Fortunately, Comdisco's been prepared. In July, the company opened a 302,000-square-foot service center in northern New Jersey. The building is equipped with 1 million feet of Category 5 cable. Eight miles from that facility is another 160,000-square-foot center for mainframes.
"We have a circuit capacity equal to 250,000 56-kbit/s modems," says Bob Bryar, Comdiscos chief technology architect for storage services. Comdisco, with 45 centers worldwide, is currently using about one-third of its overall recovery capacity.
SunGard Planning Solutions, another provider of disaster recovery services, has had 30 customers impacted by the disaster, including seven in the World Trade Center and many in adjacent buildings. "Another ninety have alerted us that they may also need assistance," says vice president of marketing Dave Palermo.
SunGard offers its customers three different types of service agreement. At the cheapest level, SunGard promises to begin data recovery within 48 hours. The midrange level uses EMCs SRDS software for synchronizing data after a disaster. The top-of-the-line service mirrors all data at remote locations so customers can immediately be back in business. Most of the financial institutions had the highest level of service. And SunGard says that's why many were still operating immediately after the disaster.
Storage equipment vendors are also directly involved in getting businesses back on track. EMC, for example, says it's got its own disaster recovery services deployed and is helping customers to set up their data there. The company is also assisting customers like Comdisco with their efforts.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
