A stingy corporate parent doesn't help. But for several months, Burbank, Calif.-based Disney had been reluctant to give Toysmart's IT department the money necessary to, among other things, hire the 15 or 20 additional people it needed, Puckett said. The cash crunch at Austin, Texas-based Drkoop also means that plans for a backup data facility outside of Austin have been put on hold, Scalpati said. Drkoop's in-house data center and its outsourced backup center are both in Austin, but that's a big risk if a natural disaster strikes the area. May. The risk is more than theoretical.
Data has to be their most valuable asset.
Sometimes a dot-com survives a technical glitch only through the heroic efforts of its IT staff. Despite several server crashes one weekend last summer, Drkoop users never saw the site go down, said Robert Eric Pearse, the company's former systems configuration manager. On a Friday night, memory problems kept bringing down the Microsoft Corp. Internet Information Server software. It was tense. They finally traced the problem to a new server-side script that had overloaded the server software.