IT Solutions Blog

Earlier in the year I attended an IBM sponsored event and during one of the talks I first heard, the “cognitive era of security”.  The speaker talked about a transition from the Intelligence Era to the Analytics Era and then into the Cognitive Era. All well and interesting but after the presentation I still felt unsure as to what exactly this “Cognitive Era” meant.  Walking out of the auditorium I envisioned the advent of a digital entity that would be capable of passing the famed Turing test.

Could your business survive an outage where you lost access to critical applications and data? Many cannot, but very few businesses pay close attention to how they can better prepare themselves for an outage. The statistics will vary, but most suggest that less than half of all businesses have disaster recovery planning in place. One Gartner survey had it at 35%. Some businesses do not have the means and others see it as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Every business needs to back up and protect data and manage its available data storage, but many don't have a good system for doing so. However, when it comes time to choose a storage option, many companies are not sure what to look for. Here are some of the things to consider when deciding what type of recovery and backup is right for your business.

Is your backup plan assisting you as you work through the phases of Meaningful Use?

When it comes to competition either across the world or via the internet marketplace, can smaller companies afford to compete globally with larger corporations without outsourcing important business functions such as IT? What are your thoughts in regards to the three questions, posed to address, this issue referenced on CFO.com?

While outsourcing can be a growth vitamin, small to-midsize companies must ask three questions before taking the plunge.

Is your IT Department Viewed as able to Drive Business Grown in New Areas or Just to Increase Effeciencies? What do you think of this study referenced in an article from CIO.com?

We have noticed a trend with some of our managed services Clients lately. They are purchasing less tape drives and moving to VTL, Snapshots and Disk Archives. Most Clients tell us that the cost of new tape drives and tapes, along with the services to store these tapes, help justify the cost of disk-based solutions. Add in a reduced Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and it is easy to see why the industry is moving in this direction. What is your experience? Is tape a dead technology or will it always have a place in the IT world?