Tech Data Corporation - Experts & Thought Leaders

BCD Founder and Chief Executive Officer - Jeff Burgess has officially announced his retirement. Burgess, who turned 66 on July 25, 2023, began his computer career back in 1979 after landing a warehouse job at Tek-Aids Industries, an IT computer distributor that carried brands such as Altos, Wyse, and Okidata. Within months, he was moved to the sales desk, and within six years was named Vice President of Sales.   Extensive industry experience After leaving the company years later, he went to Elek-Tek, the Chicago mega-retailer, helping kickstart their corporate sales division. Burgess was responsible for Elek-Tek’s gaining a single-tier distribution agreement with Unisys Corporation, to sell their Goldstar OEM personal computers directly to Unisys’ mainframe customers.  After Elek-Tek, Burgess moved to Hartford Computer Group (Inverness, IL) and, worked closely with IBM, directing the team helping to land the $200 million State Farm account for Hartford, along with multi-million-dollar accounts with General Electric and many of the GE Capital companies.  Started Burgess Computer Decisions, Inc. Burgess also began building high-availability Hewlett Packard servers for his IT customers After twenty years of working for others, Burgess opened Burgess Computer Decisions, Inc. (BCD) in 1999 as an IT Value Added Distributor, working directly with Ingram Micro and Tech Data as inventory providers, blind-shipping goods directly to his customers. Burgess also began building high-availability Hewlett Packard servers for his IT customers, among those the same GE Capital companies to whom he had worked closely in the past. In 2008, he recognised the opportunity for a customised IT server builder in the still-new video surveillance market and took the company along that path. Video surveillance storage systems Burgess leaves BCD as the worldwide pioneer in purpose-built video surveillance storage systems with over 175,000 recorders of all shapes and sizes capturing video in 91 countries and countless vertical markets.  And is amongst the most secure facilities globally, along with the coolest brands in the world. Chances are that users will pass a BCD-protected facility a couple of times a day.  Accolades and awards BCD captured many industry awards and recognition during Burgess’ tenure, being named among Inc. Magazine’s Top 5000 companies five times. BCD also received Computer Reseller News’  Solution Provider 500 six times, including CRN’s  Fast Growth 150 three consecutive years, Crain’s Chicago Business Largest Privately Held Companies four times, and what Burgess was most proud of, being named a combined ten times from Chicago’s Best & Brightest Companies, Best & Brightest Companies in the Nation, and Best Places to Work in Illinois.  Philanthropy Philanthropy was an important part of Burgess’ tenure, offering employment to interns Philanthropy was an important part of Burgess’ tenure, offering employment to interns who became future employees from College Bound Opportunities (CBO), and supporting such causes as Folds of Honour, Wings (domestic violence), Orphans of the Storm (pet shelter), Girl Scouts, and college scholarships for local community high school seniors, as well as in-house college reimbursement programs for all employees.    “It’s been a great run, especially considering where I was in my life before getting that warehouse job forty-three years ago," stated Jeff Burgess. Burgess comments He adds, "What I find most rewarding is that we were able to give so many people an opportunity, as was given to me all those decades ago. And especially considering my two sons not only work here but have earned key positions here. Plus, my daughter worked here in past summers as well.”  Jeff Burgess continues, “I leave having tremendous respect for all those team members committed to our purpose, and knowing we all mutually made a positive difference in people’s lives, both inside and outside the organisation." In addition to travelling and playing golf with his wife Joanne, Burgess plans to spend his time with their family, their dogs, and their grand dogs.

