Disaster Recovery Journal

Risk to your business comes in many forms. There are natural disasters and economic downturns, as well as legal and regulatory compliance issues. There’s also unplanned downtime caused by poorly planned change or other unexpected issues. So, with all these known and unknown potential problems, how can IT organizations prepare for the unpredictable?

Cloud computing infrastructure offers many advantages compared to traditional physical methods. From backup and replication of data, to ease of testing and restoration of business services after a disaster has been declared, cloud infrastructure can offer reliability, security, and affordability to keep your business running smoothly.

What does “secure” really mean?

One of the first scenarios people imagine about IT security is intrusion from the outside. And while that threat is real and requires appropriate measures, there are many other factors that create IT insecurity.

For example, many small companies have mission-critical applications on servers that are in the back of a storage room or under a desk. Even in larger companies with datacenters, the actual recovery procedure can involve transporting physical backups and staff driving or flying to distant locations. During this arduous process, critical information is unavailable to workers, partners, and customers – and revenue is lost.

The costs of downtime

Downtime leads to a cascade of related costs. Deadlines or SLAs missed because services were offline could lead to penalties and charges. You can incur overtime to make up for lost productivity, and your customers may look to your competitors. Downtime costs more than money – it can cost you customers.

Redundancy. Recovery. Reliability.

True IT security is not just about securing your data with firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption and authentication, but also the availability of your data. You need redundancy in both infrastructure and data protection for critical files and business services. Then you need a business continuity plan that can restore operations in minutes or hours, not days. This adds up to IT reliability that protects your business from the many causes of downtime and lost revenue.

True IT security

With today’s private cloud infrastructure you can connect with a private line, to your existing MPLS network, or over VPN and SSL over the Internet. Enterprise clouds are provisioned within SAS 70 Type II datacenters with 24x7 security that includes onsite personnel, dual authentication biometric access, CCTV, and other measures.

The cloud makes disaster recovery affordable

A private cloud strategy for achieving disaster recovery goals can provide increased security and decreased IT costs for businesses of all sizes. By utilizing a replication target in the cloud you can gain the benefits of a secondary datacenter without the capital expenditures (CapEx) for hardware and build-out, or the operations expenditures (OpEx) for colocation, power, cooling, redundant connectivity, maintenance, and hardware management.

By selecting a cloud-based provider for data replication, your workload can be replicated from virtual or physical environments to a high-availability cloud infrastructure. This offers cost-effective access to enterprise-class resources, and since cloud-based data backup is easier to test, you can save time and money when testing your preparedness.

Standby resources to restore business services

Go from just backing up your data to an actual restoration plan for business continuity. You can add computing resources that host your data in standby. A virtual machine (VM) can be registered in standby mode and quickly activated when needed to keep your business up and running. This moves your recovery time objective (RTO) from days to just hours or minutes while drastically lowering the cost of service compared to traditional means.

Protect your desktop data

After securing your servers and the data they contain, there’s another IT vulnerability that you can easily avoid. Think about the thousands of hours of work and countless documents and spreadsheets with vital content like sales reports, prospect lists, and new marketing programs your workforce has created. Now think about how much of that isn’t backed up to your servers and exists only on a single PC or laptop hard drive.

Close the loop between your desktop and datacenter

A virtualization strategy can put your desktop environment in the cloud, alongside your application servers – closing the loop between your desktops and your datacenter. It provides a unified platform that integrates desktop data with the business continuity solution for your hosted servers, data, and services.

Empower innovation with IT accessibility

People may still sketch things on paper and whiteboards, but the real work happens on the desktop environment. That’s where people write, design, engineer, and crunch numbers. It’s also where we surf, e-mail, schedule, instant message, and collaborate remotely. Providing a flexible, secure, and productive desktop environment is one of the most important IT tasks for enabling workers to create the innovative ideas that make your business stand apart from competitors.

Anytime, anywhere desktop access

Cloud-based desktops give workers the IT accessibility they need with the security the business needs. It enables mobile, remote, and home-based workers to connect to everything they could at the office. Home-based workers can access any local USB device from their cloud-based desktop and print to their local printer as easily as a network printer back at corporate. The sales team will always have access to the important files on the corporate server – even when they’re in the middle of nowhere.

Stop desktop downtime

Few things around the office are as frustrating as a PC or laptop problem that keeps you from working. A single incident of desktop downtime may not only affect the productivity of that person but his or her team and department. And, of course, it increases the workload for tech support and the help desk.

But it could be worse. What if a traveling worker on a sales trip has his laptop stolen or destroyed? Laptops are valuable – but not nearly as valuable as the data they hold.

You can prevent desktop downtime with a virtual desktop solution. Individual desktops are generated from standardized disk images that can be deployed, configured, and migrated centrally. This also provides the benefit of allowing the help desk to easily assist employees outside the main office and liberating IT staff from one-at-a-time fixes so they can spend more time supporting strategic business priorities.

The technology to affordably reduce risk

With a cloud infrastructure solution you can add redundancy, recovery, and reliability to your IT strategy. You can secure datacenter and desktop data with a backup and restoration plan that minimizes downtime caused by anything from hurricanes to lost laptops.

Luck isn’t enough. Know you’re ready with a cloud-based solution that not just protects your data, but ensures you can restore services – no matter what unexpected problem tries to disrupt your business.

Brian Ussher is the president and co-founder of iland Internet Solutions Company. As president, Ussher is responsible for leading and directing the company’s day-to-day activities and continuing iland’s growth as a global provider of managed network infrastructure and an enabler for business continuity.