Public or Private Cloud? Wrong Question

 If you're considering moving some (or all) of your applications to the cloud, your first question might be "public or private?" That's a false choice, though. According to Verizon's latest State of the Market Enterprise Cloud 2014 study, the breadth of cloud services available today can't be broken down that easily. It makes more sense to choose an appropriate cloud service for each individual workload based on these three criteria:

1. the risk profile of the workload 
2. how the workload and associated data are divided between your premises and the cloud service provider's
3. the amount of cloud environment management you're willing to shoulder

We couldn't agree more with Verizon's conclusions for assessing which variation of cloud, if any, is appropriate for your various applications. Download Verizon's free study — you'll find the details on pp. 5-6.

You'll also notice that Verizon lists all the services a cloud project might require: consulting, application portfolio evaluation, deployment and architecture design, "business of IT" support, active management of both on-site and remote cloud hardware and software, user and helpdesk support, and services around other IT areas affected by the cloud. Xantrion offers all of these services, and we're ready to help you start designing a plan to use cloud services in the ways best suited to your business.

One Foolproof Trick for Better Passwords

So you're using a password management tool to keep track of all your passwords. What if that tool gets hacked? That's not a joke — it happened last month at LastPass, a web-based service that encrypts multiple passwords. Although LastPass users' actual passwords weren't compromised, their email addresses and password reminders were.

The LastPass incident is a valuable reminder that the most secure place to store your passwords is still inside your head. But can you remember the password for every website you use without making the security mistake of reusing passwords? We certainly can't. That's why at Xantrion, we recommend and use a simple trick that generates passwords that are hard to crack but easy to recall. It just takes three steps:

1.  Start with a word you won't forget, and spell it with at least one special character. For example, "apple," spelled "4pp!e." You'll use this "seed" password in all your other passwords.
2. Come up with a simple algorithm based on the site's domain name. For example, you could use the first and last letters of the name as the first and last letters of your password
3. Combine the two. In our example, then, your password for WebEx would be w4pp!ex, and your password for Salesforce would be s4pp!ee.

You can make the details as complicated as you want, but as long as you remember the domain name and your personal algorithm, it's easy to generate unique, high-quality passwords you still won't have to write down or store anywhere.

Spending Smarter on Security

Are you putting your cybersecurity dollars where they'll do the most good? Probably not. A recent RAND study found that organizations aren't as strategic about security spending as they could be — and that as a result, their security costs will rise 38 percent over the next decade. On the other hand, RAND says that an effective security staff can cut the cost of cybersecurity by 19 percent in the first year and 28 percent by the tenth year.

Xantrion's experiences align with the study's results and its recommendations. We see technologies designed to detect and isolate intrusions offer less protection with every passing year as hackers come up with countermeasures to circumvent them. After a decade, these technologies have lost as much as 65 percent of their effectiveness. On the other hand, we've found that improving overall security hygiene and reducing risk exposure through measures like network access control, firewall policy enforcement, and patch management remain highly effective.

If you're looking for experienced security professionals who can deliver the most bang for your cybersecurity buck, contact Xantrion. We'll help you keep your protection levels high and your costs low.

How to Harness the Power of the Cloud for Security Conscious Organizations

According to a recent study by Verizon, while individual figures vary from survey to survey, the trend is clear - the cloud is now mainstream. Verizon research found that 65% of enterprises surveyed are using the cloud, and they are increasingly trusting more complex and mission-critical workloads to it.  They also found that 72% expect to put more than half their workloads in the cloud, including SaaS, by 2017.  That's up from 58% today.

Read the full article here