Cohesity has announced the release of Cohesity SiteContinuity, an automated disaster recovery solution that is integrated with the company’s backup and continuous data protection capabilities, making it the only web-scale, converged solution to protect applications across tiers, service levels, and locations on a single platform. Data security and loss prevention Cohesity is making this announcement as organisations are concerned about losing data to ransomware and malware attacks, natural disasters, or human error. This new integrated solution will help companies ensure data is never lost or compromised, applications are always available and costs are reduced, by eliminating redundant or unnecessary infrastructure and that strict service-level agreements (SLAs) are met. Many companies are not equipped to meet critical recovery objectives Many companies are not equipped to meet critical recovery objectives. In a recent study published by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), when respondents were asked if their actual recovery times met their pre-established SLAs, 78 percent stated they are unable to ‘always’ meet their objectives and 33 percent said they ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’ meet these objectives. “Maintaining the integrity of our data in the face of a disaster or attacks is crucial and protecting our applications and data across various SLAs is complex and challenging,” said Steve Culy, Senior Systems Engineer at Navis. Cohesity SiteContinuity Steve adds, “The new solution from Cohesity is very timely as it allows us to protect our mission and business-critical applications on a single platform. We can now automate our business continuity and disaster recovery strategy, all from Cohesity’s data platform, making it easier for us to manage SLAs, and reduce downtime with automated, rapid failover and failback.” “Cyber threats such as ransomware and growing natural disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires increasingly put critical applications and data at risk,” said Matt Waxman, Vice President of Product Management at Cohesity. Matt adds, “With that backdrop, this is an ideal time for IT leaders to rethink how they can simplify IT operations while also reducing costs with an integrated, web-scale, converged backup and disaster recovery solution.” Elevating Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Cohesity SiteContinuity lets organisations recover a single file, critical business application, or an entire data centre With Cohesity SiteContinuity, organisations can recover a single file, critical business application, or an entire data centre with just a few clicks, automating recovery operations spanning across application tiers and on-premises and public cloud environments. It dramatically simplifies the challenge that organisations face in trying to manage complex hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments with numerous applications running across multiple tiers with varying service levels during the course of normal operations. Converged backup and disaster recovery solution Cohesity’s converged backup and disaster recovery solution provides: Simplified operations: Consolidate backup, continuous data protection and automated disaster recovery on a single platform, managed through one global UI and a unified policy framework, across application tiers, service levels, and environments. Near-zero application downtime and data loss: With just a few clicks, automatically orchestrate failover and failback of a single application or an entire site, ensuring minimum data loss and downtime as business applications are rapidly recovered in a disaster scenario. Flexible recovery: Journal-based recovery helps to meet varying service levels across application tiers by restoring to any point in time, including days or even seconds before the disaster hit, on-premises or to the public cloud. Machine learning-based ransomware detection and recommendation: At the time of failover and/or restore, Cohesity Helios’ machine learning algorithm helps identify a clean point in time to restore. This helps protect the DR site from malware impact during the failover process. Disaster testing: Meet DR compliance objectives with confidence through end-to-end automated non-disruptive disaster recovery testing, including complete audit trail reporting. Reduced TCO: Reduce costs by converging backup and DR, eliminating the need for separate point products and driving better storage efficiency. Further reduce data footprint and costs with global variable-length de-duplication and compression across workloads. Additionally, there is no need to deploy dedicated virtual machines to support recovery of each ESXi host. Limitless scalability: The underlying web-scale architecture of the Cohesity platform enables organisations to scale BCDR capabilities limitlessly and painlessly. Application availability and data protection Application availability and protecting data against disasters is vital for us" “Application availability and protecting data against disasters is vital for us,” said Francois Lepage, Cyber Security and Infrastructure Manager at Master Group, adding “And, we believe this new solution from Cohesity could easily empower organisations to strengthen their business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.” Lepage further stated, “A single platform that can automate DR orchestration, while also managing backups from a single policy has the power to be a transformative technology.” Automated DR on a single platform “Business continuity continues to increase as a priority for many end customers. When a disaster strikes, they need simple, quick recovery as downtime and data loss is not an option,” said Brian Ellis. Brian adds, “Cohesity’s new solution offers converged backup and automated DR on a single platform with automated failover and failback orchestration for near-zero downtime. This solution changes the game for our partners and their customers.” Enhancing cyber security and controlling data recovery “With the increased frequency and cost of cyber-attacks, a robust set of disaster recovery processes combined with proven technology have never been more essential,” said Christophe Bertrand, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Christophe adds, “Organisations should look for ease of use, automation and the ability to truly control their data recovery and application availability service level agreements. That’s why Cohesity's web-scale converged backup and disaster recovery solution is not only timely, but also offers a comprehensive set of capabilities to take on the disaster recovery challenges enterprises face.” This solution will be generally available in the fourth quarter of the calendar year 2020.

Tech Data announces the launch of the RECON Security Suite in Europe. RECON offers a targeted and simplified range of multi-vendor subscription and consultation-based security solutions that help to protect against the most common cybersecurity threats. Built by Tech Data security experts from the company’s portfolio of vendor solutions, RECON enables resellers to rapidly accelerate their security offerings without investing in developing their own in-house skills, resources and tools. The suite also allows mature security partners to augment their existing offerings with a robust set of services and solutions. Managed security services RECON is structured into the following targeted categories: RECON MSP: Managed security services focused on the day-to-day management of security solutions, including managed next-generation firewall; managed identity; managed endpoint; 24x7 support and monitoring services; reporting services RECON ProServ: Security-focused consulting services RECON Risk: Consultation services which assess and offer solutions for an organisation’s key security risks RECON SOC: Security Operations Centre services including incident response and real-time alerting RECON Restore: A portfolio of backup and recovery solutions that can restore a system from catastrophic ransomware or malware attacks Growing cybersecurity market With RECON, Tech Data is bringing structure and clarity to a fragmented and fast-growing cybersecurity market" The RECON Security Suite will evolve to reflect the ever-changing threat landscape and emerging technology categories such as IoT. David Ellis, vice president, Security and Mobility Solutions, Europe, at Tech Data said, “With RECON, Tech Data is bringing structure and clarity to a fragmented and fast-growing cybersecurity market." "The suite enables us to more effectively connect partners with a leading range of solutions, services and Tech Data security experts, making it easier than ever for our partners across the region to increase and complement their own security specialisations and, of course, grow their businesses.” Also available in the Americas region, Tech Data’s RECON offering is based around the U.S. National Institute of Standards in Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework, a recognised standard that enables organisations to better protect themselves against cyber security threats.