Samsung's Data Center Fire & The Evolving Role of the CIO: Weekly Roundup

Data center fires are no joking matter. They can happen to any organization, big or small, as Samsung found this week when its South Korean data center caught fire. The damage caused a global service outage for Samsung customers. Here's the latest on data disaster prevention methods, and other data protection news from around the Web this week:

Hybrid Cloud Environments and the Future of IT

A hybrid,public and private cloud, approach to storage enables companies to take advantage of both the cost-efficiency and scalability of third-party cloud vendors, and the assurance that critical data is secure in their own cloud storage. But hybrid environments create new challenges. "Data management and migration become much more complex and security and downtime produces heightened concerns for today's CIOs," says Sergey Kandaurov, director of product management at Acronis. What do CIOs and IT managers need to know about the future of data? According to Kandaurov, a next-generation CIO needs to have a more "holistic" understanding of data, including security challenges and how location affects cloud storage. 

Read more at Digital Disruption

Samsung's Data Center Fire Leads to Global Outage

This week, a major fire in Samsung's data center in Gwacheon, South Korea, caused data outages for users of Samsung TVs, smartphones and tablets worldwide. According to Data Center Knowledge, "This clearly wasn’t a 'smoke incident' but a fully-involved building fire." The incident caused several hours of downtime for users.  

Read more at DataCenterKnowledge

BYOD: Secure Data > Device 

What's one of the simplest, and most effective, ways to secure company devices.  According to the U.S. Airforce, its not by securing data on the device level, says the Airforce, mobile devices “are not secure enough for government use.” Alternatively, industry experts recommend that companies secure the data through virtualization. Says Ed Hammersla, managing director at Raytheon Cyber Products, "Users call up cloud and enterprise apps on the same device, but the data never exists on the device. This means, hypothetically speaking, that a war fighter’s smartphone could be infected with a dozen viruses and it simply won’t matter. The data encounters no threat because it resides in the cloud." 

Read Federal Times

Photographers: Top Tips for Protecting Your Work Online

Data loss is a major concern for any photographer, but it's not the only threat. Theft is another scourge, and it's a constant threat to photographers who use social media to get exposure and recognition for their work. CloudTweaks offers several tips for how consumers and prosumers alike can protect their art from unscrupulous online users:

• Keep photos from being downloaded without permission by disabling right clicks.
• Use watermarks, advises CloudTweaks, to keep images from being repurposed without proper attribution. 
• Protect your passwords: "Avoid passwords that coincide with collection and gallery names. If necessary, make galleries unlisted so that only you can access them and then give access to who you want via links."

Read more at CloudTweaks