Big Data: Big data refers to data sets so large that that average computing tools can’t manage or process them.  Big data sizes are generally a range, and one that is constantly shifting as new tools are developed, and incorporated into everyday computing.  Currently, big data sets range from dozens of terabytes to petabytes in sizes.  Big data sets include everything from the terabytes of Tweets generated every day to satellite data collected by Google Earth.

High Performance Computing: HPC refers to specialized networking, storage, and parallel processors built to manage and compute large computing tasks.  HPC can process data at rates measured in petaflops.  HPC is often, though not always, intertwined with big data.

Big data analytics and high-performance computing require massive amounts of computing power, and your average company isn’t equipped to handle such specialized needs.

Managed service providers are stepping up to fill these gaps.  Data centers are now being constructed tailored specifically to big data needs, and with the processing power for high-performance computing.

It’s often much cheaper for companies, even large enterprises, to rent space at these data centers rather than build their own specialized data center. In addition to not having to worry about space and processing power, managed service providers are specialists in what they do. They are able to hire, train, and retain IT staff at their data centers with specialized cloud computing skills to take care of all the servers.  Your average non-tech company won’t have to spare the cost to hire someone with those specialized skills, yet can still benefit from them.

The technology and business industries are headed inexorably in the direction of big data, and with it HPC, so companies will need to be prepared.  If not now, then a year, two years, or five years in the future.  Get ready.

Are you taking into consideration how big data and HPC are currently impacting your company’s computing needs? What about in the future? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

The innovations that are on the horizon to help data centers adjust to these needs have been dubbed “Data Center 2.0.” Let us look at some of the different solutions that encompass this new approach to managing the growing complexity of IP traffic.

Microservers
Microservers are special purpose, low-power servers that are optimized to handle high-volume operations such as web page serving and parallel processing. They combine high density with efficient energy consumption, and are currently best epitomized by HP’s Project Moonshot. Though not applicable to all server tasks, they make increasingly common, low-computing tasks far more scalable and economical.

Solid-state Drives
Solid-state Drive (SSD) technology has already made somewhat of an impact on the consumer market due to it speed and power-efficiency. It is beginning to make inroads in server technology as well. Of course, SSD is still cost prohibitive for mass-scale operations, and also susceptible to “write endurance” problems which can potentially corrupt memory blocks after the course of too many read-write cycles. Intel is at the forefront of addressing these issues with its High Endurance Technology (HET) initiative.

Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) represents a decoupling of networking technology from the physical layers, thereby allowing greater flexibility. Google, not surprisingly, is a pioneer in this field. It is a founding partner of the Open Networking Foundation which is establishing an SDN protocol called OpenFlow. Google has already implemented SDN on its internal network (separate from its public-facing traffic) and in addition to massive improvements in scalability and maintenance, it is achieving close to 100% network utilization.

These are just a few of the innovations that are being used to help propel data centers into the next generation.  You can be certain that we will keep you updated on future developments and improvements in data center technology.

Data is increasing exponentially, but storage technologies aren’t necessarily keeping up.

Hard drive capacity isn’t keeping pace with the current level data increases.  Predictions says that global data will increase by a factor of 50 by 2020, but hard drives are only predicted to grow 15-fold in that same timeframe.

Not to mention, hard drive costs aren’t decreasing quickly enough, either.  The cost of digital storage media used to decrease exponentially according to Kryder’s Law. The cost of disk space tended to drop about 40 percent each year.  But recently storage space costs have not gone down as quickly as in past years.  This trend, combined with the big data surge means companies and institutions struggle to be able to purchase or lease enough space to keep up with demand for storage space.

And right now, there are no good solutions to this problem.  There are some stop gap measures available, but each has its own problems.

• HDD vs SSD: Solid-state drives (SSD) tend to have a greater capacity than disks, but SSDs are still much more expensive than Hard disk drives (HDDs), so a full-scale shift between the two storage media is impractical and cost-prohibitive for now.

• Deletion: Data deduplication and otherwise deleting unnecessary data might work — but first it will require better algorithms for calculating which data is “useful” and which is not. But this approach seems promising, and people are already talking about “smart data” as opposed to big data.

• Cloud storage: Individual companies have the option of outsourcing some or all of their data to the cloud, which could solve the storage issue for those companies. But this doesn’t address the bigger picture — the overall trend of exponential data growth, and the inherent logistical problems. Cloud provider data centers still need to purchase and maintain sufficient storage resources to handle the increase in data computing needs.

No matter which approach you look at, or the industry as a whole adopts, one thing is clear — the choice had better be made soon. No one wants big data to hit a storage ceiling, not when there is still so much untapped potential in big data, as we’ve discussed in a previous post.

