Many businesses implemented disaster recovery (DR) plans in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks two years ago, McKnight says. "DR best-practices dictate that you really should have redundant systems in a separate data center -- whether your own or a service provider's -- that is on a separate power grid from your primary facility," he says. "The events of 9/11 really emphasized that requirement, and the outage yesterday will only reinforce it."
The major stock exchanges based in New York, including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, opened as scheduled this morning, although many traders could not commute into the city to report to work.
Meanwhile, all of the major U.S. Internet backbones from the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas continued to function normally following the blackout, according to Keynote Systems, an independent company that monitors Internet performance. Most major Websites remained accessible and at their normal performance levels. A few news sites, such as www.usatoday.com and www.cnn.com, had minor availability problems at the outset of the blackout, said Keynote.
"I actually found out about the blackout before it hit any news sources via... one of my techs out in the field," writes Joel Perez, an IP engineer with Ntera, a facilities-based IP service provider headquartered in Florida, in an email today. "They lost all power and phone service. The only thing still running was his Internet connection at the PoP he was in at the moment!" Ntera lost several voice circuits in the Northeast, Perez says, but all Internet-based data links held firm.
Statements issued late yesterday by Bell Canada (NYSE/Toronto: BCE) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) boasted of minimal impact on the telecom networks. But in the case of many everyday customers in the New York area who could not get through on phone lines, the statements seemed to contradict reality.
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.
