What Does Reliability Really Mean?

We have all seen the TV commercials from Comcast and Verizon for their business Internet and phone services. These sound very attractive because of the low cost but buyer beware. Don’t get me wrong, these types of services are appropriate for some very small businesses, especially ones who maintain home offices. These are businesses that do not rely on stable Internet or phone service.

Learning from Disaster

We all hope that we never have to experience the devastation that is being felt in Japan. They are trying to cope with numerous challenges relating to basic human needs like food, water, and shelter let alone basic infrastructure like power and communications. Would you be prepared if your data center was in the path of
such destruction?

Do I Need a Data Center?

If you still own your own data center and this question has not already crossed your mind, then you might be spending more money than you need, subjecting your organization to unnecessary risk, or both. Your data center is the foundation for all your core computing resources. Any flaws in the data center puts everything installed in the data center, no matter how well implemented, at risk as well.

So what do you do? You need to securely house your servers and storage somewhere, and not go broke doing it correctly. Today, you have far more choices than you did just ten years ago. The added choices include numerous viable offsite solutions. While there are many permutations, the two basic choices boil down to keeping your data center in house or have someone else host it for you.