Eminent IT / IS Managers from Industries in Central India participate in VMWare open forum on Business Innovation

Recently VMWare organized an Open Forum on Business Innovation at Nagpur. I am glad that I was invited to share the discussion panel with other IT Managers from leading industries of Vidarbha some of them being Mr. Sanket Joshi, Head IT, Vicco Laboratories & Mr. Pramod Pampatwar, Director Technical, Jhulelal Institute of Technology. The forum was moderated by Mr. Vikas Gupta, Head IT (Spend Management) at Essar Group.

Going Digital & Going Green: Evaluating Energy Consumption of Laptops / Desktops and other Networking / IT Devices

Power tariffs in India are still on a higher side and do demand a certain attention from the owner's end so that their power bills do not skyrocket ! With processing power of CPUs on the rise alongside the need of more and more IT gadgets like projectors, LCDs, Wi-Fi routers, Firewalls, Network Switches etc etc , which are switched ON 24x7, it is a good idea to have a first hand idea of their power consumption as well. 

Lets quickly run through why a Small & Medium Enterprise would bother about Energy consumption and energy conservation by IT hardware / gadgets:

SME vulnerability to data leak & security breach: Why Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking is getting important even for smaller organizations

In this post we shall discuss why even smaller organizations need to be careful when it comes to data security and why someone would be interested (read ethical hacker!) doing so.

1. Easy availability of Tools for Ethical Hacking & Network Penetration

A simple google search will give tools for Wi-Fi Hacking

Itis not new - China employees thousands of personnels who are continuously spoofing and monitoring networks and corporate / government servers around the world. But who are these people and what are their qualifications. These are young talented teenagers or would be teenagers who are just playing around with tools on the internet and have an affinity to technology. No formal degree or education is needed. All you need a simple laptop/desktop with a dedicated internet connection. Thats all! There are videos on Youtube to train on Ethical Hacking. Freely available tools and websites which will scan IP addresses for open ports.

Disaster Management: Backing up critical data in multiple locations / PCs and Why cloud backup may NOT be the best solution

While protecting data has always been a key priority for bigger organizations, in today's data-centric and highly analytical world, it is imperative that even smaller companies take definitive steps to protect their data. Any theft or loss of data may result it days to weeks of double data entry work and cause loss of essential man-hours - thereby increasing the operating costs. 

Multiple options are available ranging from low cost to paid cloud / private cloud based solutions depending the size and criticality of data. Before we begin it is always important to segregate your data into different levels of criticality so it will be easier to manage the backup solutions and invest in them.