“Always Be Testing:” Weekly Disaster Recovery System Testing Critical for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses Statistics show that most small to mid-sized businesses will experience at least one instance of system downtime a year, at an average cost of $74,000 an hour, according to Aberdeen Group. Unfortunately, only a handful of small to mid-sized businesses have ever even tested their backup to find out if complete recovery of their data, applications and systems after a disaster is possible. For those that do test, it’s often conducted infrequently — a result of outdated thinking that DR testing is time- and cost-prohibitive or
disaster management
The Cloud: Focusing On Cloud Performance – Part 1 The cloud has established its presence with applications for individuals, groups, and small and medium businesses. As a result, independent software vendors who have peddled packaged applications to cater to business functions in different verticals for companies of size might be pondering over when it is right to transfer some key offerings to the cloud and transform themselves into cloud service vendors. Unlike small players who can leverage cloud platforms like Amazon or Google Apps, they may need to create their own or shared platforms to provide their services. This is
AWS Outage – Ground-Hog Day Meets Murphy’s Law; You Guys Should Get A Room! So, here we go again – I’ve said it once, so I’ll say it again. It gives me no pleasure to write another blog post about AWS suffering another outage in their West Virginia Zone. This because of a couple of reasons: First, the publicity – industry analysts and commentators are divided into two camps, some taking the view that AWS is slightly unfit for the purpose (Barb Darrow from Gigaom: “Cloud outage raises more questions about Amazon Cloud” ) and others taking the more pragmatic view
The 5 Best Ways For Startups And Small Business To Leverage The Cloud The number of cloud apps targeted at small businesses and startups has exploded in the past few years. While hundreds of new cloud apps come out every month, many of the categories are still not mature enough for enterprise usage. Some applications are highly suited to the cloud (such as communication management), while other applications (such as video editing) are still more suited to the desktop. This distinction is especially important for small businesses who don’t have a big IT team to fix the issues. In this
Is Your Company Ready For A Cloud Service Outage? If you are using one of the major CSPs (cloud service providers) you may already be used to major service outages. Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure have all had their fair share of outages in the past 18 months, and some of them have been huge failures (Amazon’s April 2011 outage lasted 47 hours for some customers), which have brought down sites such as Reddit. However, companies such as Netflix have been able to survive the outages well. In this post, I will cover details on how you
