October is Cyber Security Awareness Month. What's Your Plan?

If you thought last year was a challenging year for cyber security, 2022 is proving to be even more difficult. Weekly cyberattacks jumped 42% across the globe this year, according to CheckPoint Research. The list of threats is long: supply chain attacks, ransomware threats, attacks on Costa Rican and Peruvian governments, and the fallout of perhaps one of the most serious zero-day vulnerabilities in history, Log4j, followed by the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Huntington Beach Union High School District is comprised of high school students in the 9-12 grade range across three cities. Prior to the pandemic, the school district had issued students their own learning devices, but the students were the only ones poised for mobility. Teachers and administrators had fixed learning devices that anchored them to their classrooms. When the pandemic hit, the school district did not have the infrastructure in place to support remote learning.

Alliance Residential Company, one of the largest multifamily housing real estate developers in the United States, needed to rebuild many of its internal corporate support departments, including the IT department, after its sale of its management division.

My past several blog posts have been talking about the characteristics of a modern communications platform. We’ve talked about the technical things we need to pay attention to in order to deliver a better end-user experience. We’ve talked about the embracing of a mobile-first philosophy, the need for an 11-digit E.164 dial plan to enable better directory integration and click-to-call, the advantages of SIP signaling for endpoints, and so on. We’ve still got a few topics to talk about, but I wanted to share a personal experience I had recently that reminded me why it is so critically important to have these modernization conversations proactively as opposed to waiting until it’s too late.

Maintaining an optimized, healthy, and modern IT infrastructure is crucial for the survival of any business. ConvergeOne Managed Services, powered by OnGuard, allows IT staff to rest easy knowing that a highly-skilled team of engineers leveraging an industry-leading management platform are watching over their customer’s environment. OnGuard has been developed by ConvergeOne from real-world engineering insights and decades of experience managing client infrastructures.

In my last blog post, I discussed the differences between hyper-converged infrastructure and traditional data center infrastructure. Now that you understand the value of shifting to hyper-converged infrastructure, what do you do next? Let’s say you’re preparing for your data center refresh. You’re planning for some growth in storage and performance, and you have to future-proof for the next three or perhaps even five years. Not only that, but you also have to reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO), which involves reducing your data center space, cooling, and power. You’ll be looking to streamline your operations and gain cost efficiencies along the way, too.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the fastest-growing trends taking over data centers today. Many organizations have either already moved or heavily considering moving to this architecture. So, what’s the big deal about hyper-converged infrastructure? Let’s begin with an explanation of the traditional data center design and what differentiates hyper-converged infrastructure from it.