They say that information drives business. Actually, it’s electricity. Your data will most likely be useless if you have no power. On the other hand, if you can turn the lights on, you can start working, one way or another. But now in a kind of millennial Mobius loop, information is also increasingly driving power…
The data snooping debate has quietened down a little recently, even if Edward Snowden’s name still crops up here and there. Whether or not the revelations about intelligence activities have changed much in terms of governmental attitude and behaviour remains to be seen. Pressure can still be applied to Internet, cloud and telecommunications service providers…
Risk certainly marked the year of 2013, with knock-on effects on business continuity thinking. However, in a year picking up the pieces after different disasters, the real message was a reminder that while we collectively now know a great deal about risk, we don’t always prepare or take action appropriately. The devastation caused by rainfall…
If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably heard about it: the sticky note on the computer screen with the account login and password for all to see. While this archetypally bad behaviour has security officers recoiling in horror, there are also other less obvious forms of password vulnerability that affect many organisations. Fundamental problems that…
More news about IT disasters (and disaster recovery) last week, this time concerning a French state financial system. Service was interrupted for four days in a configuration used to pay suppliers, and running SAP software and operated by the national French IT company, Bull. France still has a national computer company, providing mainframes and servers,…
While cloud services have promised advantages of redundancy and resilience from the start, there is still the spectre of failure. Even the largest operators can be affected. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) suffered breakdowns in 2011 because of a wrongly applied change of configuration, and again in 2012 owing to ‘historic’ thunderstorms in the neighbourhood…