Posts Tagged ‘security’

Queen’s University Belfast appoints Novosco to build private cloud

Belfast, June 10th 2010 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, today announced it has been appointed to implement a VCE based virtualised Data Centre infrastructure into Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). This project represents the first major V-Block deployment throughout the Higher Education sector in the UK and Ireland.

Built on Cisco’s Unified Computing System, the new virtualised infrastructure will facilitate significantly greater numbers of virtual machines on the same piece of hardware. Cisco UCS offers centralised management over the compute, networking and storage elements needed to deploy virtual ICT infrastructures. This “wire once, walk away” approach will help address the power management targets within the University’s data centres.

The flexibility of the VCE approach within QUB will also afford management greater control over the support and management of the environment, with the potential for new and improved innovations delivered to an increasingly sophisticated end user base. Future investments in the platform will also be significantly less than additions to physical environments, all of which future proofs QUB’s investment. Novosco’s DataCentre Architecture Solutions’ Practice is underpinned by the VCE “DataCentre 3.0” vision. This approach, allied with EMC storage, Cisco’s UCS and VMware’s VSphere Could Operating System allows QUB the potential to optimise DataCentre resources with increased flexibility compared to traditional hardware based solutions.

Queen’s University is recognised as one of the best universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is the UK’s Entrepreneurial University of the Year, and a member of the Russell Group of the UK’s 20 leading research-intensive universities, which includes Oxford and Cambridge.

Founded in 1845, Queen’s University Belfast has been providing higher education to students from around the world for over 165 years. Currently it caters for more than 17,000 students and 3,500 staff, with some 100,000 alumni graduates worldwide.

Jim Cunningham, Assistant Director for Information Systems said, “Novosco’s experience in delivering enterprise scale virtualisation environments, along with their strong relationships with each of the VCE technology partners, made them an easy choice to deliver V-Block into the University’s Data Centres.”

John Lennon, Sales Director for Novosco said, “QUB’s approach to the next generation data centre is instrumental in helping it remain one of the most innovative Higher Education providers in Ireland. Giving staff and students a better ICT experience within existing financial and resourcing commitments will ensure that this competitive edge is maintained”.

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual & cloud IT infrastructure and network services. With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. The Novosco CloudStream™ range of solutions is leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.    

Novosco has provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes, such as the Queen’s University Belfast, Burlington Hotel, SIAC Construction, Windsor Motors and many more.

Novosco was recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009.

For more information visit www.novosco.com

About Queen’s University Belfast

Queen’s University is recognised as one of the best universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is the UK’s Entrepreneurial University of the Year, and a member of the Russell Group of the UK’s 20 leading research-intensive universities, which includes Oxford and Cambridge.

Founded in 1845, Queen’s University Belfast has been providing higher education to students from around the world for over 165 years. Currently it caters for more than 17,000 students and 3,500 staff, with some 100,000 graduates worldwide. This is reflected in the University’s Mission Statement:

“Queen’s is a broadly-based, research-driven university with a dynamic world-class research and education portfolio and strong international connections. The University promotes the widest possible access to this portfolio of excellence in an environment of equality, tolerance and mutual respect, and it fully embraces its leadership role in Northern Ireland and beyond.”

Posted in: News, Press Releases Tags: business, business continuity, Centralised Management, Cisco, Citrix, Cloud Computing, EMC, Networking, Novosco, press, security, storage, Unified Computing System, Virtual Computing Coalition, virtualisation, VMware

Belfast, 12th March, 2009 — Novosco, who is Ireland’s leading provider of virtual IT infrastructure and services, has been awarded the prestigious and internationally recognised ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications.  This formed part of an integrated achievement with Novosco also being awarded the Investors In People (IIP) award.   Novosco achieved the awards with the assistance of CIMAOMEGA, experts in transformational change in the workplace.

The Novosco NIMS system contains details of the procedures and processes that meet ISO requirements for business continuity, data security, and disaster recovery, as well as providing Novosco management and staff with an objective method of maintaining excellent working practices.

Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director for Novosco explained, “As an IT service provider, Novosco customers trust us with their confidential data and their IT infrastructure.  The awards reinforce our commitment to providing our customers with service excellence and they formally recognise that the products and services which we provide are consistently on par with world class standards.  Despite the current economic climate, Novosco felt it was important to invest in the awards as it gives us further competitive advantage and has reinforced Novosco’s position as Ireland’s leading IT provider to both public & private sector customers”. 

