Information Technology Navigator

In “Part 1” of this blog series we covered some of the basic Microsoft Azure questions surrounding security and backup. In this post, I dive into frequently asked questions around migration best practices and how to get started with a pilot project.

Q. How do I go about data migration to and from Azure?
 
A. The most effective way to migrate data to and from Azure is by using the Azure Import/Export service by creating “jobs” and shipping portable, encrypted disk drives to the Azure data center. Each disk that is shipped is associated with a single job, and there are different kinds of storage specific to each job. All in all, this is a very economic method of transfer.
 

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Ready to dip your toes in the public cloud waters? Many of our clients are in that situation, while others are pursuing a “cloud-first” strategy. Regardless of where you are in the cloud journey, I thought I’d share some of the key factors to consider when evaluating one of the most popular public clouds, Microsoft Azure. We see Azure helping enterprises of all sizes deliver on the agility and scalability required to support business growth, but before you jump in, here are some questions you should be asking and our answers to them:

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Reporting-as-a-Service (RaaS) is gaining momentum by providing IT organizations with the analytics and visibility they need to better understand their heterogeneous storage, unstructured data, backup, SAN fabric and virtualized environment. At Daymark, we’ve seen a big uptick in interest in RaaS, but like any relatively new managed services offering, there are questions. Here are some of the ones we get asked the most.

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Data protection. Storage professionals have been worrying about securing, backing up, and restoring data pretty much since computers came into use. And just when you think you’ve got it figured out, there’s a new wrinkle – a new regulation, a new data source, a shorter backup window, and endless new technologies to manage it all. Here are answers to some of the most frequent questions our customers ask in the never-ending battle to protect data and manage data growth:

Q. What’s the most common missing element in an enterprise’s data protection strategy?

A. Two things come to mind – First, an active and consistent review of backup success, as indicated by the ability to perform an effective and timely restore. And second, a lack of policy based backup that mirrors the enterprises’ document retention requirements.

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To outsource or not, that is the question – and it’s becoming a more frequent conversation among CTOs. Outsourcing an application or workload to a 3^rd party managed service or cloud provider can deliver multiple benefits, from reducing CAPEX costs to freeing IT staff to work on more strategic initiatives. But before you jump in, it’s important to make sure you are partnering with the right service provider. Here are some of the questions you should ask:

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Oracle backups have always been a challenge to manage and support given the disparate administration groups typically involved. If you are a database administrator (DBA), you need the flexibility to efficiently create backups and run restores for development cycles and upgrades. Backup administrators need to balance the backup schedule with resources and prioritized data.

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Here at our headquarters in Lexington, MA, we recently held one of the first Veritas NetBackup 7.7 Advanced Administration Training classes in New England. As NetBackup aficionados, we were anxious to learn what the certified instructor had to share on what’s really new in the latest NBU 7.7 rev.

Beyond the marketing hype, here are the 5 takeaways we believe fellow IT storage admins will find worthwhile:

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Many of us have a closet, attic, or even a basement corner for all the things that we’re not using but just aren’t ready to throw away quite yet. We just assume we’ll get to sorting what stays and what goes some other day.

The same is true for businesses – and usually the larger the enterprise, the more dark data they have. Many IT departments are burying huge amounts of data, resulting in digital mountains that are increasingly unwieldy to manage, let alone easily search through when key data discovery is needed.

Does your IT organization fit this description? If so, it’s time to recognize you have a problem. It’s called digital hoarding. You, my IT friend, are a data hoarder.

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Given the great highs and lows experienced by financial institutions over the past 10 years, there’s no doubt that today’s industry is highly resilient.

The same is also true for the industry’s IT teams. In the past, IT has been routinely asked to navigate everything from mergers & acquisitions to sophisticated security threats and emergent application demands from a fast growing segment of mobile consumers.

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A document retention policy is in reality a document destruction policy. Therefore, a key reason for an organization to adopt a document retention policy is to establish a program for the deletion/destruction of information that is not required for business, regulatory and other needs. This reality is made necessary by the fact that digital information is growing at an unprecedented rate and that much of it is contained in “unstructured” storage such as email, SharePoint and shared network drives. Data hoarding not only increases direct information technology costs but it presents other substantial risks and costs to an organization ranging from discovery of “smoking gun” documents during investigation, litigation or audit; to reputational damage from information security breaches (hacking).

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