Blogs

Given the events of COVID-19 and the need to support remote work, I had the chance to catch up with Andrew Miller, CEO at Cameyo about VPN alternatives. I remember deploying VPN 20+ years ago and while the technology was the right fit at the time, I question whether it is the ideal solution for remote work today. Listen to what Andrew and I have to say about VPN solutions and alternative means to help make remote work work.

As we all work through the various impacts of the novel coronavirus – from the depressing and the serious to the merely inconvenient – it's vital that as much industry and business as is safe and possible continues. When thousands are dying, it can seem trite to even consider this, but it is not only important in terms of us having a vibrant post-virus world; IT is an important contributor to sustaining our lives and communications today, and also a vital element to finding ways to overcome the virus.

About a month ago, I wrote a blog about how COVID-19 was driving rapid and dynamic changes for CISOs. I followed this up with a second blog, detailing a number of subsequent cybersecurity phases CISOs are now pursuing to assess and mitigate COVID-19-based cyber risks.  

Both blogs describe some fundamental problems. Corporate cybersecurity now extends to home networks filled with insecure IP devices with little or no security protection whatsoever. Meanwhile, hackers are exploiting societal malaise with online scams, rogue websites, and phishing campaigns preying upon COVID-19 paranoia. A recent article in the Washington Post described research from Palo Alto Networks identifying more than 2,000 malicious COVID-19 web domains and another 40,000 it classifies as “high risk.”

As we all work through the various impacts of the novel coronavirus – from the depressing and the serious to the merely inconvenient – it's vital that as much industry and business as is safe and possible continues. When thousands are dying, it can seem trite to even consider this, but it is not only important in terms of us having a vibrant post-virus world; IT is an important contributor to sustaining our lives and communications today, and also a vital element to finding ways to overcome the virus.

In a time where nearly every business is searching for some good news, IBM’s storage systems business impresses with strong growth. In IBM’s recent earnings announcement this week, the company reports that its enterprise storage systems revenue grew by 18%, for the second consecutive quarter of growth for IBM Storage.

This high growth rate is on par with some of IBM’s other high growth businesses such as its cloud business, up 19%, and Red Hat, which also grew 18%.

Please join me and Vinny Choinski in this video, the third in a series in which we discuss our changing world in the time of the coronavirus pandemic and its implication on data protection.

I recently had the chance to speak with James Stickland, CEO at Veridium, to hear first hand how our ESG research regarding usernames and passwords from the Digital Work Survey maps to what James is seeing with businesses today.

In the video, I share research regarding an end-user perspective on:

As we all work through the various impacts of the novel coronavirus – from the depressing and the serious to the merely inconvenient – it's vital that as much industry and business as is safe and possible continues. When thousands are dying, it can seem trite to even consider this, but it is not only important in terms of us having a vibrant post-virus world; IT is an important contributor to sustaining our lives and communications today, and also a vital element to finding ways to overcome the virus.

But that business-continuation demands some very different approaches and thinking; therefore, whenever possible over the coming weeks I'll be asking executives from IT vendors and partners to discuss their thoughts around the marketing changes, challenges, and - yes - also the opportunities that this pandemic is creating. I've called this series "Marketing in Challenging Times" - that's not to skirt around the issue of COVID-19, but to acknowledge the fact that the "challenging times" are likely to extend well beyond the point at which the pandemic is controlled, contained, or beaten...and also of course perhaps some of the lessons-learned and silver-linings-discovered will continue as well. Everyone brings their own perspectives to these conversations; as a minimum we hope they are cathartic, and at best they might provide a new idea or inspiration.

Digital transformation initiatives have been well documented over the last few years and result in significant changes to an organization’s people (skills), process, and technology. The top goals of these initiatives, as reported in ESG’s 2020 Technology Spending Intentions survey, are to drive greater operational efficiencies and deliver differentiated customer experiences. To accomplish these goals, organizations are actively modernizing their application environments.

Please join me and Vinny Choinski in this video, the second in a series in which we discuss our changing world in the time of the coronavirus pandemic and its implication on data protection.

Last week, I wrote a blog describing 3 ways that COVID-19 is changing CISO priorities for 2020. COVID-19 drove large scale work from home (WFH) initiatives where the priority was getting users up and running as quickly as possible. Security leaders were then forced into an unanticipated follow on sprint to deliver elementary security safeguards for remote employees (i.e., VPNs, endpoint security controls, network security controls, etc.).

