In Depth

In Depth

Data protection regulations and compliance

• Europe’s proposed AI regulation falls short on protecting rights

  The European Commission’s proposal for artificial intelligence regulation focuses on creating a risk-based, market-led approach replete with self-assessments, transparency procedures and technical standards, but critics warn it falls short of being ...  Continue Reading

• How the pandemic changed backup

  The Covid-19 pandemic forced big changes in how people work – we look at impacts on backup, including increased reliance on the cloud, plus security and compliance vulnerabilities and ransomware  Continue Reading

• Backup failure: Four key areas where backups go wrong

  We look at the key ways that backups can fail – via software issues, hardware problems, trouble in the infrastructure and good old human error – and suggest ways to mitigate them  Continue Reading

• Backup appliances the hot topic for Pas-de-Calais fire brigade

  With requirements for strict, long-duration backup and archiving, French fire brigade set out to replace optical media with a StorageCraft appliance and disaster-proof storage  Continue Reading

• The 3-2-1 backup rule: Has cloud made it obsolete?

  The 3-2-1 backup rule was made for small-scale use in the pre-cloud era when tape still ruled. Is it relevant in the 2020s, or can we repurpose its fundamental principles?  Continue Reading

• Top five threats to compliance during the pandemic

  We survey the top five pandemic compliance threats – remote working, Covid tracking, criminal exploits, compliance measures slipping, and heightened enforcement to come  Continue Reading

• Five ways that disaster recovery changes in a pandemic

  Covid-19 has changed IT. Previously, working remotely was a business continuity measure, but now it is the norm. That means disaster recovery has to adapt to new risks and new ways to respond  Continue Reading

• Five key questions about Kubernetes backup answered

  We look at when to back up containers, what to protect, the main methods of backup for Kubernetes and the main Kubernetes backup products available in the market  Continue Reading

• Cloud DR from the Big Three: Who’s best at what?

  We look at cloud disaster recovery from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google to see which is best for provision of turnkey solutions, breadth of portfolio and modular building blocks  Continue Reading

• Data Dynamics aims at single view of unstructured data

  Data volume is ballooning, and storage is becoming more disparate, which makes the need for a single platform to manage storage and compliance a key requirement for organisations  Continue Reading

• Five key points about cloud vs in-house disaster recovery

  The cloud is well suited as a disaster recovery failover option. The key questions are about what you should keep on-site and what goes to the cloud. We look at five key points to consider  Continue Reading

• Need to know: Five key things about backup testing

  We look at five key things to consider when it comes to backup testing – what to test, how often, making sure backups work, whether recovery is effective and ensuring processes are consistent  Continue Reading

• Backup audit: What is a backup audit and why do we need them?

  Backup and recovery are vital components to protect against data loss, whether technical or causes such as ransomware. So how can a backup audit help protect our key assets?  Continue Reading

• Erasure coding vs RAID: Data protection in the cloud era

  Erasure coding has come to prominence with its use in object storage and, by extension, in the cloud. We run the rule over its pros and cons vs RAID data protection  Continue Reading

• Top five ways backup can protect against ransomware

  Ransomware threatens to put your data beyond reach, so the best way to prepare is to have good-quality data you can restore from backup. We look at the key things to consider  Continue Reading

• Top five ways to benefit from tape today

  We look at the benefits that tape can bring, including in backup and recovery, long-term and ‘warm’ archiving, compliance and WORM use cases and ‘air gapping’ to protect data  Continue Reading

• Double extortion ransomware attacks and how to stop them

  As ransomware attacks increase, hackers are diversifying their tactics to get victims to hand over larger sums of money. We investigate the rise of double extortion attacks  Continue Reading

• Getting physical with datacentre security

  Whether it is natural disasters, terrorism or break-ins, datacentres will be vulnerable to a range of risks unless they are physically secured. Here’s how you can improve the physical security of your datacentre  Continue Reading

• GDPR at two: How far we’ve come, how far we still have to go

  Marking two years of the General Data Protection Regulation, industry voices weigh in on the state of data protection and privacy, consider what has changed, and what still needs to change  Continue Reading

• Malaysia’s data protection practices still have some way to go

  Some Malaysian firms are not using data protection tools to the fullest potential, while others only think about data protection after a breach  Continue Reading

• Surveillance capitalism in the age of Covid-19

  Could the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic further consolidate surveillance capitalist practices and enterprises? Author Shoshana Zuboff warns Computer Weekly it is possible  Continue Reading

• What are the security priorities for the post-coronavirus world?

