed worldwide is caused by data centres. This share is expected to double within the next five years. The increase in CO₂ emissions will have a profound impact on the costs for companies, their data centres, and the ecological and environmental communities at large. 

The mobile security conundrum

16 Jun 2011

Andy Cordial, managing director of secure storage systems specialist Origin Storage, explains why mobile computing users need to raise their security game if we are to avoid a series of smartphone and tablet computer driven data breaches hitting the headlines...

Whilst the range and variety of IT security defences for portable computers - that's netbooks and laptops to most people - is excellent, and able to cater for all budgets and types of user, it should be apparent to any security observer that the same cannot be said for smartphones and tablet computers.

Zeus Traffic Manager

15 Jun 2011

VMware vSphere 4 Performance On Cisco Unified Computing System

This document details the performance figures obtained by Zeus Traffic Manager running on VMware vSphere 4.0 on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and outlines the methods used to achieve these performance figures.

The 5 Golden Rules for success in Outsourcing

14 Jun 2011

The rush to embrace the outsourcing model started in the USA with the Insurance Industry’s decision to promote commodity pricing and as everyone knows, when your core product becomes a commodity you have to slash costs. The industry then moved to reduce expenses by outsourcing their IT operations and the trickle soon became a flood that embraced all industries. If you intend to join the risk-takers on the river of no return there are a few things you need to do to ensure your journey doesn’t end in disaster.

Outsourcing has worked well for some companies, but it can also lead to business-damaging disasters. The problem is, if outsourcers fail, you're left holding the baby without the resources to care for it. There is little margin for error in choosing an outsourcer as Lieberman Software found in our recent survey at InfoSecurity 2011. We discovered that 77% of IT professionals surveyed said that their outsourcers had made up work to earn extra money.

German TV Broadcaster RTL II Accelerates Content Delivery with Storage Solutions from SGI

08 Jun 2011

RTL II is a German-language private TV company operated by RTL2 Fernsehen GmbH & Co. KG which offers a full schedule of programming for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The programmes are delivered via cable networks, DVB-T and satellite. The company, which was founded in 1993 and has about 150 employees, is headquartered in Grünwald near Munich, whilst news programmes are produced in Cologne. The main shareholders in RTL II are the RTL Group, the Bauer Media Group and the Tele München Group; Burda GmbH holds a stake of 1.1 percent.

Is Your Exchange Secure, Responsive and Constantly Available?

01 Jun 2011

This article examines the challenges Exchange presents and provides a tick list so you can confidently answer yes to the questions posed

As the most widely adopted messaging platform and semi-structured data repository in the world, Microsoft Exchange is the go-to cross-functional collaboration system for many organisations. Administrators are under enormous pressure to ensure that Exchange is secure, responsive, and constantly available. So, how do they do that? This article examines how an automated data governance program can provide the answer, expedite Exchange-related management tasks and improve the controls that protect the critical data contained in mailboxes and public folders.