Are you running into big data storage problems at your company? If so, what solutions have you looked at, or implemented? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

The long-term culture in which physicians have operated is, to a degree, at odds with the present-day demand for privacy and security. Doctors want to embrace the latest technological advances, understandably to get work done and provide the best patient service possible. The desire by medical professionals and patients to provide and/or receive information on a growing number of mobile devices is increasing.  As this expectation of convenient information access and delivery grows, it must be accomplished with great care so that security breaches are avoided.

A major medical center in Boston was the site of just such a security breach. In that case,  it took no more than the theft of a personal laptop from a doctor’s office for the privacy of patient personal health information to be compromised. This data security breach in turn left the medical center vulnerable to both an investigation and potential fines vis-a-vis the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  Luckily, in that case, there were no complete medical records, medication lists or social security numbers stolen.

The hospital responded by requiring that all devices (both personal or business) that are used in any way with the hospital’s data need to have a mandatory encryption program installed.  Their action will certainly assist in future attempted breaches, but it makes one wonder how many other medical centers or companies with mobile, unsecured devices are still at risk?

At a recent PHI (personal health information) Protection Network forum in Cambridge, MA, some top information technology and security health care executives met to discuss today’s challenging environment. Among those who attended was Meredith Phillips.

At Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System, Ms. Phillips is the chief information privacy and security officer. She is responsible for overseeing HIPAA compliance in an organization with 31,000 employees. She cites a number of procedures that can help providers to avoid security breaches:

• Deal with those physicians and others walking around with insecure flash drives.  Alert them to proper data security standards and ensure that portable data storage security is enforced.
• Enforce data encryption requirements, especially on mobile devices.
• Identify rogue devices and lock them out. Owners of such devices may be malicious hackers or simply careless employees excited about the BYOD opportunity. Such devices must be quickly identified and “locked out” of a provider’s network until the device owners can be notified and the device is made secure.

As medical records become more portable and single devices provide a universal access point to hundreds or thousands of medical records, it is critical that steps are taken to protect both patient privacy and hospital liability.  While some of these procedures outlined above may seem general and of common sense, it takes discipline and proper policy enforcement to ensure that the steps are both implemented and followed.

Melissa Hedge

Contegix is proud to announce the addition of Melissa Hedge to the Marketing team. Melissa has joined Contegix as a Marketing Specialist and started her new role today. Welcome to the team, Melissa!

How many American employees do you think are using their personal smartphones or other mobile device for work?  25 percent?  50 percent?  75 percent?

Well, according to a study recently conducted by Cisco partner firms, a whopping 90 percent of workers use their personal smartphones for work as part of a bring-your-own-device policy (BYOD).  Do the employees at your company do so?  If they do, that’s potentially a huge problem.  A large portion of these employees aren’t taking proper precautions to secure their devices, leaving your company’s data vulnerable and exposed.

A few relevant statistics from the study:

• 39 percent of employees using personal smartphones for work don’t have a password lock on their device

• 52 percent access unsecured wireless networks

• 48 percent of workers surveyed say they haven’t disabled Bluetooth discoverable modes (a practice which makes it much easier for hackers to hack into a device and see data)

These statistics are averages of employees at companies in all industries, but workers in sensitive fields such as legal, finance, and healthcare had only slightly higher percentages of adoption of security measures, meaning there are still plenty of vulnerable devices being used in those industries.

In addition, 86 percent of workers surveyed say that there is no way for their employers to remotely wipe data from a lost or stolen device.  This statistic is understandable given that under BYOD policies most devices are paid for and thus privately owned by the individual worker.

(Only around 11 percent of those surveyed say they received any kind of device stipend from their employer).  Balancing a company’s cybersecurity concerns with an individual’s privacy concerns is tricky.

One potential solution for this particular problem might be the creation of a custom app or suite of apps for employees to install on their devices, to handle work-related tasks.  Employers could still have access to the apps on the backend and be able to delete data from lost or stolen devices, but not have access the rest of the data on the device.  The enterprise apps industry is already growing as more and more businesses see the benefits of creating their own apps for workers, so it may only be a matter of time before we see a solution like this implemented.

But custom app development aside, there is still a trend of security vulnerabilities facilitated by BYOD policies that companies need to address, and quickly.  It’s not enough to have a BYOD policy that states that employees can bring their own devices.  Companies need to set standard security protocols and provide training to employees to help keep their data secure.

Do you use a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device for work?  What is your company’s BYOD policy like?  Let us know in the comments.

The SEC recently announced that it is acceptable for companies to reach out to shareholders via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, as long as investors have been informed ahead of time which social media channels will be used to disseminate the information.

Regulation Fair Disclosure applies to social media just as it does company websites, according to the SEC (The SEC announced in 2008 that posting information on company websites was acceptable for compliance purposes as long as investors were informed.)

