Crystal Faulkner, host of WNKU’s BusinessWise program discusses Email Security for small and medium size organizations with Chris Resch, Chief Technology Officer and Rick Maxwell, President/CEO of Full Service Networking.
Click here to listen: Email Security: WNKU BusinessWise Radio Interview
While the driving factor for organizations to virtualize their IT infrastructure is cost savings, potentially cutting overall IT expenses by up to 70 percent, the environmental impact of virtualization is typically over looked. I am often exasperated that many small and medium sized organizations are not concerned about the environmental implications of improving their current IT network.
Frequently in our work we get the opportunity to completely reengineer an organization’s IT network infrastructure, replacing energy inefficient and power hungry servers through virtualization. On numerous occasions, we have even replaced an entire data center with a single server, which has very modest power requirements. By using less physical servers, organizations can save up to 80 percent of their energy costs, based on a 10:1 server consolidation calculation by VWware. 
Often a new virtual server consumes less power than just one of the devices it replaces. When you multiply additional servers and include the additional networking hardware and air cooling requirements, the corresponding reduction in energy can be staggering. At a recent client project, I replaced 13 physical servers with a virtual server that only consumes 250 watts of power. This amounts to significant reduction of electricity utilization and corresponding energy costs.
While the principle reasons to virtualize will remain economic, with reduced hardware and management costs, organizations should also consider the other shades of green that virtualizing servers offer – in the form of reducing their energy consumption and environmental footprint.
At the end of the day my frustration subsides as we save both our clients money and the environment in unison by deploying the latest virtualization applications.
Be Green!
Keep your PCs running at their best, whether your employees are in the office or on the road. Windows Intune by FSN simplifies how organizations manage and secure PCs using Windows cloud services and the latest version of Windows operating system, so your end-users can operate at peak performance from virtually anywhere. FSN can proactively resolve alerts, install software patches and deploy security policies, resulting in a reduction of desktop computer issues. Click here to watch a Windows Intue overview video.
Crystal Faulkner, host of WNKU’s BusinessWise program discussed Cloud Computing for small and medium size organizations with Chris Resch, Chief Technology Officer and Rick Maxwell, President/CEO.
Click here to listen: Cloud Computing: WNKU Radio Interview
By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek
Microsoft pitches more detail on Windows 8′s security and manageability improvements for enterprise IT and SMBs, a week after releasing the consumer preview version.
A week after releasing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft on Tuesday pitched the benefits of the new operating system to business users and system administrators. The company is promising that Windows 8 will give workers a consumer-device like experience on a platform that has all the security and manageability features of past versions of Windows and more.
“Windows 8 will deliver no-compromise experiences on a range of devices, from tablets and PCs to desktops,” Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. “It will give people the functionality they love and the enterprise-grade capabilities that IT departments demand.”
Click here to read the eight features in Windows 8 that could help Microsoft keep that promise to its business customers
Chris Bruer, Project Engineer and Leo Flerlage, Senior Systems Engineer of Full Service Networking recently passed the Certified SonicWall Security Administrator (CSSA) exam.
To achieve CSSA certification, engineers must verify competency for a specific technical disciplines of the SonicWall solutions.
Today’s existing x86 hardware was engineered to run a single operating system and application, causing the majority of today’s deployed servers to be vastly underutilized. The bottom-line result is high expenses in terms of financial, human capital and natural resources.
Server virtualization enables you to run multiple virtual machines on a single piece of hardware, allowing for numerous operating systems and applications to be run on a single server.
Please see the below slide from VMware, our virtualization partner:
Virtualization is a proven way to reduce the complexity of your IT network which simplifies operations and on-going maintenance. Deploying a dynamic, virtualized system considerably lowers costs and resources that are currently necessary to support your existing IT network.
By consolidating existing applications onto a fewer number of servers, your enterprise will be able to reduce capital expenditures of hardware, decrease the amount of time for routine administrative tasks by IT personnel and diminish electrical energy usage.
