Digital Disaster and Dark Ages

MAY 27, 2017:  FINANCIAL EXPRESS

if

we look into the history of world civilization, we would find that every civilization had its own distinctiveness. People of some civilizations were physically strong some were expert in building temple, beautiful houses and palace, some were expert in medical science and many other particular fields. Those civilizations were also limited in some particular geographical locations. But starting from the Middle Ages, being nourished throughout couple of centuries this universal civilization witnessed Renaissance, industrial revolution and eventually destined to IT-based, electromechanical and paperless civilization.

Cyber attack has now become a highly sophisticated, cheaper and more effective weapon for many countries. Robot technology, bio-technology, artificial intelligence and much other technological advancement are changing this world very rapidly. People are not being able to keep pace with the fastest changing technology. The world is entering into a fully digitized version. Almost all activities are being reduced to paperless. And this has made this world much more vulnerable in all respect. Cyber crime and rapid changes in IT could bring a disastrous set back of this sophisticated human civilization. Because we are always in a great concern when our various crucial passwords is going to be hacked, bank account, credit/debit card will become empty, servers of all social communication sites will be collapsed by the hackers or malware, world communication will be fully halted, all satellite will be disconnected, even the control of nuclear bomb will go under the hand of terrorists or will go under the control of robot with artificial intelligence and many other unprecedented occurrences. The recent large-scale Ransomware attack reminds us what might be scale of future cyber attacks.

Almost everything is based on Information Technology in this 21st century. Without information and database technology this world would stand steel. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and many other cloud computing facilities providers are setting up hundreds of data centers investing billions of dollars where human history, culture, business, commerce, financial transactions and daily activities are being stored. Many multinational companies, many governmental and non-governmental organizations are taking cloud computing facilities where all information are being stored in the servers of some cloud computing service providers without setting up any server or data center of individual companies. Every day millions of bits of data are being uploaded to the servers of Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twiter, LinkedIn and many other social and professional networks. All of those data contain daily activities, past memories, ideas, achievements and various expressions of human being.

The centralization of data has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, preventing digital Dark Age might be comparatively easy through centralization, but on the other hand huge disaster might be happened by a single cyber attack, terrorist attack or natural calamities. This may be compared as keeping all eggs in a single basket.

some of these are: computer viruses, cyber attacks, denial-of-service attacks, hacking, and malware exploits. they are causing huge infrastructural disaster as we have seen in the tsunami in japan and the collapse of twin tower by terrorist attack. much other sabotage are also taking place.

Another type of digital Dark Age is the perception of a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format. The name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there would be a relative lack of written record, as documents are transferred to digital formats and original copies lost.

One concern leading to the use of the term is that documents are stored on physical media which require special hardware in order to be read and that this hardware will not be available in a few decades from the time the document was created. For example, it is already the case that disk drives capable of reading 5 1⁄4 inch floppy disks are not readily available. The Digital Dark Age also applies to the problems which arise due to obsolete file formats. In such a case, it is the lack of the necessary software which causes problems when retrieving stored documents. This is especially problematic when proprietary formats are used, in which case it might be impossible to write appropriate software to read the file.

A famous real example is with NASA, whose early space records have suffered from a Dark Age issue more than once. For over a decade, magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking Mars landing were unprocessed. When later analyzed, the data was unreadable as it was in an unknown format and the original programmers had either died or left NASA. The images were eventually extracted following many months of puzzling through the data and examining how the recording machines functioned.

In order to overcome any disaster or damage an organization must have a strong Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). We know that DRP is a set of documented procedures to recover and protect a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. Such a plan, ordinarily documented in written form, specifies procedures an organization is to follow in the event of a disaster. It is a comprehensive statement of consistent actions to be taken before, during and after a disaster of natural, environmental or man-made. Given organizations’ increasing dependency on information technology to run their operations, a disaster recovery plan, sometimes erroneously called a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP), is increasingly associated with the recovery of information technology data, assets, and facilities.

Organizations cannot always avoid disasters, but with careful planning the effects of a disaster can be minimized. The objective of a disaster recovery plan is to minimize downtime and data loss. The primary objective is to protect the organization in the event that all or part of its operations and/or computer services is rendered unusable. The plan minimizes the disruption of operations and ensures that some level of organizational stability and an orderly recovery after a disaster will prevail.