Technology Technicality

We need technology. I mean we can live without it, humans have for millions of years, but today, we need technology. Everything thing today is technology driven, from banking to soda machines. How many people are kept alive each day due to technology such as pacemakers and dialysis machines? (I’ll let you do the math.) Needless to say, a lot. Today, technology is important.

Please Stand By Technical Difficulties

Today was a tough day for technology. There were three major outages.

1. United Airlines
2. The New York Stock Exchange
3. The Wall Street Journal

United stated a router issue was to blame for the airline to request a ground stop for U.S. departures. The New York Stock Exchange halted buying and selling of stocks for about 3 ½ hours due to what it called a "technical issue". A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal said its website's outage was still being investigated.

Three seemingly unrelated issues happening on the same day that point out one glaring fact, technology matters. Technology matters and the ability to keep it running and available is job 1.

I read an article written by Andrea Chang and Tracy Lien for the LA Times (Here) that had some really good quotes from several security experts. In my opinion they boil do to this; these are complicated systems, they will never be perfect, we can’t stop them from failing, but we can prepare for when they do fail so we can recover quickly.

So the experts are telling us that businesses need a Business Continuity Plan. Everyone who knows this raise your hand. OK, now if your hand is up, keep it up if you have a written and tested Business Continuity plan. Lost quite a few there didn’t we? Why? Why would you know you need one and not have one? Apathy? Cost? Odds? Whatever your excuse is, it isn’t good enough.

Even very small SMB companies spend many thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours setting up technology to run their business. If more than 10% of your yearly technology budget isn’t for security and continuity you are doing it wrong and you’re leaving yourself exposed.