Today, many businesses invest a considerable amount of resources in the establishment of an infrastructure to protect the continuous operation and the compliance with statutory regulations. Managing unrestricted admin access is a kind of risk management issue faced by many today and Identity and Access Management solutions provides increased focus to secure the organization and protect confidential and personal data with a comprehensive and focused approach.

With information security having vital importance these days, identity and access management (IAM) technology have become an integral part of security tools, and most enterprises are realizing the value of the same. IT networks face increasing threats from inside and outside an organization. The need to comply with numerous regulations is driving users to adopt Identity Management technology. It is essential to establish the accountability around data access and management, and it is important that IT provide value to the company's employees by giving them smooth access to the business apps.

Many a time, traditional perimeter defenses can miss insider threats, for instance password disclosures and fraud due to staff involvement in addition to external online threats. To manage the occurrence of these threats, many IT departments are using advanced identity and access management (IAM) solutions. These solutions provide ongoing access to information, applications, and networks. Many businesses believe that security threats are purely external attacks. When threats come from within their organizations, encrypting data, updating their virus protection and fortifying their firewalls will not be enough to keep their organization safe.

Identity and Access Management is a crucial activity for the modern enterprise. Unofficial access to corporate data can have huge financial consequences. An inadequately controlled IAM processes can lead to regulatory non-compliance for the reason that if the organization is audited, the management will not be able to prove that company data is not at risk for being misused. Some organizations maintain multiple directories and multiple access systems, which cause difficulties in administration and sometimes may compromise security as well. Effective Identity and Access management is a combination of processes, technologies, and policies to manage user identities throughout their life cycle.

IT organizations look to fully implement IAM by combining the expertise of IAM professionals with an architecture that is prepared for IAM based on industry best practices.

Effective systems integrations along with effective identity and access management can help organizations reach their security goals in less time and better manage the cost of their solution. Invest in a solution that can to address specific requirements and meet the evolving needs of your business.

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Posted by kelton08 at 1:09 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 14 September 2012 1:13 AM EDT

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Globalization and technological innovation have led to the growth of IT infrastructures in every business environment. With such apparent infrastrucutre growth, the  corporate houses as well as small and medium business enterprises are faced by the challenges of increased energy and power cost as well  operational overheads. Organization in an attempt to meet these challenges has turned to use data centers. The extensive use of data centers today demands that these organizations reduce their carbon footprints and global warming.

Data centers which came into existence to meet the growing need for information storage and faster retrieval across the  locations, were dense with computer systems, networking and telecommunication equipment. Further, with demands for a customized software and applications in all walks of the product life cycle, critical business data had to be made available to the IT outsourcing teams. This called the need for strong information security methods. Virtualization of the data centers were aimed  towards making  efficient use of available hardware and software resources. However, with the eco-friendly requirement integrated into the business systems,  the IT giants worked on developing data center virtualization models which would help in reduction of energy consumption by nearly 80-90%. 

With green computing becoming the buzz word today, organizations tend to use environmentally bio-degradable materials and sustainable resources rather than hazardous materials as components for the data center infrastructure.  Further, data center virtualization allows organizations to reduce the number of hardware installed which brings in cost savings in sizable forms. However, adopting virtualization was easy without the requirement of  any large investments.

The growing demands for datacenter virtualization paved way for leaders in the IT industry  to extend their experience in  IT operations and management to both small and medium business organizations as well as the as large corporate giants.  These IT service providers offer the client organizations virtualization-as-a- service, besides the traditional virtualization methods across applications, networks and systems.

The data center virtualization offered by the leaders in the industry segment  can be enumerated as a 5-phase  lifecycle process. This includes -

·         Assessment and analysis of the performance statistics of the existing infrastructure, applications, its related business requirement.

·         Defining the requirements for environmental changes and bring about architectural changes through  operational design

·         Implementation and integration of virtual infrastructure with application and network

·         Facility Management and

·         Transformation

The client organizations benefits with facilities of virtualization without any upfront investment. Correct implementation of virtualization will establish valuable efficiencies like agility, flexibility, better network capacity besides reducing costs.

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Posted by kelton08 at 4:21 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 7 September 2012 4:27 AM EDT

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Technological growth of the organizations has helped them evolve with data centers that can multiply to cater for myriad needs.

