John Mayer At Dell World 2015!! (Oh, I'll be there too.)

An artist who defies all boundaries, John Mayer has won seven Grammy Awards and sold more than 17 million albums worldwide. The singer, songwriter and guitarist’s skills have been widely acknowledged by some of the world’s greatest musicians. Mayer has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists from the worlds of rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, and country including Eric Clapton, BB King, Buddy Guy, Dixie Chicks, Jay Z, Alicia Keys and many more. His latest collaborative effort is forming the band Dead & Company with Grateful Dead founding members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. They will hit the road for a series of sold out arena concerts this Fall playing selections from the Grateful Dead songbook. - See more at: http://dellworld.com/entertainment#sthash.sCD5KsRb.dpuf

Seven-time Grammy Award winning artist 

John Mayer 

will perform at Dell World 2015!

An artist who defies all boundaries, John Mayer has sold more than 17 million albums worldwide. The singer, songwriter and guitarist’s skills have been widely acknowledged by some of the world’s greatest musicians. Mayer has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists from the worlds of rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, and country including Eric Clapton, BB King, Buddy Guy, Dixie Chicks, Jay Z, Alicia Keys and many more. 

By the way, I'm going also. As part of the influencer community I will also get to participate in the press conference, learn about the latest news announcements, join influencer-specific breakout sessions, network with Dell executives, partners and customers, and have full access to the Dell World Main Track keynotes and breakouts.

Join me in Austin!

 

An artist who defies all boundaries, John Mayer has won seven Grammy Awards and sold more than 17 million albums worldwide. The singer, songwriter and guitarist’s skills have been widely acknowledged by some of the world’s greatest musicians. Mayer has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists from the worlds of rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, and country including Eric Clapton, BB King, Buddy Guy, Dixie Chicks, Jay Z, Alicia Keys and many more. His latest collaborative effort is forming the band Dead & Company with Grateful Dead founding members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. They will hit the road for a series of sold out arena concerts this Fall playing selections from the Grateful Dead songbook. - See more at: http://dellworld.com/entertainment#sthash.sCD5KsRb.dpuf

An artist who defies all boundaries, John Mayer has won seven Grammy Awards and sold more than 17 million albums worldwide. The singer, songwriter and guitarist’s skills have been widely acknowledged by some of the world’s greatest musicians. Mayer has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists from the worlds of rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, and country including Eric Clapton, BB King, Buddy Guy, Dixie Chicks, Jay Z, Alicia Keys and many more. His latest collaborative effort is forming the band Dead & Company with Grateful Dead founding members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. They will hit the road for a series of sold out arena concerts this Fall playing selections from the Grateful Dead songbook. - See more at: http://dellworld.com/entertainment#sthash.sCD5KsRb.dpuf

An artist who defies all boundaries, John Mayer has won seven Grammy Awards and sold more than 17 million albums worldwide. The singer, songwriter and guitarist’s skills have been widely acknowledged by some of the world’s greatest musicians. Mayer has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists from the worlds of rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, and country including Eric Clapton, BB King, Buddy Guy, Dixie Chicks, Jay Z, Alicia Keys and many more. - See more at: http://23.253.79.122/entertainment#sthash.kmwZmF7U.dpuf

 ( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

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Data-centric Security: The New Must Have

Where is your data right now? The explosion of cloud computing and consumer IT means that your data, as well as data about you, can be virtually anywhere.

Having your data and the data about you virtually everywhere is, in fact, key to the cloud computing business model. This means that traditional security concepts that focus in depth on infrastructure defense no longer apply. No one knows and understands this more than Dell’s Brett Hansen, Executive Director, Dell Data Security Solutions.

At Dell Peak Performance, held this year in Las Vegas, NV, Brett and other Dell Security leaders offered key insights about security trends and customer needs. While there, I had the opportunity to interview many Dell executives and business partners on the important IT security specific challenges being faced today by Dell customers. They were also able to provide their own vision for the future of cybersecurity. In this article, I share my conversation with Brett.

Kevin: Brett, thank you for taking the time to meet with me today. Could you please describe for me your role at Dell?

Brett: Sure Kevin. I’m happy to speak with you today. I currently lead the Endpoint and Data Security business for Dell. Although it’s a relatively young business unit, it focuses on securing our customer’s most important asset, their data that exist on end point devices.