According to Regulation FD, public companies must distribute information via non-exclusive channels that can reasonably be expected to reach a large portion of the general public, so all company investors can have access to material information about a company at about the same time.

Although the SEC says that disclosing company information through social media is permissible, it is necessary to inform investors ahead of time they will be receiving communications through specific social media channels so that the communications are not seen as selective disclosures.

The catalyst for this finding by the SEC was an inquiry conducted by the Division of Enforcement after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings disclosed viewing numbers on his personal Facebook page and did not report this information to its investors either via press release or Form 8-K filing. After the Facebook post announcing that Netflix had broken one billion hours of monthly online viewing, Netflix stock price rose from $70.45 a share to $81.72 at the close of the next trading day. Netflix had not informed investors prior to this that the company would be sharing material information through Hasting’s personal Facebook page.

The investigation concluded and the SEC issued its finding that companies could release financial and related information to investors as long as investors had been alerted to expect communications from that channel.

This ruling has many implications for businesses, and not just company announcements via a Tweet or Facebook status. Now that social media falls under the aegis of the SEC, companies should look into creating company social media policies, tightening security around their social media accounts, and standardizing communication through social media.

With this ruling, how will your company start using social media to communicate with its shareholders? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

But a recent study has shown that many have acknowledged that BYOD security is a major concern. In fact, one-third of the respondents claimed they are not prepared for the threats that BYOD presents to not only mobile security, but also to sensitive enterprise data.

Up to now, the solution would be a program called Mobile Device Management (MDM) though this can be an extreme situation. For example, if the employee leaves the company, the first directive is to completely erase the device, which would unfortunately take the employee’s personal photos, music, and apps with it. Of course, with BYOD, employees are playing “Angry Birds” on the same device they negotiate business proposals with which may ruffle a few corporate feathers. There is always the passcode solution to protect the device. However, that certainly is no protection from a toddler who playfully presses buttons and unwittingly gains access to every company app.

The question that remains is how can enterprises effectively protect company data breaches that can occur on personal mobile devices if they are lost or stolen? The answer lies in device virtualization. Just as in the case with desktop servers, mobile devices can also be virtualized and have separate workspaces to house corporate apps and data that are completely separate from personal files. This reduces the chance that company data will be accessed since an additional layer of security can be utilized.

Mobile device manufacturers have even begun to prepare devices for such configurations. Blackberry, for one, announced their program called Blackberry Balance which allows the user to create “containers” to succinctly divide their personal and work areas. Samsung has also done the same with their KNOX technology for Android with security and management enhancements that make a clear separation between work and personal use.

While the technology is still a new one, device virtualization can prove to be an effective means of securing company data with BYOD policies. Contact us for information on how our cloud solutions can protect your sensitive corporate data.

What level of support does each of your managed service plans provide?

A good managed service provider should be able to tell you what kind of staff monitor the data centers, what training they have, and if the staff is available 24/7/365. Find out if the managed service provider monitors for problems or if they require you to report issues yourself, and if so, what’s the protocol for reporting issues to the provider? Know what you are paying for, up front.

What kind of backups do you have in place in case of equipment or service failure?

Back-up servers, back-up generators, back-up parts — a good managed service provider should have back-ups for every piece of equipment in the data center, and a plan in place to switch over to the back-ups as quickly as possible in case of failure. Every second the equipment is not up and running will impact your bottom line, so you want that time minimized.

What security measures do you have in place?

A trusted managed service provider should have numerous security measures in place, including but not limited to: secure facilities to house the data centers, closed circuit digital cameras, security guards on-site 24/7, biometric scans, and controlled access via keycards and coded badges. A conscientious managed service provider knows that the security of their customers’ data is paramount.

How customizable/adaptable are your managed service plans?

Every company’s needs are slightly different, and your managed service provider should be able to tweak their services to suit your company, and not try to shoehorn your company into a one-size-fits-all plan.

How do I access my data on your servers, both while I’m a customer and when I want to switch providers?

The managed service provider may be managing your data, but it’s still your data, and you should be able to access it 24/7/365 — both online, and by accessing the data center in person if necessary. And while every managed service provider hopes their customers will stay with them, it’s a reality that needs change and clients will need to switch providers. A good managed service provider will give you back your data quickly, and in a format that you prefer.

Don’t be shy about asking questions – any reputable managed service provider should be able to quickly and easily answer all the questions on this list, and the answers should satisfy you. If you aren’t hearing answers you like, try another provider.

What questions do you ask when searching for a managed service provider? Let us know in the comments.

Shawn Barry

We are pleased to announce the addition of Shawn Barry to our team!  Shawn has joined Contegix as our newest Linux Technical Engineer and he will be on the 3rd shift crew. Welcome to the team, Shawn!