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Montpellier’s tech team is counting down to a PR launch alongside Gartner Symposium/IT Expo 6-9 November, Barcelona, Spain, for world-leading tech brands who have joined forces in a global industry initiative.

The move by major players in the technology sector comes at a time when attacks on IT infrastructure are becoming more prevalent, including sources ranging from competitors to hostile governments that are affecting organisations of all sizes worldwide. This is commonly exemplified by ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, whereby hackers flood a website with traffic so it can’t handle visits from ordinary web users.

For more than one-third of companies, a single hour of a DDoS attack on critical web infrastructure can cost up to $20,000, according to a 2014 report by the security firm Imperva Incapsula. (For some companies, the cost of an attack can exceed $100,000 per hour.) Given that the majority of attacks continue for more than six hours, these losses add up quickly. In a particularly stark example, the airline Virgin Blue lost $20 million in a period of IT outages that spanned 11 days in 2010.

The internet infrastructure company Akamai found that DDoS attacks were up 129 percent in the second quarter of 2016 compared with the same period last year, and that the websites that were targeted were hit an average of 27 times.

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Philip Hicks and Andy Parker

Montpellier director and Head of PR and Content, Philp Hicks, welcomed industry moves to address IT outages and develop a unified approach and standard. “The technology sector is tackling the issue of IT outage in a collaborative initiative that will benefit the global business community. As an integrated marketing communications consultancy, we understand the need for the highest security across an organisation’s website, ecommerce platform, Intranet site or any other vulnerable platform as we build all of these on a daily basis. By working together to bring about such initiatives as zero outage, we are saying to the world that we want to make our IT infrastructure of higher quality, and more importantly, safer and secure.”

Andy Parker, Senior Consultant in the specialist Montpellier Technology practice added: “IT security should be the top of every organisations’ agenda, from government agencies to companies on the high street. With this new initiative, the technology community is providing the framework by which standards can be set and security improved. This can only be of benefit to everyone as we continue to fight those that want to harm our IT infrastructure.”

For further information on this initiative, or how we can help you with your website or any other PR and marketing requirements, please contact Philip.Hicks@montintegrated.com Tel: ++44(0)1242 262977

Tech giants collaborate on Zero Outage to define new industry standard

Founding Members Brocade, Cisco, Dell EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Juniper, NetApp, SAP, SUSE and T-Systems join forces to develop a common framework aimed at improving quality and reliability.

A group of technology companies announced that they have joined together to establish a Zero Outage Industry Standard Association to safeguard the quality and reliability of IT infrastructure. The common goal of the group is to maximize availability and customer satisfaction by improving stability and security by defining an industry best practice based on a Zero Outage framework.

The association’s founding members are: Brocade, Cisco, Dell EMC, HDS, Juniper, NetApp, SAP, SUSE and T-Systems.

The digital world is increasingly dependent on IT. A technical defect, human error or untrained process execution can be a threat to everyday operations. Therefore, manufacturers and service companies are growing a sense of urgency for an uninterruptible supply of their services. With the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association, major tech-companies want to start an community discussion and work out a common understanding of quality.

In order to enable highly stable operations, companies need to be able to control the quality of platforms, people, processes and security throughout the whole supply chain. The Zero Outage Industry Standard association intends to specify consistent error response times, employee qualification levels and set security and platform requirements. This can help companies to minimize errors, increase availability, ensure security and operate cost-effectively.

The association members all come from different fields of the IT industry. The aim is to work together as partners and develop an industry-wide known and respected “Best Practice” approach to ensure a stable and secure IT environment. The framework will be published on http://www.zero-outage.com/