Technological growth of the organizations has helped them evolve with data centers that can multiply to cater for myriad needs. However, with diverse groups managing the computer rooms, organizations are faced with the challenges of managing the segmented approach, inordinate cost of floor space, maintaining cooling conditions as well as system management.

To cater to the demands for an energy efficient data center that can provide the hosting and migration capabilities and seamlessly deliver to the global clientele, leading IT service providers have worked data center transformation strategies. The green data center strategy designed developed by them will not only be energy efficient but will also bring in the various services under the single service delivery framework with a single point of operations for the customer. By focusing on the core competencies, these leading service providers provides their customers with best of the breed solutions. Besides, they also collaborate with the global leaders in various fields to provide for a seamless end-to-end infrastructure services for integrated service delivery.

The green IT initiatives adopted by the enterprise will surely cover the technological dimensions, facility and management. This will help enterprises and IT organizations reduce their environmental impact by assessing, planning, and implementing initiatives around their datacenter environment. The next-generation data centers thus designed and developed besides providing for end-to-end data center services will also cater for Near-shore Co-Location Solutions, Business Continuity Planning, Cloud Computing and Mainframe Management Services.

Data center transformation solutions by the leading service providers involve understanding the data center technology, such as virtualization, power management and data center consolidation. Further, they also work on the data center facilities by bringing about structural and non-structural changes. The Audit and Gap Analysis helps to rebuild facility/assets to be energy efficient. Besides the experts in the field provide consultancy to ensure right performance for legacy systems and use energy efficient CPU models. As part of the non-structural changes, the enterprises make use of energy efficiency metrics and also quantifies the primary energy and carbon emissions.

The service providers in their effort to ensure smooth transformation into a green datacenter are compliant to the regulations, and manages the workload and optimizes the application performance and energy used by the servers. The datacenter management services by the service providers focuses on IT equipments along with their power and cooling requirements. By identifying initiatives for energy efficiency these service providers leverage on their strong expertise in data center transformation and help the customers achieve information security besides significant energy and cost savings.

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Posted by kelton08 at 6:09 AM EDT

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As enterprises grow so does the requirement for global information exchange amongst employees, suppliers, partners and customers. Today thanks to advancements made in technology and innovation it is easy to transfer huge chunks of data to any parts of the world within seconds. Though technological advancements provided new business opportunities for companies to explore, it also led to the growth of sophisticated cyber crime.

Technology advancements facilitate smooth business operations but if left unchecked it can lead to drastic revenue loss, legal liabilities, diminished productivity, and brand erosion. This is because as technology advances, cyber crime becomes increasingly sophisticated and pervasive. As more and more information is stored, processed, and transmitted electronically, the risks of unauthorized access both from internal and external sources increase. Since cyber criminals stop at nothing to put their devious plans into action, it is upon the enterprises to protect sensitive information from falling into wrong hands. Therefore, it is highly essential that all companies irrespective of whether they are big or small to implement effective security measures to protect information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording, or destruction. Information security is the indispensable part of any business operation and hence enterprises must regularly carry out training, assessment, protection, monitoring & detection, incident response & repair, documentation, and review to keep the cyber criminals at bay.

Moreover, ensuring information security is very much essential if enterprises want to comply with the different regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA), the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Personal Information Protection and Electronics Document Act (PIPEDA) and so on. Otherwise, it can lead to huge financial penalties, expensive lawsuits, loss of reputation and business.

Enterprises must be careful when looking out for service providers and must choose only those with end-to-end capability. They must help enterprises in not only building up business aligned information security framework but also improving the Return on Security Investment (ROSI). They must be adept at providing a wide spectrum of services such as Information Security consulting, Identity and Access Management services, Transformation & System Integration services, Managed Security Services and so on.     

Thus, information security is very essential as it offers strategic, financial, and technical benefits to enterprises and helps the enterprises to achieve the desired state of the information security robustness.

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Posted by kelton08 at 5:49 AM EDT

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Recently, a research conducted by Microsoft, it has been revealed that the daily power consumption of a typical data center is equivalent to the monthly power consumption of thousand homes, with a total of 61 billion kilowatt hours going toward datacenter energy consumption. If this pace is maintained then in the forthcoming three years we will require additional 10-15 power plants to keep up to the requirements.

