Backup and Disaster Recovery, when the public administration goes into blackout
Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Men are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and intelligent. The combination of the two constitutes an incalculable force.
Albert Einstein
Einstein’s famous words about computers might almost sound anachronistic in a world governed by the pervasiveness of social networks, the speed of communications and galloping technological progress. Yet there are many cases in which human inaccuracy and computer stupidity intersect, creating real “disasters”.
This is what happened a few weeks ago at the
Supreme Court of Cassation
where, due to a blackout , it was impossible to withdraw and file judgments. Not only that: during the hearings everything was recorded by hand.
The problems would have arisen, according to the most accredited reconstruction, from the replacement of three hard disks, with the emergency system not having come into operation as it should have.
Fortunately (or maybe not) in the Supreme Court everything is still filed in paper format, a sort of old school backup, directly in the offices in the civil sector with the original of the appeal accompanied by seven copies, and in the criminal sector the appeals arrive by mail forwarded by the Courts of Appeal. Therefore, there were about 800 legal practitioners, including lawyers, office assistants and litigants, who were unable to collect the documents they needed.
But the Supreme Court is not the only one to get tangled up in the maze of information technology. What can we say then about when in 2017 it was the Friulian doctors who got stuck with the health IT system in a tailspin due to the blocking of a server.
The blackout affected all sectors, from hospitals to healthcare facilities but also general practitioners. A significant stop given that it was impossible to report online and electronic prescriptions, also causing a lengthening of times in regional clinics and emergency rooms. In short, unacceptable inconveniences in 2018.
Unfortunately, we could go on for hours citing similar cases, but we know that the reader’s time is precious and when a problem arises, solutions must be given. Such as, for example, relying on Cloud Computing , i.e. a system capable of delivering processing power, database storage, applications and other IT resources on demand through a cloud service platform via the Internet with pay-as-you-go rates.
With cloud computing, you don’t need to make large investments in hardware infrastructure or spend a lot of time on time-consuming hardware management tasks. Instead, you can provision compute resources based on specific needs, such as to develop a new and winning idea or get your IT department up and running. This allows you to access the amount of resources you need almost instantly, paying only for what you use.
But that’s not all. For the old saying that “prevention is better than cure“, many companies use so-called Disaster Recovery systems, a fundamental solution to protect data and IT systems from possible disasters, such as natural disasters, human error, hacking, theft or other accidents.
The Amazon Web Service cloud, for example, supports many well-known disaster recovery architectures, from “pilot flame” environments, which are better suited to data centers with small business workloads, to “hot stand-in” environments, which enable lightning-fast failover times. With data centers in regions around the world, AWS provides a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable rapid recovery of IT infrastructure and data.
So, Einstein was right. The inaccurate slowness (of the public administration) will bury us.
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