To dash to the cloud, stash in the cloud

1. To dash to the cloud, stash in the cloud Your business faces constant pressure to stay competitive in your industry, and that means creating new services or investing in new technologies to gain an edge in productivity. What gets left out is investing in technology infrastructure resilience. Setting up secondary sites for disaster recovery and maintaining high availability lag behind deploying new services and improving application scalability, which focus on capturing new customers. There is no denying that disaster recovery and high availability are critical to retaining these newly captured customers in the long run, but investment barriers have kept a lot of businesses from achieving this objective. With the advent of the public cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) gives your organization the option to build your disaster recovery sites in the cloud. However, actual early IaaS implementations struggled to provide reasonable recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO/RTO). With new services like Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Services, on the other hand, you can implement low-RPO, low-RTO disaster recovery services at a cloud-service price point instead of resorting to co-located or self-managed secondary data centers. According to a recent survey, half of all outages are caused by server failure. Power failures make up one third of such problems and about one in five outages are caused by cyber-attacks. So in addition to ensuring server uptime, protecting data stored within the enterprise has taken on a new urgency. When it comes to your data, there are three main categories: Personal work data Enterprise content Applications and their data    We’ll omit enterprise data warehouses from the scope of this article –that’s a discussion for another time. Personal Work Data Personal work data includes all the documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations that live on your notebook and require protection. Microsoft OneDrive for Business provides an excellent mechanism that seamlessly stores all such

2. documents on Azure Cloud and makes them accessible from all devices that you use over the course of your day. No longer do you have to turn on your computer and hunt for Wi-Fi to share a document with someone on the go – now you can access the same documents from your smartphone. Enterprise Content With Office 365, SharePoint Online, Planner, and Yammer, it has never been easier to just use cloud-based tools that securely store your data on Microsoft Azure. SharePoint provides a focal point for information sharing in the cloud with advanced features like real-time editing by multiple team members. It also offers secure access to authorized business partners and customers and provides features for categorizing documents using your own business vocabulary. Applications and their Data Application data is stored within databases and file servers, and applications themselves run on various physical servers and virtualized environments like Hyper-V or VMware. This complexity adds to the challenge of maintaining backups in a way that enables the storage and rapid recovery of different application components, data, and state information that belong to the DB tier, app tier, web tier, and Active Directory. At Visionet, we have helped several our enterprise customers select the most appropriate cloud-based backup and disaster recovery technologies, which has significantly reduced their primary and secondary data center costs. Please contact Visionet for a complimentary personalized assessment of your backup and disaster recovery needs.