IT Trends & Technology

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.

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.

According to a Forrester study, only 2 percent of companies could restart operations within an hour of a disaster incident. Additionally, based on Gartner calculations, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour. In short, pairing a major IT disruption with a poorly designed or reactive disaster recovery plan can result in a perfect storm that could cripple your business and have ripple effects for years to come.

A 2016 survey of IT managers revealed that 90 percent had confidence in cloud-based disaster recovery services versus a 74 percent confidence rate for on-premises solutions. Of the same group, half were leveraging the cloud for disaster recovery (DR) while 9 percent were only using cloud services.

It’s clear that the people on the front lines of information technology are putting their trust in cloud-based DR. Take a look at five reasons why.

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.

In the midst of spring, the severe weather threats of torrential rain, hail, and more importantly, high winds and tornadoes.  Many companies, especially small organizations should be reviewing their disaster contingency plans. However, many do not have adequate, if any, business continuity plans or have heavily outdated plans that are not reviewed regularly from an IT perspective in the event of a disaster.

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.