As discussed in previous blogs the topic of the “information explosion” seems to be top of mind for many IT execs today (unstructured data being the chief protagonist responsible for data growth in most companies). Many IT organisations have, until now, relied on the collapsing cost of storage as a risk mitigation technique & “band-aid” strategy (“well,  disks are no longer costing what they used to so we just broker very cheap deals and add racks to the datacentre”)..

This somewhat tactical and short-sighted approach has its obvious short-comings.. For one, 2002 was the last year in which disk price performance kept up with information growth. Secondly, all this “cheap” disk needs somewhere to live (and it needs to be cooled, powered, administered…).

It is predicted that the growth of data will be 800%, with 80% unstructured data in the next 5 years. While enterprise data is growing at a rate of 40% to...

St. Paul’s Cathedral has dominated the London skyline for more than 300 years, while almost everything around it has changed. From the street to the Shard, the traffic to the tourists, it’s all new, while the Cathedral has stayed the same. The same is true of the data that dominates our lives.

Although you might think data is constantly changing, it remains the one invariable in a dynamic IT landscape. Anyone the wrong side of 40 will remember the different eras of IT. First we had the mainframe period, then the dawn of the PC, followed by the brief, bright light of client/server computing. Next came the Internet and collaborative computing. Throughout the last 30 years, the bedrock of all those eras has been data. Yes, there’s more of it—unstoppable amounts in fact—but it’s always been there, always needed to be protected, secured, and kept available.

Right now, we’re in the post-PC era, where everything is Cloud-enabled, and...

The industry is buzzing right now with talk of “the information explosion”. In talking to customers and digging a little deeper, it seems that the trend of unmanageable and extreme data growth is largely the fault of “unstructured data” (email, video, social media, backups, powerpoint are all cited regularly is chief culprits).

Whilst an exponential growth in data and the storage devices necessary to store it are clearly in need of revised and sometimes disruptive new approaches, I can’t help but think that a “back to basics” philosophy might also be appropriate in many cases.. You remember, good old-fashioned IT service management discipline that we were told years ago would bring our IT shops into line (and that most of us never quite got around to implementing).

On recent visits to our customers and in discussing their current storage and “information explosion” nightmares, we have (in almost every case) needed...

The furious discussion about the appropriateness of the term Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) has finally died down and many people are now gun shy about using it. I’m okay with that.  I completely agree that the phrase was overused and over applied. But that doesn’t mean we should bury the term.  First we should properly define it.  Symantec has done that here.  Next, I’m going to go out on a limb and actually praise the use of the term APT.

So what’s to praise about the term APT?  Two things.  First, it was an extremely effect way of getting the attention of people who have for years been ignoring the risk of targeted attacks.  We were able to advance the conversation and get companies out of the mind-set that targeted attacks were something that happened to other people.  If you’re one of the ones that still need proof take a look at the data we...