Department
Risk
10 articles filed under Risk.
When to Consider High Availability?
“High Availability isn’t something you buy, it’s something that you do.” – John Nicholson Few things are more universally desired in IT than High Availability (HA) solutions. I mean really, say those…
Disaster Recovery Planning with Existing Platform Equipment
Disaster Recovery planning is always difficult, there are so many factors and “what ifs” that have to be considered and investing too much in the recovery solution can itself become a bit of a…
A Public Post Mortem of An Outage
Many things in life have a commonly accepted “conservative” approach and a commonly accepted “risky” approach that should be avoided, at least according to popular sentiment. In investing, for…
The Jurassic Park Effect
“If I may… Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You…
The Weakest Link: How Chained Dependencies Impact System Risk
When assessing system risk scenarios it is very easy to overlook “chained” dependencies. We are trained to look at risk at a “node” level asking “how likely is this one thing to fail.” But system…
The Inverted Pyramid of Doom
The 3-2-1 model of system architecture is extremely common today and almost always exactly the opposite of what a business needs or even wants if they were to take the time to write down their…
Virtual Eggs and Baskets
In speaking with small business IT professionals, one of the key factors for hesitancy around deploying virtualization arises from what is described as “don’t put your eggs in one basket.” I can see…
Nearly As Good Is Not Better
As IT professionals we often have to evaluate several different approaches, products or techniques. The IT field is vast and we are faced with so many options that it can become difficult to filter…
Do You Really Need Redundancy: The Real Cost of Downtime
Downtime – now that is a word that no one wants to hear. It strikes fear into the heart of businesses, executives and especially IT staff. Downtime costs money and it causes frustration. Because…
Why We Reboot Servers
A question that comes up on a pretty regular basis is whether or not servers should be routinely rebooted, such as once per week, or if they should be allowed to run for as long as possible to…