“Novosco has been our trusted partner since 2003 and we congratulate the company on the achievement of the ISO awards.  Novosco implemented the virtualisation of our IT infrastructure, which decommissioned over 20 servers and saved around £200k compared to the cost of a non-virtualised environment.” said Jim Fennell Information Systems Manager, Lagan Holdings Ltd.

At the end of last year, Novosco also received the Investors in People (IIP) recognition.  The company was formally assessed with regard to staff training, development and overall company performance. 

Patrick McAliskey continues, “The IIP award shows that we take our commitment as an employer very seriously.  The process has helped us to organise our development programme so that it delivers focused, up-to-date skills to our workforce.  The award is integrated with the ISO accreditation to ensure the high standards needed for these awards are continually maintained.”

About Novosco
Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual IT infrastructure and services and is committed to assisting customers in the evaluation and optimisation of their IT systems.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions.  This approach enables Novosco to develop and deliver cost-effective IT solutions that enhance client operations.

Novosco have provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes including Acheson Glover, Belfast Trust, Lagan Holdings and many more.   
For more information visit www.novosco.com

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: awards, business, business continuity, Quality, security

Last week Microsoft published Security Bulletin MS08-067. This bulletin describes a vulnerability in the Windows server service, affecting Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 2003 and 2008.

Microsoft have also released a corresponding “out-of-band” (i.e., not contained in the monthly batch of updates) update in the shape of KB958644. The update is available from Microsoft Update.

Novosco are actively encouraging all of our customers to deploy the update as soon as possible (on all Windows hosts – clients and servers). You can do so by visiting the Microsoft Update website or by deploying with Windows Server Update Services or some other 3rd party deployment tool.

But why all the fuss? Well, this particular vulnerability is wormable – meaning that potentially (more on “potentially” later) the vulnerability can be exploited by a worm, i.e., self-replicating malicious code that seeks out vulnerable hosts and infects them from your laptop while you’re writing your blog post…

Talking about worms in this way takes me back to those bygone halcyon days when Windows anti-virus was “optional”, host based firewalls were unheard of and the only reason to use a firewall in the enterprise was to take advantage of its NAT capabilities and not fork out for expensive publicly routable IP addresses for your network. It was also the time before we had all deployed WSUS or some other automatic update solution. Right?

Wrong! Even though we now have written policies defining that laptops must have host-based firewalls and AV, and we have fancy UTM devices at the network perimeter, all too often we still have the problem that updates are being ignored. Consider this situation: a user goes home with their company laptop (which hasn’t been updated in the last 8 months) and browses the web for a while from their home internet connection. Because Internet Explorer hasn’t been patched they get burned by some exploit which drops a Trojan containing code which in turn exploits the MS08-067 vulnerability. The user didn’t really do anything wrong, wasn’t an local administrator and knows nothing of the infection. Next day they plug their laptop into the corporate network and while they’re at the coffee machine ten minutes later they see the IT admins running past on their way to the server room as the “whole network’s down!!!!”.

Update mangement would have saved that company on two counts – the first by patching the user’s laptop. If it wasn’t vulnerable the malicious code wouldn’t have got onto it in the first place. The second; even if the laptop hadn’t been patched (say the user was off work for a while and got infected anyway) the servers would have been patched and wouldn’t have been vulnerable so no downtime would have occurred.

That example’s a bit simplified, certainly a layered security solution of best practices, AV and UTM would have helped. But I think it serves to get the message across – the fuss surrounding this update is symptomatic of a bigger problem.

Now I put “potentially” in bold above for a reason – there is no worm exploiting this vulnerability (that we know of, yet). Right now, there is however a recognisable trojan which is being used in targeted attacks. And, there’s publicly available exploit code in the wild which means you can bet that VXers are beavering away trying to develop a suitable worm. So you have a choice – patch now or don’t. You can choose not to and give me the old excuses about the risks of deploying patches (breaking applications etc) but that’s why Microsoft genuinely recommend that you test their updates with your applications and if you’re really that worried you should seriously think about a test environment, but if (maybe when) the worm hits and you get burned I’ll try not to say “I told you so”.

Remember folks – “Proactive patching is better than reactive repair”.

Posted in: Technology Tags: Microsoft, security, update