Fail-safe data security is a vital and non-negotiable component of any business. Confidential information is often times exchanged over servers, and every company follows strict protocol to ensure that this information is transmitted and stored in the safest way possible.
Because we live in an era were the rapid exchange of technology is the accepted norm, a mass amount of private and confidential information is being exchanged over secure data servers thousands of times per minute every moment of the day.
At Plum, we adhere to the strictest security protocols in order to ensure that our customers’ data is safely uploaded, transmitted, saved, and discarded. For customer’s that choose to use Plum’s hosted IVR infrastructure they have access to world-class data centers across the United States and Europe, complete with telco provisioning, limitless port capacity, fault, tolerance, and disaster recovery.
One our biggest achievements this year involved expanding and increasing our hosted IVR infrastructure. We increased our telecommunications, web, and database cloud infrastructure in order to offer our clients maximum capacity and redundancy. In addition, we did even more to improve our failover and disaster recovery services for our customers.
Data security was also one of the biggest topics in the tech world, with groups like Anonymous and Lulzsec dominating the headlines (link to blog). While these groups, especially Anonymous, weren’t new to the scene, they presented a looming threat to network administrators worldwide through their massive data breaches.
Anonymous has actually been around since 2007, but they exploded into popular consciousness this year due in part to their extremely high profile targets. From their targeting of government websites in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya during the Arab Spring to their hacking of Bank of America, it seemed as if Anonymous was everywhere, and could breach every firewall thrown at them.
LulzSec drew similar notoriety having been responsible for the compromising of hundreds of thousands of Sony user accounts and for taking the CIA website offline. LulzSec claims to have disbanded at the end of June 2011, but many members are believed to also be members of Anonymous, and Operation AntiSec, another hacking collective.
These two groups went far in exposing the security vulnerabilities of what were previously assumed to be some of the most secure websites and databases in the world.
While these group’s tactics were highly objectionable, they did expose weaknesses in security systems that may have gone undetected otherwise. Because of these data breaches, those working in the IT space have had to upgrade and adapt their applications and systems.
Systems once thought to be fault tolerant and fail-safe were exposed as quite the opposite. In reality, these hackers have changed the way data and websites are secured, and future data security efforts will benefit from this knowledge.
It has been quite a momentous year in technology, and we here at Plum, like everyone else, are waiting with breath that is bated to see what innovations and events 2012 has in store! Happy New Year!
