Status as of Saturday, December 2, 2017

[pavvappav]

Do you have access to commercial leased line providers in your area? For security purposes, I've used Verizon Frame relay circuits for intranet connections with VPNs running over the Verizon links. But that will just get you your pipe, you would need to work out peering with a layer 1 or 2 provider, like HE.net for ip transit.

On the topic of backup servers and storage -- AWS must meet regulatory requirements for some of their largest customers. For this reason they offer solutions like encrypted elastic storage using either a KMS server or customer side provided keys.

One cloud security offering I have not tried, but may be worth taking a gander at is the Azure. While Azure also provides a encrypted data-at-rest solution, they are will soon be leveraging the virtualization based security introduced in windows server 2016 to provide encrypted data-in-memory. The Azure confidential computing solution does have sign-ups for early access, and may be worth a look. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ ... computing/

Are you guys really not making enough money at 5% to repair, upgrade and stay operational?

Money isn't the issue.

Actually, one of the things you quickly find out when you get some money is that nobody wants to take it. We gave up on Comcast and they lost a $72,000 contract after their salesman never called us back. We're willing to pay for overnight shipping, but the quickest the vendor can get a processor out is three days. We want to use restaurants to save us time but none of them will deliver to us because we're too far away, no matter how much we offer them. We've been working with lawyers and still don't have a signed document after five months.

It's astonishing how worthless money is. You need a certain amount of it to live, but after that, nobody seems to be interested in earning it.

The other issue is that you can't predict what will fail next. I never even considered that a processor on a computer would fail. Since we just bought a new processor, it's unlikely that the next failure is going to be a computer, so buying a backup computer isn't the right move. I'm not sure how one gets a list of things that are likely to fail.

[Helotours]

A fully functional second system that can take over operations when system 1 fails is a recommendation. Then, system 1 is repaired and becomes the back up. The internet provider could be problematic if you're getting sporadic service, outages, etc. We have Verizon FIOS and it's only been out three days in two years. I am not well-versed on your profit margins, so it's hard to make any viable suggestions. I used to run a large aviation company and we would stock repair parts based on percentage risk of failure. We had a history to reference.

[AppleMiner]

You have two choices.

1> Reactive, wait for something to break, order the part, be down until the part is replaced but not have extra expenses.
2> Proactive, have backups on site, ready to be hot swapped to on a moments notice, cost is having duplicated hardware.


It all comes down to how much money you lose in how long it takes to get a replacement.
My last company if their whole computer system went down, they could still work, just not fill or update current or new orders, the old ones in the system could keep the plant running for the next 6 months much less 3 days for any replacement parts I would ever need to get in.

The company two jobs before the last one...It had everything, entire server rooms at a backup recovery location located a minimum of 1 hour travel time in case of evacuation or disaster that was able to go online and resume all normal operations within a 4 hour timeframe I believe was the requirement for a level 4 banking/securities standard for the amount of banking and secured network transactions that place did.