Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice. Each instance, they had to rebuild the movie.
Two months and hundreds of man-hours of work vanished
It all innocently started with a fix to Woody’s hat. Woody needed a slight wardrobe upgrade—that’s all. Just a hat reposition. While one of the editors was tinkering in the file system, trying to install a new and improved Woody, something much unexpected happened.
THE folder containing the Toy Story 2 movie—that at one point had 40 files— suddenly had four then none. What Oren Jacob, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Pixar recounted was an entire movie deleted off the company’s servers.
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Studies find employees waste over half of their work day on personal time.
Alarming findings from several recent studies on Cyberslacking show that your staff is likely using their work day to partake in personal activities. And even more shocking is that many of these activities could compromise your business.
The internet has definitely altered the way work is performed. We are much more connected to our clients and colleagues than ever before. But we’re also closer to criminals as well. Despite the positive impact the internet has had on communication, it comes with a cost. Wasted work days online are now not so uncommon. Games, videos, social media all contribute to over 35% in productivity of your workers (on average). Depending on how connected your staff is, those numbers could be as great as 70%!
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Several folks have asked me recently how we’re able to find good people to work at Dynamic Edge. How we can tell when someone is going to be a good fit. How we decide on who to hire, and who to pass up. I had described the outcome of our hiring process about a year ago, but thought it very fitting to revisit the topic of how to hire, specifically describing how we hire.
First, let’s recap the facts:
Dynamic Edge remains VERY selective when it comes to hiring high quality technicians. As we reported in 2015, we hire under 3% of applicants that apply to work at our company. To put this hiring rate in context, Deloitte (considered one of the toughest consulting firms to land a job) has a hiring rate of just over 3.5%— a number they consider being highly selective.
So, how do we find the best people to work at Dynamic Edge?
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Recent reports suggest Eastern Block European countries may start seeking Russia for security-related concerns. What these reports don’t underscore is that there may be implications for your business! I want to take a few moments to explain how Russian influence may increase your cyber security vulnerabilities.
What is all this about eastern block countries seeking Russian protection?
A recent Gallup poll of 4 NATO countries—specifically Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia and Turkey—has suggested that popular sentiment is leaning TOWARDS Russian support and away from the US. People in those countries are feeling that Russian policies may be better in their self-interest than those of Americans.
Russian cyber security threats persist to riddle American businesses of all sizes A recent forensics report on ransomware identified that over 1.4 million businesses were hit by ransomware last year. What’s startling is that over 75% of ransomware has been developed by Russian speaking cyber criminals.
What’s even more concerning is that Russia is ACTIVELY swaying eastern Europe.
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How many times have you heard the word “Trump” today?
It doesn’t matter where your staff fall on the political spectrum. One thing is clear—EVERYONE (even people without a single political bone in their bodies) is talking about something related to politics. And it’s become strikingly clear that your staff are talking about politics too (ON THE JOB!). In fact, in a recent poll by Betterworks, 87% of workers read about politics on social media during the work day. 77% have conversations during the workday.
And guess what?
It typically takes 23 minutes to resume work at full mental capacity after distractions. So on top of having a workforce that is distracted more often than not by social media and the 24-hour news cycle blasting up-to-the-minute political news, every time a new announcement or post comes out, it is taking your staff an additional 20 minutes or more to get back to fully functioning?
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I was searching online for the right bouquet of flowers to send a friend yesterday and had decided to visit one of half a dozen national flower chains—one that I had used in the past. After navigating from the homepage to the birthday flowers section, I clicked on the purchase button and nothing happened. At first I thought it was an issue with my computer. But after trying to make a purchase from my phone, I realized, their site was “sort of not working”. Pages were loading, but the site was NOT fully functional. The most important part—the PAYMENT pages—were offline. A few minutes later, I realized that this flower website was hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and was affected by the MAJOR outage experienced by millions. Around noon eastern, AWS reported a major outage to customers across the United States. In fact, millions of American customers were struggling with accessing their data—many of which were websites (Amazon hosts nearly 150 THOUSAND websites).
Amazon’s web services is currently one of the largest web hosting providers in the US. When an outage occurs and you’re impacted, you’re just another number. I could only imagine having my website hosted by a company that large resolving a HUGE outage.
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