Melbourne IT's Hnarakis loses 'wing man'
Melbourne IT's chief operating officer Andrew Field has been poached by an unknown company, leaving chief executive Theo Hnarakis bereft of the executive he described today as his "wing man".
Melbourne IT CEO Theo Hnarakis
(Credit: Melbourne IT)
"As they say, things come in threes. Andrew was the third piece of bad news in recent weeks," Hnarakis told ZDNet.com.au.
Field's resignation after 10 years with the company was preceded by separate incidents affecting two of the company's web hosting subsidiaries, Queensland-based WebCentral and New Zealand-based Domainz.
Hnarakis described Field as his "wing man", adding that he had been poached by another organisation that had offered Field a faster path to a likely chief executive role.
"As much as I'm disappointed to see him go, out of challenges come new opportunities," said Hnarakis.
Last month WebCentral's customers suffered an outage lasting several days after WebCentral claimed to have "experienced a data corruption" in one of its IBM shared storage devices. Melbourne IT said it only affected a small portion of its customer base.
And In late April the company's New Zealand hosting business Domainz was hacked by political demonstrators. The hack affected Microsoft's primary portal, along with MSN, Windows Live, Hotmail and MSDN.
"The hacking incident was extremely unfortunate, and of course, since then the Portuguese registry has been hacked as well," said Hnarakis. "It's extremely unfortunate, but they were able to enter an area where we weren't paying that right amount of attention."
Hnarakis said the hackers were only successful for one hour and that it has now invested in a three-tier, firewall architecture that will be stress-tested before it goes live.
Hardware failure was pegged by Hnarakis for the recent WebCentral outages. "The fundamental reason it took three days to recover this was because we wanted to ensure that no data was lost and no emails were lost for customers," he said.
WebCentral was in the process mirroring for its servers to mitigate future outages. "At the end of the day, if your equipment fails, you need the redundancy to deal with it. We hadn't had that, but we will," said Hnarakis. "I'm very cognisant of the impact it had on our customers."