Therefore, data center managers have two essential guidelines to follow, namely operational efficiency and application accessibility. Generally, these two often remain at odds with each other. For attaining operational efficiency a data center manager requires to introduce new technologies. However, when it comes to the deployment of new technologies there are certain application accessibility challenges. In addition to this, there remains the old school adage “if it is not broken, then do not fix it” that further leads to challenges in the adoption of new technology trends. One of the time tested ways of managing data center expenses and offering application accessibility is datacenter virtualization.

The concept of data center virtualization is a simple one – converting physical instances to virtual ones, hosting multiple virtual instances on lesser physical machines, and minimizes power consumption. Gartner in 2008 predicted that approximately 4 million virtual machines are expected by 2009 and 611 million virtualized personal computers are expected by 2011 with the IT architecture and operations deeply influenced by virtualization in 2012. However, globally architects are working towards finding out the appropriate application for virtualization and how can virtualization assist in power conservation?

According to computing language, data center virtualization is a broad term that indicates the abstraction of computer resources. The term was widely used back in the 1960’s. The process of virtualization allows one computer carry on the job of numerous computers, by resource sharing from a single computer across multiple platforms. The various forms of virtualization are:-

* Platform Virtualization – This is the separation of an OS from the underlying platform resources

* Resource Virtualization- This entails virtualization of certain system resources, for instance name spaces, network resources and storage volumes

* Application Virtualization – This consists of hosting of individual applications on a separate software/hardware

* Desktop Virtualization - This refers to the remote manipulation of a computer desktop

Today, eminent companies specializing in information security and systems integration has come up with innovative datacenter server virtualization lifecycle services. These services can help you attain benefits such as:-

CAPEX Savings from

* Partition

* Consolidation

OPEX Savings from

* Virtualized production servers

* High availability

* Enhanced disaster recovery capability

Strategic Business Benefits like agility & flexible through:

* Automated IT processes

* Available resource pools

* Capacity on-demand

* Data Center Operational Support

Data center virtualization is frequently implemented to assist business scenarios such as data center consolidation, disaster recovery, test and development and security. Virtualization is much more than a mere consolidation of physical services and reducing data center expenses. The technology has other useful impacts that range from optimal resource utilization to substantial savings in power, energy and management expenses.

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Posted by kelton08 at 3:22 AM EDT

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Virtualization technology is rapidly becoming the foundation of modern data centers. Not long ago, virtualization was all about server consolidation. Virtualization today is enabling businesses with greater agility. Before considering a virtualization project for your data center, it is important to first confirm if your facility can even handle the transition.

With data center virtualization, there is a direct impact is on the expenses and on wasted processing power and leans towards creating a green datacenter. There is no need to create a huge datacenter, just install powerful virtualized servers or running a huge number of servers can make a difference. Virtualization is an ideal tool for data center improvement. But if not designed and built correctly, newly virtualized systems can cost the company time and resources, creating confusion among departments. That is why it is important to take the time during the planning stage to look critically at your IT environment.

When implemented correctly, data center virtualization establishes valuable efficiencies and that can help contain costs. In a virtual IT environment, it helps businesses to increase utilization of their existing hardware by running virtual servers on fewer, highly scalable enterprise-class servers. Use of a virtualized datacenter tackles major space constraint in many organizations. Control costs, increase utilization, more responsive IT green initiatives. While the benefits of virtualization can sound impressive, getting there may present challenges without adequate planning. Many datacenter virtualization solutions ensure competency in hardware requirements, by enabling an organization to utilize lesser hardware to perform the same jobs.

To ensure that datacenter virtualization in your business is a success, ensuring security is critical. As with any implementation, the virtualized environment should follow the same stringent security controls as a physical one.  A good virtualization plan is tied to a good storage plan. Backup is highly essential.  Virtualization is growing because it can provide business continuity capabilities. Any Virtualization solution should provide a flexible architecture and the tools needed to help you manage capacity and include load balancing to ensure performance and fast response times and redundancy.  With datacenter virtualization, it is possible for enterprises to centralize IT management, outsource IT management and reduce the size of IT departments.

