Disasters occur, and very rarely according to anticipated schedules. Given the overwhelming reliance on IT in most organizations a disaster has the potential to force out of business the unprepared making disaster recovery and adherence to best practices vitally important. Any organization without a disaster recovery plan is courting fate and is unlikely to survive. Disaster recovery in an IT context is not the same as high availability and the two should not be confused, yet in many organizations this is the case. High availability [...]

Between forty and sixty percent of all businesses that suffer a business threatening disaster fail in the next five years so disaster planning is not taken lightly by stockholders, or regulatory authorities. Conducting an audit of the disaster recovery plan will immediately make obvious any discrepancy that would affect business continuity Disasters occur all the time, and are rarely anticipated. Many IT administrators and organizations plan for hardware failure in their networks or attacks from hackers and viruses, and understandably many will have no plans [...]

Data integration is the process by which data and information from disparate and often incompatible  sources is brought together by transforming the data into a single unified view, usually within a new application that offers additional reporting designed for users outside of the usual user base of the source data. Data integration also goes under the name Enterprise Information Integration (EII). The process of data integration is complex and over time has evolved into very sophisticated tools available as standalone software from third party vendors, [...]

When you’re ready to start your own business or do your own stuff, then it’s probably time to purchase your database.  Choosing a database is not that difficult.  You need to understand what you want and what you need and choose the database that suits you best. Whether you use your database for business, education or other purposes, it is quite important to focus on the capacity of the database you’ll be choosing.  For instance, if you’re in business, you’ll probably need a server database.  [...]

As business becomes increasingly dependent on electronic data the demand to integrate multiplesources of data into a single application or report has driven market growth for software that can natively work with proprietary and open source data. Known as data integration, this software accesses data stored in incompatible formats to produce new data and reports.Combining data from across the corporation, some of which can be decades old, with other data contained in databases, emails, documents, spreadsheets, or applications requires specialized solutions capable of interfacing with [...]

When data is scattered across multiple databases with different file formats, most IT administrators will immediately think of data integration solutions to solve corporate data mining operations. Data integration is the process of bringing together all of the organizations data into a single view that allows new manipulations and reporting previously not available. Combinations of flat file or relational databases needing to be merged with data stored in spreadsheets, word processing files, letters or emails, and calendars never used to be possible without expending significant [...]

Disasters sadly are a fact of life, most of us manage to avoid them although this is probably more to do with circumstance than any activity on our part. In IT terms the same applies, yet with the benefit of disaster recovery training the effects can be minimized, although never completely eliminated. The probability of disaster striking at some point thru no fault of the IT manager and her team is high, be it hacker attack, or earthquake, the end result is always still the [...]