Our team has provided Chicago businesses and municipalities with IT outsourcing solutions for nearly 20 years and has always aimed to improve IT systems that increase their bottom line. We are honored to be recognized as one of the leaders in the industry by the TechAmerica Foundation amid such an elite group of innovators. We congratulate all our fellow finalists for their exceptional work.

Shawn Osborne, TechAmerica Foundation chairman, says each year, the caliber of nominations for the American Technology Awards increases. This is a true testament to the technology industry, and the foundation’s power for transforming the world around us. “We congratulate Prescient Solutions for their outstanding work, and thank them for their contribution to the growth and innovation of our vibrant industry.”

The awards are awarded on the basis of a thorough evaluation by industry experts and technology leaders. This year, TechAmerica Foundation – which educates industry executives, policymakers and opinion leaders on using technological innovation to advance prosperity, security and general welfare – will recognize excellence in 15 categories through the award program.

We are looking forward to attending the Technology and Government gala dinner in Washington, D.C, where the winners will be announced on June 20, 2013. Stay tuned for the results!

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This year, six thought-provoking keynote speakers, breakfast briefings with industry experts, product exhibits and more than 80 content-rich breakout sessions all gave us a better understanding of what is needed to support the ever-changing IT services and support landscape. A few key themes stood out as most important in better serving our customers:

• Cloud: The new job of IT in an increasingly mobile world requires the delivery of software and services via the cloud and a set of consolidated tools that seamlessly integrate into existing technologies and processes. A number of tools and processes that are emerging were discussed, which prepares us for the future.
• Information sharing: Our customers’ IT environment constantly changes. Successful improvement and optimization depends on many variables, but nothing is quite as critical as the cultural and human considerations. Sharing experiences with other companies, recognizing the most common cultural pitfalls, proactively discussing techniques for engaging and motivating the right resources provides for the best ingredients for establishing solid outsourcing strategies and partnerships.
• Digital impact: One of our keynote speakers, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, provided a glimpse into how advances in digital technology can be used to help create engaging, thought-provoking work faster than ever before, and all doing more with less. He offered his perspective on how business and technology have changed over the years.

We are already looking forward to HDI 2014! See you in Orlando!

What did you learn at HDI Conference? What would you add to our list of key takeaways?

 Tom Pettenon is the president and COO of Prescient Solutions.

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A hybrid cloud is a combination of private and public clouds. Using a hybrid cloud eliminates organizations’ reliance on any one system, internal or public, or on any one cloud service provider for greater flexibility. Hybrid clouds can also cut back on costs because they are essentially shared between organizations, while allowing companies to maintain business processes and implement additional or new services effectively.

Thinking about bringing the hybrid cloud to your organization? Here are four things to consider:

1) Risks

Planning for a new systems and infrastructure environment requires risk assessments of the existing environment and the cloud solution, cost analysis, return on investment and project implementation.

2) IT Environment

Be sure to check the physical connectivity, network communications requirements, operating systems benefits/limitations and application requirements. If these aren’t compatible, problems are sure to arise.

3) Spikes in Usage

To define systems requirements for existing applications being moved to the cloud, use a reporting tool to track utilizations like bandwidth, processor, memory and systems resources over the course of time and relate it to business processes, such as month/year-end or tax season.

4) Business Needs

Know what you require from your IT system. Define, document and validate all business processes before moving into cloud implementation.

Even after implementation, be ready and willing to revise your plan as organizations are constantly changing to new processes and needs. Now the question falls to you, to cloud or not to cloud?

–Jerry Irvine

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1. Establish priorities: Without understanding the needs of your organization and placing proper priorities for those needs, you will find yourself in a sticky situation. Making use of your resources, specifically the executive champions on the teams, to help you organize the projects based on need is crucial. Take time to list out the priorities. Having it written down will allow you to clearly see dates, times and other important data about the project.
2. Outline most important steps: Once you have the clear overview, it is time to start putting things in order. Take the highest priority project first and build an outline. A tool like Microsoft Project is very beneficial, or use Word or Excel. Take the key aspects of the project and list them as the highest part of the project.
3. Iron out the details: Once the overview is complete, focus on the finer details. With this deeper dive, we can better understand the time or resources needed to support the project. It is important to understand that the more detail you add to this deep dive, the more precise your project timeline will be. By the time you get to this point, you will have a greater understanding of the entirety of the project, which will allow you to build out timelines and resource requirements.

Efficient project management is crucial to completing projects successfully. Which of the steps above have been the easiest as well as most challenging for your organization?

–Jason Minner

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As every company surveys its risk during these final months of the year, organizations are making several costly mistakes when crafting a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. These myths can hinder the development and implementation of successful BC/DR planning.