Datacenter virtualization empowers the IT department with tools for resource scheduling, data protection, and disaster recovery. It can help enhance your infrastructure performance. Team up with the best service provider with a service desk support who can combine security and reliability to accomplish an enabled enterprise.

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Posted by kelton08 at 2:28 AM EDT

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Security enterprise asset management is an organizational method and in most cases is available as a software application. Most companies provide this software utilizing a database structure. This application can work in cooperation with other operating systems as well. It shares data on a mixed platform, such as Linux, Sun Solaris, Windows 98/NT/2000 and many others.

Security enterprise asset management solutions are efficient and can function smoothly without affecting the flow of your daily activities. Under this a company manages its physical assets by evaluating the causes of their possible failures. Using this solution you can review methodically all the failures, their effects and causes and set up security measures and other important maintenance guidelines. Most IT service providers make of this solution as it can conduct automatic inventories of the companies assets and sets up a dynamic audit. Furthermore, it recognizes the actual location of assets, even if they are remotely placed in other organization networks.

Recently, eminent IT brands specializing in managed security services have come up with security enterprise asset management solutions. It involves all the activities linked with end-to-end tracking and management of assets that are:-

· Asset Discovery (Physical and Logical)

· Configuration Management

· Retire & Disposal Management

· Interface with Enterprise Asset Management Systems and Processes

· Enterprise security posture assessment

· Request & Approval Process

· Compliance to Regulatory Laws if applicable

· Procurement Management

· Create & Maintain Definitive Hardware Store

· Supplier/Vendor Management

· Re-Deployment and Movement

· Interface with complimenting, dependant ITSM Processes and Functions

· Physical Asset Tracking

· Assessment on ISO 27001 and PCI controls.

· Software License Management

· Contract Management (Support/Maintenance/ Renewals /Enterprise License Agreement)

· Create & Maintain Definitive Software Library

Service providers of enterprise security and asset management offer their users with accurate and complete data about the condition of their assets by sending regular updates. Users can quickly run and record associated searches and reports concerning their assets. It helps them and their agents to detect problems easily and pace up the remediation process. Furthermore, the solution helps to calculate the rollouts and enhancement costs. It can also manage the daily operation of logistical units, enabling the users to get involved in freight forwarding and transport unit repairs. It helps to come up with custom reports on the usage and sets up estimations on what might possibly occur. This allows the users to anticipate the requirements and expenses and remediate for problems that might arise.

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Posted by kelton08 at 3:23 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 2 August 2012 4:23 AM EDT

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Cloud computing is the technology that is in high demand right now. With the help of the cloud platform you can easily avail services from anywhere anytime with the help of a mobile device or a thin client. All the processes that are deployed on the cloud are easy to use and manage and this reduces your time and costs. In a world rife with competition you have to act wisely and promptly. The cloud services are quick which gives you an advantage to make critical business decisions accurately based on the real-time updates on the latest changes in the market.

The cloud computing technology has proved to be a boon in managing the IT costs. There is no requirement for any additional infrastructures or facilities. The infrastructure is highly integrated and leverages collaboration amongst the various IT processes and frameworks. Since compatibility between the processes is high the costs are reduced and efficiency is enhanced resulting in increased revenues and profits. The technology provides you with excellent network support services such as consistent and uninterrupted network connectivity and all latency issues are eliminated thus delivering an advanced and highly effective model.

The cloud computing technology deploys best ITIL asset management practices that produce optimum results. It contributes productively towards asset discovery, creation and maintenance of hardware and software libraries, physical asset tracking, configuration management, procurement management, request and approvals, contract management, vendor and supplier management, re-deployment and movement, retire and disposal management. The cloud provides you with standardized and comprehensive IT security consulting services for prevention of data leakage. You are provided with secure SDLC design and coding practices, source code reviews, regular audits and reports that help you in modifying your security strategies for more effective protection.

The cloud technology helps in the enforcement of a streamlined, automated, centralized IT management process that reduces all complexities and risks, and leverages performances. It provides you with consistent server monitoring service and enhances the visibility of the process. The processes that are deployed are energy-efficient and based on the lean management model that eliminates all wasteful procedures and helps in saving costs. You are also provided with superb service desk support that facilitates you to easily create requests, resolve incidents, reports incidents and review the status of your submitted requests.

