Nowadays, the big question is not whether your business will move to the Cloud but when. Earlier this month, Oracle announced that US telecoms giant, AT&T, will shift thousands of its large scale databases to Oracle’s Cloud IaaS and PaaS. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has signed an ambitious mandate to move all US federal IT systems to the Cloud.
By 2019, 73% of companies plan to move to a fully software-defined Cloud hosted data centre, according to the latest research by McAfee.
These days we are used to the idea that there is a mobile phone application for every problem presented by modern living. Need to pay a bill or transfer some money? There is a mobile phone banking app for that. Need to find your way to a new place? There is a mobile GPS app for that. Need to get some takeaway food delivered to your door. There is a delivery service app for that. Need to call a taxi late at night and pay on your credit card? There's an app for that as well.
There seems to be a trend these days for spotting five things that we have learnt from any given event. I don’t know why five things rather than say ten. Maybe it’s because after that number people start to get bored these days.
Well, I certainly don’t want to bore anyone, so I will stick to five things for my list, which is what to watch out for in your business continuity planning. This list is the result of many years of experience in business continuity/disaster recovery work, mostly helping companies who have suffered some kind of catastrophic IT failure.
The first thing to look out for, or expect, is the unexpected. In my last blog I talked about so-called ‘black swan’ events. These are events that are totally unexpected in that they are beyond the frame of reference of most people, like the ideas of black swans was in medieval times. They tend to have a massive impact on an organisation, but even so are often not learnt from. You need to acknowledge that you cannot predict or plan for every eventuality, but you can prepare yourself so that whatever happens you have a fighting chance of surviving it.
If you are a regular follower of this blog then you will know that cyber crime is one of our hottest topics. There is literally nothing of more concern right now to business owners than the prospect of having their IT systems penetrated, their data stolen and their servers corrupted. You might on occasion be tempted to think that this is all another IT scare story designed to frighten people into spending money on cyber security consultancy and anti-virus software, just like the so-called ‘Millennium bug’ that failed to materialise on the stroke of midnight at the turn of the century.
You might recall that my blog last week talked about children hoping for a Snow Day so that they could get out of going to school for a day. Well, they say you should be careful what you wish for because yesterday I found myself at the centre of a massive snow storm in Boston, Massachusetts that they are calling ‘Snowmageddon’. The snow is three feet deep here, with all 36 inches falling overnight on Tuesday.
