British Airways Data Center Computer Outage Leaves Passengers Stranded Over Holiday Weekend

Not the holiday weekend that passengers of British Airways were expecting when the airline had to cancel hundreds of flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports, reportedly leaving 75,000 passengers stranded in 170 airports across 70 countries.  On Saturday, May 27, an extensive computer system failure affected all check-in and operational systems with respect to flight, baggage and communication.  This could cost British Airways hundreds of millions of dollars in passenger compensation and out of pocket expenses for the multiple day ordeal.  So, what happened?

According to British Airways Chief Executive, Alex Cruz, the problem was caused by a power surge that also rendered the back-up systems ineffective.  Apparently the power supply issue was at one of the airline’s U.K. data centers and the IT staff there have spent days getting systems back up.  The exact circumstances as to why the back up system failed as well at this time is unknown. However a spokeswoman for British Airways states: “When the customer disruption is completely over, we will undertake an exhaustive investigation to find out the exact circumstances and most importantly ensure that this can never happen again.”  Lesson learned, test your data center backup plan before chaos ensues.  Read full article here.

 

 

 

 

Government and Public Safety Agencies Rely on Backhaul Engineering for Wireless Communications Applications

Meeting the wireless communication demands of the federal, state/local governments, and public safety agencies is at the core of Backhaul Engineering’s service capabilities. As a single-source wireless engineering services company with more than a decade of industry experience, Backhaul Engineering provides the wireless industry with high-quality engineering, design and support services.  Both national and local clients value their experience in the areas of path engineering, spectrum management, interference mitigation and troubleshooting; as well as, unmatched installation management services. A total solutions provider from your core network to mission-critical voice backhaul, building interconnectivity and video surveillance.

 

Cities are now requiring occupancy licenses and Fire and Police radio signal repeating systems to ensure proper handheld communications in new construction.  Backhaul Engineering also offers a full package of services for Public Safety RF compliance such as signal propagation studies, predictive modeling, and installation with local Police and Fire.  Earlier this year Backhaul Engineering joined Diversitec, the parent company of EdgeMCS, family of companies. C.J. Grothendick, President & CEO of the Diversitec family of companies states, “Backhaul Engineering’s unique experience with public safety applications dovetails nicely into Diversitec’s existing customer base and the modular data center offering of Edge MCS. The skill sets in our family of companies perfectly complement each other.”

Internet of Things World 2017 Highlights the Rise of Edge Computing

Top IoT industry trends were discussed at the Internet of Things World 2017 conference last week; one being the rise of edge/fog computing as the shift in the way users interact with edge devices moves towards data consumption and production at the edge.  Before the explosion of IoT devices, users mainly consumed information at the edge.  Now, the growing number of edge devices creates large amounts of data and decisions can be made by machine learning techniques without user intervention. No doubt cloud computing will face some challenges as critical response times for processing data, the amount of energy needed and the affordability of sending so much data to the cloud first for processing comes into question as the interest in IoT shows no sign of slowing down.

The Internet of Things World 2017 conference covered a whole host of topics associated with IoT security, autonomous vehicles, intelligent transportation in smart cites and where to start aligning IoT strategy during lively presentations and panel discussions.  Industry experts and thought leaders in this space felt AI is becoming a key focus and the drivers for growth in the IoT will be the smart buildings, homes, cars and cities of the future.  Read full article here.