Many of you may know that a couple of weeks ago Gartner published its first-ever magic quadrant report on Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). In case you missed it, Acronis is challenging the leaders in this space, and Gartner ranked us highest among the Challengers on our Ability to Execute.

In today’s blog, I’d like to step away from the technical aspects of disaster recovery and focus on the human impact. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite books on the subject of predictability and inevitability: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

In today’s business world, we need to justify every dollar that we spend, lowering costs, and delivering a return on investment on everything we do. Nowhere is this more true than in IT, where Big Data, Mobility and BYOD are changing the way we work across the globe, requiring companies to an IT depratments to invest and change to remain competitive.

Since its launch on May 28, 2003, Windows Server 2003 has become the backbone of many data center operations. More than twenty million servers worldwide still use Windows Server 2003. According to W3Techs, 25 percent of the Windows-based web servers still run IIS 6.0, running on Windows Server 2003. Now after 12 years, Microsoft has said it will discontinue Windows Server 2003 support on July 14, 2015.