As organizations struggle to implement encryption for stored data, one critical question frequently surfaces - Which encryption method is best for our organization, file-level encryption or full-drive encryption?

The amount of protection provided by these two approaches differs greatly, as does the management and user burden and the ability to meet legislative requirements. Before embarking on either path, it's critical that an organization understands the pros and cons of both techniques and carefully considers the best place to start.

IT organizations have been caught between a rock and a hard place. Charged with protecting their company's information, IT organizations have established aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) that impact the manner in which they implement data protection by setting recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Organizations struggle with shrinking or non-existent backup windows, the need to recover quickly, often to a specific point in time, and even meeting compliance or regulatory guidelines. Backing up to tape is no longer adequate; not only is it difficult to administer for backups and recoveries, but it lacks the speed, reliability, flexibility and simplicity IT needs to meet stringent SLAs. Backing up to disk using virtual tape emulation or virtual tape libraries also falls short as the administration of the solution is tape-centric and schedule driven. Add in the explosion of data, along with the challenge of protecting remote offices, and you have the challenge facing many of today's business - with IT sitting on the front lines of aligning business needs with today's technology.

As a result, a growing number of IT organizations are augmenting their traditional backup and recovery strategies with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. CDP dramatically improves RPOs and RTOs while eliminating backup windows. What's more, CDP not only reduces the need for tape in the backup and recovery process but it also makes recovery easy enough that users can often recover their own files, without help from IT.

By Ken Horner

Open source technologies are gaining momentum as a viable backbone for core computing requirements, resulting in soaring popularity for Linux worldwide. In fact, 2006 was a banner year for Linux, powered by a record surge in enterprise deployments as well as broad-based validations from industry heavyweights, including Oracle and Microsoft.

As the fastest growing operating system and storage management software opportunity in the market today, Linux continues to gain substantial traction in companies of all types and sizes, from mid-range organizations to large-scale enterprises running mission-critical applications.

Perhaps the most valuable validation that Linux is ready for primetime in enterprise and data center environments is its ever-increasing application support. Beyond its distinguished trademark as a staple for use in web portals and web hosting as part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), Linux is winning broader acceptance as a platform for mission-critical databases, messaging, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and payroll. In response, enterprise software vendors are increasingly porting applications to Linux, resulting in wide-scale deployments across all industries, including finance, retail, government, manufacturing and education.

The ability to install more affordable hardware and take advantage of many more software choices results in higher-performance, lower-cost technology deployments. To that end, the long-term value proposition for migrating to Linux is a compelling incentive. Reducing costs has been a dominant driver for Linux adoption, especially at the expense of UNIX, because the tab for software and porting is low to non-existent.

By now, it should not surprise you that sensitive and confidential data is on your network. Corporate strategy and intellectual property, staff working and personnel files, customer and partner account requirements, client identification numbers and histories, even competitor documents�you name it, it is out there somewhere, on your network.