If the recent system crashes plaguing major international corporations like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and the NASDAQ stock exchange tell us anything, it’s that redundant data backup and disaster recovery are more important than ever.
On Aug. 16, four minutes of downtime across Google’s entire system, the source of which has still not been revealed, resulted in a 40% drop in global Internet traffic. Three days later, Amazon.com went dark for 30 minutes, costing the online retailer $66,240 per minute. Microsoft Outlook customers reported problems accessing their email between Aug. 14-17, an issue that was eventually traced to the company’s Exchange ActiveSync service hitting a glitch, which flooded the system with increased traffic.
Meanwhile, on Aug. 22, Apple’s iCloud system endured an 11-hour blackout that only affected 1% of its customers but instilled fear in the hearts of the storage service’s 300 million users. On the same day, the NASDAQ crash resulted in the American stock exchange halting all trading for three hours, a major confidence shaker that was reportedly the result of a good old-fashioned server crash caused by data collection system connection failures. Even The New York Times, whose Aug. 27 crash was chalked up to a malicious attack from the Syrian Electronic Army, suffered a much-less-publicized blackout on Aug. 14 that was reportedly caused by regular system maintenance.
What’s unusual about the aforementioned system failures is the vocal charge technology experts are leading about the problem of increased automation and decreased human oversight. “These outages are absolutely going to continue,” Neil MacDonald, a fellow at technology research firm Gartner, told The Guardian. “There has been an explosion in data across all types of enterprises. The complexity of the systems created to support big data is beyond the understanding of a single person and they also fail in ways that are beyond the comprehension of a single person.”
Don’t think those glaring examples of billion-dollar corporations temporarily breaking down apply to the more scaled-down operations most of us interact with on a daily basis? Consider this: if the tech world’s biggest fish are prone to periodic blackouts caused by faulty servers, software glitches, and misguided automation efforts, isn’t it time your business considered the health of its own backup and disaster recovery situation as well?
CMIT Solutions’ backup and disaster recovery (BDR) service, CMIT Guardian, offsets these problems by employing different levels of redundancy: file and folder backup, complete server and system virtualization, on-site or off-site backup, data encryption, and remote cloud services. Whatever the size or scope of your business, CMIT offers a backup and disaster recovery solution right for you. Don’t wait for a catastrophe to strike to put a plan in action. Sign up for a free technology and security assessment from CMIT, and we’ll show you how to protect your business’s most valuable asset—its data.