Keeping up with the whirlwind pace of the technology industry is difficult, to say the least. To help you spot the big trends in IT and cloud computing for 2016 and keep up with data security needs, we've put together a list of what we expect to see this year.

Here at Kelser we've seen the same security errors being committed time and time again. In order to help keep companies from making the same mistakes, we put together a list of not only the worst security sins -but also some of the most surprising (and least thought of).

Independent security audits, such as a penetration test or vulnerability assessment, serve a critical purpose in an information systems security program. I’ll offer you two distinct perspectives to consider, depending on your role in your organization.

All kidding aside, you may or may not be aware of a pending change in how secure sites (think SSL/TLS) are secured. This is the SHA-1 to SHA-2 transition. It’s actually been in the works for a while, and primarily involves upgrading the certificate(s) on your public-facing websites, with more secure certificates. So what is SHA-1 or SHA-2 and why do we need to change?

Network automation is right up there with automated server provisioning, to accelerate the development and advancement of applications and services. A common example, might be: “There’s a problem in production and I need to clone my production environment to a bubble test environment for rapid testing and resolution.”

iPads, tablets, and other ‘smart’ devices are well known as popular entertainment mechanisms. But considering how distracting these devices can be, should your company allow and encourage their use?

It happens all the time – for all the right reasons, one of our customers is interested in VDI until they see the price. Sticker-shock doesn’t begin to describe the experience one goes through, when looking into traditional VDI for the first time. Many organizations, large and small, understand the operational overhead (i.e. cost) of managing desktops, seeing VDI as a way to both streamline operations and deliver a consistent end-user experience.

There’s a new old buzzword surfacing in the storage space: “Erasure Coding”. Sounds pretty fancy! Believe it or not, most of you are using some form of erasure coding (EC) in your data centers today. The concept generally describes the math behind data availability and redundancy (think: RAID). What we are seeing now, is traditional RAID exposing significant limitations with both large, slow drives and super-fast SSDs. RAID also doesn’t generally describe data locality for availability purposes. Before we get into advanced erasure coding, let’s talk about what RAID-5 and RAID-6 really are.