In the last month a large number of enterprises were flooded
by unseasonal and incessant rain; the situation was such that people shelved
differences and collectively in unison worked to save human lives. Stories of
valor and selflessness published and circulated on social media gladdened the
heart wanting to reach out to make a difference. If anyone did think about loss
of property or submerged data centers, wisely they did not air their concerns
lest be seen as insensitive to the disaster and loss of human lives.
Nature’s fury has no answer, we prepare for what we can
imagine and what we get the budget for; the rest is assumed to unimportant not
to attract attention or funding. This is despite the fact that many enterprises
have suffered due to their oversight, inattention, or plain simple apathy
towards their critical infrastructure, IT being a prominent part of it. In the three
decades in the (IT) industry, I have seen a lot of things go wrong,
experiencing some natural calamities and many more avoidable manmade disasters.
When I started my work life, mini computers were just
beginning to gain interest, and my role included advise customers on how to set
up Computer Rooms (yes that was the term used, there were no Data Centers
then), power stability, routing of cables and the general stuff that we take
for granted now. Customers would end up allotting basements, terraces, under
the staircase, next to the elevator shaft, space locked in the middle of the
office, and crunched space after all the executive cabins were provided for.
No amount of suggestions or fear of disruption made them
reconsider; it was as if the temple of computing (you had to take off your
footwear before entering the computer room) did not merit the importance that hardware
providers demanded. My first tryst with natures’ fury happened with basements
in a business district getting flooded with floating mainframes and submerged
UPSes. It took almost 2 weeks for the impacted to recover leaving aside data
loss from which some never recovered; history repeated itself again twice in a
span of a decade.
People started moving the computer rooms upward locating
them on higher floors much against the ire of the well-heeled executives who
wanted the vantage window view and corner; servers needed backup window air-conditioning,
until commercial data centers and improving networks made it feasible to
outsource them. Clouds, ISPs and hosted applications made way for elimination
of the hardware from the equation of things to manage. For the laggards and those
who believe they can do better themselves they continue to face challenges.
Unfortunately stupidity manifests itself in many ways which
cannot be obviated; the internet has many stories of engineers and users who
have tickled the funny bone while they had to manage the effects of their
actions with fried servers to roasted peripherals. The case
of a factory gate pass system on the cloud has been told in many forums on
how not to use the cloud or for that matter how the CEO fired the CIO and the
entire IT team with their inability to fix his computer (he had forgotten the
wall power switch).
Today the cart has been put in front of the horse many times
with technology being imposed on the hapless in a quest to find the question to
which they can be the answer. These are justified with same old anecdotes of
disruptive companies having grown larger than life. There is little evidence
that any of the followers have made any significant impact. IoT will change the
world, Beacons will disrupt your life, Wearables are the next big thing,
aggregators of the world unite; we have nothing to lose except the investor’s
money.
Coming back to natural disasters, we try to save a planet
for our benefit which has survived evolution of mankind and will probably live
beyond its extinction too. We want it to remain habitable to our liking
preserving the development we have indulged in precariously in proximity to
water as well as hilly regions. Nature keeps reminding us our fragility and
place in the ecosystem; my sympathies with the ones who lost a lot more than
their personal belongings, their lives disrupted within a few days never to be
the same.
Let us all put together our resources and energy to do what
we can to reduce the impact of the fury that we cannot control.
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