How to choose a Good Data Recovery Service?

Data loss happens; it’s just as simple as that. The vast majority of critical business and financial documents is stored on business computers. Files and documents can be accessed much more quickly on a computer than from a file cabinet. If set up properly, those same files are accessible from anywhere in the world. The myriad of documents that used to fill rows of cabinets now lives on a single hard drive on a single computer. To be sure, all of your business eggs may reside in one digital basket.

We often pre-plan our emergency actions in preparation for fires, floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters. We take out insurance on our buildings and physical equipment to ensure that we can rebuild and start anew. However, when was the last time that emergency data recovery was a part of your pre-planning session? Honestly, you can rebuild your facility, restock your supplies and purchase all new office equipment. Even so, without your data, you have no business. It has been estimated that re-entering 20 megabytes of sales and marketing data would take almost 20 days at a cost of close to $17,000. Can your business afford to be down that long or spend that kind of cash to recover?

Natural disasters do not happen that often, right? Natural disasters actually account for only about 3 percent of all data loss. Hardware and system failures cause an estimated 44 percent; human error is responsible for an additional 32 percent. Hard drives are mechanical and they fail. People are human and they mess up. Are you prepared to recover from what constitutes 76 percent of all data loss?

Part of your disaster planning should consist of researching for and finding a reputable data recovery service. Data recovery prices vary greatly; so does the quality of service provided. File recovery is not an easy task on a physically failed drive. Even data retrieval from a logically impaired drive can have disastrous consequences if not done properly. Investigate several data recovery services to see what they offer and what kind of guarantee they have for their services. Find out if they have invested the time and money for expert training and top-notch equipment.

Find out if the service farms out their work or does it in-house. Find out what security measures they take to protect your business data. Once chosen, the service should work with you to implement a plan for emergencies. When the need arrives, they will be able to get your business back up and running in the shortest time possible.

Many services do more than just hard drive recovery. Some perform flash drive recovery and can retrieve photos from digital camera media. Some offer archival services, transferring your data from old storage technologies to the new, state-of-the-art media choices.

ICT Applications in the Agriculture Industry

Information and communication technology is covering up most of human interactive areas and makes the life mush easier. We can see ICT applications from getting news to social networking. 

But we can see that ICT applications are not mush into agriculture as much as it is bonded with other areas. Most of countries of the world are mainly depended on agriculture. And we can recognize Sri Lanka, our country as a country which has an agricultural economical system. But we don’t have much ICT interaction with our main economical factor.

When we consider ICT with agriculture we can see some main areas that we can mainly focus on. We can create a website where farmers and buyers can meet and discuss prices of their products. Farmers can put the price and amount they have and then buyers can bid on products and buy. These will really faster than the methods that we have now. And again this web site can be extended not only as an ebay but also where information about buyers and farmers can be added. And hosting a web site which contains all agricultural information in it will be also really helpful. And again we can develop a mobile back end application for farmers to inform via SMS about weather, right times to cultivate etc. And if we go more far we can use embedded systems to automate several parts of the cultivation process such as watering, fertilizing…etc.

So we can see that there are so many ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural industry by using information and communication technology. But there are obstacles. We can easily find software engineers to create ICT application regarding to agriculture. But lot farmers do not have ICT knowledge. In most countries we can see this as a common fact. In Sri Lanka we have this lack of knowledge and also the lack of infrastructure for ICT. For remote cities like Horowpathana there maybe not even internet available for people. And attitudes of people also matters in such big change. People may get afraid to interact with new technology.

Creating an ICT application is not a really big deal but the problem comes out when they try to distribute that application among farmers and other related personals. So the infrastructure for information and communication technology should be increased and the ICT literacy in the country also should be increased. So there should be special campaigns for targeted group of people. 

If above requirements fulfilled and can establish a good ICT background for agricultural industry, it can be very easily developed. And it will make all processes faster and accurate than present scenario. In other hand more youngsters will be interested in agriculture than this context when agriculture is mixed up with new technology. So ICT application can be really benefitted for agricultural industry if they establish well and implement well.

The Impact of Information Technology to the Social Solodarity of Modern Sri Lankan Society

We are living in 21st century. In this era of Information technology every aspect of human life has some kind of connection to information technology. In 19th century man wanted to go to the outer space of the earth but in 21st century every man is seemed to be a prisoner in cyberspace.

Information technology is not a stream of knowledge or technical process that can be point out and defined easily. It can be defined hardly as a combination of computer and communications technologies that helps produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information. Sri Lanka is also heading towards to the era of information technology. Although Sri Lanka is a developing county which has not very good rate of computer literacy; the contribution of Sri Lankan’s in cyberspace is fascinating.

