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Why Ransomware is a Threat to Availability

According to the FBI, ransomware became a billion dollar industry in 2016.  That is right, $1 billion.  If ransomware were a legitimate industry, it would be the focus of case studies in every business school in the world as its growth is unprecedented.  This growth is attributed to four primary reasons. The amount of money […]
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The Advantages of Software Defined Storage

Companies across the globe are rapidly undergoing a digital transformation covering every aspect of their respected organizations, especially the enterprise.  This macro process has pushed IT leaders to migrate applications and data to the cloud as well as software defining their own on premise infrastructures.  This is being accomplished by incorporating the technology triad of […]
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Does the Cloud have a Layer 1 or Layer 2?

Your customer calls the hotline and reports an outage. Now what? Well, first we need more information. What’s down? When did it go down? Were there any changes that may have affected it? Have other customers reported outages that may be related? We can’t possibly cover all the issues here. So let’s consider a specific […]
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Hybrid Cloud. Hybrid IT. Hybrid Availability.

There is a lot of talk about hybrid these days when it comes to IT.  For the past five years or so, the Hybrid Cloud has been a hot topic as organizations are now open to hosting their digital services and data beyond the walls of the datacenter perimeter.  Recently, the new approach of managing […]
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Load Balancing Moves to the Cloud

Everyone in the IT business has heard of load balancing, but many don’t know much about it. Even technology professionals who are familiar with the concept may know little about how it works. A brief introduction to the subject of load balancing and its development will help to round out our IT education. Why Load […]
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Top Tools for Network Troubleshooting

If you are a network administrator, you really want to get a handle on your network. But even laymen sometimes need to figure out what’s going on. There are some basic tools that will help you do that. Let’s have a look at some simple pieces of software that can be accessed from nearly any […]
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Minimize risk. Maximize availability.

Businesses take risks. It comes with the territory. But that doesn’t mean that an enterprise should push blindly forward, ignoring the potential threats to availability and ultimately its success. Risk assessment is essential to understanding the territory and blazing the trail ahead. And risk mitigation is the key to controlling those factors that endanger IT […]
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Root Cause Analysis to Maintain Uptime

“Houston, we have a problem…” For NASA, the disaster aboard Apollo 13 required a systematic approach. And that’s what they got thanks to the Kepner-Tregoe methodology.  The decision matrix developed by Charles H. Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe was employed at NASA to help bring the astronauts home. It is a step-by-step approach. And it is […]
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Server Hardening for Security and Availability

Server hardening is a necessary process. And it’s a never-ending one. From the moment you pull the machine out of the box (or create it in the virtual environment), it pays to be thinking about security. But server hardening can do more than keep your machine safe. It will help with performance, and it can […]
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Decrease Downtime with Change Management

Service providers do everything they know how to avoid downtime. Generally the best practice is not to touch a live network. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But change is inevitable, and eventually every network or system will need improvements. The trick is to handle these changes with little to no disruption of running […]
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The Coming Revolution of Software Defined Networking

Roughly, a decade ago, VMware released their ESX virtual hosting platform that literally changed the datacenter, as we know it.  It came at a time when datacenters were inundated with server sprawl as every new application request resulted in the purchase, racking and configuration of a new server.   The arduous hardware purchasing process for servers […]
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Why You Need Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)

One of the mantras for today’s enterprise could be, “living on the edge.”  With the proliferation of the cloud and the digital services and mobile apps that it hosts, today’s enterprise is all about the edge.  Chances are your company or organization has a web presence on the Internet thanks to Web 2.0, which gives […]
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Does Convergence Impact Uptime?

One of the biggest trends in data center infrastructure is convergence. Actually it has been happening for some time. Equipment footprint has been getting smaller for years. Functions that used to be handled by huge dedicated machines are now accomplished by modular cards. Specialized servers, switches, routers, and other network devices have been combined into […]
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Website Down? Understanding Why

“The website is down again!” That can be pretty frustrating. In the heat of the moment, most of us don’t really care why it is down — we just want back online. But the curious user may want to know more. What could make a web server unreachable? Why do they go down in the […]
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Is the TCP/IP Protocol on the way out?

“I am looking for implementations of TCP/IP for UNIX systems, including an interface for an IMP.” That was the start of the TCP/IP Digest on the ARPANET UNIX-Wizards mailing list on October 2, 1981. Mike Muuss was the researcher who got the conversation started. And look how far we have come since then. The Birth of the […]
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The Foundation of Networking – It’s about Availability

As we look forward to even greater advances in technology, sometimes it helps to take a look back. Many of us take for granted the connectivity that we enjoy across a wide variety of applications. Sometimes it is seamless, and other times – well, we know that improvements are on their way. But the applications […]