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31 December 2009
SME Disaster Preparedness Survey – two sample findings from the Symantec report.
Most SMEs instinctively know a certain percentage of their customers will extend goodwill to them should they experience a disaster and need to recover their business. But exactly what percentage of their customers will extend that goodwill has always been at best a guess. Now they have a hard number to work with: 39 percent of their current customers will abandon them if they are affected by a disaster.

How well are SMEs protecting virtualized server environments? Over one third (36 percent) of SMEs do not backup their virtual environments. This percentage of unprotected virtualized servers in SMEs coincides with about the same number of organizations (35 percent) that do not protect their virtual servers which Symantec found in a previous 2008 survey.

For a full copy of the survey contact us.

18 December 2009
H1N1 Pandemic - Just whom do you believe?
Dr Osterholm of the University of Minnesota writes there are three critical questions that should be front and center for you, your family, and your organization:

1. Has this pandemic to date been a big deal or has this been a bunch of hype? Or maybe it's been somewhere in between?
2. Where are we in this pandemic experience? Is it over—or is another big "shoe" about to drop?
3. If it's not over, what should you be doing for yourself and your family to be better prepared, and what should your organization be doing?

We have Dr Osterholm's answers so call or email us for his wise predictions.

11 December 2009
Security concerns are holding back cloud computing adoption
A new Forrester Research study is the latest in a line of surveys which have identified security concerns as the main factor which are inhibiting the uptake of cloud computing.
According to the ‘Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009’ survey 49 percent of respondents from enterprises and 51 percent from small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not using cloud computing.
The survey of more than 2,200 IT executives and technology decision-makers in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US is Forrester's largest annual survey of emerging hardware trends for both enterprises and SMBs.

4 December 2009
IT Cloud-based services gain ground rapidly: but confusion still exists
The storage industry is still confused as to why cloud-based services are deployed within organizations, reveals a survey conducted at Storage Expo 2009 by Hitachi Data Systems. Despite this concern, businesses still believe that cloud technology will grow in importance for their organization in 2010.

The majority of survey respondents (79 percent) said that organizations deploy cloud-based services to save operating costs and just over half (57 percent) stated capital expenditure savings as a reason for deployment. Other reasons that respondents gave for deployment were business continuity (40 percent) and supporting business growth (32 percent).

Nonetheless, respondents are still confident that cloud-based services will impact their organizations more in the coming year. The majority of those questioned (76 percent) said that the cloud would be important to its organization in 2010. This contrasts with only 56 percent that stated it was important at the moment. When asked the same question about virtualization, 98 percent said it would be important in 2010 and 95 percent believe it to be important now.

Steve Murphy, vice president UK & Ireland, at Hitachi Data Systems expressed surprise at the survey findings, stating:
"The results show an alarming misconception around the reasons why organizations are using cloud-based services. Due to the limited information about cloud deployments to date, there is little evidence to suggest that it genuinely results in cost savings for the organization. Until present security and compliance issues with cloud storage are resolved, moving to a cloud computing model might actually be costly to an enterprise in terms of data loss or fines for non-compliance. For these reasons, it is equally surprisingly that IT workers think organizations would deploy these services to achieve business continuity and business growth."
"The cloud looks set to be a major hot topic just as virtualisation has been and continues to be. It is not surprising that organizations will be investigating cloud-based services over the coming year, due to the hype surrounding the technology. There is certainly a case for the private cloud in the enterprise but public cloud-based services still have a long way to go before becoming a viable business proposition."

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