Portal:Storage

Wikitip

Mobile platforms bring unique security challenges

IT must step up to the security issues of mobile computing. Laptops and high-end smartphones in particular are a major target for theft, and while most thieves are just after the device, which they wipe clean and fence, some may be sophisticated enough to realize that the information on them, and the access to corporate information through them, is often much more valuable to competitors than the phone itself. Wherever possible users should be discouraged from saving sensitive information on laptop hard drives and required instead to access that information only through secure network connections. Good password practices, including changing passwords periodically, should be enforced. Every mobile employee should have an electronic wallet on his device where he can store all his passwords under strong encryption, giving him only one password that he needs to remember and eliminating the common practice of jotting passwords down on a slip of paper kept in the wallet or of using obvious passwords such as a child's birth date. And devices themselves should be equipped with a strong, password-activated locking system that encrypts all sensitive data. Really sensitive data should be double encrypted – once in the application and a second time by the device locking system. Of course none of this is perfect, but if it becomes more expensive to crack the codes than the information is worth, then the information on the device, if not the device itself, can be deemed reasonably secure.

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Featured Case Study

Virtualization Energizes Cal State University

John Charles is the CIO of California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) and Rich Avila is Director, Server & Network Operations. In late 2007 they were both looking down the barrel of a gun. The total amount of power being used in the data center was 67KVA. The maximum power from the current plant was 75kVA. PG&E had informed them that no more power could be delivered. They would be out of power in less than six months. A new data center was planned, but would not be available for two years.

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Featured How-To Note

Storage Virtualization Design and Deployment

A main impediment to storage virtualization is the lack of multiple storage vendor (heterogeneous) support within available virtualization technologies. This inhibits deployment across a data center. The only practical approach is either to implement a single vendor solution across the whole of the data center (practical only for small and some medium size data centers) or to implement virtualization in one or more of the largest storage pools within a data center.

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