IT Trends & Technology

In today’s 24/7 business environment, having a disaster recovery plan is essential to guarantee critical data, software and applications are replicated and available in the cloud in the event of a planned or unplanned IT outage. Costly outages happen more often than one may think; one in three companies has declared a disaster in the past five years, according to research from Forrester.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system and Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 are among the products that will reach the end of support on January 14, 2020. Microsoft Office 2010 will meet the same fate later in 2020, along with several other products. These end of support deadlines highlight the need for organizations to migrate to Windows 10, Office 365 and Windows Server 2019 to avoid technical and security disruptions.

When a large healthcare provider saw the writing on the wall that their existing IT infrastructure, data center, and systems were not enough to keep pace with their projected growth and compliance requirements, they knew something had to change. With the help of FNTS, they successfully moved their legacy data center to the cloud and laid the technical foundation for responsive operations for decades to come. 

As digital transformation strategies drive more customer initiatives, banks and credit unions are changing their views of cloud usage.  Financial institutions are becoming more pragmatic in their approach to gaining operational efficiencies, improving the customer experience, and move beyond their traditional core banking platforms.  Off to a slow, fragmented start, expect to see cloud adoption accelerate.  Gartner expects the cloud computing services market to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 alone, topping $200 billion worldwide.

Implementing a disaster recovery plan and preparing for unexpected disruptions is becoming imperative for utilities in the event of natural disasters, cyber attacks, human errors and other issues or security threats that could result in a critical outage of power, water, gas and other resources. According to a recent Information Security survey by PwC, only about half of utilities have an IT disaster response plan because of concerns about price, time or changes to operations. The reality is, a true event can end up being far more disruptive. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime caused by an IT failure is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour, on average. This doesn’t even account for lost customers, delayed services or damage to a company’s brand. In today’s digital, fully-connected community, utility companies can’t risk not having an alternate solution to get back online in the event of an outage.

Keeping pace with digital change can be a huge undertaking for utility companies, both big and small, especially in today’s rapidly evolving digital age. Continuous technology advancements mean even the newest technology will someday be obsolete, and investing in upgrading equipment can be costly, unexpected and hard to prioritize.

If you feel like the IT security and threat environment has evolved at a remarkable pace in the last 5 years, you’re right. Between the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), regular updates to compliance standards such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA, threats of ransomware and data leaks, and the continued growth of cloud services, it can be hard for any organization to keep up and feel secure.

A few years ago, the idea of moving all of your IT infrastructure to the cloud was dismissed as just a trend that would soon fade away. The reality, however, is that cloud computing—when planned effectively, implemented properly, and managed with the right vendor—can offer huge financial and operational advantages over traditional data centers.

When you see big brands such as Marriott, Target, and Sony in the news announcing they have fallen victim to cyberattacks or ransomware, it can be easy to think that it could never happen to your organization. Sadly, it is not until an unexpected natural disaster, cyberattack, or even human error occurs and severs access to critical corporate data that a company ends up realizing the full extent of the fallout—to their bottom line and their brand.

Completing a data center migration is no easy task—but it can be a necessary one, whether because of a need for more storage, an effort to comply with new regulatory requirements, or a desire to reduce costs. Unfortunately, many organizations make the already-complicated technical task even harder by failing to comprehensively plan the migration, understand its impact on the business, or take advantage of the experience of migration experts.

To help set your organization up for success, we have put together these 8 best practices that can turn this chore into a turning point.

This article was derived from an article published on TechRadar. Read the full article here: “Are you available for a quick task?” – Keep an eye out for the latest phishing scam hitting inboxes

The FBI estimates phishing scams have resulted in billions of dollars in fraud losses over the last five years. According to FNTS Information Security Architect Richard Kalinowski, there has been an increasing number of these targeted email cyberattacks across the globe, and phishing emails are sailing past spam filters and into company inboxes with more regularity.

From just dipping their technological toe in the water to fully hosted data centers in the cloud, organizations have begun to embrace a wide range of managed services. If your organization has followed this path, then it is likely that you have heard the phrase “software defined data centers” (SDDC) and wondered what it meant and if it was right for your operations.

As managed services and hosting solutions have evolved, many customers have found that separating out their SQL databases from their other web and applications services can help them realize significant benefits. Whether the SQL databases are used for application development or in production environments, feeding data-hungry websites or business-critical applications with robust, highly available, and scalable hosted SQL databases can prove to be a differentiator for your business.

The digital transformation is underway in the utilities industry, with many public and private service providers modernizing grids and replacing aging infrastructure and assets with more efficient technology.

From smart grids to smart meters, technology is transforming the way the utility industry does business. IT is being used to enhance operational processes and customer experience in a digital age where information security is trying to keep up with big data. To get an idea of the scope of data being collected, one only needs to look as far as the smart meters utilized by households. A single household smart meter can generate 400 megabytes per year. If you multiply that by 135 million smart meters in the United States, it equates to 54 petabytes, or a little more than half of the data uploaded to YouTube in a year. This data must be stored somewhere that is secure, so that if and when disaster strikes, it is protected.