Category: Disaster Recovery

How Digital Technology Helps Deal with Climate Change

Digitization and climate change are both hot topics. The two subjects are also getting used together in the same sentence more frequently. For example, did you know digitization is good for reducing carbon emissions? According to the World Economic Forum, Digital technologies have the potential to reduce global emissions by 15%.

Since the pandemic lockdown, people have been working from home. The workforce has been slow in returning to the corporate office setting. An IFS survey conducted last year reports that almost three-quarters of respondents plan to increase spending on digital transformation. The climate control benefits include a reduction of CO2 emissions due to less commuting and travel to in-person meetings. Technologies like Microsoft Teams have made multi-site team meetings easy and readily available.

Cloud migration is the price of admission to competing in the digital world. 

Moving your IT environment to the cloud reduces the need for additional hardware, but more importantly, to your bottom line and the environment, cloud migration modernizes your operations. While being on the cloud, and using robust cloud-enabled services like IronOrbit’s INFINITY Workspaces, won’t make your business carbon neutral, it is a significant first step on that journey.

DEMATERIALIZATION
How You Can Reduce the Environmental Impact on Doing Business

Hardware casings, cords, adaptors, and other electrical products are called E-waste. E-waste is a growing problem. Significant environmental damage happens because nature cannot absorb these products. E-Waste is a significant contributor to the haphazard disposal of old electronics: they’re inert. All E-Waste products contain hazardous materials of one kind or another. The toxic materials are predominantly lead and mercury.

By switching to IronOrbit’s cloud, you can reduce the amount of hardware because you no longer need to invest in so many on-site computer stations. There’s no need to pay for its maintenance or replace machinery when it becomes obsolete. Instead, you only pay for the exact services you need. Over time, this saves you money. Cloud computing can help your company become sustainable while making it more profitable and productive.

Reducing Needless Travel Reduces Carbon Emissions

INFINITY Workspaces is our brand of DaaS, robust technology that enables employees to work remotely with ease. There are different INFINITY packages to fit specific use cases. Even designers and engineers can access the most demanding modern applications on their mobile devices. INFINITY Workspaces empowers Geographically dispersed teams to do their best work. The technology inspires productivity while eliminating the need for lengthy commutes. It also eliminates the carbon emissions associated with daily commutes.

Adopting a work-from-home environment or even a hybrid workplace is an excellent way to reduce your business’s carbon footprint. You could also save some money in the process.

Shared Data Centers Reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)

On-premises servers and data centers use substantial amounts of energy both for running and cooling. The manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of the hardware and peripheral products also add to GHG emissions. Companies can reduce emissions considerably by moving to a cloud computing environment. Once a company moves to the cloud, they use shared data centers. Like the ones operated by IronOrbit, shared data centers run far more efficiently than individual facilities or on-premises servers. There is no longer a need for personal equipment.

A recent forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that cloud computing will prevent the emission of more than one billion metric tons of CO2 between 2021 and 2024. Moving away from legacy software and hardware and towards cloud adoption is a logical next step for companies. Insofar as business continuity and investment in the future, cloud migration is a necessity.

Cloud computing and all the digital benefits of having your IT infrastructure on the cloud are valuable for IT departments. IT departments can work more closely with business leaders to develop new sustainability goals. It is favorable for companies, and of course, it contributes to a healthier environment.

Contact us for a no-obligation proof of concept. We’re here to help.
Balancing with Dominos
Cybersecurity as a Cost of Doing Business

 

Cybersecurity is turning out to be a top priority for organizations in every sphere. The reason being that cybercrime is costing businesses around the globe billions of dollars each year. 

According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach is $4.24million as of 2021, up from $3.86million in 2020. With cyberattack stories becoming a common feature of news headlines globally, companies cannot ignore the risks they face and whether they’re doing enough to protect themselves.

Why? Cyber gangs have evolved. They aren’t only interested in the so-called ‘big corporations.’ Small businesses are also falling on the receiving end of cyber-attacks, not because the cybercriminals are interested in compensation, but because small businesses hold data that can lead to a bigger catch.

Any way you look at it, your business, big, small, new, or old, possesses something that may aid cybercriminals in their course—the more reason why cybersecurity is critical in every business.

For many companies, embracing some form of cybersecurity is preparing or dealing with a growing concern of sophisticated cyber-crime.

This post will guide you through the right approach to adopt cybersecurity as a cost of running your business.

Conducting Threat Assessment

Your cybersecurity cost should be based on the level and types of threats you are exposed to, face or project.

As organizations give their teams the liberty to work remotely, organizations are more vulnerable than before. As such, it’s as important as ever to conduct a comprehensive threat analysis for your organization— following best practice guidelines—and decide on a cybersecurity budget.

Threat assessment also helps to validate your cybersecurity budget over time as threats evolve.

Educating and Training Users

Innovative business leaders understand the importance of constant cybersecurity and insider threats education. While your team members may not intentionally act maliciously, research shows that they’re the weak link to exposing company data to risk.

Aside from your core cybersecurity talent pool, your entire team must be well-educated on cybersecurity’s significance and best practices.

This calls for organizational investment in employee’s career and skills development if they want to maintain a high level of security.

Organize workshops, seminars, etc., to train everyone through simulated exercises, so they develop skepticism plus the ability to spot threats and readily report any suspicious activity.

Well-trained employees are essential to the success of any cybersecurity strategy.

Preparing for Incident Response

Prevention and remediation measures are two different expenses that most organizations get mixed up. Enterprises need to acknowledge that these are distinct departments that work together to get threats out the door.

However, spending generously on prevention and forgetting incident response can wreck your remediation journey when calamity strikes.

To be safe, organizations must also set aside risk tolerance funds for remediation processes based on the assessment of expected incidents.

