By Brian Smith, business unit manager: managed datacentre and cloud solutions, Datacentrix

Local businesses have been under more pressure than ever before to harness remote working – over the lock-down period and most likely beyond. Combine this with the additional stresses associated with load-shedding, and it becomes clearer that uninterrupted technology availability – and datacentre resilience – is more important than ever.

Defining data centre resilience
Simply put, a datacentre’s resilience is the measurement of its ability to continue to operate despite the failure of a component, such as its related equipment or power grid connection, or any other disruption.

Datacentre resilience can be considered from four aspects, namely:

• Telecommunications - the network
• Electrical – the power
• Structural - the physical building or room housing the datacentre
• Mechanical – the cooling system

As prescribed by The Uptime Institute, there are standard datacentre resilience measurements, known as tier ratings. There are four tiers of datacentre resilience, from lowest to highest: N, N+1, 2N and 2N+1.

Questions that help determine the priority that datacentre resilience has in your business
Continuous resilience improvement is a must today, with connectivity being for many a business’ life-support system, and so local C-level executives have to scrutinise their specific business requirements when it comes to its advancement.
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The following questions could help to pinpoint the level of urgency that data centre priority has within the business:

• How much downtime is acceptable?
• How much budget can go towards improving resilience, which would need to take infrastructure, maintenance costs and more into consideration?
• Does the cooling system work, even if there is no power?
• Is it possible to generate power within the datacentre?
• Are the correct technical skills in place. Once these questions have been answered, a business’ uptime needs become clearer.
• Which makes more sense to host the datacentre internally, or outsource it to an expert?

Considerations for eliminating vulnerabilities in your data centre
To improve resilience towards reaching the five or six nines of availability can be an expensive exercise within an existing, in-house datacentre, to the tune of millions of Rands, only recoverable over the next seven to 10 years. It would require:

• The right equipment
• The right systems (data centre infrastructure management; building management and environmental management)
• The right staff
• The right maintenance contracts
• The right location
• Energy efficiency and accessibility to more power if needed
• Seamless connection to more than one telecoms provider.

Essentially, as availability is increased, so too is the cost ratio for each percentage point gained.

Benefits of outsourcing
The benefits of outsourcing datacentre requirements mean that the services partner will handle power and connectivity requirements, ensure that the right equipment is in place, and have the right staff and technical expertise on board – with uptime service level agreements (SLAs) in place. This will not only ease remote working requirements; it also allows businesses to step away from budgeting towards an OPEX focused model.
 
One of the major advantages of a hosted environment is the economies of scale; there is a fixed investment spread over a larger group of companies all accessing the service, and ultimately making a high availability, higher tiered environment more accessible to many organisations from a cost point of view.

• Power requirements
• Connectivity
• Equipment
• Systems
• Skills
• OPEX model
• Support of remote working
• Economies of scale
• Increased resilience and higher availability
• Higher tiered environment
• Improved accessibility

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. In fact, 10% of organisations already have.
 
Contact your Datacentrix representative to discuss this in more detail, or send an email to [email protected]

By Ahmed Mahomed, Datacentrix CEO

There are two main reasons why people are currently most susceptible to cyberattacks:

• The increased number of remote workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic (which brings its own complications); and
• The heightened emotional vulnerability of individuals during these difficult times.

 
A recent report by independent global business advisory firm, FTI Consulting Inc., revealed that local businesses were already under immense security pressure due to a ‘lack of cybersecurity preparedness, which continues to create problems and risks for companies in South Africa’. The 2020 FTI Consulting Resilience Barometer also stated that, ‘while most leaders in the region are aware of the risks – 84% surveyed believe they have cybersecurity gaps - less than half said they have made investments in that part of their business in the last 12 months. This disparity between known risk and response is concerning even during the best of times.’
 
It continued: ‘Recent changes in the ways we are working has presented cybercriminals with a multitude of opportunities to exploit weaknesses in systems, processes, and behaviour. In addition to simple email phishing scams, employees are expecting non-standard emails from their IT support teams, making them more susceptible to work-related phishing attempts.’
 
Reasons why phishing and ransomware are on the rise 
There are a number of reasons why we are seeing more scammers than ever before preying on people to gain access to sensitive information for nefarious purposes.

1. Technical vulnerabilities: Unfortunately, organisational chaos that ensued out of necessity to keep businesses up-and-running following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s initial lockdown announcement at the end of March, exposed unexpected technical vulnerabilities that were of great advantage to cyber attackers.
2. Accessibility: The remote workforce is no longer protected behind a corporate firewall, making it more difficult to manage who is accessing what information, when.
3. Heightened emotions: Users are receiving countless phishing mails masquerading as urgent lockdown-related announcements from schools, the Department of Basic Education, or health organisations among others is the order of the day. The intent is to use our insecurities, confusion and emotional responses against us to gain access to sensitive information.
4. Growing IoT devices: The number of IoT devices in use has changed the corporate attack surface for good. We’re no longer just protecting corporate brick and mortar; the breaching of vital equipment that can be ransomed for digital currency is a very real and current threat.

 
Cybersecurity advice for CEOs 
The following advice will help CEOs protect their businesses – not just physical corporate assets, but more importantly, the valuable data residing on these devices.

1. Vigilance: It is clear that all employees need to be more vigilant. Protecting the data elements in our businesses translates to cybersecurity right through to the edge, encompassing mobile device protection, a mail scrubbing engine and more.
2. Cyber posture assessment: The best place to start is to complete a cyber posture assessment, which evaluates the current security environment - from security patch management, machines without security solutions, the use of public Wi-Fi, uploads, password age policies and the like.
3. Measure the attack surface: By measuring an organisation’s ‘attack surface’, which describes a total sum of the vulnerabilities and weak spots in a network or environment that are accessible to a threat actor or can aid the threat actor with malicious intentions (such as committing data theft and compromising assets), it is then possible to identify best practices and highlight parts of the environment that are particularly vulnerable and may require attention.
4. Establish a security-based culture: A very important point to remember is that people operating within a more relaxed home environment are naturally less vigilant, so companies must also incorporate regular user awareness training, taking decisive steps towards ensuring that employees are continuously educated on how to manage corporate assets outside of the work environment.

 
Download the full Cybersecurity article here. Get in touch with your Datacentrix representative to discuss our cybersecurity services or visit https://www.datacentrix.co.za/security.html