Posted on Thu, Apr 15, 2010
We're not sure if Wallis Simpson (the Duchess of Windsor) had it right when she famously said, "A woman can't be too rich or too thin," but when it comes to business and computing, the Duchess was spot on.
Certainly, there's no such thing in commerce as too much profit.
And, with Wyse thin client (and even zero client) computing, the benefits of "thin" are in, in ample supply.
Shed worries, not services with thin client
Thin client computing, where data, operating system, and applications all reside on a server in the data center and are delivered to users via the Web, improves security, manageability, availability, reliability, scalability, and reduces total cost of ownership.
Thin client computing is flexible too, running on UNIX/Linux, HTML apps, Microsoft Windows Terminal Services, Citrix Applications Delivery, and VMware VDI, or even combinations of these operating systems.
Users interface with their desktops as if they were PCs, virtually unaware they're working in a virtual environment (unless the Red Sea parts again and somehow users actually notice how much more reliable you've made their IT systems).
Security
Thin clients don't have a local storage device; without one, there is no place for viruses and other malware to reside. Protect the server and you've protected all your users' devices, whether a handful of them or a global enterprise's worth.
Without a local storage device containing data, the risk of losing data to thievery or falling out of compliance with privacy regulations likewise is reduced. When the time comes to upgrade, update, or maintain security software, it's all done in the data center.
Manageability
Everything from configuring users' desktops to deploying new software gets simpler to manage with thin clients. Backups are a breeze because IT manages it in the data center, no more worries that units have been left disconnected and thus miss the backup cycle. And, with updates delivered centrally to the server version control is maintained for every desktop in your inventory.
Availability
Absent any moving parts and armed with solid-state technology, Wyse thin clients never really fail to deliver the data users need. The servers hold the data and keep viruses and malware at bay.
No cooling fans and no disk drives means thin clients are nine times more reliable than PCs. The reliability of the entire IT infrastructure gains dramatically as a result.
Total Cost of Ownership
No mechanical parts to fail, none to maintain; no place for malicious code to reside, none to remove. And, fewer cooling fans use less electricity reducing your carbon footprint and your electric bill. Research shows that thin clients can cost as much as 40 percent less--some $1,000 per seat per year.
Scalability
For growing enterprises, thin client computing takes all the trouble out of deploying new units to users. Plug in three or four cables on-site and everything else is configured and delivered from the data center, saving time and money.
If your environment is already, or will soon be, virtual it's difficult to think of a reason not to adopt thin client computing.
Cost savings are substantial at every juncture in the delivery of IT services to the desktop; security is improved; management of the infrastructure is simplified, and enhanced, at the same time; and as your organization grows, your costs in time and resources to bring another user online are as minimal as they can be.
Is your company considering implementing thin client computing? What are your main concerns? Leave your comments below and let's get the conversation going!
Posted on Wed, Apr 07, 2010
Settling on a managed services provider (MSP) is not unlike any other long-term relationship, personal or professional. It may not be "until death do you part" (at least we hope not), but it's no less intimate or challenging.
Here are some things we've found make for a successful relationship between MSP and client:
1. Skill-set
Your MSP has the right skill-set for your enterprise, and years of experience to prove it.
2. Flexibility
Options, options, options; how service is delivered, what controls are in place, oversight, and accountability.
3. TechNOWology
Your MSP is so close to the cutting edge, it often feels like you're getting tomorrow's technology today.
4. Modus Maximus
Best practices, constant refinement, and innovation describe your MSP's methodologies.
5. Modus Fastimus
Your MSP understands the value of time and uses it wisely.
6. Discretion
Customer data is handled carefully, confidentially, and securely.
7. Portfolio
A full complement of services, whether delivered in-house by your MSP or by one of their trusted partners rounding out their services portfolio.
8. Clarity
You established clear objectives with your MSP from the start.
9. Compatibility
You're going to be seeing a lot of your MSP during the life of the contract. You two connect well culturally, communicatively, and you see yourselves working well together over time.
10. Focus
The terms of the deal are important, but you also kept an eye on the long-term goals while hammering out the terms of the contract with your MSP.
11. Execution
Sales is sales and delivery is delivery. You and your MSP paid attention to the details of delivering on the promises.
12. Enunciation
Your specifications and instructions to your MSP were as detailed and precise as possible.
13. Great Expectations
MSPs are no different than anything else you buy: You get what you pay for, so set your expectation levels accordingly.
