European’s largest cloud provider, OVHcloud, suffered a catastrophic fire last month that destroyed one of its data centers and smoke-damaged a neighboring one. OVHcloud customers with data in the burned-out data cener who had their own disaster recovery measures in place or who purchased the off-site backup and disaster-recovery services offered by OVHcloud have been able to resume operations. Those who did not lost data that will never come back. Some losses were complete, such…

A new survey by the Uptime Institute found that power issues are becoming less of a problem for data center operators, but networking and software issues are emerging as an increasingly bigger problem. The Uptime Institute’s third Annual Outage Analysis notes that while improvements have been made with technology and availability, outages remain a major industry, customer, and regulatory concern.  The report also shows that the overall impact and direct and indirect cost of outages…

Reflecting on the nexus of Cisco’s product takeback and reuse program a year and a half after we relaunched it, Cisco VP of Global Distribution Sales Andrew Sage explains, “We wanted to make it as easy for our customers and partners to [send back old equipment] as it is to take recycling to the end of the driveway.” By streamlining and simplifying the customer experience, Cisco has made important progress toward that goal. Let’s take…

From the dot-com bust to the global financial crisis, past disruptions have led many businesses to put their digital strategies on the backburner. Organizations that continued to invest in next-generation technologies had an easier time shifting gears to speed ahead. They understood that proactive optimization and continuous transformation are necessary pathways to agility, growth, and innovation. It’s time to transform Fast-forward to 2021. Digital technology is now commonplace in nearly every industry, but organizations are…