Following are the biggest myths organizations should bust when creating (or failing to create) BC/DR plans:

• BC and DR are the same thing. A lot of SMBs are having IT develop duplicate systems in external data centers and believe this to be sufficient. What is the benefit of having a secondary order entry system when you have no way to take orders? To simplify, BC planning encompasses the development of all policies and processes that allow the company to continue its core business functions as well as provide its products and services. DR is a component of the BCP, defining those policies and processes necessary to support the company during a disaster or emergency.
• A loss won’t happen to me. Companies simply fail to consider the possibility of a loss or the existence of risks, which could significantly impact business. These companies fail to develop a BCP or DRP and instead implement legacy backup or locally clustered solutions believing this level of fault tolerance is sufficient. Development of a BCP to include a DRP must begin with the support of the executive management. Initial steps to ease their development include creating a complete inventory of all business departments, the processes they perform and the equipment of systems needed to perform those processes. This inventory provides the basis for the plans, documentation for the risk assessments and the criteria for the impact analysis.
• Having a secondary IT facility is enough. When companies develop their IT DRP they assume that all of the systems and devices must be replicated and that the entire environment should be tackled all at once. However, it is more important to perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis to determine the assets, which if they became unavailable would impact the company the most. These are the assets that should be considered when reviewing the need for secondary facilities and devices. Nevertheless, even these should be closely reviewed to determine the best and most cost effective protection. Depending on the type of loss and length of time a system can be down without major impact, there can be multiple options for DR. Simply developing a replica of the business environment can be costly and unnecessary.

Take a few minutes to survey your BC/DR plans. Have you made one of these assumptions today?

-Jerry Irvine

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Winners were chosen based on their dedication to the field of public safety communications and a continuing interest in maintaining the highest standards. Scott was recognized for his continued support at our client’s site, including network infrastructure, disaster recovery configuration and systems consolidation for more than 38 governmental agencies in Illinois.

As IT outsourcers, we are committed to working seamlessly with our clients, delivering value that helps our clients succeed and grow.  We are proud to have Scott on the Prescient team. Please join us in congratulating him!

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Businesses need to consider a variety of IT security risks today: viruses, malicious applications, hackers – the list goes on. With all of the new threats and vulnerabilities popping up, many companies are taking their eyes off of the most common method of transmitting these very threats: EMAIL.

Email was initially the greatest means of stealing information, but has since gone overlooked with emerging threats such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting garnering increased attention.

So it’s understandable that many companies simply install an anti-spam and anti-virus solution on their email server and call it a day. Email, however, is still a major vulnerability and needs to be addressed.

Digital signatures

Many companies are implementing digital signatures between their business units, service and product providers, financial institutions and their clients. Encrypting emails is a necessary part of implementing digital signatures, but establishing encryption policies between organizations on its own cannot ensure confidentiality.

Email reputation

Email reputation solutions use information from the sender, characteristics of the email and even lists of known malicious email servers to block or accept email from specific servers. While these solutions provide a good level of protection, there is a potential for false positives.

Email security

Email security is not only about securing the environment from malicious activities but also about securing the environment from inappropriate use. While some loss of corporate intellectual property can be attributed to malicious applications, far more can be credited to authorized users’ actions. Many employees email themselves company information to their other email accounts in order to allow them to work remotely. This transfer of data may be innocent in thought but causes security risks in practice. Once company confidential data leaves the internal corporate systems, little, if any, security solutions are available to protect it.

Data loss prevention

Data loss prevention solutions are designed to reduce the risk of data loss by monitoring specific categories of data and alerting or blocking unauthorized usage. Data loss prevention solutions provide some access control characteristics or work with access control solutions to limit access to specific users and applications. Additionally, they are designed to stop unauthorized duplication, printing and transmission of data. These solutions can stop data from being emailed outside the company or limit emailing to specific organizations or individuals. Implementation of data loss prevention solutions typically include access control mechanisms like multi-factor authentication, encryption of data and network and server monitoring. Data loss prevention solutions have matured over the past couple years, providing more functionality and features as well as coming down in price. As a result, they are beginning to become popular.

Mobile data management

With the reliance on smartphones and other mobile devices, all of these same solutions now need to be replicated in the mobile world. Mobile data management solutions provide added levels of control and security for corporate email, voice and text communications.

What is your organization doing to protect from email security breaches?

-Jerry Irvine

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Goals

Begin by determining the goals for using mobile data: Which business processes are enhanced by putting information into the hands of trusted parties? Usually this is determined by which job types internal to your organization are performed outside of the office (e.g., sales or field staff). Then consider how users who are typically office-based may become more efficient by having access to information from home or off-hours.

Performance

Once goals are established and a policy is in place, consider whether your current server and network architecture can handle the demands of mobile data users. With voice, video and data so widely available on personal devices, tolerance for downtime or poor performance has diminished in recent years.

