A Burglar Alarm for the Web...

Nearly all of us, in business, understand ‘security’ – locks and keys, security perimeters and alarm systems. It is easy to think of preventing the loss of “things” – theft of computers, machinery, stock, equipment and so forth – after all that is what the insurance company will replace! However, in truth, one's business is not so much concerned with loss of a ‘thing’ but loss of ‘capacity.’ Think of capacity as the inability to ship a product or provide a service because a necessary tool or input has been stolen or think of it as the loss of a bid due to the theft of confidential information.

When one moves onto the worldwide web the question of ‘capacity’ becomes clearer and more vital to a business. After all, everything on the web is, ultimately, either data or software. If a website is defaced by web-vandals, if data is stolen, if sites goes dark, if email fails or if a web-enabled mission-critical goes ‘down,’ your organization has lost the ‘capacity’ to deliver even though every single one of the company’s traditional physical assets are locked down tight.

In this new world of information what is the one vital piece of information a manager needs to have? Simple. A manager needs the security of knowing that they have the capacity to do business; to provide information, or execute transactions over the web – these services cannot be lost or interrupted. Thus, what managers need most on the web is a security alarm that alerts them to loss of ‘capacity.’ After all loss of capacity is – very quickly loss of work, reputation and – worst of all – money.

Anything that can be seen on the web can be monitored on the web. This means that a web-based alarm service has no hardware or software to install – it is a service that can be enabled by simply subscribing to it.

Over time users of web-based monitoring have come up with a surprising range of uses beyond simple verification of availability of their own services.

One organization implemented web-based monitoring to prove to their ISP – and ultimately to a court – that the ISP’s claims of a stable connection were untrue.

Another user wanted to monitor the timeliness of critical weather data from their weather service bureau. A third wanted to verify that a critical trading partner’s site was up and running. Web-based monitoring can be an IT tool, a management tool to verify IT claims and even a business tool to validate mission critical connections and data.

Once web-based monitoring is in place there is a specific level of assurance that an organization’s capacity on the Internet, or any other sites and services you may wish to monitor, will not be degraded without their immediate and explicit knowledge. Furthermore, a top notch web-monitoring service will generate detail and summary reports giving an independent check available to management of the actual uptime and availability of monitored web capacity.

Nothing is more valuable to today’s companies than their reputation to deliver. With competition relentless and customer expectations continuously rising it surely only makes sense to spend the few tens of dollars a month to monitor your organization's ability to meet its commitments.

Article submitted by Petrus B. van Bork www.outerline.com Outerline Data.