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Defending Against SQL Injection

If you’re worried about computer hackers, you should be worried about SQL injection (SQLi). It keeps showing up on the top ten list of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). In 2013, the year of their latest approved list, OWASP put injection at the top of the list. “Injection flaws such as SQL, OS, […]
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Uptime Institute Ensures IT Infrastructure Reliability

When it comes to IT infrastructure, there’s not much room for error. In fact, businesses have come to expect their data technology environment to be completely reliable. As we wrote in “The Essence of Uptime“, “The standard for network uptime is 99.999% availability.” Data center reliability is essential to the success of the enterprise now […]
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Network Availability – Is it Important to you?

Alright, we admit that our company has a certain obsession with network availability we collectively call “uptime”. It’s even in our name. We’re totally committed to keeping services up and running for our clients. And while uptime is our best friend, we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the enemy:  downtime. We’ve […]
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Multicloud Adoption

There is plenty of evidence that businesses large and small are adopting a multicloud strategy. Case in point is a white paper produced by IDC entitled “Adopting Multicloud — A Fact-Based Blueprint for Reducing Enterprise Business Risks”. IDC is a global provider of market intelligence about IT and telecom. The report tells us that the […]
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Surprising Cloud Adoption Trends

We all know that businesses are moving to the cloud. But how? Anyone who knows the basics of cloud technology is also aware that there are many approaches to the adoption of cloud technology. An enterprise can choose from public, private, or hybrid solutions. They can go with only one cloud provider or they can […]
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Leading Causes of Downtime

IT systems go down for a lot of reasons. Some downtime causes are obvious, while others take some time to understand. And still others are just plain comical. In this article we’ll have a look at different approaches to assigning blame for outages, and we’ll offer a short list of our own. The concept of downtime applies […]
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Is Liquid Cooling Worth the Risk?

Water and computers don’t mix, right? So why would anybody want to try to cool computer equipment with water? Lots of reasons. But the first thing you think, of course, is this: “Will it leak?” Well, probably not — but we’ll get into that. You should know that water and computers are definitely not mutually […]
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Can Too Much Redundancy Impact Availability?

After unabashedly extolling the virtues of redundancy in a recent article , you may be wondering why we would follow up with another post questioning whether sometimes too much (redundancy) was just too much. Credit fellow staffers for the suggestion that we revisit the issue.  The problem was clearly a part of our initial research, and it deserves […]
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Internet Load Balancing and Failover for Multiple ISP Links

Controlling traffic is a key facet of internet management. Sometimes primary connections will go down. Or too much traffic may cause congested links or overwhelmed devices to become unusable. We wrote about the implementation of load balancing in the cloud in a 2017 blog post. When people think of load balancing, they usually think about traffic that […]
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One Summer Street Data Center Fire

Data center outages are not at all uncommon, and because of that we don’t bring your attention to them on a regular basis. However, this writer has seen firsthand the “no expense spared” architecture at Boston’s One Summer Street, so when Markley Group’s impressive flagship data center – the largest colocation facility in New England with almost […]
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HTTP/2 Makes the Internet Faster

If you have ever worked on a farm or have done construction, you probably got used to carrying things. And you might have heard your supervisor say at some point, “Get it all in one trip if you can.” That’s the idea behind HTTP/2. Earlier versions of HTTP required multiple TCP streams to transfer the […]
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Selecting the Right Monitors for Your Website

Suppose you’ve just launched a new website and you want to make sure that everything keeps working fine. What’s the next step? You could just hope and pray, but there is merit to being more proactive than that. The responsible thing to do is to monitor your website, including all the critical pages, services, and […]
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Redundancy: When Too Much is Just Right

Redundancy is indispensable in the world of information technology. Of course, redundancy is not welcome in every aspect of life. If your company doesn’t need you anymore and makes you “redundant”, you’ll have to look for another job. Poorly written text may be credited to the Department of Redundancy Department. The concept of redundancy is […]
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Proactive IT Maintenance to Minimize Downtime

No one needs to explain to you the virtues of being proactive. Of course, no one can make you (or this writer) do it either. You may know that you should change the timing belt on your car every 60,000 miles or so, but it’s even easier to do nothing about it — until your […]
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Top 6 Tools for DNS Troubleshooting

Looking for a handy online DNS Tool, try ours here! Troubleshooting never ends. Problems in network computing can happen at many different levels. One technology that every internet user depends on is DNS, which stands for domain name system. A domain name is an alphanumeric designation for an IP address. DNS servers are the databases […]
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What Went Down in 2017

The internet is replete with Top Ten lists and other rankings. But the criteria for distinguishing between #1 and #10 is often no more than personal whim. So with the caveat that these are not necessarily the worst or the biggest, we’ve decided to list and describe some of the most interesting outages in the […]