Virtualization provides built-in agility to manage today’s network with increased application availability and data recoverability, while being nimble to quickly adapt to the future IT needs necessary to grow your business.
8 Features That Could Make Windows 8 Great by Paul McFougall, Editor at Large, Information Week
Windows 8 represents the biggest redesign of the Windows operating system since Microsoft gave the OS a big overhaul with Windows 95. That effort introduced the Start button, Taskbar, and other now standard icons. Windows 8 goes even further.
Users will have the option to ditch the long familiar Explorer interface and work in Metro mode, which effectively turns a PC into a tablet or big smartphone. There are lots of other big changes in store–here’s a look at some of the more significant ones that Microsoft has confirmed to date.
To read the full article, click here.
Cloud computing has certainly caught on among business owners. No surprise there: the cloud offers more computing power, cheaper storage, seamless scalability and the simplicity that comes with someone else taking care of your servers.
But there’s a catch. To take advantage of cloud software and infrastructure, you’ve got to give up some control over your data … Or do you?
Have your cloud and your privacy too
Here’s the thing: not all clouds are the same. There’s the public cloud, the one with which we’re most familiar. But then there’s the hybrid cloud too. As its name suggests, the hybrid cloud is a combination of two different types of clouds, public and private. The hybrid cloud can give your business all of the benefits listed in the first paragraph (power, affordability, scalability and simplicity) without the tradeoffs that come with entrusting your data to an unknown (or unresponsive) quantity.
How might that work in practice? Here’s an example: A business provides some resources in-house. For instance, it might store current consumer data on its private in-house cloud. It might also store employee records, new marketing campaigns, and current proposals to new clients on its in-house storage.
That same business, though, might store older, archived data on a public cloud service. This frees up space on the business’ servers, and allows its in-house computers to operate more efficiently.
At the same time, taking a hybrid cloud approach to data storage allows businesses to take advantage of the space-saving benefits of the public cloud without also exposing their sensitive current data to third-party providers. In other words, the hybrid cloud provides businesses with security, cost-savings, and efficiency.
Why the hybrid cloud approach makes sense
It’s little wonder, then, that so many businesses today are moving toward a hybrid cloud approach. There is simply too much data floating around today for smaller businesses to adequately store. At the same time, businesses in today’s competitive environment don’t want to expose company secrets and sensitive consumer data to either their rivals or hackers.
The hybrid cloud allows businesses to have the best of both worlds.
Source: ImageQuest, a Managed IT Service firm in Nashville, TN.
10 Security Trends to Watch In 2012 by Mathew Schwartz, Information Week
As 2012 gets underway, what can businesses expect on the information security front?
If 2011 was any indication, this year will be anything but quiet. Last year featured seemingly nonstop waves of hacking, malware, and spear-phishing attacks that succeeded in exploiting well-known businesses, including RSA and Sony. All told, businesses’ collective data breaches exposed millions of records.
Expect 2012 to offer more of the same and then some. In particular, keep an eye on these 10 top information security trends.
1. Breaches now inevitable, say businesses. Over the past few years, there’s been a notable change in information security rhetoric: Instead of preventing all attacks from succeeding, many CIOs now acknowledge that getting hacked is a question of when, not if. The chief culprit is the sheer volume of attacks being launched, which makes the chance that one of them will succeed nearly inevitable. According to the “2011 Data Breach Investigations Report”from Verizon, for example, the number of attacks launched online against businesses between 2005 and 2010 increased by a factor of five.
The new mandate, then, is not just to maintain killer defenses, but also to have the right technology and practices in place to quickly detect when the business has been breached, and then to block the attack and ideally identify how the breach occurred and what might have been stolen. “We frequently see organizations with protective measures based on the assumption that they are not a target,” said Alan Brill, senior managing director of the cyber security and information assurance division at Kroll, in a recent report. “Yet 2011 taught us that no one is exempt from attack.”
To read the full article, click here.