Work responsibilities are also more time sensitive, not only because certain issues require quick turnaround, but also because employees expect the work to be available to them when they are ready to focus on it. They may even dedicate a certain time to address work issues, and if the network or application is unavailable, not only will they be less productive, they may also be less willing to adopt the mobile technology that you are counting on them to use.

Security

Extending the enterprise generally means making information available via public networks or via networks over which you have less control. The combination of personal information and surfing can also jeopardize the integrity of a company asset. Begin by deploying tools (e.g. VPN) that allow for secure remote connectivity and have policies in place that speak to the personal use of business devices.

We also recommend managing all wireless devices on a company-paid corporate plan, instead of having users “bring your own device” (BYOD). Let’s face it, employees will use their company-paid wireless services to make personal calls, surf the Web and conduct personal business.

Yet, while the management of a corporate plan introduces a higher level of management and administration than simply letting employees expense part of their personal wireless devices, a corporate plan allows your organization to fully audit wireless devices because the device, service and number are all company-owned assets. In the case of BYOD, employees can put your business functions at risk without your ability to audit and mitigate potentially harmful activity.

Acceptable Use Policy

For organizations that must abide by Sarbanes-Oxley, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Payment Card Industry, Freedom of Information Act  or other types of compliance and regulatory constraints, the ability to send and receive data of any kind, anywhere and anytime means that a formal, written policy must be in place regarding the use and dissemination of information. Formalizing and adhering to an acceptable use policy are the first steps in keeping the benefits of mobility from becoming a Pandora’s box for your organization.

How has increasing mobility improved business performance at your organization? What challenges have you come up against?

–Jerry Irvine

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Traditional means of securing data continue to be through the use of multiple layers of security, including Virtual Private Network (VPN), which encrypts data between locations. However, cloud computing makes these traditional methods more cumbersome.

Cloud service providers do not typically allow for physical-level VPN traffic, although they do support application-level encryption via HTTPS, providing for secure communications at the application level and data payload. Application-level encryption is becoming the de facto standard for “secure” data communications, but it does not provide the same level of security as site-to-site or client VPN products.

Also, data encryption is provided by most cloud providers. Depending on the methods and specifics of the encryption types and algorithms being used, this encryption in the cloud provides protection of data should external applications or malicious entities gain access to the cloud-based, publicly-accessible data of our clients.

However, because the cloud providers maintain the encryption algorithms and may also have the encryption keys, the cloud provider may have the ability to access, distribute or corrupt data. As a result, moving to the cloud is not a “no brainer” for companies or organizations. Implementation of cloud computing can provide:

1. Cost savings via the potential to decrease IT resources and reduction in spends on hardware and software

2. Increased fault tolerance and disaster recovery options due to the distributed data center configuration of cloud providers

3. Increased accessibility because of the Internet-based access.

However, no one benefit may be significant enough on their own to motivate a client to switch to the cloud. Only after understanding the return of all of these benefits in conjunction with the risks will most clients see the light.

IT Hardware and Software Vendors seem to stand the most to lose in the cloud computing scenario. However, some understand that there is a place for both On Premise and cloud-based IT services.  The largest software manufacturer in the world, Microsoft, is welcoming cloud computing. They have created SaaS, PaaS and IaaS service offerings (Office 365, Azure, Windows Server Hyper V, Dynamics) to supplement their key product offerings, which have traditionally existed on Premise.

This strategy seems to be logical, as some type of local infrastructure will need to exist for clients to access the Internet-based systems. As a result of the local infrastructure, which will need to continue to be managed and supported, some other local services and resources can be run with little cost increase. While understanding the potential benefits for cloud-based services, the local environment must become more reliable, secure and efficient in order to support the remote cloud-based resources.

In order to help with our clients’ decision on which applications, services and resources should be placed into the cloud, we consider the following:

1. Current applications and data in use by the clients: Non-mission critical applications are the easiest and least concerning tasks to move first providing the opportunity for a successful Cloud migration and implementation. Applications such as hosting of public websites, email and offsite file replication provide quick wins in cost savings, fault tolerance and data accessibility.

2. Cloud service providers who provide “private” cloud options specifically for clients’ proprietary data: These implementations are providing a hybrid of Software as a Service and Platform as a Service offerings, which may allow for more direct control of data security for the client. As a result, VPN services may be able to be configured and data storage could be encrypted without any involvement from the cloud provider.

3. Service offerings of different cloud providers specializing in specific industries: As a result of a cloud provider’s industry specialization, they may obtain certifications like PCI and HIPPA, which may ease the concerns of clients for placing their data into the cloud.

Have you moved to the cloud? What challenges did you need to overcome?

-Jerry Irvine

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