14. Responsibility
Outsourcing is not a ‘set-it-and-forget-it' proposition for you. Your MSP is shouldering the load, but you haven't shirked your responsibility for oversight and management.
15. C-straight
Senior level execs on both sides of your MSP deal have signed off on the deal ensuring high-level stakeholders on each end.
16. Out-right
You looked at your goals and consequently outsourced the right projects, not just the ones you don't like doing.
17. Clean Slate
You didn't just offload your dirty laundry on your MSP. You turned over a manageable situation, not one that requires insight into your history, culture, or business context, things your MSP couldn't possibly know.
18. Survey Says
You tied your SLA metrics to your customer satisfaction survey so you and your MSP know when you're succeeding and when you need to make improvements.
19. Homework
You did your due diligence, checked your MSP's references, standing in the business community, and the IT community, and everything checked out before you signed on the dotted line.
What other ways has your organization benefited from working with an IT Managed Services Provider? Let us know in the comments!
Posted on Mon, Mar 22, 2010
Not too long ago, offensive material arrived in a "plain, brown wrapper," its contents known only to sender and recipient, and only those two parties were impacted by what was inside the wrapping.
Today, not only are there more types of objectionable material than ever before, but the ubiquity of the internet facilitates more channels to deliver more contraband to more people, more quickly, than ever imagined.
Millennia ago, those with malicious intent hid inside really large gifts (think Trojan Horse), then attacked their enemies in the middle of the night. Nowadays, well, malice still arrives in a Trojan horse, it's just a much smaller, and far more potent, weapon.
There was even a time when digging a trench around the castle and filling it with water was sufficient to protect all the master's assets.
But today's Web-engaged enterprises face assaults from a much broader geography than the perimeter of the castle grounds-the entire planet.
And so, the need to safeguard the enterprise via Web filters-whether to combat phishing or pharming attacks, stem malware, or prevent objectionable material that puts the organization at risk civilly, criminally, or both, from crossing your digital threshold grows more pressing each day.
Consider this when contemplating Web filtering software and tools:
Billions of Web pages pose potentially billions of threats to be sorted through every time someone in the organization logs on to a PC or workstation;
The diversity of these pages, and the way users and groups interact with them, are essentially limitless; still, too many restrictions can constrain productivity and demoralize your workforce.
The Web landscape changes; Constantly. Keeping a current database is critical.
Your own landscape is challenging; servicing remote sites, limited budgets, and resources, no shortage of regulatory compliance to abide by.
Nothing says, "We don't trust you," like a monitor from Big Brother
Nothing sours a relationship-any kind of relationship-faster than a lack of trust.
So, when, as is sometimes the case, employees take offense that their organization is considering, or implementing, a Web filtering system, a little education is in order.
The workplace is not home. The public school or library is not home. Every user has the potential to expose countless others to harmful materials; shareholders rightfully expect their investments will not serve as conduits for clandestine or illegal pursuits.
Web filtering software, properly deployed and judiciously managed, is the modern-day moat keeping the castle-the enterprise-safe from today's threats.
| To learn more about protecting your corporate networks from attacks and security breaches, visit CBE Technologies' Security Portal to find out how CBE Technologies' can help you procure and monitor a security system that enables protected business communications and high security, without compromising performance. |
Posted on Tue, Mar 09, 2010
If ever an endeavor were all about the information, it's education.
Information moving from teacher to student, student to teacher, teacher to parent (and of course, vice versa); administrators, staff, the educational community at large, all exist solely to transfer knowledge from generation to generation.
And, what moves information better and faster-thus, lubricating the wheels of learning-than the Web? Nothing.
As Web apps continue to penetrate (and improve) education, the question for IT soon arises, how best to leverage the Web, via the cloud or VPN? It's not a simple question; every district, every institution, every situation is unique.
But, just looking at where IT is headed, the forecast definitely calls for things to get a lot ‘cloudier' in the short- and long-term.
Why? Lower costs, simpler management, and better utilization of existing resources, to start; better access for all and better education, to boot.
On Cloud 9
Solutions like webNetwork, a joint offering from Dell and Stoneware, enable educators to quickly, easily, and inexpensively float private clouds to serve their own needs exclusively, or in collaboration with other districts or institutions.
The net effect, if you will, is students with access to projects and documents, anywhere, anytime they can access the Web; teachers are no longer tethered to the classroom, they can view or update assignments in real-time; parents are as plugged in to their child's educational progress as they choose to be, all with the click of a mouse.
