Racksquared Updates and Insights

Are Your Data Backup Processes and Technology designed to evolve?

When it comes to data backup, there is one undeniable truth, your data is growing and your processes and technology need to be built to evolve and support that data growth. Every day your data volumes grow, your technology ages and your requirements change. You may not notice these changes day to day or month to month but year to year, if you look, you will see how things have changed.

When I speak with customers, what I tend to see is companies that invested in a backup system years ago, set it up and for the most part forgot about it.

IT and your data are what keep your business up and running but if the systems are working and there is no data, business comes to a halt. That’s why it’s so important for you to have a comprehensive data backup process that includes steps for securely getting your data offsite.

In working with many small businesses, we often find that the one-and-only backup copy of a company’s data is stored in a nearby desk drawer or taken home by an employee each evening. This can lead to the worst-case scenario: not having any data to actually recover when an event occurs.

The IBM i skills shortage isn’t going away

A shrinking IBM i talent pool has been a major concern for years. 

Back in 2015, dwindling access to IBM i professionals was blamed by IBM’s own top brass on revenue shortfalls. A system that had been around for nearly three decades, it was only a matter of time until the veterans left for greener pastures. The problem was, and continues to be, that fewer young professionals have been eager to master the same set of skills.

Depending on when you read this, you are either seeing the final days of support for the IBM Power7 or that milestone is in your rear view mirror. December 31, 2020 is/was the day IBM finally ended support for all IBM Power7 machines.

The change comes as no surprise. Power7 and Power7+ servers have been around since 2010 and 2012 respectively and IBM long ago published the end-of-life dates. But that doesn’t mean many businesses aren’t scrambling to find a solution. HelpSystems‘ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey shows that 15 percent of IBM i shops are still running Power6 servers, and 38 percent are running Power7 gear.

If you are like hundreds of thousands of organizations world-wide, somewhere in an office, warehouse or maybe on the dock sits a black box with a silver IBM logo, chugging along, powering your business’ most critical applications, every minute of every day.

When security incidents originate within the organization, whether through malicious intent or negligence, these incidents are considered as coming from “insider threats.” A recent IBM Security Study, “The Cost of Insider Threats,” indicated that 77% of these threats are related to employees accidentally sharing information (either through negligence or theft). The study included 204 companies with 4,716 insider incidents and placed an average annualized cost of $7.37 million on these incidents. While these costs, may not reflect what a small or medium-sized business might experience, the bottom line is these incidents result in significant expenses to the companies that are attacked.

More than 150,000 organizations worldwide rely on the IBM Power Systems platform and the IBM iSeries operating system to keep their core business up and running. This includes business applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, banking applications, customer relationship management (CRM) software and health information systems. Because of  the business-critical nature of these applications, companies rely on the iSeries as it is known for its reliability, scalability and stability. But what happens when the unthinkable happens and one of these systems fail?

Have you ever wondered if colocation services make sense for your company? Consider this, Vertiv and the Ponemon Institute conducted a survey of 63 data centers, that had experienced outages, and found that 46% were caused by data center equipment issues such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and generators, 22% human errors, 22% cybercrime, and 10% were related to weather. By adopting a colocation strategy, you can dramatically reduce your business risk associated with each of these factors.

Working remotely isn't a new phenomenon, but what is new is everyone working remotely. With that sharp increase in remote workers comes several challenges. In a business-as-usual environment, the decision to begin a work-from-home program would take weeks or even months of planning. Once the plan was developed, the concept would be tested and slowly rolled out while leadership managed and monitored how it was changing the business.

This methodical, planned approach completely shifted with the pandemic. In March 2020, many companies took "work from home" from concept to production in a matter of days. This was done out of necessity, and it is likely that in the haste of immediate action, lots of details were missed. Now that work from home is a reality, here are three things that should be top of mind.

According to OWL Labs’s “State of Remote Work 2019” survey 30% of all full time employee are working from home up from 18% in 2018. What is unknown is how many companies have the capacity for larger amounts of people working remotely in the event of a disaster.

Disasters come in many shapes and size and as IT leaders, we have been tasked with developing disaster recovery (DR) plans that will minimize the risk for our companies. Through the years, this has meant getting good backups, making systems more resilient and reducing recovery time objectives. The focus on hardware and data has created systems that are very reliable but what many of these DR plans fail to consider is “how will my employees work if they are no longer able to go to the office?”.