Category Archive for : ‘Data Center Redundancy’

On June 30, 2015, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council rolled out a new assessment tool for financial organizations, with the aim of helping them detect and defend against security risks.

The Cybersecurity Assessment Tool walks users through the process of analyzing their own systems, personnel policies and technology infrastructure to determine how prepared they are to defend against threats like data theft and hacking.

The assessment is divided into two sections – Inherent Risk Profile, and Cybersecurity Maturity – with five points of focus for each section:

Inherent Risk Profile

This section of

At around lunchtime on July 8, 2015, trading at the New York Stock Exchange came to a halt when NYSE decision-makers recognized a “technical issue” associated with a software release. Reports since then have been vague regarding what the issue was and how it was remedied, but it seems symptomatic of problems that affect businesses of all sizes.

The NYSE outage could be the result of a coding problem. When code is flawed, businesses may not notice the problem until their security has already been compromised. And while many people with knowledge

Indiana is a state known for basketball, motorsports and vast expanses of farmland. But increasingly, it’s becoming a hot spot for tech startups. According to Forbes magazine, between 2001 and 2013, the Indianapolis-Carmel area ranked ninth of all cities in the United States for tech sector growth, with a 50.4 percent increase in overall tech industry employment.

It’s not just tech companies that are setting up shop in the Hoosier state. Some businesses have chosen to move their headquarters to Indiana, thanks to tax breaks and other incentives. And all of

In 2014, businesses learned about a security vulnerability that could jeopardize their internal documents and their customers’ personal and financial information. The Heartbleed bug was unique, in that it wasn’t a virus that inflicted a single, obvious attack that could be easily identified. Instead, it leaked security keys, passwords, content, historical data – all kinds of information that could open the door to hackers everywhere.

One year later, and three out of four businesses are still at risk of being harmed by the Heartbleed bug. That’s why IT departments should be

The NYSE, along with United and WSJ.com, outages were cause for concern last week, raising a variety of questions in the midst of reports of “technical issues”. The official statement reads as follows:

“It was determined that the NYSE and NYSE MKT customer gateways were not loaded with the proper configuration compatible with the new release.”

Our very own Rich Banta, chief compliance officer and co-owner of Lifeline Data Centers, shared his own thoughts and comments in a recent TechTarget article regarding the outage.

“An attack is a technical issue you have to plan

Developers can run into problems when their applications lack scalability or compatibility. To ensure applications can meet the demands of users, developers must devote considerable time to testing, but they may need access to additional resources in order to do that.

When developers are testing the functionality of an application, a host server may become less responsive. That means, in the workplace, end users may find that everyday computing tasks take longer to perform. That’s why it makes sense to have a separate server dedicated solely to development and testing. And

The “Internet of Things” or “IoT” … what is it, and what does it mean to your company?

Simply put, the IoT describes what happens when you set off an alarm leaving a store, because a cashier forgot to deactivate the security tag on your item. The tag sends a signal to a receiver, which in turn triggers an alarm. Those two devices are communicating, without human involvement, and providing an additional measure of safety for a retailer. But devices that can communicate independent of humans could also compromise the safety

Technology seems to be evolving more rapidly than the law, with regulators scrambling to draft rules only after a dispute or question arises. Lawmakers and courts encounter new issues that didn’t exist decades ago … for example, whether social media evidence is admissible in a court case.

When technology grows to the point that it triggers regulatory concerns, the Federal Communications Commission is bound to respond. Recently, the FCC tackled questions about broadband Internet, when it issued the Open Internet order. Now, the FCC is being asked to re-evaluate how cell

When you manage your company’s data center, your primary focus is keeping servers up and running. But if no one is checking the efficiency of those servers, you could be maintaining machines that offer little value in exchange for the power they consume.

In 2013, data centers in the United States consumed 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. Here’s how much power that actually is:

A 500-megawatt coal plant can produce 5 billion kilowatt-hours per year
5 billion kilowatt-hours is the approximate annual electricity usage of a city of 140,000 people
That means data centers

With a rapidly changing business climate that includes data, cloud and analytics, data centers are expected to undergo numerous changes in the next few years to adapt. However, it can be difficult to predict what those changes might be.

Following are some of the biggest variables that could impact data centers in the immediate future.

Regulatory questions

The Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet rules forbid Internet service providers from favoring some Internet traffic in exchange for payment (that’s just one provision of the rules that are also known as net neutrality law). But