Racksquared Data Centers Expands into Louisville, Kentucky
I am new to the world of IBM Power but in the last 6 months, I've learned a lot and would like to share some of those key
learnings with you. I'm going to talk about how staying current on your OS avoids trouble, why you need to follow the 3-2-1 best practices rule for backups, and how having a disaster recovery plan prepares you for a worst-case scenario.
According to TechTargets, “The term cloud came into widespread use in 2006 when Amazon launched AWS with the Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) service”. Since that time, there have been endless debates as to whether it is better to host IT infrastructure on-premises or in the cloud. From my perspective, the answer is a definite “it depends”. How do you figure out what’s best for you? Check out the three questions you need to ask as you determine on-premises versus the cloud. Your company should have the expertise, technology, and environment to support your business requirements.
Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled The IBM Power Trap that described how a series of decisions related to how you
manage your applications and IBM Power can leave you stuck. A few people reached out to me with questions so I thought it might be appropriate to share a real-life story about one of our customers, we will call them Glass Corp International (GCI), that got caught in this trap and had to be rescued.
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.
“Ransomware damages are predicted to cost the world $11.5 billion in 2019, and $20 billion in 2021” according to ”Cyber Security Ventures 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime Report”. They go on to say that they predict that “a company will fall victim every 14 seconds by 2019, and every 11 seconds by 2021”. What many don’t realize is that these threats aren’t focused solely on large enterprises that can pay big ransoms, but instead take broad aim and seek to collect smaller ransoms from lots of companies. This focus on small to medium sized companies by hackers is often due to the fact that they have fewer security resources than their larger counterparts.
As a business, it can be challenging to predict where a company's infrastructure will be five years down the road. That's why many companies are choosing to partner with a colocation provider.
IT systems these days are so critical to the success of any business, but even with the conveniences afforded by technological advancements, many companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place should they experience unplanned downtime. According to the State of Global Disaster Recovery Preparedness Annual Report, 57% of IT professionals surveyed have had at least one system outage in the past three months and 60% of companies don’t have a fully documented disaster recovery plan. Organizations need to prepare for everything from natural disasters to cyber-attacks.
