Analysis Back in the days of the mainframe, technology risk looked a lot different. You paid a lot of money for a big box in the corner, using software often written by the same supplier. If it went wrong, a nice techie came along and fixed it. Business moved slowly enough that the world didn’t come crashing down if you couldn’t process …

It's a bit rich when a fire prevention system designed to protect a data centre kills its servers, but that's what happened when inert gas was injected into a Nasdaq Digiplex bit barn in Sweden. The gas release – on 18 April – caused a loud, high-pitched whistle, which resulted in vibrations destroying server disk drives, the …

The UK's National Health Service has learned from last year's WannaCry attack – and started putting in place disaster recovery measures that will allow it to maintain services in the face of an even fiercer assault. The worldwide spread of WannaCry last May hit hospital networks particularly hard and left doctors and nurses …

Belgian bank Argenta has apologised for a botched tech plumbing upgrade that delayed transfers and confronted customers with incorrect balance data. The bank, which has 1.4 million Belgian customers, blamed the problems on post-upgrade issues with the data transfer mechanism between its two data centres, among other things. …

This Damn War Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. It's a law most IT people would understand and perhaps even fear. It was my third day as the new network manager for a reasonably sized estate across several sites, most inhabited by weirdy beardies who had jobs like counting bats, frogs and other animals you may never have heard of. It …

Only one in five FTSE 100 companies disclose testing of online business protection plans. Most (57 per cent) of FTSE 100 companies talk about their overall crisis management, contingency or disaster recovery plans within their annual reports but few in comparison mention cybersecurity. Just 21 per cent of UK Blue Chip …

Exclusive Hard-pressed outsourcing titan Capita wrestled with almost sixty separate outages at its data centres in the space of just half a year, The Register can exclusively reveal. An internal log of the problems dating between June and December 2017, seen by us, detailed the extent of the downtime, with as many as 44 incidents …

Down in the Dell there is a new Data Domain box – a smallish, entry-level one – the DD3300. It is a 2U rackmount chassis with 3TB or 4TB SAS disk drives providing up to 32TB of usable capacity, said to be 1.6PB after deduplication (logical capacity) and data can be ingested at 7TB/hour using Data Domain Boost. If a backend …

Veeam has announced the acquisition of N2WS, an IaaS startup, whose board includes Veeam co-founder and President Ratmir Timashev, for $42.5mn cash. It said N2WS was the main provider of cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which makes it the main public cloud backup and DR IaaS …

VB2017 Avast staffers spoke at the Virus Bulletin International Conference in Madrid, Spain, on Thursday to shed more light on their postmortem of the CCleaner fiasco – and urge developers to protect their software's toolchain and distribution systems from hackers. The widely used utility, which removes unwanted temporary files and …

The UK National Lottery has apologised for a website outage that left money in the pockets of punters unable to play games on Saturday evening. “We're very sorry that many players are currently unable to access The National Lottery website or app. Our 46,000 retailers are unaffected,” it said on Twitter before adding “please …

A ransomware assault late last month is continuing to affect the operations of Copeland Borough Council in the northwest of England. The processing of planning applications is still being affected weeks after a major cyberattack hit the council in rural North West England. The planning application for a housing development of …

With Houston in the midst of severe flooding from Hurricane Harvey, telcos say they are so far maintaining service and will help with emergency efforts by waiving service costs. Mobile carriers AT&T, Verizon and T‑Mobile all say they will be providing residents of the areas hit hardest by the storm free calls and data service …

The UK government has announced that businesses providing essential services like energy and transport could be fined as much as £17m or 4 per cent of global turnover for failing to have effective cyber security measures in place. The proposals from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport satisfy requirements under …

Cisco has admitted to a cloud configuration cockup that erased customer data. The networking giant explained: “On August 3rd, 2017, our engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage service and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on …

The owner of the Dettol brand and Durex condoms could be left millions out of pocket after falling victim to the NotPetya ransomware last week. The malware attack, which centred on Ukraine but also affected several multinationals worldwide, disrupted production and deliveries at UK-based Reckitt Benckiser, a consumer goods …

The massive IT systems failure caused by a power surge at British Airways' primary data centre will cost the airline £80m. Willie Walsh, the chief executive of BA's parent body International Airlines Group, issued the news to a roomful of investors at the company's AGM this afternoon. The systems crash on the morning of May …

Analysis An IT bod from a data centre consultancy has been fingered as the person responsible for killing wannabe budget airline British Airways' Boadicea House data centre – and an explanation has emerged as to what killed the DC. Earlier this week Alex Cruz, BA's chief exec, said a major "power surge" at 0930 on Saturday 27 May …