  The Covid-19 pandemic is forcing massive change across the business world and things may never go back to normal. What does security look like in this new world, and what will buyers be prioritising?  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Replication vs backup, and synchronous vs asynchronous

  Storage 101: Can replication replace backup? What are the pros and cons of synchronous and asynchronous backup? What’s the best way to mix backup and replication?  Continue Reading

• Contact tracing: The privacy vs protection debate

  The Covid-19 pandemic has necessitated extreme measures not seen in peacetime for over 100 years. Contact-tracing apps are being developed as a tool for managing the pandemic, but are they a step too far?  Continue Reading

• Snapshots 101: Array vs backup software

  We run the rule over snapshots in storage arrays and backup software and find a range of capabilities that go from mere support to fully snapshot-centric approaches  Continue Reading

• A carrot-and-stick approach to fixing cyber security complacency

  With a majority of IT decision-makers holding the opinion that their employers are complacent when it comes to data protection, we look at what needs to be fixed, and how to fix it  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Snapshots vs backup

  We go over the basics of snapshots. They are a quick and accessible way of protecting data, but they are not a substitute for backup. So how do you combine the two?  Continue Reading

• Multicloud storage 101: Pros, cons, pitfalls and strategies

  Not putting all your eggs in one basket can be helpful to an enterprise’s resilience strategy. We look at multicloud storage and the benefits and pitfalls it brings  Continue Reading

• NAS backup: Which suppliers have gone post-NDMP?

  NAS backup with NDMP has many drawbacks so some vendors have moved to a data management approach that tracks changes and allows for incremental forever protection  Continue Reading

• Top five compliance concerns for UK business in 2020

  We look at the top five legal and regulatory compliance concerns for UK businesses in 2020. It’s a list that includes GDPR, the DPA, PECR, PCI-DSS and the CCPA  Continue Reading

• What’s the problem with NAS backup?

  NAS backup has always been problematic, but what exactly are the issues with NDMP, and what are backup suppliers doing to make a decades-old storage staple easier to protect?  Continue Reading

• Top four compliance considerations for SMEs

  We look at the key data compliance regulations that affect smaller companies – such as GDPR, the Data Protection Act, PCI-DSS and PECR – and some key industry-specific frameworks  Continue Reading

• Six disaster recovery pitfalls and how to avoid them

  We look at some key pitfalls in disaster recovery, such as failing to plan, not testing the plan, not protecting backups, poor communication and neglecting the human element  Continue Reading

• Spread of Kubernetes spurs backup and disaster recovery products

  Growth of containerised applications brings with it the need to back up and provide disaster recovery. But what do you need to protect, and who provides the products?  Continue Reading

• DRaaS decisions: Key choices in disaster recovery as a service

  We examine the key decisions when considering DRaaS. Whether to go full self-service, assisted or managed will depend on what you need to protect and your in-house resources  Continue Reading

• Five ways that backup has changed since the days of tape

  Back in the day, all this was tape, but times have changed, with cloud-to-cloud backup, cloud storage, virtual and physical backup appliances and myriad endpoint hardware  Continue Reading

• Five essential steps to a sound disaster recovery plan

  We walk through the key steps to develop a disaster recovery plan – from risk assessment and setting recovery objectives, to the plan itself and a testing regime to keep it fresh  Continue Reading

• Get ready for CCPA: Implications for UK businesses

  The California Consumer Privacy Act, a wide-ranging data privacy and consumer protection law, comes into effect on 1 January 2020. How does CCPA differ from the EU GDPR regulations and what are the responsibilities for UK businesses operating in the...  Continue Reading