In Nassim Talib’s book, The Black Swan, he focuses on the extreme impact of rare outlier events. I highly recommend adding it to your quarantine reading list. The key takeaway is that you can’t predict these events, so don’t try. Instead, prioritize creating robustness, whether in your life or in your business, so that you are prepared. It is not an if; it’s a when. 

As we all work through the various impacts of the novel coronavirus – from the depressing and the serious to the merely inconvenient – it's vital that as much industry and business as is safe and possible continues. When thousands are dying, it can seem trite to even consider this, but it is not only important in terms of us having a vibrant post-virus world; IT is an important contributor to sustaining our lives and communications today, and also a vital element to finding ways to overcome the virus.

Please join me and Vinny Choinski in this video, the first in a series in which we discuss our changing world in the time of the coronavirus pandemic and its implication on data protection.

Veeam's maniacal focus on channel has paid off handsomely through the years. What is even more remarkable is how much has changed in what used to be a very traditional 2-tier distribution channel with VARS and integrators in the same 10-year timeframe. The ability of Veeam to help partners evolve to successfully adopt and make money with cloud technologies while avoiding disintermediation has been key in my opinion. 

The notion of a matrix of “anyness” describes how the combination of knowledge worker mobility and the broad use of cloud services has significantly impacted the cybersecurity remit. The recent surge in remote workers has brought this concept to the fore and shown how conducting business on any device from any location at any time accessing any app and any data is the norm. This reality certainly challenges the castle and moat security model, highlighting the need to evolve how we think about the perimeter, to one that contemplates the many aspects of identity.

As we all work through the various impacts of the novel coronavirus – from the depressing and the serious to the merely inconvenient – it's vital that as much industry and business as is safe and possible continues. When thousands are dying, it can seem trite to even consider this, but it is not only important in terms of us having a vibrant post-virus world; IT is an important contributor to sustaining our lives and communications today, and also a vital element to finding ways to overcome the virus.

But that business-continuation demands some very different approaches and thinking; therefore, whenever possible over the coming weeks I'll be asking executives from IT vendors and partners to discuss their thoughts around the marketing changes, challenges, and - yes - also the opportunities that this pandemic is creating. I've called this series "Marketing in Challenging Times" - that's not to skirt around the issue of COVID-19, but to acknowledge the fact that the "challenging times" are likely to extend well beyond the point at which the pandemic is controlled, contained, or beaten...and also of course perhaps some of the lessons-learned and silver-linings-discovered will continue as well. Everyone brings their own perspectives to these conversations; as a minimum we hope they are cathartic, and at best they might provide a new idea or inspiration.

Anyone tracking virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has seen numerous claims over the past 5+ years that “this is the year of VDI.” The technology has been compelling but limited in deployment for corner cases and specific employee profiles. It’s never bounced past these use cases. Until now.

COVID-19 has found companies left unprepared for this unplanned event and without a solid business continuity plan in place for WFH (work from home) employees. Prior to COVID-19, business executives were reluctant to support WFH and feared the impact to employee productivity. The technology to deliver a secure workspace for an employee is rarely the issue but was often used as an excuse to restrict WFH policies. A small percentage of companies had a local business continuity plan in place for local natural disasters, but few had plans in place to address the scale of WFH we are seeing today.

There hasn't been a conversation in the past 3 weeks in which a particular non-cyber (for once) virus hasn't been discussed. Many of our clients are asking us what we believe will change from a product/service/solution strategy in the space of backup and recovery. I don't have a crystal ball but based on recent research, and as the year progresses, I expect that we will be able to better understand what might be significant changes in how organizations approach IT and the topic of backup and recovery, including disaster recovery. 

For the last couple of years, SD-WAN technology has been on a roll. Businesses going through digital transformation initiatives are increasingly leveraging cloud platforms to host applications (both IaaS and SaaS) that are critical to the business. However, the legacy hub and spoke networks leveraging private telco links were not designed for direct connection to cloud-based apps from remote locations. Instead, all the traffic was funneled through the data center, creating a lot of round trips, latency, and poor user experiences.