If a disaster happened today, would your company be truly ready? More often than not, disaster recovery plans and procedures already are set in place to protect a company’s IT systems and critical enterprise applications. However, CIO’s Todd R. Weiss wants companies to ask themselves: If disaster strikes, will critical enterprise apps be ready?
“Everything from off-site data centers hosting your critical applications to data backups that are available at the flick of a switch when needed,” Weiss points out, “have to be maintained, updated and tested on a regular basis so that they absolutely, positively can be relied on in a real disaster.”
Weiss recommends real-situation testing, with the article mentioning the benefits of virtualization in an event of a disaster. To see how LTI handles disaster recovery, backup and archive services, click here and contact us today.
Part of what makes disaster recovery testing so effective is examining for, and providing solutions against, critical weaknesses. Germany’s IT agency is probably wishing Apple’s iOS critical weakness had been handled before they discovered that a tool that lets people remotely jailbreak their iPhones could be modified to attack iPhones and iPads with malicious PDFs, prompting the German government to issue security warning after the iOS jailbreak release. CNET’s Elinor Mills reports that Apple responded by saying a fix is in the works and, in the meantime, Germany suggests not opening PDFs from unknown origins. A simple solution, really. One reminiscent of same suggestions for all the malware that affects countless computer and IT systems. Learn more about LTI’s superior level security here.
And… what a waste!
A recent blog post on MIT’S technology review discusses the hidden damage from waste data. The blog points out that “deleting data requires energy, which means that a substantial fraction of a computer system’s energy budget is currently devoted to creating and then almost immediately scrubbing data. And if the wasted energy weren’t bad enough, computer memory has a limited life span. Flash memory, for example, has a lifespan of 100,000 cycles. So cycling it needlessly brings the inevitable breakdown closer.” Johns Hopkins University’s Ragib Hasan and Randal Burns provide some suggestions for dealing with waste data, drawing from actual waste management ideas.
Hasan and Burns suggest that operating systems could provide incentives for applications to reduce the amount of waste files they generate, perhaps by reducing the I/O bandwidth or scheduling fewer CPU cycles to the worst offenders.
“This concept is equivalent to the Pay-as-You-Throw scheme and the polluter-pays principle used in real life waste management,” they say.
Also suggested are “digital landfills,” made of a semi-volatile storage medium that gradually degrade in time. “Unwanted data objects will fade automatically and the storage space can be reclaimed,” say the pair from Johns Hopkins in the blog.
To learn about LTI’s capacity management, click here. And find out more about how LTI’s innovative approach and established commitment to providing top-level security make the Company an industry leader worldwide.