Lessons Learned from Superstorm Sandy

During and after Superstorm Sandy, power and communications were out. Weeks later, power is still out for tens of thousands and some buildings will be uninhabitable for months due to contamination. Cellphone carriers successfully fought the FCC on installing backup power and Netflix reported that viewership doubled on the East Coast. If your organization had a work-from-home disaster recovery plan, did it work?

Don’t Lose Your Data To Someone Else’s Disaster

In our last blog I said to watch for our guest blogger Randall Becker. As much as I would like to take credit for his writing, this is Randall’s entry. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. What is “The Cloud?” Put simply, a computing cloud is a set of resources that […]

What Does “Data Loss” Mean To You?

Protecting your data against loss means protecting it against a spectrum of risks. If you are worried about corruption or deletion of data, then you should be thinking about replication and backup. If you are worried about your data falling into the wrong hands, then you should be thinking about data encryption solutions along with access controls and separation of duties. Last but not least, if you are worried about regulatory compliance or eDiscovery, then you might also have a requirement to store your data in a provably read-only form.

I Got Burned And So Can You!

On Saturday, February 20th at approximately 2:20 p.m. Mountain Time, the shared server that my Internet domain is on experienced a hardware failure as a result of an annual fire system inspection at WestHost’s Data Center (DC). An inadvertent release of Inergen (a fire suppression product) was triggered by an actuator that was not removed […]

A Sidekick In The Pants – The Final Countdown?

Microsoft said Thursday that it believes it has recovered most of the Sidekick data that it initially feared might have been permanently lost. I am guessing that they located an older offline backup and are working on restoring it and applying any changes made to user data after the backup was made. This means that […]

A Sidekick In The Pants – Part 2

Thousands to tens of thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick customers may have lost all of their data. Here are some more thoughts on data protection.

A Sidekick In The Pants

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, have announced that they lost subscribers’ contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists and photos – and there is no backup.

You Do Take Offsite Backups, Right?

Avsim.com, a popular website for users of flight simulation gear has been felled by hackers who attacked the company’s servers. Unfortunately, data was never stored offsite and offline, so when both servers were attacked, more than a decade of links, software modifications, and exchanges were permanently destroyed.

Cloud Computing is Just Time Sharing Warmed Over

Cloud Computing is what graybeards used to call Time Sharing. When computers filled rooms and cost millions of dollars, many companies had a dumb terminal like a Teletype, IBM 3270 or ADM-2, or a combination card reader/printer in their office which was connected by a point-to-point leased telephone line to a central computer somewhere. Customers were billed for […]