It's tough enough finding a needle in a haystack when you know where the haystack is.
While some argue a VPN is more secure than the cloud, others point to the fact that it's very difficult to locate something if you don't know where it is to begin with.
Since one of the key benefits of cloud computing is that data gets stored wherever it's most efficient to do so at the time, try finding where a specific data-set resides in a cloud. Pardon our grammar, but it ain't so easy.
And besides, it's not like there isn't rigorous security being applied in the cloud too.
Who would have ever thought cloudy skies would be a good thing?
For IT, the benefits are as tangible as those of the educators they serve:
- Lower hardware costs
- Web apps cost less to license than off-the-shelf software
- Simplified IT management, increased scalability, and freedom from endless software updates to end devices
- No need to purchase or manage a VPN
No matter where your educational enterprise is today, there are, no doubt, clouds on the horizon. But, with this type of cloud, the only thing that may rain down upon you are happier internal clients, showering you with compliments.
| To learn more about other options for improving your educational institution's IT services management, visit CBE Technologies' Education Portal to read our latest case studies we've created and discover other solutions available for educational computing needs. |
Posted on Thu, Feb 04, 2010
Is it that you don't like saving budget for more valuable endeavors, things that generate revenue or help your enterprise meet mandated standards more cost-effectively?
Not likely.
Maybe you don't want to leverage and maximize the investments you've already made in infrastructure?
That can't be.
And, we know it's not that you prefer having to manage multiple storage environments when one console will do.
Public sector or private, in IT, to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. With data propagating prolifically and no end in sight, right about now, a lot of folks are asking themselves whether it's time to implement virtual storage in their environment.
If you have to ask, you probably already know the answer.
If storing data hadn't become an issue, the question wouldn't have arisen.
But fortunately, virtualization technologies-notably in storage-are mature enough now, and their benefits quantifiable and real, making the answers more apparent than ever before.
Consider the upside of virtualizing your storage with companies like Datacore Software:
- With storage virtualization you can change your storage configurations without downtime; no more internal customers griping over data migration.
- Storage virtualization gives you one centrally managed console; your physical disks now look and feel like one unit.
- Whether you inherited disparate legacy systems or just like to "keep your vendors honest," heterogeneous storage environments are managed as easily as identical drives with storage virtualization.
- Your tiered storage architecture is set free; you can migrate data to the optimal drive for it anytime a data-set's priorities change.
- Storage virtualization enhances other systems' performance; helping to boost the performance of subsystems, overcoming sluggishness and reducing things like provisioning times from days to minutes
So, as your data pours in over the transom, the question, "Should we virtualize our storage?" is perhaps no longer relevant. The questions instead may be, "Why shouldn't we virtualize our storage?" and "What are we waiting for?"
Posted on Mon, Dec 14, 2009
Mirror, mirror on the wall, which virtualization solution-Vmware, Microsoft, or Citrix-is fairest of all?In the television special now being shown on HBO, The 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall Fame Concert, Bono (of U2 fame) takes the stage to explain what rock and roll means to him. "For me," he says, "it all comes down to one word: Liberation. Political liberation, sexual liberation, and spiritual liberation."
In a very real way, that's what virtualization is all about too. Liberating your hardware-your servers-from their physical constraints.
By unlocking your storage, by freeing up more server capacity, by setting your IT staff free to work on more important things than provisioning or moving servers, you can optimize your investment in technology (often by as much as 65% more in server utilization rates) and people.
But, like so many other things IT, the choice of which vendor to partner with, which provider's product to adopt is more complex than the complexity it always purports to reduce.
Here's our quick take on the state of the server virtualization market:
VMware (Vmware.com)
On the plus side of our evaluation equation, VMware is a solid player in server virtualization, holding the lion's share of the market.
Their ESX and ESXi hypervisors support Windows, Mac, Linux, and a few other operating systems, giving you the widest selection of guest OS support. Their selection of pre-built appliances is also the broadest offering available.
On the negative side, the management tools you'll no doubt want are not included and will cost you more money on top of an already very expensive, often perplexing pricing configuration and per-seat licensing fee.
Microsoft (Microsoft.com/hyperV)
One of the primary benefits of choosing Microsoft's HyperV Server is that it comes free as part of your Windows Server 2008 64-bit implementation. Licensing guest Windows virtual machines is thereby also a cost-effective part of this solution.
