Disaster recovery continues to be an area of high risk and high cost
A recent survey by Janco Associates showed that organizations of all sizes considered that the loss of IT systems was the threat most likely to have an impact on costs and revenue and that it is the most commonly experienced disruption. The regulated nature of the IT environment, combined with the statutory obligations of clients’ data protection, means that having a disaster recovery system in place is essential. Until now, enterprises of all sizes have faced enormous costs and inflexible regimes to implement effective IT disaster recovery provisions. Many have therefore been forced to settle for a mere plan of action or ineffective options, which may in reality, do little to reduce their risks. So what are the options for protecting critical IT systems for your firm? Have a backup Most organizations take backups, but it is the barest minimum requirement for protecting your firm from a disaster. Backups are for getting you out of a hole when you accidentally delete/lose/corrupt data on your working machines. If you lose those machines completely then the backup will only help once you have replaced and rebuilt your systems. In addition, replacing and rebuilding is not as simple as it sounds and can take a long time before you have working systems again. CIOs should also know that taking a backup is not the same as having a good working backup. Backup processes have a reputation for letting enterprises down when they need them most. If the recovery plan in based on backups only, CIOs should check regularly that backups are actually working and understand that they have only covered the first step and plan to be without working systems for typically around 3 to 7 days). Also, remember that if you want to guard against a disaster that physically destroys your machines, then your backups need to be off-site - well out of harm’s way.
BlackJack
I haven’t been to Vegas for over 10 years and I like a bit of BlackJack. What are the small tables there now? $5 tables? Also, where is a good online place to find out the rules and good guidelines to play BlackJack smartly? I don’t want to loose all my money in one hand.
Credit Card Processor Disaster
Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net was down several hours. The service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites. A fire in Seattle s Fisher Plaza appears to be the reason what has taken down Authorize.net. With its website down, Authorize has set up a new Twitter account to provide updates and address the many customer complaints and questions. On July 2nd at approximately 11:10 pm, an incident in a garage-level electrical room disrupted power to Fisher Plaza East and knocked out the facility’s backup generation system. The electrical room is where Fisher Plaza East receives its power from Seattle City Light. One of the services affected was Authorize.net, the largest credit card and e-check payment processor in the world, with tens of thousands of partners and processing millions of transactions on a daily basis. Authorize.net set up a Twitter account to keep its customers informed and transaction processing has been restored with a backup data center. ARB transactions will be rerun over the weekend thought there are still issues with CIM, VPOS and api.authorize.net.