• SME disaster recovery made easy with cloud, hybrid and HCI

  Disaster recovery is a lot easier for small businesses than it used to be, with use of the cloud, hybrid cloud, physical and virtual appliances, and hyper-converged infrastructure all among the choices on offer  Continue Reading

• Taking responsibility for security in the cloud

  From accidental leaks to full-on data breaches, maintaining security across cloud services is becoming a headache for enterprises. What questions should organisations be asking of their cloud service provider and, ultimately, whose responsibility is...  Continue Reading

• ICO says UK police must ‘slow down’ use of facial recognition

  The Information Commissioner’s Office is calling for a statutory code of practice to govern how police in the UK deploy live facial recognition technology while controversy surrounding its use continues  Continue Reading

• How APAC firms can slay the storage management beast

  The data deluge and compliance requirements are shaping how Asia-Pacific firms are approaching storage management issues in the age of cloud  Continue Reading

• French baby store modernises backup as Veeam handles 150TB a night

  France-based maternity, baby and children’s store Orchestra needed to share IT resources between 700 points of sale across multiple time zones, and backup for 100 applications  Continue Reading

• Cloud snapshots and backups: How to protect data in the cloud

  You often need more data protection than native cloud services will give. But should you choose backup or snapshots? And what about third-party backup in the cloud?  Continue Reading

• Unstructured data compliance: Obstacles and solutions

  Stored unstructured data could be a black hole full of unknown risk. We look at the key dangers to compliance in unstructured data and some ways of mitigating the risks  Continue Reading

• Backup product approaches vary as they take aim at the cloud

  Use of the public cloud for backup data is something all the backup software suppliers provide, but implementations range from simple S3 connections to expansive software offerings  Continue Reading

• A cloud compliance checklist for the GDPR age

  The cloud is supposed to make things simpler, but when it comes to compliance, things can get complex. Here is a look at the essential elements of a cloud compliance strategy  Continue Reading

• Data protection, backup and replication in the age of the cloud

  A data protection and backup strategy has to take account of the expansion of the sphere of IT, from the datacentre to the public cloud to devices and locations at the edge  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged backup appliances bring flexibility benefits

  Backup appliances in scale-out format allow data protection to be scaled easily by simply adding extra nodes. But is it an idea that’s ready for the enterprise?  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Self-encrypting drives' benefits and limitations

  Self-encrypting drives are a cost-effective way to ensure compliance in certain situations. We look at self-encrypting drives, what they’re good for and their limitations  Continue Reading

• Data protection for containers: Why and how to do Docker backup

  Containers such as those from Docker are agile, lightweight and can be short-lived, but they and their data often need to be protected. We look at the key options available  Continue Reading

• How the internet of things and edge data impact data storage

  Remote device data poses challenges for the datacentre, but edge processing, analytics and the cloud can help businesses profit from the promise of the internet of things  Continue Reading

• Flash vs 3D Xpoint vs storage-class memory: Which ones go where?

  New media provide a range of options to speed workloads, from “old-fashioned” flash to storage class- and persistent memory. We help you exploit the storage performance hierarchy  Continue Reading

• Data recovery disasters: Kroll Ontrack on how it helps enterprises bounce back

  Data recovery expert Kroll Ontrack provides a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges enterprises and consumers face getting their files and information back when disaster strikes  Continue Reading

• DR 101: The disaster recovery plan and disaster recovery strategy

  We walk through the key steps and essential building blocks required to develop a disaster recovery strategy and how to write a disaster recovery plan  Continue Reading

• Hyper-convergence + backup software = scale-out backup nodes

  Hyper-converged infrastructure with built-in backup software brings scale-out capabilities to provide data protection nodes via pre-configured appliances that can build into clusters  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure and disaster recovery

  Hyper-converged infrastructure products merge server, storage and hypervisor in scale-out nodes, so how can functionality in HCI products help deliver disaster recovery?  Continue Reading

