DRaaS

Leveraging Cloud Computing for maximum business value

Bobby Varghese

With the advancement in technology, there has been a shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Barely a decade old, cloud computing has been a game changer in the tech world and if utilized correctly, it can prove to be advantageous to an enterprise. However, to ensure efficiency, care should be taken and detailed research is imperative while selecting the Cloud that best fits an organizations workload. Lower cost due to the elimination of capital expense, high speed of processes, scalability when necessary and reliability with respect to data backup and recovery are a few of the many benefits, that make Cloud Computing a must have.

In this article, we have listed the top 6 ways in which businesses can make use of Cloud Technology:

Virtualisation (Infrastructure-as-a-Service): Being cost-effective and scalable, it is one of the most attractive solutions for any enterprise. IaaS helps in reducing the investment on Physical hardware thereby reducing the IT and capital costs.

Application Development and Testing (Platform-as-a-Service): Constantly acquiring and installing new hardware and software becomes an expensive affair for any enterprise.­­ Thus, using a Cloud environment to develop applications proves to be a more practical choice. Developers can simply log-in to their Cloud platform and can access the tools required to create applications.
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Top 7 Tips For An Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

Bobby Varghese

Here’s a no-brainer – many companies rely on IT for their survival and they won’t be able to work if their system went down. If you think your company is one of them, then it’s important to have a proper Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place so that you are able to reduce your downtime and get back online as quickly as possible.

Here are top 7 tips to help you implement an effective Disaster Recovery plan:

Identify your risks:
Identifying major security threats to your IT infrastructure can help you put procedures in place that will reduce the risk and determine the course of action needed for recovery.

Prioritize your activities:
Identify your most critical services and the order in which you want to restore them. This will help you create a recovery plan which will help minimize the effect of the disaster on your business.

Make a list of software details:
If you’re running different software programs in your business for different activities, make sure you have a complete list of applications you are using, their configuration settings, the contact details of the owners, and your contract details. This will help you remember the applications important for your business.

Create a response team:
This is an essential element of a DR Plan and includes personnel you will need to get your system back online. You can take help from your internal staff or can hire third party vendors to help you in this process.

Assess Recovery Procedures:
The top goal of every company is recovery and restoration of its data after the disaster. In order to collect and restore the data, the company must answer questions like where the data has been stored, who has access to the data, is the data secure, whether it can be recovered in case it’s lost and how to retrieve the data in case the company switches its users.

Keep your backup ready and waiting:
It is often said that business should never anticipate profits but should provide for all possible losses. Keep a backup of all your business resources on-site, off-site or on the Cloud so that you don’t have to worry about the data loss in case of a disaster.

Run and Test your plan:
Testing your plan is another important part of DR planning. No matter how well you’ve planned your recovery, actually implementing the process is always different from the way it was planned. Run the test plan and make the required tweaks for the final version of the DR plan.

When a disaster strikes, most of the companies suffer because of the absence of a proper Disaster Recovery Solution. Having a solid DR plan will help the businesses resume their operations after the minimum downtime and continue to provide good and reliable services to their customers and suppliers. Developing a DR plan can be time-consuming but the benefits heavily outweigh the costs should a disaster occur.

 

Sysfore can help you with a cost-efficient way to meet your disaster recovery objectives. You can write to us at info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.

5 common misconceptions about Disaster Recovery demystified!

Bobby Varghese

An organization’s data is recognized as the most vital asset. Companies who do not understand the importance of data backup and recovery are less likely to survive in the modern economy. According to a recent study, an hour of downtime can cost a small business around $8,000. Despite this, companies fail to invest in Disaster Recovery. Another study showed that 51% of small businesses still use local hardware-based backup solutions for their data which makes them vulnerable to data loss caused by various natural and unnatural disasters.

Below are 5 common misconceptions about Disaster Recovery:

Disaster Recovery is expensive: Business leaders often assume that having a robust disaster recovery plan will require high investment to hold copies of all servers, storage, and networks in a secondary data centre.

Cloud-based Disaster Recovery or Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) helps the organizations to move their enterprise applications to secure cloud locations where they pay only for the storage they use thereby reducing costs.

Our backup is on the on-site server: Organizations argue that their data is backed up on the on-site server and that they’re covered in case disaster strikes.

DRaaS is about minimizing the downtime after a disaster. Having a robust Disaster Recovery strategy will help the organizations to restore their operations quickly and in a highly automated fashion.

We work in a region with a pleasant weather: Organizations usually feel that because they’re working in a region with a generally good weather, they’re not susceptible to outages.

Organizations can face outages as a result of human error, malicious attacks, power outages or bad coding other than weather conditions. Thus, every company should have a robust contingency plan to be able to recover from a disaster.

There are no outages in our organization: When it comes to outages, they may temporarily go unnoticed but those small losses add up and become expensive over a period of time which can have a negative effect on the company’s revenue.

Organizations need to pay attention to outages in order to implement an effective and a reliable Disaster Recovery strategy.

A little downtime can be handled easily: Business leaders argue that because most of their systems are not customer facing, they can handle a little downtime easily. With the increasing demand for instant responses from organizations online, even a little downtime can lead to a massive impact on the customer loyalty which will further affect the revenue.

We conclude by saying that without having a proper contingency plan, companies run the risk of incurring high monetary and non-monetary losses like outages, downtime, loss of data, low employee morale, loss of reputation, and lower revenues. Thus, a robust disaster recovery strategy is important to run a successful and a secure business.