The cloud isn’t just about technology.  And you may be surprised to learn that the private cloud project moving slowly through your architecture group should really be your number one priority. But your team may not know it and may not be treating it that way. So what else is the cloud about? It’s also [...]

Many IT organizations take on data migration projects themselves, only to soon realize that they should have used outside help from the beginning. Moving business-critical data has the potential to cause serious disruption to the organization and requires significant planning to alleviate risk. Data migration includes the obvious ones such as storage, server and application [...]

Monday was the opening of really, three different EMC events.  EMC World is an annual event held for the EMC user community, Global Partner Summit the annual update for the worldwide partner community of EMC, and the SE conference for the EMC and partner presales technical community. An estimated 15,000 are in Las Vegas this [...]

EMC World is upon us. EMC World begins Monday in Las Vegas.  As partner shows go, this is one of the big ones.  EMC World is actually comprised of three integrated events: Global Partner Summit on Monday is focused on partners like Datalink. Global Technical Summit for EMC and partner SEs VMworld for partners and [...]

Next week is Data Center World where over 1,000 data center and facilities management professionals from around the globe will get together in one place — Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with peers as this will be the third consecutive year I’ll be presenting. This year’s presentation, “Five Keys to [...]

It used to be the only companies that needed real Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) programs were those that were regulated or heavily IT-dependent. If you weren’t in that group, you could bet against a disaster occurring and get away with not having tested or updated your plan, and in most cases there wouldn’t be consequences. But today’s complex supply [...]

Symantec Vision affords Datalink invaluable time with Symantec  customer-facing teams, sales and product leadership to  get clarity on future solution roadmaps, strengthen our technical training and better equip  our field organization to help our customers  maximize the value of their current & future investment in Symantec products. This year, the conference centered on Symantec’s new [...]

A mentor of mine in the consulting business once told me that consultants have a “Golden Searchlight,” which could be shined on issues that had been either inadvertently overlooked or carefully hidden. But, once the Searchlight revealed an issue, it had to be dealt with, no matter how painful or embarrassing, so the advice was [...]

You can’t say you have business continuity or IT disaster recovery capabilities unless you know they work. And the only way to guarantee your capabilities are real is to test them. Many organizations avoid “testing” because of the “pass or fail” implications, and choose to use terms like “exercise” to soften and sometimes, lower expectations. [...]

Last week, security firm Rapid7 released the results of a scan they did of Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), and the results have caused shockwaves around the Cloudsphere. It turns out that 1,951, or 16% of all storage “buckets” were exposed to the public, such that any user stumbling across them would be able to [...]