• Q&A: NetApp’s storage play in the age of cloud

  Storage supplier’s Asia-Pacific general manager reveals the changes that are taking place within the company to keep up with the changing tech landscape  Continue Reading

• Backup product survey: Cloud and VM integration now table stakes

  For enterprise backup, cloud integration and the ability to backup and be deployed in virtual machines as well as be controlled from the hypervisor are table stakes, along with data reduction and app-specific backup  Continue Reading

• GDPR brings serious implications for data storage

  New European Union data protection regulations put tough requirements on organisations that store “personally identifiable data”. We look at what is needed to achieve compliance  Continue Reading

• Backup testing: What to test, when to test, how often to test

  We run the rule over what’s involved in backup testing in virtual and physical server environments, how often you should test and the key pitfalls to avoid  Continue Reading

• Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?

  Making a backup is only the start of the process. You must be sure you can restore, that backups contain what you need, and that they will work with the applications that need them  Continue Reading

• Q&A: From backup to data management

  Beyond data backup, extracting more metadata to improve business processes and data management will become more important, says a senior Veritas executive  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery testing: technology systems to test DR

  In this concluding part of a two-part series, Computer Weekly looks at ways of testing disaster recovery plans, with methods including array-based replication and hypervisor-based approaches  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery testing: A vital part of the DR plan

  Disaster recovery provision is worthless unless you test out your plans. In this two-part series, Computer Weekly looks at disaster recovery testing in virtualised datacentres  Continue Reading

• Lauri Love: the student accused of hacking the US

  How did a brilliant but fragile computer science student from a rural English town end up facing life imprisonment in the US? Computer Weekly speaks to Lauri Love  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure product survey: The challengers

  In the first of a two-part survey, we look at the hyper-converged infrastructure market and the startups providing VM-native servers and storage, and datacentre-in-a-box products  Continue Reading

• Flash storage roundup 2016: Flash technology outliers

  Flash storage doesn’t just come in traditional drive format and PCIe card. There are significant outliers in the market that make use of custom flash modules, flash/Dimm and QLC  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and the cloud aid disaster recovery in Spain

  As virtualisation and cloud services take hold, Spanish organisations can take advantage of less costly and more flexible responses to the threat of unplanned outages  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation rolls on, but still less than 50% of workloads are virtualised

  Survey finds server virtualisation is top way to upgrade datacentres, while public and private cloud storage gains serious momentum  Continue Reading

• Hybrid flash array roundup 2016: The Big Six

  Will 2015 be remembered as the last big year of hybrid flash storage? The Big Six offer hybrid flash, mostly based on HDD-era designs, and innovation has slowed as all-flash rises  Continue Reading

• All-flash storage roundup 2016: The startups

  Computer Weekly surveys the startups and specialists in the all-flash array space and find a market in which advanced storage features are becoming the norm, while suppliers battle down to $1/GB  Continue Reading

• Microsoft’s underwater datacentre: The pros and cons of running subsea facilities

  Underwater datacentres can help providers save on land costs and cooling, but at what cost to the environment?  Continue Reading

• Take-up of cloud storage in Europe affected by privacy issues

  The cloud storage narrative has been heavily US-biased, with take-up of cloud in Europe modified by concerns over privacy and responses to Safe Harbour’s nullification  Continue Reading

• NAS vs object: Which one for large volumes of unstructured data?

