OOMBA - What EXACTLY Do You Do?

OOMBA is a fun word to say.  It doesn't always translate exactly what we do, however.  Allow me to explain.

At OOMBA Security we believe in no Single Points of Failures (SPFs).  We believe in High Availability (HA).  We also believe in Business Continuity (BC), dynamic infrastructure and Disaster Recovery (DR).  All these cool words support secure computing.  Uptime is everything at OOMBA.  Configurations should be simple.  Things should just work.

A single point of failure is as simple as having one connection to the Internet or one power supply in your computer.  We are an independent company that isn't try to sell you something you don't need.  When you buy hardware buy two, right?  Yes, that still applies if you want to take advantage of redundancy, fault tolerance and high availability.  At OOMBA we help you configure it.  By virtualizing your environment you can much, much more redundancy out of the two things you buy. Configuring it properly, securely and simply is where we can help.

Let me tell a little story about high availability.  A customer has two, full-size computers with lots of redundancy built in.  One day one of the two computers failed.  It went down cold. Over the years of maintenance their highly available cluster switched from the primary to secondary often enough to lose track.  All the primary virtual computers just happened to be located on the one physical computer that went down hard.  Because the configuration wasn't being monitored to ensure the split between primary and secondary was equal the customer experienced downtime.  Two things need to happen to ensure this never happens again.  First monitor and alert every time the balance of primary and secondary virtual machines changes.  Second, consider manually setting the primary at the end of each maintenance period to ensure the balance is always equal between to systems.  There was nothing wrong in the virtual configuration that was initially set up.  What was missing was monitoring and procedure that created a situation where all eggs ended up in one basket.  At OOMBA we can help configure your systems completely - from installation to disaster recovery.   Let us do a free "single point of failure" review of your system today.  You decide if you want our help to resolve issues (and there are always issues) or we can help you fit it yourself.  At OOMBA we always provide superior customer service.  Proper configuration should cost and arm and a leg.  Let's work together for your maximum benefit.

Highly available systems can be very expensive or free.  The benefit of a supported vendor's clustering system is help is just a phone call away. The vendor will even configure and certify it for you.  Open source software allows you to download the software for free. A community provides support online.  What's the difference between the two?  Cost.  You can pay a lot of money for a fully configured high available solution from a vendor.   Or nothing for open source.  It's been said you get what you pay for.  Today it's all in the configuration and support.  You decide how valuable uptime is to your business.  I've seen systems where everything is redundant and fail over is seamless.  Pull a plug or a cable and watch the magic as a system or component goes down over here and comes up over there.  It's a beautiful thing.  Customers never feel the impact.  Load balancing your network traffic can provide similar benefits for much less money.  Instead of having two of everything you might have ten.  Ten virtual servers load balanced across multiple physical systems.  Say your customer is online filling out an order form.  That's money in the bank right?  Then the computer they are connected to fails in some way.  What happens to the transaction?  In a properly configured environment the fail over occurs.  The session the customer has is simply moved to another available virtual machine.  Including the memory, data on disk and network connection.  The customer doesn't realize a thing.  They keep on filling out the form. HA can be very expensive or virtually free.  It does take experience to know what you need.  At OOMBA we can help with that!

Business Continuity is the ensuring the business can continue in the case of any interruption.  Where business continuity ends Disaster Recovery begins.  At OOMBA these concepts are built in to everything we do for you.  First we analyze your system to locate any points of weakness.  Then we correct it or help you do it yourself.  Business continuity can be a variety of concepts.  From procedure - who is going to cover for you when you go on vacation?  To having fault tolerant network connections that automatically fail over.  Disaster recovery can be anything on a small scale like an accidental deletion of an important file to a full-scale recovery from a flood.  Having a plan to recover from a disaster is the best insurance you can buy.  OOMBA has the experience to provide a full business continuity and disaster recovery plan.  Your insurance may give you a discount for having these plans.  Your business may be required to have these plans.  At OOMBA we can help with that!

Allow us to help you with a free risk assessment.  The assessment can be single scop,e like finding your single points of failures and recommending solutions. We provide assessments built to your needs.  Then you'll have a plan and a partner who can help you with solutions.