Notable Cloud Outages of 2020

Periodically we talk to someone who says something along the lines of: “we don’t need Total Uptime since we moved to the cloud.” A most interesting statement that is simply the result of someone misinformed about the benefits and capabilities of cloud. Does the cloud provide incredible flexibility? Yes! Does it let you provision services […]

VoIP Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) planning is essential for active businesses. We’ve written a lot about it here on this blog. Usually it’s about internet services and websites and data services. But what happens if your phone system goes down? That can be a real disaster too. And it’s especially vulnerable now that many businesses have moved […]

Measuring Failure

If you are goal-oriented, you know how important it is to measure success. For network professionals, the goal is usually 99.999% availability. But despite all the counsel we’ve heard about focusing on the positive, sometimes we need to take a closer look at what negative things may affect us. For network management, there are several […]

Top External Monitoring Tools in 2020

What is external monitoring? In a general sense, it means regularly checking on something to find out what is happening. It’s a way to gather information. In a large network, it means observing and recording data from a wide variety of devices and applications. We should clarify that monitoring and management are not the same […]

Network Failover Can Save Your Business

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, they say. You should always have a plan B. Companies spend millions on their data connections, but even the best of them can fail. And what happens when you don’t have adequate backup systems in place? Well, take a look at our survey of outages in 2018 […]

Network Availability is the Name of the Game

Your network is everything. At least it seems that way. You can offer the most wonderful services in the world, but if your customer can’t access them, you’re dead in the water. Let’s face it. Most businesses suffer when the internet goes down, or when critical network services are not available. You’ve probably experienced the […]

What Went Down in 2018

Despite whatever bad news you read in this article, we encourage you to remain positive. It’s just human nature to have a curious interest in the calamities of others. So if that’s what gives you your kicks, feel free to enjoy our 2nd annual dispatch on some of the most interesting outages of the past […]

Increase Availability with Ticket Excellence

Everybody has troubles — especially IT professionals. But for obvious reasons, they don’t have the luxury to ignore them, run from them, put them off, or pass them on to somebody else. Doing so would undermine availability. Perhaps the availability of a server or a desktop, or even a workforce. No, in the world of […]

Is Tier IV Certification Worth It?

In a previous article about Uptime Institute, we talked about the different types of certification a company can obtain. Achieving tier certification from Uptime Institute can cost a lot of time and money, but it can be pretty important. According to Colocation America Corporation, “If you’re in the data center business and not familiar with […]

Data Center Power Reliability

In some respects, a load bank test of a data center is much like a road test of an automobile. Suppose you are in the market for a car, and you meet with a dealer or a private party to check out what they have to offer. You start it up, look under the hood, […]