Kevin: That is a very critical aspect of any business as cloud computing has grown in importance. From your vantage point, what has changed in the cybersecurity marketplace over the past 12 months?

Brett: Over the past year, we have seen a major sea change in how people work across all industries. Cloud computing, mobility and teleworking have all combined to drive us outside of the four walls of an office in the performance of what we have normally referred to as “work”. This also takes us outside of that corporate network core environment. This transformation has introduced new risks for our customers. They are now balancing regulatory compliance and increased IT security needs with an equally important imperative of providing a non-obtrusive work environment that empowers productive workers. This challenge is exacerbated by the growing population of millennials, supplemental workers and contractors within the workforce. These requirements creates a new working paradigm that embraces the productivity and mobility of a modern workforce in a way that also provides security, risk mitigation and business success.

Kevin: Embracing this new paradigm has physical, personnel as well as cybersecurity challenges. With that said, what is the number one cybersecurity challenge facing the marketplace today?

Brett: The myriad of capabilities that need to be deployed in order to address cybersecurity challenges defy a single answer, but one area I would like to focus on today is data encryption. When operating in this new working paradigm, enterprise data is no longer relegated to a single device housed within an enterprise controlled environment. This operational reality will expand as organizations become more open and the unimpeded flow of information becomes more critical to business.
The dramatic growth in enterprise use of public clouds like Dropbox, Box, One Drive and Google-Drive reflect this change. Companies and end users are rightfully embracing opportunities to work smarter, faster, collaboratively and more efficiently. At the same time, however, these opportunities are creating great risk. As the expanse of data movement grows, the enterprise’s ability to control and protect that data increasingly diminishes. Simultaneously, the data itself is becoming more important because it carries intellectual property, employee information and customer data. This is why our customers, both large and small, consistently ask us to help them embrace this new modern workplace paradigm without creating undo risk for their businesses. In short, they are saying, “Help me protect my data.”

Dell’s Brett Hansen at Dell Security Peak Performance 2015 

Kevin: IT security has been mostly infrastructure-centric. Today you are talking about a data-centric protection approach. How does Dell plan to help its customers navigate this different approach in implementing IT security?

Brett: Infrastructure-centric is a great term for describing the traditional approach to IT security. For years when people have talked about protecting data, they’ve equated the concept to how banks protect our money. In protecting your money, banks use locks, security cameras and armed guards to keep the money in one place — the bank vault. That approach, however, won’t work if the money needs to move or flow. Today’s modern economy depends on the ability of money to flow and the velocity of that flow improves the business of banking. It’s no different when you’re talking about data for a modern business.

Kevin: At Dell Peak Performance we heard that enterprises have suffered over$600B in cybersecurity losses this year against just a $200B investment to protect against these losses. What should senior decision makers and IT professionals learn from this statistic?

Brett: This is a lesson for the IT department as well for every CEO. In the past, cybersecurity has been considered a side conversation, but, today, it is a key element of just about every aspect of a company’s operations. That makes it a true business imperative. As companies build their product development, human resources and operations strategies, they must address cybersecurity as a key component of these central business decisions.

Kevin: With respect to cybersecurity, do you have any industry specific insights that you can share?

Brett: Every industry is affected by the cybersecurity challenge. This has become a reality over the last 5-6 years. In health care, for instance, rich media and broadband access has combined to enable doctor-to-doctor international collaboration. While this capability can clearly save lives, it also presents challenges to IT professionals who are tasked with meeting privacy and security mandates imposed by regulatory requirements like HIPPA. Manufacturers, on the other hand, with a very different information technology heritage, are now facing similar cybersecurity challenges when it comes to the protection of intellectual property. The manufacturing industry is actually playing catch up to some other industries as they work hard to improve IP related data protection capabilities. The proliferation of multiple device makes this even more difficult.

Kevin: With the FCC now empowered to sue companies that suffer data breaches, legal risks in this area have grown exponentially. Do you have any final comments or specific recommendations for corporate decision makers?

