Virtualization + Cloud Equals Perfect Storm for Disaster Recovery Services

RKON CTO Marc Malizia’s article “Virtualization + Cloud Equals Perfect Storm For Disaster Recovery Services” appeared on CloudTweaks, a leading cloud community for cloud news, analysis, infographics and more. Click here to read the full article.

Not very long ago disaster recovery was a luxury afforded by only the very large companies due to the prohibitive cost and effort required.  Frequently even these large companies were unable to justify the investment and went without a disaster recovery plan. Today, virtualization and cloud enables companies of all sizes to implement a scalable, highly efficient disaster recovery plan without a huge investment.

Costly and Resource-Intensive Disaster Recovery of Yesterday

At one time, investment in disaster recovery came in one of two forms: build a replica or subset of the production-computing environment at a secondary site or contract with a disaster recovery provider.  These disaster recovery providers maintained data centers equipped with compatible computing platforms upon which a company could restore their environments when a disaster was declared.  The latter was often the more feasible solution since the service provider was able to leverage their hardware investment over a pool of customers thereby lowering their per unit cost and passing some of the savings along to their customers.  Though, I have heard many companies complain over their $50,000-$400,000 monthly costs to maintain their contract for a secondary site disaster recovery location. These exorbitant fees did not even cover the customer’s annual testing costs to simulate a disaster and test their recovery process that often included IT staff members rolling through airports with cases of backup tapes…

Click here to read the full whitepaper.

Organizations on Average Hit Every Three Minutes with Malware: How Vulnerable is your Organization?

Threatpost.com reported that an organization on average experiences a malware-related event every three minutes, often involving business-related spear phishing and targeting technology companies. Those findings were included in a new report on advanced persistent threats released by researchers at the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab and drawn from 89 million events the company’s appliances gathered worldwide during the second half of 2012. Click here to read the full article.

RKON provides a full suite of threat management and security assessment solutions. Learn more about how to protect your organization by having a vulnerability assessment conducted by one of our security engineers.

Evernote Hacked – Millions Must Change Passwords

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and instructions.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that any of the content you store in Evernote was accessed, changed or lost. We also have no evidence that any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed.

The investigation has shown, however, that the individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords. Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.)

While our password encryption measures are robust, we are taking additional steps to ensure that your personal data remains secure. This means that, in an abundance of caution, we are requiring all users to reset their Evernote account passwords. Please create a new password by signing into your account on evernote.com.

Click here to read more.

Windows “Blue” already

Rumors are already flying all over the place…

Windows Blue development has passed Milestone 1 (no details as to what that entails). The next milestone is called MP, or “Milestone Preview” because Microsoft will release a preview version of Windows Blue after meeting that milestone. The Milestone Preview will precede the final product by “a few months,” so developers and early adopters can work with it. Win8China claims that RTM is scheduled for June 7, at which point Blue will be made available on MSDN, followed by general availability in August. Blue will be free to Win8 customers.

Windows Blue will be faster, use less power, and run with a new, smaller kernel, version 6.3 (recall that Win8 runs kernel 6.2). The UI hasn’t changed — no Start button, no Aero. Windows Blue will support more screen scaling — presumably for smaller (and larger?) screen sizes. There’s some talk of “multi screen applications,” although in the context it isn’t clear if that refers to Metro apps. Not much change for PC and mouse users.”

What will the next version of Windows have in store for us?

Click here to read more.

F5 BYOD 2.0 SOLUTION – F5 Mobile App Manager

F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, announced F5^® Mobile App Manager, a new hybrid cloud solution for mobile application management that enables organizations to safely and cost-effectively support enterprise BYOD initiatives. With F5 Mobile App Manager, enterprises can extend corporate applications and data to employees’ personal mobile devices while leaving all personal content under the control of the device owner.

F5 Mobile App Manager delivers the following benefits to enterprises:

• Improved security – Using the App Wrapper functionality in F5 Mobile App Manager, IT can secure internally developed and third-party applications quickly and easily before making them available to employees on mobile devices. When F5 Mobile App Manager is used with BIG-IP APM, IT can create a secure application VPN for corporate applications. And because BIG-IP APM utilizes the customer’s on-premises identity stores, employee information stays on premises, minimizing the risk of identity theft.
• Improved user experience – Employees are more comfortable knowing that their personal content is completely inaccessible to IT, won’t be automatically wiped in the event a device is lost or stolen, and that device functionality (such as the camera) cannot be restricted. F5 Mobile App Manager also requires minimal storage space on the device, and because enterprise applications don’t run constantly in the background, they help preserve battery life.
• Cost savings and reduced IT overhead – Because F5 Mobile App Manager is a hybrid cloud solution, IT avoids costly hardware and infrastructure investments and saves time by managing and securing enterprise content only rather than entire devices. In addition, organizations that have been using MDM solutions reduce their VPN costs by handling only enterprise-related traffic rather than all mobile traffic (business and personal).
• Scalability – F5 Mobile App Manager can easily be scaled to meet an organization’s growing demand to support employee-owned devices. The proven scale and performance of BIG-IP APM, which supports up to 200,000 concurrent users, ensures that the mobile infrastructure scales cost effectively.

