As governments and health agencies around the world begin considering to and/or easing quarantines, starting Wednesday, June 10^th, Wowrack will start requiring everyone that visits Wowrack’s office or data center to wear facial coverings within all common areas of Wowrack facilities.  

Regarding the protocols, you must:

• Wear any face coverings that fit snugly and cover one’s nose and mouth. Cloth-based face coverings are permitted (it does not have to be surgical grade or N95-rated masks).
• Wear the face coverings at all times within the common and near entry/exit areas.
• Bring your own facial coverings for Wowrack will be unable to provide those to visitors due to limited supplies globally.

During your visitation, we also suggest you to:

• Maintain proper social distancing guidelines.
• Limit your time in the common areas as well as site visits and onsite personnel to a minimum or critical activities only. Work activities requiring 3^rd party vendors, onsite auditors or non-essential staff should be deferred.
• Help keep the number of occupants per elevator to a maximum of 2.
• Immediately report onsite positive cases of COVID-19 to Wowrack Management at management@wowrack.com should you find any.

We thank you in advance for your cooperation and understanding pertaining to these guidelines and protocols. Should there be any future changes or adjustments, we will keep you updated promptly.

Regards,

Wowrack Management

The post Site Visit to Wowrack – Facial Covering Requirement appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

Dear Valued Customer,
As the global effect of Coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to evolve, we at Wow Technologies, Inc are committed to the health and safety of our customers and employees. We continue to monitor the developments and the guidance of public health authorities, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

In light of recent developments, including the recent Washington State “Stay at Home” order by Governor Inslee as of 3/23/2020, I wanted to provide you with an update on our efforts to continue to provide your Hosting needs.

What you can expect from us :

• Our business operation has been deemed as “essential” business as Datacenter operators and Network Operators in the “Stay at Home” order. This means that Wowrack will continue to operate our Data Center and Cloud infrastructure and be able to support it.
• Our Data Center continues to be operational and staffed 24/7. Employees who are not feeling well are required to stay home.  Employees onsite are required to follow the public health authorities’ guidance on personal hygiene, infection prevention, and control practices.
• All employees who are not essential to facility maintenance have been asked to work remote; we’ve limited travel and opted for virtual meetings whenever possible.
• We are increasing cleaning frequency in high traffic touch points such as door handle and finger print reader for our Datacenter and office doors.
• Only authorized customers are welcome to visit our datacenter when necessary, but at this time, we have asked our employees to refrain from shaking hands and to maintain the recommended six-foot distance from others.
• We are rescheduling and/or cancelling all non-essentials in-person meetings. We can still be reached virtually thru email, phone conferences, zoom meetings, and video calls.
• All on-site customer projects that requires our engineer to be on-site will have to be rescheduled unless it is an outage or emergency situation. 

  Our request to you:

• We recognize that your business still have to operate and projects still have to be performed in a timely manner. However, due to the “Stay at Home” Order and the safety of our employees, we request that all non-critical projects that requires in-person or on-site visit to be rescheduled to later dates. Our Network operation team is still available 24/7/365 to attend to your request remotely if needed.
• Unless necessary, please avoid interfacing with our employees face to face.  If you need carts, tools, etc during your visit to our Datacenter, please request those items by sending your request to support@wowrack.com so that our staff can put your requested items beside your cabinet.  Once you are done, you can leave those items beside your cabinet and update the ticket so our staff can retrieve them.
• We urge you to monitor the guidance of public health authorities and other sources of credible information. For your convenience, below are some references and resources for your consideration:
  Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO)

We appreciate the trust that you place in Wow Technologies Inc. and assure you we will continue to closely monitor the situation and take actions necessary to help keep our employees and customers safe while maintaining a high standard of service! 

Best Regards,

Erward Osckar
Chief Executive Office

The post Covid-19 Situational Update from Wowrack appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

Whether if it is technology for storing information and data or tech for sending information and communicating with clients and customers, we all depend on our information technology systems. And although our technology is great and functions as it should most of the time, there can be issues where our tech fails to work or is impacted on.

This may occur through human error or natural disaster, however the consequence remains the same: you have a technology failure or disruption that can be a enormous detriment to the operation of your business. 

Depending on the nature of your business, this tech outage might be minor or catastrophic. The process of recovering from a technology disruption is called IT disaster recovery, and if you do not have this in place, you may find it hard to recover fast enough to see minimal impact on your business. There’s certainly value in understanding some of the key ways in which disaster recovery can save your business and some of the key scenarios in which disaster recovery may be required.

