How to Navigate the Alleyways of Business Continuity Management and Disaster Recovery Two years back, in the aftermath of the Fukushima earthquake in Japan, I had written about how Cloud Computing offers a credible Disaster Recovery option. For companies which cannot afford to spend millions on their own collocation facilities, the Cloud remains the best option. Of course, a lot has changed since then. Now, the ability to recover from disaster within stipulated timelines is no longer a business necessity, but a regulatory mandate, especially for any company operating in finance. Also, there has been a spate of standards, regulations
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Private and Public Cloud Migration Standards Ever since cloud computing has seen mainstream adoption, the ability to migrate data between public or private clouds is becoming a key concern, especially due to the large size and the cost involved in the switch. The first question that comes to mind when discussing cloud migration is if there are any cloud standards that will ensure interoperability? This is because in the absence of such frameworks, the effort of translation or manual data transfer operations might exceed budgets, especially for large public clouds. Hence it is essential to understand if there are any
Mimecast Outage “Cloud Kettle Calling The Pot Black” UK based cloud continuity and security vendor Mimecast today suffered what is looking like from many customers tweets an outrage of over 5 hours effecting customers email flow. Customers appear to have 1st noticed the issue at 11am UK time when news appeared that customers inbound and outbound email had come to a halt. The real issue here is that Mimecast positions themselves as a business continuity provider, a cloud system that protects customers from email outages. Whilst they filter email and provide archiving their key differentiator been delivering continuity to ensure always on
Virtualization + Cloud Equals Perfect Storm For Disaster Recovery Services Not very long ago disaster recovery was a luxury afforded by only the very large companies due to the prohibitive cost and effort required. Frequently even these large companies were unable to justify the investment and went without a disaster recovery plan. Today, virtualization and cloud enables companies of all sizes to implement a scalable, highly efficient disaster recovery plan without a huge investment. COSTLY AND RESOURCE-INTENSIVE DISASTER RECOVERY OF YESTERDAY At one time, investment in disaster recovery came in one of two forms: build a replica or subset of the
Three Reasons Why Sys Admin Jobs are Not Threatened by Cloud More often than not, concerns around cloud adoption are actually questions relating to job security of the IT staff once the company decides to adopt cloud. This is a misconception which none other than the IT departments who have gone through the transition can confirm. What these system administrators have learned the hard way is that Cloud is not their enemy; in fact, it simplifies their job and adds further value by providing an opportunity to initiate exciting new cloud services and projects for the company. With your company’s applications, data and infrastructure moving to
Cloud Governance Should Be Prioritized When businesses move existing applications and resources to the cloud, they always do it in phases, moving the most stable applications first in order to minimize down time. The transition is a slow process which enables users to have enough time to adapt to the new system. Because of this, cloud governance is also staggered per application or phase. The problem here is that people will get used to the staggered way governance is being implemented with many people overseeing governance for each different application. The correct method is a centralized approach to managing cloud
Virtualization Spells “Money” for SMB IT Consultants in 2013 Listen up, SMB IT guys. Consider this: The typical small and medium business server uses about 10% of its computing power. But small businesses continue to segment their servers—one server per core function—as companies like Microsoft, Dell, and HP have recommended for years. And while that’s definitely a best practice from a technical perspective, it’s a horrible waste of resources from a financial one. Enter Virtualization Ask any 10 small business owners about whether they have dedicated or virtualized IT infrastructure, and at least nine of them are likely to blink stupidly at you. That’s why
