Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Disaster Recovery

All servers are now operational after a short outage this afternoon. Any problems, please contact us.

posted by Unknown @ 10:35 PM

New Service

New hosting services are now coming on line. We thank our paying customers for their support that has kept our little operation going during the downturn, but demand is certainly hotting up these days.

This means we can now offer:


  • New Services
  • Faster web sites
  • More online tools
  • Stronger reliability
  • Reduced Costs


A few of our clients may experience a period of interruption to normal service as new services come on line.

posted by Unknown @ 4:57 PM

Thursday, September 25, 2003


Massive IT Failure


Massive IT failure occurs for one of three reasons:


  • Inadequate Planning
  • Being a featured target
  • Bad techniques


NZ's most famous IT failures reveal a transient corporate understanding of the management issues. Any relaxation in the discipline of development results in patchy work.

In order to guarantee faultless operation you need three things:


  • A good methodology
  • Strict normal adherence to standards and structure
  • Consistency

The problem is that creativity does not thrive in overly ordered environments. People like to be suprised by the reactions of others to their efforts rather than a knowledge of system integrity.

There is plenty of motivation in a spotty teenager able to bring down a billion dollar empire. But where is the motivation to do things right in the enterprise? Why is Solitaire the most used application in NZ businesses?

The other problem is that computer programming is fun. And a good programmer will know how to delay gratification and write the entire programme before pressing the run button.

Security is a culture, not an off the shelf package. It is more than a set of rules or particular hardware/software combinations. It is also the people, and it is also the architecture. It is mainly procedures adequate to protect, detect and prevent rather than fix, but when are the experts called in?

When hundreds of viruses have cost business billions. If they just wrote it right in the first place is not a valid arguement. Nobody knew what we were going to demand of operating systems. They got to be able to do everything.

If you want to survive the coming onslaught, prepare.

If you also want to make a profit, you do not want to be worrying about your system going down.



See also:


posted by Unknown @ 2:28 PM

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Business News - New name on line for broadband

New Zealand evolved Broadband

Walker Wireless are launching their new Whoosh broadband service. This promises to be faster than Telecom's offering and less prone to massive overuse line charges.

Broadband monopolist Telecom has charged every broadband user a line charge plus usage charges when limits such as 400MB or 600MB were exceeded resulting in some unwary businesses being charged thousands of dollars for email virus infections that could have been blocked at the ISP level.

To offer broadband and then limit access with unrealistic levels with out provisions for unauthorised use combined with published weaknesses in some operating systems is dynamite, its asking for trouble and it is begging for competition.

Welcome Walker Wireless and its Whoosh product. Available sometime soon.


posted by Unknown @ 2:08 PM