Wednesday, May 8, 2013
RKON CTO Marc Malizia’s article “Virtualization + Cloud Equals Perfect Storm For Disaster Recovery Services” appeared on CloudTweaks, a leading cloud community for cloud news, analysis, infographics and more. Click here to read the full article.
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 production-computing environment at a secondary site or contract with a disaster recovery provider. These disaster recovery providers maintained data centers equipped with compatible computing platforms upon which a company could restore their environments when a disaster was declared. The latter was often the more feasible solution since the service provider was able to leverage their hardware investment over a pool of customers thereby lowering their per unit cost and passing some of the savings along to their customers. Though, I have heard many companies complain over their $50,000-$400,000 monthly costs to maintain their contract for a secondary site disaster recovery location. These exorbitant fees did not even cover the customer’s annual testing costs to simulate a disaster and test their recovery process that often included IT staff members rolling through airports with cases of backup tapes…
Click here to read the full whitepaper.
Monday, July 23, 2012
With all the technologies available, how do you go about creating a DR solution that’s the best approach for your organization? Watch this recording of RKON Practice Director Troy Dechant’s presentation at Technology Executives Club DR Conference on Thursday, June 28, 2012.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
We have complimentary VIP passes available for Technology Executives Club’s Disaster Recovery Cloud & Colocation Strategies Seminar. The event takes place on Thursday June 28, at the Union League Club in Chicago from 12:30-5:00pm and focuses on how DR strategies have evolved and how today’s options can help meet multiple DR & Storage & Resiliency needs.
Click here to register now with our complimentary VIP passes.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
The recent NATO summit in Chicago brought to mind two key technology questions;
- Are you prepared to recover in the event of a disaster and how quickly can your business be up and running?
- How much productivity is lost if your employees cannot get into your office?
Recovery in the event of a disaster
The NATO summit went off with only a few minor disturbances. Congratulations to the City of Chicago, the Chicago police department and the police from various other departments who came in to support the CPD. Congrats should also be given to the protestors who for the most part, behaved in a civilized fashion.
Chicago businesses avoided the damage that a riot might have caused. If your place of business were to find itself in such a scenario, do you have a plan to mitigate the damage? Is your data stored off site? If the power or Internet access you rely on were suddenly interrupted, are you prepared?
More productive working remotely
The Loop yesterday was a ghost town as regular business commuters stayed home. Today on the train, I overheard two lawyers and two insurance agents talking about their 5 day vacation.
If the law firms and insurance agencies had a virtual environment prepared, these employees could have worked from home saving their businesses from the unexpected time off. Meanwhile, competitors who have a working virtual environment (we have helped several law firms and insurance agencies launch virtual networks) enjoyed a real competitive advantage because their employees continued working remotely.
Sure, NATO summits don’t happen very often. Chicago won’t have another any time soon. However, there are other circumstances that can prevent employees from accessing your physical location such as severe weather (snow, tornado, hurricanes depending upon where you are) or unexpected news events that might result in protesting, rioting or even celebration (local sports team victories come to mind). Such events can interfere with your standard operation limiting access and therefore productivity.
The benefits of having a DR plan and a virtualized environment go beyond such extreme examples as I have suggested. But when something like the NATO summit happens in your neighborhood as it just did in mine, it brings such scenarios front and center.
Are you prepared? If your employees could continue working through an interruption of normal workday flow, what would that mean? Would it give you a leg up on the competition?