Why Disaster Recovery?

Every day you rely on technology to function and communicate with your employees and customers. If you suddenly lost access to this information what would happen? Would you lose profits? Would you lose the capacity to operate your business? Put simply, a disaster recovery plan allows you to endure minimum downtime and to get your business up and running again following a ‘disaster’ – delivering peace of mind and ongoing profitability.

Bottom line is that the world is unpredictable and anything can happen. You can have all the insurance in the world but if you have mission-critical functions and applications, your insurance isn’t going to get your systems online again. The only thing that can protect you against an outage is disaster recovery.

How Disaster Recovery Can Save Your Business

1. There’s a catastrophic hardware failure

One of the biggest concerns a business owner has is keeping their server room operating at an optimum temperature and ensuring that data management is performed safely and with plenty of backups. It is essential to both back up your business data in a secure location, and to also implement mission-critical functionality that can be rolled out in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure. This might be something as simple as identifying a core/skeleton staff that can operate the business at a minimum and ensuring that a remote location is available to perform these functions.

2. There’s a natural disaster

Technology has come a long way when you think back to even the turn of the century, nowadays we’re far more likely to have data and significant information stored in the cloud which makes getting online a lot easier. Again though, you need to consider what would happen if your office had a fire or flood and how you would continue to serve your customers – even at a minimum – and ensure that this is available to you.

3. You experience human error

No one is perfect. Not even us – though we’re pretty close. From time to time there will be a human error which takes place, whether it’s a file that’s deleted or a system that’s corrupted through someone’s mistake. If this happens it can be just as catastrophic which is where a data recovery system can be invaluable.

4. You get hacked/corrupted

In today’s day and age, no one is immune from the long fingers of cyber-crime. It is imperative for both the successful operation of your business and your business’ reputation to ensure you have comprehensive disaster recovery systems in place in the event of a hack.

Get in Touch with Us Today

No business is immune from disaster and from the threat of losing access to data and information. When you have a disaster recovery plan in place, you can ensure that any loss of data and access is minor and temporary. A good disaster recovery plan works to repair confidence in your business and to ensure profitability.

At Wowrack, we work with you to ensure that your disaster recovery plan is comprehensive and suitable for your business. We make sure you have everything you need, and nothing you don’t. Contact us today and get peace of mind with us.

The post Disaster Recovery for Your Business appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

What Is Disaster Recovery?

A disaster can be any sort of unexpected event that interferes or disrupts your business’s IT workloads.

You are not able to know the exact nature of a cloud disaster only after it has occurred. What you are able to do is prepare a disaster recovery plan, which will assist you in quickly restoring operations back to normal following a disaster.

Cloud Disaster Recovery

There are various ways to implement a disaster recovery plan. One approach would be relying on on-premise infrastructure for backing up your workloads.

The method that provides you with the greatest flexibility and recovery speed, however, is a cloud backup and disaster recovery. Then, when disaster occurs, those resources can be restored from the cloud back to their original locations — whether those locations are on-premise infrastructure or the cloud.

Another way to describe cloud backup and disaster recovery is to call it offsite disaster recovery because your workloads are backed up to a remote site and can be recovered from there.

It’s important to note that a cloud disaster recovery plan can be used to back up and restore workloads that run on-premise as well as those hosted in the cloud. You don’t have to run your production systems in the cloud in order to take advantage of the cloud-based disaster recovery.

Why Use Cloud Disaster Recovery?

A cloud disaster recovery plan provides several key benefits, as compared to other types of disaster recovery strategies:

Scalability

It is more scalable, since you can easily increase the amount of resources that you back up in the cloud by purchasing more cloud infrastructure capacity

Cost Options

You can pay as you go. In other words, you pay for cloud disaster recovery infrastructure as you use it; there is no need to invest upfront in hardware or to pay for more infrastructure than you actually use at a given time.

Spread Your Backup

Cloud-based disaster recovery makes it possible to leverage geographic redundancy features. This means that you can spread your backed-up resources across multiple geographic regions in order to maximize their availability, even if part of the cloud that you use fails.

Speed & Efficiency

Recovery from the cloud is fast because most cloud infrastructure offers high bandwidth and fast disk I/O.

In a Digital Nutshell

Utilizing disaster recovery solutions affords you a surplus of benefits that prove to be invaluable to you and your business. You’ll gain scalability and availability, while also likely reducing your overall costs as compared to a disaster recovery strategy that relies only on on-premise infrastructure.