Click here to read more.

Hidden Security Risks on Enterprise Networks

The Check Point 2013 Security Report sheds light on what is hiding on corporate networks, and the major security risks organizations are exposed to on a daily basis:

Hidden Security Threats 
From crimeware to hacktivism, cyberattacks will continue to evolve this year, impacting organizations of all sizes. The research revealed that 63% of organizations were infected with bots, and more than half were infected with new malware at least once a day. The report reveals a list of top threats, including the most infamous botnets, top malware location by country, top vendor vulnerabilities and exposures, and SQL injection events by source country, among other surprising findings.

Risky Web 2.0 Applications
The surge in web 2.0 applications has given criminal hackers unprecedented options to penetrate corporate networks. The research found 91% of organizations used applications with potential security risks. These risky web applications are brought to light in the report, including frequency and usage of anonymizers, P2P applications, file storage and sharing applications, and top social networks – all of which can potentially open a backdoor to enterprise networks.

Data Loss Incidents 
Corporate information is more accessible and transferable today than ever before, leading to higher risk of data loss or leakage. More than half of the organizations studied had at least one potential data loss incident. The report exposes the different types of sensitive data leaked and lost, including PCI related information as well as HIPAA–protected health information. It also sheds light on the industries with the highest tendency toward data loss.

Click here to read more.

Are you getting the most out of your WAN Optimization?

Did you know that misconfigurations in your Riverbed Steelhead environment could impact the effectiveness and speed of your WAN Optimization?

RKON can provide a complete health assessment of your Riverbed Steelhead environment. We will check your configuration to determine if your WAN connections are properly configured, following industry best practices, and taking advantage of the newest Riverbed Steelhead code releases. Your current operating firmware will be checked against what is offered in the newest stable build to see if you are missing out on new features and improvements.

Click here to ensure optimal performance from your WAN.

Secret Backdoors found in Firewall, VPN gear from Barracuda

Krebs on Security recently reported that a variety of the latest firewall, spam filter and VPN appliances sold by Barracuda Networks Inc. contain undocumented backdoor accounts. While the backdoor accounts are apparently set up so that they would only be accessible from Internet addresses assigned to Barracuda, they are in fact accessible to potentially hundreds of other companies and network owners. Click here to read the full article.

If you are looking for network solutions for your company, contact RKON. We provide network, security, and virtualization solutions, support, and managed services.

Applying Operational Metrics to Measure our Service Level

RKON’s Operations Team is committed to providing superior client service. We continually monitor and measure the level of service we provide to our clients through client satisfaction surveys, feedback, reporting, and process-driven operations.

Overview of the Statistics we Measure

• Average 1st Response: This is the average time it takes to get an operations engineering resource engaged on an incident once the ticket is created in our system (24x7x365 days).
• Service Level: All calls placed to our Operations Center are measured and reported. Our goal is to field all incoming calls in 20 seconds or less during regular business hours Monday through Friday. This metric identifies the percentage of calls that were fielded within 20 seconds.
• Customer Satisfaction Survey Results: This is the average rating that the operations engineering resource is receiving from the client on returned Customer Satisfaction surveys. The surveys are emailed out after an incident has been closed and the engineer is being rated by the client for that particular incident. The score is based on a rating of 1-5, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest rating.

Click here to see our October 2012 Report.

Windows for the Mobile-Cloud Era

Citrix revealed that Project Avalon, which is designed to simplify this transition, will be delivered in two major releases. The Excalibur release, available this quarter as a tech preview, will feature groundbreaking advancements in simplicity, scalability and rich multi-media services needed to deliver Windows apps and desktops to millions of new consumer style mobile devices. The Merlin release, available as a tech preview next year, will focus on Windows as a cloud service, simplifying and automating infrastructure deployment and management across virtual infrastructure, private clouds and public clouds, while enabling self-service subscription for users and departments.

Key Highlights of Excalibur Release:

• FlexCast 2.0 for Simple, Unified Service Delivery
• Reinventing HDX for Mobile and Video
• New HDX EdgeSight for Real-time Analytics and Service Visibility
• Support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

Key Highlights of Merlin Release:

• Self-service Provisioning, Management and Service Orchestration
• Open, Scalable, Any-site, Any-cloud Architecture
• Mix-and-Match Releases for Uninterrupted Service Upgrades

Click here to read more.