IT Trends & Technology

On August 24, 2005, when the storm that would become Hurricane Katrina was several days out from landfall along the Gulf Coast, Walmart’s director of business continuity activated the company’s emergency operations center, recalled key staff, and set years’ worth of plans into motion. In the days that followed the devastation of Katrina, Walmart was able to deliver 100,000 free meals and 1,900 truckloads of supplies to survivors and to provide emergency workers with supplies and protective gear. 

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.

If your business is running legacy IT systems—and chances are that it is—you know they can introduce a number of challenges for you and your staff. But more than just an annoyance, legacy systems eat into your bottom line, costing you money, alienating customers, and introducing security risks. Legacy IT is a form of technical debt not easily satisfied.  Here are just a few of the issues you may be facing.

Do you know the true cost of a downtime event for your business? You may have run some numbers through a downtime calculator and have a rough estimate of the impact of downtime on your business. However, you are probably not considering some costs that are harder to quantify. And those costs could significantly affect your bottom line.

Help!  I have a crisis and there is nothing I can do about it......but report it.

Susan Couron, a Client Executive at First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) interacts with clients on a daily basis.  She understands more than anyone the importance of technology, and the impact it has on her customers.

Regardless of how outages occur – whether man made or by Mother Nature – they happen, and they happen often. If a company experiences an outage, it can be catastrophic. Let’s take a look at the dollars, and make cents of this:  

As we approach the end of October and the Halloween holiday I found myself reflecting on what scared me as child; ghosts, boogie men, a pop quiz in school. As we grow and mature those things no longer seem important and lose their ability to grip your soul in the middle of the night like they used to when you were young. In part because you develop some perspective and in part because you learn of even scarier things that are actually real and can harm you in other ways.

Health, car, house or property, event pet – insurance comes in every form and most of us have it.  The fear of the unknown (and the law) drives us to make sure in the event of an incident we will be able to function and restore our belongings or health back to their natural state.  In fact it is often AFTER we have to use our insurance we learn about everything that isn’t covered….it takes an unfortunate incident to realize we didn’t have the coverage we thought we had.  Now many people are fully covered and walk away praising their coverage and the painless efforts and go back to life as they know it, but what about those that don’t and what does this have to do with IT?

A couple days after writing Part I, I received a call from one of our Interns whose SDHC Camera Card was “unreadable” and her Spring Break vacation photos were gone.

Recently, I had a relative whose laptop died and she was upset about losing all of her data.

Five 9s, or 99.999%, refers to the desired availability of a given computer system. Having a 99.999% means the system will deliver its service to the user 99.999% of the time it is needed. In total, the only downtime in a given year calculates out to five minutes and fifteen seconds. Five9s is recommended for mission-critical data and e-commerce.

As an IT professional who works with many corporations that have mission critical websites that cannot experience outages, I am not alone in wondering what went wrong with the http://www.healthcare.gov site launch. For the amount of time and money that was invested in launching this site, the types of outages and problems encountered should have been significantly less than what was experienced. Not every implementation, especially one on this large of a scale, is flawless but with proper planning and testing many of the pitfalls could have been avoided. A recent article in CIO magazine highlighted areas necessary to be evaluated for other companies to avoid similar problems.

Netflix, founded in 1997, is championed as the spearhead for “Cloud Computing v1.0.” But with great power comes great responsibility. Since it’s the first of its kind, it hasn’t quite worked out all the kinks. For example, in 2012 four outages occurred. These outages happened at the most inopportune times- like on Christmas Eve when your family has finally gathered around for the traditional yearly viewing of the classic Die Hard.

One of the first questions I get from most prospects is “What does FNTS provide for Disaster Recovery?”  The answer is: a lot.  But let me digress before tackling the answer in detail.