How Can This Happen? California warns of lost parent-child data

When I read the news about California officials warning that personal information about parents and children in child support system was missing....I was a little more than shocked.  Here is the real kicker...The contractors are IBM and Iron Mountain.  They said "could not locate several specialized computer storage devices."  Apparently, stored data was being transferred from an IBM facility in the state of Colorado to California, and some devices holding information were missing upon arrival.  Information unaccounted for included people's names, addresses, social security numbers, and places of employment.

Whenever your data is being transferred via a physical device, you are at risk.  We have a local company in my city that drives around town picking up tapes.  I often wonder if people realize how vulnerable they are using such an approach for backup and offsite storage.    This is a good reminder to revisit your offsite storage approach.  The staff at VAULT400 will be happy to discuss options even those that do not include their offering.  

United Computer Group Releases Profile

United Computer Group (Owner of VAULT400) recently released a Corporate Profile Document celebrating their 25th anniversary.  You can learn more about United Computer Group by clicking here.

United Computer Group is a technology solutions provider for the mid-market.  UCG is conveniently located in the Cleveland, Ohio area.  This allows them to effectively service their over 1,000 IBM Power Server clients in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other surrounding states.

VAULT400 in Security Newsletter

I thought the advertisement in the SecureMYi Security Newsletter was pretty clever.  I must admit this was the first time reading this newsletter and I found it quite informative.  Anyway....here is the clever picture:

Disaster in U.S: An Extreme and Exhausting Year

I read this article in Yahoo news about 2011.  Triple digit temperatures, Tornadoes, Wild Fires and FLOODS have pummeled the U.S.  It seems like more than ever the need for appropriate backup and disaster recovery is critical.  Read Yahoo article.

VAULT400 Competitor was "Fired"

Competitor was "Fired".  VAULT400 initially lost the business due to lower install and support costs.  Unfortunately, the client did not experience the savings nor support they had expected.  They suffered from a serious lack of service!  As you will read in this article from IT Jungle by Dan Burger; Managed Service Providers (MSPs) need to deliver project management skills.  There needs to be continual communications on project status and especially on potential problems.  A vendor who calls itself a managed service provider better be big on service.

77% of Businesses Experienced Data Loss Last Year

Check Point and Ponemon published the results of their survey.   Security Complexity in 21st Century IT Environments, show respondents cited customer information (52%) as the most common type of information compromised – in addition to intellectual property (33%), employee information (31%) and corporate plans (16%). With the adoption of Web 2.0 applications and more mobile devices connecting to the network, organizations are challenged with enforcing better data security and IT Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) requirements.

According to the survey of over 2,400 IT security administrators, the primary cause for data loss resulted from lost or stolen equipment, followed by network attacks, insecure mobile devices, Web 2.0 and file-sharing applications and accidentally sending emails to the wrong recipient. In addition, approximately 49 percent of all respondents believe their employees have little or no awareness about data security, compliance and policies – encouraging business to integrate more user awareness into their data protection strategies, as people are often the first line of defense.  Link to complete artcle

Related articles

• Business must report data breaches to public, EU says (zdnet.co.uk)
• Largest data breaches of all time (flowingdata.com)

Top 10 IBM i Product and Technology Trends for 2011 : Data Vaulting

VAULT400 was singled out in the Top 10 Trends article in IT Jungle.

An excerpt from the article: Hosted DR/HA, and D2D
One of the most widely adopted cloud applications in the IBM i community may be data vaulting and hosted disaster recovery (DR) services. By sending their data over the wire to companies like Vault400 ... IBM i shops are getting rid of their tape drives and tape-based backup processes, while keeping data safe from outages and disaster.