Data Center

Today’s privacy environment is far different from the landscape that businesses faced only a few years ago. This movement began in the European Union, which in 2018 replaced its existing privacy rules with the General Data Protection Regulation. This sweeping privacy law provided broad worldwide protection for the personal information of EU residents. GDPR’s reach spread well beyond the European continent, as almost every large American company has some business presence in Europe. Organizations scrambled to understand the impact of these new regulations and update their European-facing websites to comply with the new standards.

In July 2020, privacy regulations hit closer to home when enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act began. CCPA provides GDPR-style protections to residents of California. Due to the difficulty of segregating information about California residents, most companies are choosing to apply CCPA standards to all of their customer information. In fact, many privacy experts suspect that other states will soon follow California’s example and pass their own consumer privacy legislation.

Here are a few things that you can do to make sure that your organization is ready for these new regulations and whatever is next on the privacy horizon.

Technology is more important than ever to the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. For many firms, IT is a top driver of deals, but it can also be a sticking point.

In its “Corporate M&A Report 2020,” Bain warns of the challenges posed by IT integration: “In a tech-enabled world, deal scrutiny is expanding to include issues such as data ownership and access to critical technology, often prompted by national interests, as well as the impact on future competition. The time, complexity and the resources to get deals over the regulatory hurdle are rising — it will take longer than you think and cost more than you expect.”

It’s essential for organizations to prepare for the integration process and enter it with their eyes open. These four types of technology tools can help to streamline IT integration.

It is an understatement to say that 2020 has been a year filled with unknowns. So, it’s not surprising that many organizations are holding off on planned IT upgrades, waiting to see what the future holds before they expend significant capital on a data center refresh.

Companies do, however, need ongoing support for their data center infrastructure. For those that had previously planned to replace equipment when the original warranty expired, some form of extended support will be necessary.

Business and IT leaders can choose between extended support contracts from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) or third-party maintenance (TPM) providers — each of which has its own unique benefits.

As companies across industries have discovered in recent years, hyperconverged infrastructure offers simplicity and scalability in the data center. While these benefits are important for almost any business, HCI can be particularly useful for financial firms.

Here are three ways HCI can help banks, credit unions and capital market firms face down common challenges in the industry.

State and local government agencies are making great strides in harnessing the power of data and applying it to problems in law enforcement, homeland security, emergency management, counterterrorism and cybersecurity. Realizing that data serves as a force multiplier, agencies are investing heavily in the design and implementation of next-generation work centers (NGWCs) that rapidly ingest and analyze massive quantities of information from social media, the Internet of Things, legacy data and other sources to provide decision-makers with valuable real-time intelligence. Here are six foundational technologies that NGWCs share.

When many businesses shuttered their physical offices and sent employees home in March, IT departments scrambled to scale up their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

At the time, the priority was getting users set up with remote access to the work resources they needed as quickly as possible, so IT departments largely received a pass for skipping the time-consuming steps that would have made their environments more efficient. But now that remote work is the “new normal” for many organizations, it’s important to take a step back and optimize those virtual desktop environments.

Business and IT leaders looking to build out VDI environments that work for their organizations should follow these best practices.