Thank you all for coming. I know that our last audit showed us several areas that we could improve on; that is why I have asked for this meeting today. Since that audit, we have been measuring multiple baselines several times each day as well as every day of the week. We were able to verify several key issues that are not only disrupting our customers’ ability to use our products but those problems are also forcing us to pay more in wages due to unnecessary downtime.
We have come to a point where our hardware is needing a major overhaul. Due to the age of this hardware, we are paying more for extra insurance that new hardware can provide with a lesser monthly cost. We are also spending several hours a week just to keep our servers up and running to meet our growing companies expanding network load. After doing some calculations a new server rack would have a lower Total Cost of Ownership due to the previous issues. I trust that within the first quarter that we have a new server it will have cost less than another quarter of keeping the current system up and running.
This new server would also come with multiple benefits besides the **TCO* previously mentioned. Our current server was built for our company when we were less than half of our current size and was not expected to be targeted by many attackers. This is causing us to have major issues with availability, especially when we have necessary repairs to be done which forces us to go completely offline. We have been able to mitigate this most of the time with after-hours or weekend repairs but the system is starting to have unfixable issues.
Our current server has several hardware-level concerns causing our Key Risk Indicators to increase every month. We are seeing more instances of attack over a wider surface area due to our unsecured server. We have found a workaround for most of the more severe issues but it has not gotten to a point where it is not a question of IF we will lose data to a threat but WHEN. This sever was good for our original needs but now the maintainability is almost no existent due to the hardware no longer being updated.
If we do not want to purchase and host the server ourselves then we can also look into a cloud provider who will instead require a smaller monthly fee and allow us easier scalability as we grow as a company. While that may seem like the best solution we are now unable to keep all of our information in-house and will need to have audits done on the provider’s side to ensure our data is kept intact and secured from outsiders. The cloud providers will allow us a bit of “on-demand” resources if we ever have major traffic due to unforeseen events as well.
I appreciate you all coming in today and I hope after hearing my concerns that you (the board) will talk amongst yourselves to decide if you want to go forward with an on-premise hosting solution or if you would prefer that I look into some off-site cloud providers to help our company grow while keeping our staff, clients and overall company safe from the concerns I have brought forth today.
Zacvr
I wanted to use new programs, but they had not been created yet so what better way than to make them myself?