The post The Benefits of Cloud Disaster Recovery Plans appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

• As mentioned, the growing amount of insecure devices, especially IoT devices like digital video cameras and connected cameras
  
• A global increase in bandwidth speed, allowing more junk data to be sent via DDoS attacks more quickly
  
• The growing marketplace of malware software and methods which can be attained and used by skilled and unskilled hackers alike

DDoS Attacks Will Only Get More Frequent – And More Severe

Deloitte predicted that DDoS attacks, a damaging form of cyber attacks where unreliable traffic overloads the bandwidth of a target system, would become larger in scale, more difficult to mitigate (thereby increasing the severity), and more frequent in nature by 2017. Undoubtedly, their prediction came true, as a number of factors have allowed these issues not only to continue, but to flourish.

For unprepared companies, an unmitigated attack could very easily take many organizations offline, and render their data insecure and vulnerable. Some ways in which a company may realize a DDoS attack is happening is by noticing abnormal website behavior such as:

• Rapidly increasing traffic (with no explanation)
  
• Slow network (or slow loading of graphics on GPU servers) 
• Inability of users to access certain pages or the entire website altogether

From a global standpoint, while China easily takes first place in being targeted by DDoS attacks, the US is easily in second place, with Q1 2018 registering an increase in attacks over Q4 2017.

How Can DDoS Attacks Be Mitigated?

Undoubtedly, the best method of mitigating DDoS attacks is by utilizing a third party company to help divert dangerous junk traffic. And more and more companies are getting on board with this sentiment, as their spending habits reflect movement towards exterior IT spending:

• Between 2016-2026, enterprise cloud spending is increasing at a rate of 16% CAGR, says Wikibon:

• Similarly, and most compelling for those who want to keep up with cloud trends, IDC’s study also claims that “cloud computing spending is growing at 4.5x the rate of IT spending since 2009 and is expected to grow at better than 6x the rate of IT spending through 2020.”

With trends obviously shifting in the direction of more cloud investment, it’s imperative that companies invest not only in this rapid growth, but do so in a responsible and informed manner in order to protect their (and their clients’) assets.

One of the most cost-effective and foolproof methods of mitigating DDoS attacks is by working with a third party to ensure consistent, complete monitoring of your infrastructure.

“Wowrack’s Remote DDoS Protection can be set up with ease no matter where your network infrastructure is located. With features such as perimeter defense, 24/7/365 security over critical servers, and extranet entry points, having peace of mind to global remote access for DDoS protection has never been easier.” – Wowrack.com

For a full list of what Wowrack protects against, check out their comprehensive list of DDoS mitigation solutions. To inquire about how to fully protect your infrastructure from the rising threat of DDoS attacks, contact Wowrack today.

The post The State of DDoS Attacks in 2018 appeared first on Wowrack Blog.

Protect Your Business

A data outage can seriously hurt your company. You could lose business and lose revenue. How much revenue? Up to $5600 per minute. An outage can also harm your company’s reputation. In the business world, damaged trust is not easily regained. You’ll want to do everything you can to prevent losing that trust in the first place. To make matters even worse, the cost to your company will keep mounting when you have to spend precious minutes fixing the PR disaster. Every moment that you spend rebuilding your company’s reputation is a moment when you could have been building revenue instead.

Protect Your Clients

You and your employees aren’t the only ones who could get hurt in case of a data outage, especially if your company works with sensitive information. For instance, if your company works with medical information, you have to make sure that your apps and other technologies are HIPAA compliant. Patients have to trust that their medical information will stay safe. Companies in the financial sector have to store data that could ruin livelihoods should that information leak or become lost. If your company loses this sort of client information, you could deal with legal issues in addition to PR issues.

Your Disaster Recovery Plan

At Wowrack, we work with a four-step process to develop your disaster recovery plan. We always start with a free audit because we know that one size does not fit all when it comes to disaster recovery. Different companies have different pain points, different needs, and different budgets. We’ve worked with all of them. Next, our experienced architects will engineer a recovery plan that fits your company’s unique needs. Third, we’ll deploy the plan so that you can retain your peace of mind. Finally, we manage your disaster recovery plan for you. You already have enough to do during the day. Let our experts manage your plan so that you can keep focusing on growing your business.

Are you ready to get started on your disaster recovery plan? Click here to request your completely free consultation. Don’t wait to protect your business.

The post You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan appeared first on Wowrack Blog.