Brett: For too many years cybersecurity has been an afterthought. First, to repeat something I’ve said before, cybersecurity must now be an integral part of many core corporate decisions. Secondly, companies must accept that the old paradigm of locking down, restricting, prohibiting or dictating how information technology is used by their employees no longer works. Your best employees will find a way to get around your corporate dictates in order to get their job done. You must create and deliver IT solutions that balance productivity, accessibility and collaboration in a way that still protects corporate data and information.

Kevin: Thank you for sharing your insights today.

Brett: You’re very welcome.

This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.

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Personal email:Pathway to Cybersecurity Breaches

As a business communications tool, email is the dominant option, and many corporations have policies that allow the use of personal email on corporate computers. In a recent Adobe Systems commissioned online survey of 400 U.S. white-collar, adult workers, more than 90 percent of them admitted checking personal emails at work. The workers questioned in the poll estimated they spend 6.3 hours a day checking emails, with 3.2 hours devoted to work emails and 3.1 hours to personal messages. Nearly half of the respondents also said that their use of emails for work will increase in coming years with 19 percent saying it will go up substantially.

Employers generally have the discretion to monitor and restrict employees’ personal computer usage as they see fit and, in most cases, email messages are not subject to any personal privacy laws. But even with these stipulations, Dell SonicWall channel partner Michael Crean, President and CEO of Solutions Granted, says that allowing personal email on corporate PCs is just not worth the risk. Solutions Granted, a small veteran-owned business, is certified as a SonicWALL Managed Security Service Provider. According to Crean, the threat of malicious attacks and subsequent remediation cost far outweighs any gain from allowing personal email access. “If your employees need to check their email in the car, they use their personal phone. So why can’t they do the same at work?”

Email phishing, the attempt to acquire sensitive information for malicious reasons by masquerading as a trustworthy entity, is a significant cybersecurity threat.

“In one incident investigated by Dell SecureWorks, attackers phished an employee at a manufacturing company to obtain the login credentials for the company’s Citrix platform. The attackers were able to use the credentials to connect to internal corporate resources, then move laterally through the network and harvest intellectual property using the company’s Altris platform, which remotely distributes new software and patches to all the endpoints.”

The most sophisticated attacks are grouped in two categories:

• Indirect Phishing Attacks –attackers direct a series of emails, usually in combination with organizational information from other sources such as LinkedIn, that add up to a successful phishing campaign. An example would be an employee being tricked into giving away Yahoo credentials as part of an attack, which can give access to contact or calendar information. Another example would be an employee with a cloud-based company email (i.e. Office 365 or Gmail for Business accounts) could be successfully phished. This could give the attacker a platform for sending malicious emails that appear safe.

• Direct Phishing Attacks – Cybercriminals seek login credentials for actual business systems. During Q2 2015 security analysts found multiple examples of phishing attempts on Outlook credentials. Aside from email access, these credentials are frequently used for domain logins, providing an attacker with access to other cloud-based services, such as Dropbox or Salesforce. This sort of breech could also provide an attacker with direct access to corporate proprietary information.

Phishing is often described as spam and, according to Secure List, generally followed the same template:

• Very little text (the email generally contains a typical header consisting of several words which is exactly repeated in the body of the message)
• One or more links which load a brightly decorated picture (sometimes in parts) with all the necessary advertising data (a more detailed advertising text plus contacts: website address, phone number, company name)
• Another long link that leads to a resource that corresponds to the content of the email
• Additional ‘white noise’ text to bulk out the email

The white noise text consists of random phrases or single words in any language which may not be the same as the language of the mass mailing. This text is generally invisible to the reader of as it is written in white or pale color on a standard white background.  Email is also often used to distribute malicious attachments in Microsoft Word or Excel.

Phishing is an equal opportunity threat with “Global Internet Portals”, which include email and search portals taking the brunt of the attacks. As a trusted advisor to their customers, Solutions Granted recommends the following:

• Severely restrict or eliminate employee access to personal email via company-owned assets;
• Don’t let preferences of your human resources team overrule the need for IT security; and
• Use industry proven cybersecurity technologies and best practices.

This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.

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IEEE Cloud Computing: Legal Clouds

The new issue of IEEE Cloud Computing is now available!  

