How does a small or medium business ensure it can meet the basic needs for disaster recovery and business continuity? Whether it be Internet-facing applications, or Enterprise-facing applications and data, one of the most important issues faced by small companies is the potential loss of information and applications needed to run their operations.
Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites - it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.
Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company's data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.
Last Thursday (9 Apr 2009) brought a new experience to many in the telecommunications industry - a malicious attack on two separate underground fiber optic systems. The damage wiped out normal communications, including emergency 911 services, in many areas of the San Jose/San Carlos area, including service as far away as Gilroy.
This is the first time most in the telecom industry have experienced intentional disruption to telecom infrastructure, and both industry experts and authorities are scrambling to understand the WHYs, HOWs, and WHOs of the incident.
The telecom industry, and watchdogs looking at the telecom industry, have long advocated stricter oversight and control over critical telecom infrastructure. In New York most manholes are not secured with any kind of lock, allowing virtually anybody with the desire to enter the underworld of critical infrastructure. In downtown Los Angeles there is a high density of telecom carriers centered in the Wilshire, West 7th, and West 6th area. In addition to telecom infrastructure, the power company, water, and sewage share the space below our major streets and intersections. Thus, if there was a desire for malicious activity below the streets of LA, or other major cities, it is not just telecom, but nearly all our critical infrastructure services which would be damaged or seriously disrupted.
What do you do when your IT storage and processing growth requirement demands a tremendous increase in servers and data center space, but your IT budget is shrinking? What do you do when disaster recovery requirements demand geographic backups with near zero time recovery point and recovery time objectives?
Ask Bert Armijo at 3tera. 3tera is a young, rapidly growing company based in Aliso Viejo, specializing in cloud computing - specifically the provisioning of cloud computing.
At the last CTC meeting (22 Jan) Bert gave a great presentation on the future of data processing as we know it. While talking with the audience on a very human level, he was actually passing a level of complex knowledge to the audience that left everybody wondering what had hit them. And burning many, many brain cells trying to wrap their minds round the implications of computing in the "cloud."