  Both NAS and object storage offer highly scalable file storage for large volumes of unstructured data, but which is right for your environment?  Continue Reading

• The state of all-flash versus hybrid storage in Australia and New Zealand

  Magnetic disk drives are yesterday’s technology. Soon all servers will be based on all-flash arrays – or will they?  Continue Reading

• Interview: James Bamford on surveillance, Snowden and technology companies

  Investigative journalist and documentary maker James Bamford was among the first to uncover the secrets of the US National Security Agency and its global surveillance  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery planning: Where virtualisation can help

  The disaster recovery planning process is not fundamentally technology-centric, so when can virtualisation make it quicker and easier to restore services after an unplanned outage?  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and disaster recovery: DR features in VMware

  The key areas of functionality in VMware that can help with disaster recovery – including VMware backup, migration, high availability and replication  Continue Reading

• Big data poses storage challenges in Australia and New Zealand

  Big data is like digging for gold, except you must keep every single rock. Computer Weekly unearths some of the main challenges facing those mining data  Continue Reading

• How Asean organisations are untangling big data storage challenge

  If organisations are to benefit from the promise of big data they must get on top of a legal and regulatory minefield when it comes to storing data. How are Asean IT departments navigating this?  Continue Reading

• Russian organisations have confidence in virtual backup

  Russian organisations are content with the options available to them for backing up virtual servers  Continue Reading

• The truth about virtualisation and disaster recovery

  The fundamentals of disaster recovery are well-established. But there is uncertainty, and even false claims from suppliers, about how the rise of virtualisation affects DR  Continue Reading

• Russian personal data law set to come into force despite fears

  New law says all personal data submitted online by Russians must be held in the country's datacentres. But can the infrastructure cope and will the legislation deter foreign companies?  Continue Reading

• Virtualisation and storage: Five ways to do it better

  Server and desktop virtualisation bring many savings, but you have to work smart to ensure storage performs efficiently. We survey the top five pitfalls and how to avoid them  Continue Reading

• Demand for all-flash storage to accelerate in Australia and New Zealand

  Demand for all-flash storage will increase in ANZ, as a result of lower prices and greater capacities.  Continue Reading

• Automation and acceleration the Asian aspiration

  Storage infrastructures within Asean organisations are changing to support technologies designed to speed up, automate and centralize.  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery in Russia: Critical sectors play it safe

  Disaster recovery methods in Russia span tape backup to cloud disaster recovery, but for businesses in the most critical sectors in-house provision is the favoured method  Continue Reading

• How to cull old, potentially risky data

  Unused data is a potential security risk, with old spreadsheets, reports and email containing industry secrets and laced with company gossip. If it's no longer useful, it's time to delete it  Continue Reading

• Mobile device management (MDM) vs backup

  MDM tackles the challenge of mobile devices flooding the enterprise, but it doesn’t mean you can stop worrying about mobile data protection  Continue Reading

• VM backup drops off as DR motors on: what’s behind the survey figures?

  We look behind the storage and backup headlines in the ComputerWeekly.com IT spending priorities survey  Continue Reading

• Virtual server backup catches up with virtualisation in Poland

  Server virtualisation has swept Poland, but businesses are still catching up to the reality that backup requires a different approach  Continue Reading

• Challenges in virtual server backup and how to tackle them

  We look at the problems associated with virtual server backup and how they can be mitigated to ensure smooth and efficient data protection  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery in Turkey: Some businesses shine but many lag

  Overall disaster recovery readiness is poor in Turkey and the Middle East, but some businesses buck that trend  Continue Reading

• CW500: IT infrastructure for data protection

  The infrastructure to protect data is a thorny issue especially in an age where data is being proliferated throughout an organisation.  Continue Reading

• Backup vs archive: Can they be merged?

  As backup software suppliers build more archiving features into their products, we look at whether it’s possible to merge backup and archive systems  Continue Reading

• Principles of compliance in the financial services industry

  Compliance in financial services can appear a staggeringly complex web of laws and regulations, but some key principles apply, says Mathieu Gorge of Vigitrust  Continue Reading

• Big data storage: Hadoop storage basics

  Hadoop changes the game for enterprise storage. We look at how Hadoop crunches big data, its key storage requirements and survey the vendors  Continue Reading

• CW500: Thinking outside the big storage box

  Big data doesn’t necessarily mean big storage infrastructure  Continue Reading

• Public sector backup strategy: Easier than ever; harder than ever

  Public sector backup strategy is a complex beast that must operate in large and heterogenous IT environments.  Continue Reading