Social solidarity is synonymous with social cohesion or social integration. And social solidarity refers to “the integration and degree or type of integration, manifest by a society or group”. (Collins Dictionary of Sociology; Page - 621).From society to society the definition for the social solidarity can be changed. In simple societies social solidarity means kinship and shared values. In more complex societies it base on various theories.

Sri Lanka is a country which has a very good social structure from the ancient time. Sri Lankan people are well known as a set of people who has very good integration. Hence the Sri Lankan society has very good social solidarity.

But with this impact of Information Technology the beat of Sri Lankan society had was bit changed in past few years. Information technology has impacted on Sri Lankan society’s social solidarity in both good and bad ways.

The main fact of information technology that effects on every society in the world is Internet. Internet is a huge collection of networks that has linked with everything which man interacts with. It has made both good and bad effects on the social solidarity of Sri Lankan society.

The latest tendency of internet is social networking through online. There are so many social networks available in cyberspace such as Face book, Hi5, Friendster, MySpace…etc. Lot of Sri Lankans use these social networking web sites. As an example Face book has the 3rd rank of Sri Lanka’s most visited website list (source: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/LK). Through this kind of web sites, users can interact with his friends, relations and with many groups easily. This can effort to the strength of the social solidarity but at the same time this will make social ties online things rather than things that the person feels as real things.

Blogging is also a good concept of sharing ideas and making good conversations among people. These web services help people to find out people who match his/her ideas and make good conversations.

And using mailing functions users can spread their ideas and requests all around the world in seconds. So the person can interact with people around the world just sitting on a chair.

In contemporary Sri Lanka the Television is also a well known thing in Information Technology. Some television programs do a great service to by helping to buildup and maintain a good social solidarity in the society.

Not only in good ways but also in bad ways the Information Technology affect the social solidarity.

Although the internet has become a vast advantage to the mankind it makes so many bad impacts towards the social solidarity. As an Asian country Sri Lanka still maintain their values inside the social solidarity. In the internet we can find out so many bad websites and other stuffs. These things can lead the social solidarity to ruin.

Teenagers who have computers at home run to the home as soon as he gets rid of school or tusion class and turn on the computer. In this way he/she is losing time of playing and making good connections with friends. And E-mail chains that we receive several a day can also contain misleading information and give a bad picture about the society and people. If a child grows up with holding his fingers on a key board most of the time he is building his ideals through things he see in the screen. If he sees a man or a woman in a pornography movie somehow those scenes may affect his ideals. This can make a man isolated.

Although the social networks like Face Book, MySpace….etc create relationships in the society. This can lead someone to an unsuitable relationship. And in Sri Lanka a computer user can not interact with the majority of the country through computer. He gets to know only about computer using crowds’ attitudes, ideas and visions. Through that a good social solidarity does not build up.

And in contemporary Sri Lanka it seems to be that ……..People are getting addicted to the television and tele dramas. When a person get use to live with these things he/she buildup a world around them for themselves. When a mother of a family gets addicted to this we can see clearly how social solidarity gets affected by the Information technology. If mother get use to such things the communication in the family get stop. This can lead the social solidarity to a distraction.

By considering all above mentioned facts we could come to the conclusion that Information Technology brings benefits to the social solidarity as well as it harms it. As a country with a great reputation for its cultural and sociological values we should be able to maintain those values. As the members of this society it’s our responsibility to maintain the social solidarity at a higher level by working with Information Technology.

Sources:

• Wikipeadia

Information Systems

Information Systems (IS) is an academic/professional discipline bridging the business field and the well-defined computer science field that is evolving toward a new scientific area of study.An information systems discipline therefore is supported by the theoretical foundations of information and computations such that learned scholars have unique opportunities to explore the academics of various business models as well as related algorithmic processes within a computer science discipline. Typically, information systems or the more common legacyinformation systems include people, procedures, data, software, and hardware (by degree) that are used to gather and analyze digital information. Specifically computer-based information systems are complementary networks of hardware/software that people and organizations use to collect, filter, process, create, & distribute data (computing). Computer Information System(s) (CIS) is often a track within the computer science field studying computers and algorithmic processes, including their principles, their software & hardware designs, their applications, and their impact on society. Overall, an IS discipline emphasizes functionality over design.

As illustrated by the Venn Diagram on the right, the history of information systems coincides with the history of computer science that began long before the modern discipline of computer science emerged in the twentieth century.Regarding the circulation of information and ideas, numerous legacy information systems still exist today that are continuously updated to promote ethnographic approaches, to ensure data integrity, and to improve the social effectiveness & efficiency of the whole process. In general, information systems are focused upon processing information within organizations, especially within business enterprises, and sharing the benefits with modern society.