The financial services industry has developed a certifiable methodology designed to help banks recover from the complete loss of all IT systems for an extended period. Is this a blueprint for improving corporate resiliency?
A recent outage at Akamai took down access to cloud services from Amazon Web Services and Oracle, as well as online services for American Express, Charles Schwab, Costco, Delta Airlines, FedEx, United Parcel Services, and many, many others, mostly…
The pandemic has accelerated some long-term trends toward greater use of digital services, remote working and remote operation. Overall, costs have been pushed up, but other impacts are less clear — some are even counter-intuitive. Many…
In the 12 months from early March 2020 to April 2021, COVID-19 made a big impact on how and where IT was used. This had a surprising — and in some ways paradoxical — impact on IT service availability and the number and severity of outages recorded.
A recent outage at content delivery network Fastly took down thousands of websites in different countries, including big names, such as Amazon, Twitter and Spotify, for nearly an hour. It is the latest large outage highlighting the downside of a key…
Cloud, hosted and many other internet-based services and workloads are designed to operate with very low failure rates. Large (at-scale) cloud and IT service providers use an array of software and data management tools, strategies and services to…
A sector-wide focus on efficiency does not necessarily extend to many organizations’ centralized 3-phase uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. Today, these systems routinely achieve 94% to 96% efficiency in normal operational mode. Economy (…
Data center uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems are evolving. New technologies are enabling various electrical approaches. But will UPS systems of the future meet the changing requirements of operators? This report discusses UPS adoption…
Across the world, data center owners and managers are striving to buy more renewable energy and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. The global internet giants and the largest colocation companies have led the way with huge green energy…
Uptime Institute Members say one of their most vexing security concerns is the insider threat — authorized staff, vendors or visitors acting with malicious intent.In extreme examples, trusted individuals could power down servers and other equipment…
Avoiding downtime remains a top priority for all managers of critical infrastructure. But as technology changes, and as the demands placed on IT change, so do the types, frequency and impacts of outages, as well as the best practices in outage…
In early March 2021, a hacker group publicly exposed the username and password of an administrative account of a security camera vendor. The credentials enabled them to access 150,000 commercial security systems and, potentially, set up subsequent…
The catastrophic fire that occurred at OVHcloud’s SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France (see Note 93, The OVHcloud data center fire) has led many operators to question their vulnerability to fires.Fires at data centers are a constant concern, but…
The fire that destroyed a data center (and damaged others) at the OVHcloud facility in Strasbourg, France, on March 10-11, 2021, has raised a multitude of questions from concerned data center operators and customers around the world. Chief among…
Data center operators routinely maintain multiple physical perimeters against intruders and regulate the activities of the people inside. However, cloud computing and increased remote monitoring and automation bring new security challenges.