Upgrading and Replacing your Infrastructure 

Today’s technology is fast-paced, ever-evolving, and driven by innovation. As a result, software, tools, and hardware possess a short life cycle often sustained by ongoing updates, releases, and upgrades.

Over time, such technology becomes unsupported and outdated, putting your organization at risk of cyber-attacks.

This is to say that enterprises must regularly check and replace obsolete systems or face security risks due to human negligence, malice, or system failure.

Security-as-a-Service 

Security-as-a-Service is a worthwhile undertaking that can keep your organization ahead of security threats. Even with in-house experts, it’s not uncommon to see large organizations outsource or rely on third parties on SaaS.

Consultants bring innovative ideas and deep industry knowledge to help test and secure your business. They help identify gaps and formulate, cocreate or improve security practices and processes.

Also, due to the complexity of cybersecurity, it becomes wise to use outside help and let your team focus on core business operations.

Outsourcing helps organizations leverage large pools of minds while limiting overhead costs, reducing risks, and getting access to proprietary security technologies such as DaaS, app and server hosting, disaster recovery and backup plans, and more.

Preparing for the Worst

An organization always needs to understand that risk assessment is critical regardless of how strong its defenses are. Risks change every minute, which requires your organization to adapt, adjust and prepare for new threats.

This means that your cyber security budget needs regular review and will most likely increase. Realistically, you can’t base your current cybersecurity budget on last year’s threats.

Cyber Insurance

Could you afford to pay out fines and restore normalcy if your businesses suffered a devastating cyber-attack? If not, cybersecurity insurance is worth your consideration.

Cyber insurance helps mitigate expensive losses while mitigating for your business the negative impact of data breaches, downtime, infrastructure damage depending on coverage. Notably, cybersecurity insurance should be a backup to a solid cybersecurity strategy.

Don’t wait until calamity strikes to put thought into protecting your organization.

With a rising number of cyber-attacks and an ever-widening regulatory landscape demanding stricter data protection requirements, organizations need to integrate cybersecurity in their operating costs to mitigate the risk of threats.

With these tips and a reliable security partner, you’ll be well on your way to protecting your business from threats.

 

To learn more about how you can protect your company from cyber-attack, please call

888-753-5060

Hurricane Sandy as seen from space.
IronOrbit After Sandy: The Data That Survived The Storm

 

Businesses shouldn’t gamble by settling with less-than-adequate disaster recovery. Their IT infrastructure absolutely needs to be able to withstand the most sophisticated cyber-attack or the most destructive natural disaster. Budgets are too tight and the competition is too high in this economy for any kind of setback. Fortunately, businesses with on-site infrastructures have an alternative to expensive, self-run, off-site backup facilities: fully-managed private cloud solutions from IronOrbit.

Many businesses in the northeastern United States with on-site IT infrastructures recently found themselves under-protected with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. These companies lost all their files and applications as floods destroyed their computing equipment—part of the toll of $50 billion in total economic losses related to the storm. On the other hand, some businesses may have been able to protect their IT hardware from water damage but were one of 8.5 million customers without power. Many companies lost productivity, sales, and customers as a result. The Manhattan-based websites Gawker, Buzzfeed, and the Huffington Post all went down after power outages at their self-hosted data centers, for example. They each lost about $100,000-$150,000 in ad revenues per day during the downtime (based on their yearly revenues of around $60 million).

Businesses caught off-guard by Hurricane Sandy shouldn’t dismiss the disaster as a “once-in-a-lifetime-storm” that will never be repeated and thus does not justify future preventative adjustments to their IT infrastructure. Firstly, “once-in-a-lifetime” natural disasters, in spite of their name, seem to be occurring every six-to-twelve months. Consider that the Japanese tsunami ($300 billion in total economic losses), the Thailand floods ($45 billion, while also causing a 28% increase in the price of hard drives), and the 2011 U.S. tornado outbreak ($20+ billion) have all happened within the last two years. Secondly, businesses with on-site IT infrastructures can attain better protection from data loss and downtime without having to pay for expensive off-site backup facilities and hardware by switching to the cloud. With the cloud, companies get a more reliable, mobile, and secure infrastructure for a lower cost and with superior disaster recovery.

Cloud computing can be trusted to prevent data loss and downtime better than on-premise IT infrastructures for several reasons. First, the cloud’s off-site servers will usually not be affected by the same localized storms that its users deal with. Second, even if a cloud data center were damaged by a hurricane, clouds have data backup sites and ready-to-go infrastructures or “hot sites” throughout the country. Finally, the cloud does not require any on-site hardware and can be accessed from anywhere. If the main office of a business has been destroyed, employees can access their files and applications from a cloud-based infrastructure while reconvening at a temporary location or working from home.

IronOrbit users in the Northeast experienced first-hand the ability of the cloud to prevent data loss and downtime. During Sandy, it was business as usual for all the IronOrbit users with Internet access (including via mobile data networks). Guillo Cianci of the Long Island-based Fratello Construction Inc. remarked, “Hurricane Sandy could have been a catastrophic data disaster for our company but our business didn’t skip a beat. Some of our neighbors were not so lucky. Hosting our IT with IronOrbit has been one of the best business decisions we have made; knowing that my business will always be up and running pays off every day.”

On top of the inherent disaster recovery capabilities of the cloud, IronOrbit takes additional measures to prevent even the possibility of data loss and downtime. With 24x7x365 technical support, we can help you with any issue at any time—even in the midst a power outage or destructive storm during the middle of the night. We’ve set industry-low Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) of 4 hours and 12 hours respectively. At the moment, we’re also offering to rebuild the IT infrastructure of any company that has been affected by Hurricane Sandy for free. Signing up with IronOrbit means no more worrying about disasters, downtime, or data loss—with us, you’ll be protected from all three.