Disaster RecoveryCategory

Yesterday, there was a world-wide incident that affected computers running CrowdStrike Falcon, where there was a conflict between the vendor’s anti-malware protection and the Windows sensor, resulting in a BSOD and unresponsive computers. This is a major incident that was effectively the effective impact as we were expecting from the… Continue Reading Lessons from the CrowdStrike incident

What is your strategy for patching and updates? Whilst it might be tempting to just leave your systems on auto-update, the alternative to manually delay updates to always be one behind the latest (also known as an N-1 update strategy), may also be a problem. Updates and patching of software… Continue Reading N-1 update strategy

In times where you need to run through your BCP drill, it is important to know and understand the reasons why you need to exercise your Business Continuity Plan drill, and where it fits in with the rest of your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP or DR Plan). Your BCP Drill… Continue Reading The BCP Drill

On 22nd September 2022, Optus Telecommunications announced that they had detected a “hack” of their systems, and revealed that 9.8 million customer records had been accessed. For Australia’s second largest mobile phone provider, this represents nearly half of all Australian’s personal details, which includes name and address and phone number… Continue Reading Hacking risk for domestic violence victims

Often misunderstood, but the concept of “design for failure” is now common in the lexicon of system design and business operations. When you design for failure, it is not because you want to fail – instead it is with the understanding that failures can and do happen, but you want… Continue Reading How to design for failures

If you have ever been in a tricky situation, you will know that half the battle is knowing what is going on – you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what has happened. However, root cause analysis needs to wait until after the issue is resolved. Too often,… Continue Reading Half the battle is knowing what is going on

With the use of Software as a Service offerings increasing, with 99% of businesses projected to use one or more SaaS solutions in an industry that is worth $165Bn a year. There are 15,529 companies providing SaaS solutions , and so it seems like a logical choice to start using… Continue Reading Risks of SaaS

2020 has not started well, particularly in Australia with bushfires, floods and now Coronavirus. It is undeniable that life and culture will be changed forever by the lockdown of business and society caused by the global pandemic that has gripped the whole world. The short, medium and long term effects… Continue Reading How Covid-19 may change business and IT

It may feel like the ability to work from home makes home isolation possible to do remote working during Covid, but it is not all perfect… Recent events in 2019/2020 have shown the demand for people to self-isolate or quarantine themselves to reduce the spread of Coronavirus or COVID-19, and… Continue Reading Home isolation – is remote working the saviour?

The problem with backups Legacy approaches to backup in the IT industry are largely focussed on performing a backup of an entire server. This means that multiple backups will contain a full copy of the Windows operating system, and other files that will never need to be restored. Follow this… Continue Reading Backup for cloud

We have all had it before – something that has been around for a long time, and we have no idea if it is important any more – but no-one will take the ownership to declare that it can be disposed of. This is where the Scream Test comes in.… Continue Reading The Scream Test

I recommend that all businesses perform a paper exercise of running a BCP drill, as a way to tease out the conceptual and procedural issues related with planning for business continuity. It can be a desktop process of running through the BCP plan, and it helps to have a critical… Continue Reading The BCP Drill

It has finally happened – many years ago, when I worked at VMware, there were internal rumors of a rebootless upgrade being worked on since vSphere 5.0. And now, with the release of vSphere 6.7, you can upgrade the hypervisor without rebooting. What happens is the hypervisor will re-load, without… Continue Reading VMware rebootless upgrades are here!

Are you retaining a backup for 10+ years? Can you still use the data? How useful are your backups? A necessary burden Backups are a necessary task for all businesses. A hundred years ago, if there was a fire at a business, then everything would be lost – a paper… Continue Reading How useful are your backups?

Humans originally evolved to be dependent on fear. In modern life, the fears that we had evolved around are no longer relevant; we are not going to be hunted by large animals, we have conquered the dark, winter and times of hunger are distant memories. It may be true to… Continue Reading What was a fear, becomes a strength

Disaster Recovery is the process by which an organisation recovers its business operations after a disaster. It often is a focus of the IT department, however it is a business responsibility. Business Continuity Plans are the ability for an organisation to know how they will continue to provide business operations… Continue Reading Disaster Recovery Planning – How To

You may know about ToR, top-of-rack (for) switches. It’s the practice of placing a physical switch within each rack, so that the network switching for the rack is close to the servers or devices that need to connect to it. The ToR switches will allow servers to communicate with each… Continue Reading Top of Rack switch placement in a rack – not at the Top!

The concept of “Design for Failure” is often used to describe the approach that assumes that there will be a hardware or system failure somewhere, sometime – and instead of architecting for hardware and server clustering and availability, to design applications so that recovery can be performed quickly. Where the… Continue Reading Design for Failure

If you are new to using the cloud, or are now deciding to move more workloads to the cloud – here are my top 10 tips for cloud adoption 1. Switch off dev/test when not using it Probably the biggest advice I can give is to understand the differences between… Continue Reading Top 10 tips for cloud adoption