The cloud help desk helps to restore normal operations without delays to avoid any adverse impacts on your business. With such profound capabilities you can expect high returns on investment in business and minimal damages and losses.

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Posted by kelton08 at 5:41 AM EDT

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The globally bound business organizations aim for newer markets and higher revenues. However, globalization with its benefits also offer these organization challenges of maintaining a vastly spread out organization. Nevertheless, technology has brought in a number of innovations that has facilitated the widely located offices of these enterprises to remain connected through the corporate network.

Corporate network is a  network service which as per Wikipedia definition is a service hosted on a computer network on a defined service protocol to provide functionality for end users of the network.  The client computers or end-users share the resources with the help of servers.  Further  technological  advancement led to increased demands for a stronger IT infrastructure  with more focus on the networked environment. Maintaining network security was another  challenging factor for the new age organizations. However, to ensure secure data transfers, the  network services were configured as local networks and wide area networks with a valid internet protocol address for every user accounts.

The aggressively competitive business environment led to network  services becoming the backbone of the global organization. However, the continuous increase in  IT infrastructure and applications  has  made the  network a complex environment. Business houses and corporate sector in need for an end-to-end   networked systems looked towards  organization which would provide them with seamless and highly managed network services.  Further, good support services are also essential in managing the networked environment. Outsourcing the management and network support services to experts will facilitate the global enterprises to focus on core issues.

The leading service providers with years of experience and team of experts   help the global  organizations with optimum and cost-effective network services. The  entire suite of  managed  services include conceptualization, implementation and delivery of LAN and WAN management, unified communication systems, management of the network operations center and IT security consulting for the networked environment.

However, for a network support service to be truly effective , requires the services to be open to the clientele 24/7. The expert teams  from the leading service provider are available at all times to provide solutions to problems faced in network system integration , implementation services, VoIP, WLAN management or network virtualization. A good network support service provider is one that ensures  integrated performance and end-to-end visibility across  the infrastructure landscape with   faster and timely communications through an online service desk and this forms an important part of customer relationships.

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Posted by kelton08 at 4:56 AM EDT

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There are plenty of changes taking place in application lifecycle management (ALM) with a large range of tools available to support application development. Organizations usually spend a lot on various point function tools that don’t work very well. The reason for that is these tools are in isolation and typically use traditional manual procedures to coordinate data that do not play well together. Integration is not usually present when it comes to choosing tools from different vendors to different lifecycle segments. For an optimum application development environment, an organization must connect these multiple lifecycle tools.

ALM fundamentally links business with software development like developing, testing, tracking and fixing etc. with a set of tools and applications that facilitate and integrate two groups. As all disparate tools across various functions need to be connected for the project stakeholders to share the required information, it is only when the right people are on the right projects at the right time that efficiency can be achieved. With Integrated ALM there is greater insight and better transparency for all business activities.

While most projects involve teams from different countries or companies with different cultures participate in application development, it becomes essential for an enterprise to accommodate different culture and tools, while remaining connected to ensure that there is no duplication of work and compromise of productivity. Integrated ALM helps overcome the challenge of a globally distributed environment. With efficient Application Lifecycle Management , not only is there an increase in productivity, the teams in the teams in the organization are also allowed to share the best practices for development and deployment. Developers can focus on the needs of the business while maintaining consistent quality and ensuring that the requirements and the expectations created for all end-users are met.

Integration of the application lifecycle stages brings huge opportunities for increasing the productivity of individuals and teams as it analyzes trends and implements metrics based management best practices. Although ALM reorganizes development, it also decreases the time it takes to develop the software and bring it to market. Teams can collaborate more efficiently and effectively, thereby eliminating human interface errors and time delays and helps get the most out of your investment in labor and technology.

Connecting tools has become a necessity for an organization to disseminate, implement methodologies and processes across the ALM Tools. Adopting one integrated and automatically synchronized software will certainly be advantageous. With efficient integrated ALM there will be a better synchronization between IT and the rest of the business to deliver a competitive edge in a globally distributed development.

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Posted by kelton08 at 6:26 AM EDT

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