If you're already an MS shop, running the Windows family, this is potentially a good choice for you. But keep in mind, HyperV Server has limited management tools, in fact, just one: System Center VM Mamager.
Citrix (Citrix.com)
With its acquisition of XenSource a couple of years ago, Citrix positioned itself to be a major contender in the virtualization space and the investment is paying off.
Whether you choose the free XenServer Express or the licensed XenServer Enterprise, you're getting a powerful server virtualization product. The open-source solution (a big plus, in our view) runs Windows and Linux and all the management tools you could want are included with the enterprise version.
Xen Server Enterprise also manages HyperV, offers 32 CPU support, and Citrix's partnership with Microsoft ensures broad adoption.
While currently Xen lacks pre-built appliances, those are already in the Xen pipeline.
Combine the XenServer with XenDesktop and you have a rather complete, very flexible, end-to-end solution for all your virtualization needs.
Posted on Mon, Nov 23, 2009
I know you. I've seen you at the department store fragrance counter the day before Valentine's Day. We've met in line at the post office on April 15, sometimes just before midnight, haven't we?
You're not a procrastinator, you're just like the rest of us: time-challenged.
Be that as it may, January 1, 2010 is coming. And, from Weymouth to Williamstown, and everywhere in between, the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will expect you to be fully compliant with Mass 201 CMR 17, the legislative standards to which your enterprise will be held regarding the safeguarding of of Massachusetts' residents' personal information.
Make a List, Check It at Least Twice
The legislation itself is, as compliance dictates go, surprisingly simple.
Basically, Massachusetts wants you to follow industry-standard best practices for security and to have a solid plan in place in the event something malicious occurs with the consumer data you're charged with safeguarding while it's in your custody.
Mass 201 CMR 17 is itself a checklist of what's required of you and your enterprise.
Here's roughly what the law says and, better yet, what you need to do to make good come next January 1.
These are your "duties":
Put someone in charge of data security
If you don't already have someone fulfilling the role of chief information security officer, now's the time to fill that vacancy.
Risk management
Identify the internal and external risks to data security, confidentiality, and integrity. Make sure you have a training program to ensure employees are versed in compliance. Monitor employee compliance with policies. Upgrade systems as necessary. Store records in locked containers or facilities. Constantly work to improve detection, prevention, and responses to security threats.
Remember the home front
Got any telecommuters on your team? The way they access, handle, and transport sensitive data must be part of your overall security plan.
Justice served
Mass 201 CMR 17 requires that violators of your policy are disciplined for their actions.
Lock the gate behind them
Be sure employees who are separated from the organization no longer have access to secure data once they're gone.
The Partner Principle
Make sure third-party business partners have the means to meet compliance standards and are contractually obligated to do so.
Take only what you need
Keep the minimum amount of information necessary to serve your customers, nothing more.
Take stock
Keep an inventory of records and the devices storing those records.
Fact-check
You're required to routinely monitor the efficacy of your security program. Make sure your security practices actually work as planned.
Double-back
The new law requires a minimum annual review of your policy or a review if your business practices change substantively from the time you first implemented.
Report cards
Document your responses to any security breaches and how your business practices will change to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
Your system needs:
Secure user authentication protocols including: control of user ids and identifiers; secure means to select passwords with at least seven letters and numbers; secure locations to store passwords, separate from where the data those passwords secure are; access restricted to active accounts only; blocked access after multiple failed attempts to enter the system.
Secure access control measures including: restricted access to data, limited to those who need it; a unique identifier (not vendor supplied) in addition to passwords for those with computer access.
Encryption: No matter how it's transmitted, data must be encrypted.
Monitoring and review: Audit trails detailing access by users and non-authorized users, including success and failure of logins.
Review the reviewers: Periodic reviews of those auditing the user audits.
Firewall: Your enterprise needs a current, up-to-date firewall to prevent unauthorized users from gaining entry if your systems access the Web.
Up-to-date antivirus and antispyware: Your system must routinely update for virus definitions and software patches.
Records review: After a reported breach in security, records must be reviewed to determine whether or not the integrity of the data has been compromised.
Educate: Mass 201 CMR 17 requires you to educate your staff on the proper use of your security measures and the importance of computer security.
Put these measures in place and when those auditors show up at your door in the New Year, you can offer them the last of the eggnog and rest assured that your systems will pass inspection hands-down. Need help? Give us a call at 1-800-YES-TECH, Option 1 for help with compliance to this law.