Eliminate Data Center Downtime through “What If” Simulation

Posted on August 22, 2017August 22, 2017 by Diversitec

How vulnerable is your data center to system failure? Are you able to access how resilient your data center is by knowing how many single points of failure you have or identify your weakest links? In today’s digital lifestyle of always-on and fully connected, the costs of data center downtime is measured both financially and in the impact to a company’s reputation. According to the Uptime Institute’s seventh annual Data Center Industry Survey, downtime matters with more than 90 percent of data center and IT professionals believing that their corporate management is more concerned about outages now than they were just 12 months ago. However, only 60 percent report that they measure the cost of downtime as a business metric.

Having significant hardware redundancy, a backup for the backup for literally everything could make a data center more resilient. However, this is not a good strategy for a company’s bottom line especially in light of the exponential growth of data from IoT. Thus, means for eliminating or mitigating downtime to non-harmful levels should be top of mind for IT management. One such way is to allow facilities managers to experiment in safe offline environments by creating virtual prototypes to troubleshoot “what-if” simulations for potential risks associated with power failure or critical systems going offline. Read full article here.

Raising the Bar for Internet of Things Through Tougher Security Bill

Posted on August 15, 2017August 15, 2017 by Diversitec

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing exponentially everyday with experts weighing in on the warning signals of its associated risks to global security. Notable statistics cited on IoT include the research firm Gartner saying that IoT devices have increased 31% from 2016 to 2017, hitting 8.4 billion connected “things” this year, and that the number will surge to 20.4 billion by 2020. Accenture estimates the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030 making the surge from industrial companies using IoT devices have a very positive effect on economies around the world. Steps need to be taken to ensure that manufacturers of IoT devices are equipped in producing cyber secure devices and new legislation is being proposed to address security issues.

As a start to try and fix the potential massive security problem imposed by IoT, lawmakers in the U.S. Senate introduced a bill in early August that would apply to vendors supplying the US federal government by setting baseline security standards and use of a broad range of Internet-connected devices, including computers, routers and security cameras. The new bill, Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017, was introduced by Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). As an example, the bill would require vendors of Internet-connected devices purchased by the federal government be ensured that their devices are patchable, rely on industry standard protocols, do not use hard-coded passwords, and do not contain any known security vulnerabilities. For more information on the new legislation, read full article here.

Edge Data Center Deployment Considerations

Posted on August 2, 2017August 2, 2017 by Diversitec

As emerging trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), streaming content and next-generation telecoms come into play, new thinking is going to be required to optimize opportunities of edge computing initiatives. Where technology is going to be deployed and what supported resources are needed to boost application performance, will determine the level of success for innovations in edge solutions. Just as important, who within the organization is leading the charge for an edge deployment and are they a part of the data center team?

Edge data center technologies take center stage when it comes to businesses that need to reach their customers quickly in an effort to drive sales by taking advantage of where the customer is at that moment. One such example provided by Kelly Quinn, analyst for the International Data Corporation, highlights that in an effort to reduce latency and improve customer responsiveness; a retailer could deploy edge data center devices to quickly sense when connected customers come into the store and push special offers to those shoppers while they are there. According to Quinn, “Any business that serves content to end users or engages end users in time-sensitive transactions stands to gain by implementing edge deployments.” Read full article here.