IT Services

Millions of business users-and their laptops-travel through busy transportation hubs worldwide each year.  With summer gearing up, it's the perfect time to travel, relax-and have sensitive business data lost or stolen.  

According to the Ponemon Institute, every year a staggering number of laptops are lost or stolen, most of which contain valuable-and highly sensitive-business data.  Today we're expanding our Dell ProSupport commercial offerings to protect business assets and data with Dell ProSupport Mobility Services, a new group of services aimed directly at tackling this for our customers to help them stay protected while connected.   

Some of the new options include:

• Laptop Tracking and Recovery
• Remote Data Delete
• Hard Drive Data Recovery
• Certified Data Destruction
• CompleteCare Accidental Damage
• Extended Battery Service

 
Also released today is the latest research from the Ponemon Institute.  Sponsored by Dell, the Notebook Lost & Found Study surveyed more than 800 business travelers, with some sobering results that might keep an IT manager or two up at night.

• 630,000 laptops are lost each year, most of which are lost at airport security checkpoints-between 65-70% of these are never reclaimed
• 53 % of business travelers carry customer or employee data on their laptops
• 65% of business travelers have not taken steps to protect sensitive corporation information on their laptops
• 42% of people say they do not back up their data 
• 16% of people would do nothing if they lost their laptop while traveling on business
• 77% of people say there is "no chance" or less than a 10% chance they would recover their laptop if lost in an airport
• 99% say they have never lost a laptop but 84% say they know someone who has
• 70% of respondents agree or strongly agree that they rush from the time they arrive at the airport to the time they board the flight
• 61% of people worry that security checkpoints will cause them to miss their flight

For a full copy of the report, more statistics, and tips and tricks for staying protected and connected, visit http://www.dell.com/getprotectedandconnected. 

Dell ProSupport Mobility Services are available to customers in the U.S. and Canada through Dell sales representatives or through Dell Registered Channel Partners.   Mobility services will be available in Latin America, Europe and Asia in July and August.

Wired has a fascinating series of articles on its site describing what it calls the Petabyte Age.

According to Wired, “Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different.”

Our related version of this concept is the Connected Era. The way people connect and communicate is changing, and changing the world. A truly globalized information technology infrastructure and those who build, run and use it are creating this new connected era.

Bottomline – storage plays a critical part in this ever expanding infrastructure. I’ve seen reports predicting that the amount of information created this year will surpass available storage capacity. I’ve also seen estimates that medium and large orgs can expect a 55% CAGR for file storage over the coming years.

To help customers plan, manage and protect their petabytes, we’ve just announced a series of storage consulting services. We also announced a partnership with GlassHouse Technologies to plan and implement DR plans.

Let’s get connected – just don’t forget the storage.

Very interesting video discussion between Steven Schuckenbrock, our CIO and President/SVP Global Services and CNET News.com’s Dan Farber.

From a CIO perspective he talks about how we’re transforming our own IT practices and implementing “green.” As SVP Global Services he’s asked about ITaaS, SaaS, and cloud computing.

Chris Evans, the Storage Architect, had an interesting post last week about how two airports in Europe were closed recently because a couple WWII bombs were found.  He then goes on to discuss data storage "time bombs", one of the biggest threats to archived data.

Data archiving repositories are probably the best hedge against losing data in the digital dark ages.

I've thought that archiving services are the best option for most businesses.  Why do this yourself if you don't have to?  I would rather not be responsible for the details if there are others who are going to specialize in it.  Security and privacy concerns have to be addressed as do redundancy and survivability.

Brett Ortega faced a challenge. He is the redevelopment and project manager, of American Baptist Homes of the West.

ABHOW's mission is to enhance the independence, well-being and security of older people by providing housing, health care and supportive services.

Brett discusses their increasing technology needs - all over wireless access, adding more servers without adding data center space are a few examples.  His team of 8 IT pros and 7 technicians did it. And saved a bunch of money and went green at the same time.