Conficker, Cut Cables Show Digital World's Fragility - Preventing Communications Blackouts
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Communications blackouts are a little
harder to combat, but the technology is available to minimize the risk
presented by a single point of failure, such as the cut fiber-optic cables in Silicon
Valley. Businesses need to consider how they are connected to the
outside world—that means understanding the infrastructure your bandwidth
provider employs and identifying where single points of failure can occur.
Currently, failover technology is the best bet for keeping communications lines
open—here, a business can turn to broadband satellite technology to reroute
traffic in case of a primary communications link failure, or, at the very
least, sign with a secondary bandwidth provider that routes traffic differently
than the primary provider—that should reduce some of the risk.
With the
explosion of VOIP (voice over IP)-based communications and Web-enabled
applications, maintaining that IP link to the world has become almost as
critical as reliable electric service.
Power grid interruptions are perhaps the hardest
emergency to deal with. After all, a power outage affects a lot more than just
IT services. While having no electrical power is a major hindrance to any
business, that is not the worst of it—sudden power loss or brownouts can damage
electronics and scramble data.
To avoid those problems, businesses must invest
in UPSes (uninterruptible power supplies), which provide enough juice to
weather a brownout or at least provide enough time to perform an orderly
shutdown of critical systems. UPSes prove to be cheap insurance against
unexpected events. For businesses that cannot tolerate power outages, stand-by
generators can bridge the gap and keep systems humming for an indefinite period
of time.
For many, deploying all of those
technologies would be overkill, but for some it may be a necessity. It all
comes down to how resilient a business needs to be to weather these
attacks—attacks that are only likely to increase in frequency and extent.
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