This special issue looks at how to balance

privacy with legitimate surveillance and lawful data access. Some of the specific areas covered are:

•     Balancing Privacy and Surveillance in the Cloud;
•     Data Flow Management and Compliance in Cloud Computing;
•     Anonymous Credential-Based Access Control Scheme for Clouds; and
•     End-to-End Privacy for Open Big Data Markets.

This issue also features articles on cloud forensics and the strategic value of cloud.

I am also very proud to present my debut article for IEEE; "IEEE GovCloud: Making a Difference for Global Governments":

On February 8, 2011, then United States CIO Vivek Kundra released the US Federal Cloud Computing Strategy[1]. In the executive summary he laid out the inefficient state of affairs that was the US Federal Government’s IT environment:
 
The Federal Government’s current Information Technology (IT) environment is characterized by low asset utilization, a fragmented demand for resources, duplicative systems, environments which are difficult to manage, and long procurement lead times. These inefficiencies negatively impact the Federal Government’s ability to serve the American public.

Cloud computing has the potential to play a major part in addressing these inefficiencies and improving government service delivery. The cloud computing model can significantly help agencies grappling with the need to provide highly reliable, innovative services quickly despite resource constraints.”

These words heralded the start of the US Federal Government’s Cloud First policy. It also turned out to be the start of a global trend towards the adoption of cloud computing services by governments around the world...."

 Please visit the IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine homepage for more!

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This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.

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Cloud hosting: Look beyond cost savings and weigh pros, cons

Is your company struggling with the idea of using “cloud hosting” in order to save money?
Truth be known, using cost savings as the primary reason for moving to cloud will almost guarantee failure. Some reasons that typically lead to cloud computing costing more include:

• Building and migrating to a private cloud, which will almost always cost more than staying in a traditional data center;
• Migrating legacy applications that weren’t designed to operate in a virtualized environment or are tied to very specific environments run on older operating systems or require out-of-date drivers;
• Special or very unique auditing requirements;
• Failure to modify or update enterprise IT policies to reflect the new IT consumption model; and
• Failure to modify operational practices in a way that takes advantage of the “pay-as-you-go” economic model.

With that said, however, over 82 percent of companies have saved money just by implementing cloud computing, 14 percent were able to shrink the size of their IT department and 80 percent reported extreme productivity improvements.[1] That means that moving to the cloud can actually make money!
An organization’s decision to move to the cloud is, above all else, a cultural change that could affect much more than the IT department.
First, using either cloud computing or traditional data center hosting comes with a decision to outsource all or a portion of your organization’s IT infrastructure. This should drive your initial decision of whether to consider cloud computing as a viable option. Although characterizing these observations as advantages or disadvantages depends on the enterprise’s specific situation, environment and requirements. Generally accepted views are reflected in Table 1.

 

Second, I’d like to point out that the term “cloud hosting” is very misleading. Even though it is broadly used in the marketplace to represent a fusion of cloud computing and data center hosting, the two business models are complete opposite.

• In data center hosting, the customer dictates the hardware, software, security, and operational processes that will be used by the provider. The provider will customize the offering to meet those dictates. The customer bears the capital expense of doing this through a long-term financial agreement with the provider.
• In cloud computing, the cloud service provider dictates the hardware, software, security, and operational processes that can be used by the customer. The provider typically will not customize their offerings to meet customer dictates. Because the capital expense of building the cloud offering is borne completely by the provider, it recoups the cost through a pay-per-use operational charging model.

This background is essential to putting the advantages and disadvantages of both into perspective because they are driven by their respective embedded business models. See Table 2.

The choices between outsourcing vs. insourcing or cloud computing vs. data center hosting are not a science, nor are they absolute. An organization of any significant size will most likely pursue an “all the above” strategy with constant corrections driven by cultural and business environments. As soon as you’ve made a decision you’ll probably start the process all over again.
So, my final piece of advice is to plan for and expect constant change because the most successful organizations have change management as a core competency.

For more views regarding this important decision, you should check out the following:

• Outsourcing Vs. Insourcing: You Need Both
  
• Cloud, Colocation and the Transforming Data Center: What You Need To Know
• Colo in the age of cloud
• The Total Cost of Ownership: In-House vs. Cloud-Based Development Environments

 This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. For more on these topics, visit Dell's thought leadership site Power More. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don't necessarily represent Dell's positions or strategies.

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