Human error to blame for disruptions

Although disasters make headlines, 80% of all IT outages are caused by human error. To defend against downtime or service interruptions, organisations need to maintain strong business continuity plans, says Information Week.

The term "business continuity" today conjures images as varied as flooded data centres, cascading power outages, and waves of cyber attacks. But the real reason to plan ahead for a business disruption is likely to be much more mundane: Some well-intentioned system administrator makes an ill-advised change to a server in your data centre, causing all hell to break loose.

Up to 80% of all IT outages are caused by improper changes to the IT environment, Bob Vieraitis, VP of marketing for change control software vendor Solidcore Systems, told InformationWeek.

Hifn, the power behind network and information security, says PacketLight, a leading Israeli provider of storage and data connectivity solutions, has integrated Hifn's FlowThrough security processor architecture into its new WAN connectivity solution, the PL-200, reports CNN Money.

The company says with Hifn's processing power, the PL-200 can provide robust data protection and data reduction at wire speeds to carriers, enterprises and SMEs without sacrificing backup or recovery performance.

"We reviewed quite a few compression and security solutions and found that Hifn's FlowThrough Architecture stood out in its ability to offload all of the security processing from the host CPU for our storage over IP and Ethernet SAN connectivity device," said Koby Reshef, VP of marketing for PacketLight Networks.

While many people worry about the impact hurricane season may have on home and family, the question remains, how many businesses are prepared for a disaster, weather-related or otherwise, says CRN.

The days of throwing the latest backup tape in the boss's glove compartment and hoping for the best are gone. Systems, processes and tasks have become far too complex to rely on what was once a simple solution, which arguably had little real value to begin with.

Businesses break down into two categories: ones that have experienced a disaster and ones that will. Selling disaster-recovery solutions to the first set of businesses seems pretty easy; it's the second set where the opportunity lies and which proves to be the most challenging.