From the way legal teams prepare for trial to how they communicate with clients and other professionals, technology is quickly becoming an influential member of the practice. However, even in today’s technology-driven world, not all firms can label themselves tech savvy. To help those firms integrate technology into their businesses, this article explores the top five technology trends presented by the American Bar Association’s 2013 Tech Report to keep an eye on for the future of successful law firms and professionals.

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Small businesses are increasingly seeing the advantage of software as a service. It’s a model that opens up new possibilities to them. There is little or no capital investment and a convenient pay-as-you-go subscription model. It’s no wonder that many SMBs are now using cloud business software they would never have thought of installing on servers on their own site.

Cloud storage is even simpler. The data for entire small business can be uploaded without having to worry about investing in extra hardware or complex technology. But what about ‘Disaster Recovery as a Service’ or DRaaS for short – is that just for the bigger organizations, or does it have something to offer smaller enterprises too?

Beyond data storage

Sending data back-ups to the cloud is already a step forward. It’s typically mush safer than using local disk drives or burning CDs or DVDs to store data. However, in the event of an IT disaster, it may take more than a simple data download to restart operations. Floods, fires, lighting and even traffic snarl-ups can damage servers or make them inaccessible. And that banal but fatal disk crash can have the same effect too.

Effective disaster recovery solutions must therefore handle a range of different potential problems and let organizations rapidly get their IT working again in all cases.

What should DRaaS providers offer?

Your business may be small, but that doesn’t stop it from having the same requirements as bigger corporations. Computer downtime may be just as catastrophic for you as for them. So if DRaaS looks like a good idea, make sure you’re getting all you need.

• Recovery time. Making your IT available online may take a few hours, or as little as 5 minutes. Compare this with what your business needs and what it costs – and also with the other solution of trying to do it all by yourself.

• Special server platforms. Your enterprise may also be using particular applications or platforms in order to do business. Or you may require your data and applications to comply with specific regulations (health, financial or other). If you want to use DRaaS, make sure your provider gives you not only the right technical resources, but also any necessary regulatory compliance.

• Data back-up or online computing environments? Not every DRaaS solution includes both back-ups and replication of your computing facilities. If you want both items covered, check the service agreement before you sign up.

• Getting back to normal afterwards. Using a replicated cloud-based data center may be a godsend if your own IT facilities are out of action. However, when they’re back, you’ll want to transfer your operations back out of the cloud and into your normal IT environment again. So check to see if your DRaaS provider will really be there to help you complete the entire recovery process.

So do small businesses want DRaaS?

The possibilities above motivate small companies to look for smarter online solutions for safeguarding their data and their computing ability. There’s evidence to suggest that they’re taking action too, according to recent (2012) data from Gartner, the market research company.

As many as 90% of DRaaS set-ups are for organizations running just 3 to 6 enterprise applications, with between 2 and 5 terabytes of associated data storage. While it’s better to think out your own solution rather than just copying what other SMBs are doing, statistics like these suggest it’s worth taking a look at DRaaS.

The post Disaster Recovery as a Service – Can Small Businesses Now Benefit? appeared first on CloudWedge.

When we are deciding between public or private cloud implementation there are some capabilities we need to take into consideration and security is one of the top ones. Other characteristics like integration with existing systems, costs and management are also important.
Looking at the management side of a cloud environment, there may be some delivery models that can be used in this arena that can bring new ways into the decision process.

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Software development, like manufacturing, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle has often remained craftwork.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, will discuss the many lessons and processes that DevOps can learn from manufacturing and the assembly line-like tools, such as Platform-as-a-Service, that provide the necessary abstraction and automation to make industrialized DevOps possible.

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We recently released AWS CloudTrail integration with Logentries – and not surprisingly we’ve seen a significant uptick in adoption as one of our most popular integrations. My job as director of customer success is to make things as simple for our customers as possible. One question that consistently pops up, is how to collect AWS CloudTrail logs from multiple AWS regions.

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Virtustream is the enterprise-class cloud software and services provider trusted by enterprise customers worldwide to migrate and run their mission-critical applications in the cloud. For businesses, cloud service providers and government agencies, only Virtustream enterprise-class cloud solutions meet the security, compliance, performance and efficiency requirements needed to migrate and manage the most complex mission-critical applications across hybrid, private or public cloud environments.

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The cloud plays an essential role in modern business. Once just a novel convenience, cloud storage and compute underpins many of the most important parts of the economy, both on and offline. The cloud landscape is no longer the preserve of a small number of giant infrastructure providers. Eager to capitalize on the dominance of the cloud infrastructure and services sector, dozens and perhaps hundreds of vendors have entered the space, competing fiercely on price and value-adds as they attempt to differentiate.

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In today’s post in the modernizing your infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud series, I am going to talk about Hyper-V over SMB, which we introduced in Windows Server 2012. It is also important to note that you can use storage spaces to house your SMB share that Hyper-V will leveraged. In Part 7 I talked about storage spaces: Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud – Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2 (Part7)

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It’s an oft-cited FEMA statistic that 40 percent of small businesses never reopen after a disaster. Almost certainly contributing to this eye-popping failure rate is the fact that an estimated 74 percent of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) lack a disaster recovery plan, while 84 percent haven’t bothered to obtain disaster insurance.
On an annual basis, flooding ranks as the most common and costly type of natural disaster in America. This hurricane season alone is expected to boast 10 named tropical storms and five hurricanes. Those SMBs that don’t want their data to wash away with the rest of their possessions should consider revisiting the planning process, strategies, and cloud technologies that help businesses stay afloat in the event of a disaster.

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