Started with your new company? Great! Now it’s time to have some boosting plans for your company’s growth. But as your company grows, you will have to take care of the emergencies that might occur at some point that warrants crisis management in IT. The crisis can be in any form – natural disaster, data breach or product malfunction and you might be the entity for it to happen. In case of disaster weather, sysadmins need to take the hot seat if the user machines aren’t working quickly, since it’s a massive task. But as said, people only remember how you handled it and not the mistake they committed.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
The economics of disaster recovery
Companies increasingly need constant access to data and the cost of losing this access – downtime – can be catastrophic. Large organizations can quickly find themselves in the eye of a storm when software glitches strike. It can result in lost revenue, shaken customer loyalty and significant reputational damage.
In August 2013, the NASDAQ electronic exchange went down for 3 hours 11 minutes, causing the shutdown of trading in stocks like Apple, Facebook, Google and 3,200 other companies. It resulted in the loss of millions of dollars, paralyzing trading in stocks with a combined value of more than $5.9 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland has now had five outages in three years including on the most popular shopping day of the year. Bloomberg also experienced a global outage in April 2015 resulting in the unavailability of its terminals worldwide. Disaster recovery for these firms is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.
Yet whilst the costs of downtime are significant, it is becoming more and more expensive for companies to manage disaster recovery as they have more and more data to manage: by 2020 the average business will have to manage fifty times more information than it does today. Downtime costs companies on average $5600 per minute and yet the costs of disaster recovery systems can be crippling as companies build redundant storage systems that rarely get used. As a result, disaster recovery has traditionally been a luxury only deep-pocketed organizations could afford given the investment in equipment, effort and expertise to formulate a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
Cloud computing is now making disaster recovery available to all by removing the need for a dedicated remote location and hardware altogether. The fast retrieval of files in the cloud allows companies to avoid fines for missing compliance deadlines. Furthermore, the cloud’s pay for use model means organizations need only pay for protection when they need it and still have backup and recovery assets standing by. It also means firms can add any amount of data quickly as well as easily expire and delete data. Compare this to traditional back up methods where it is easy to miss files, data is only current to the last back up (which is increasingly insufficient as more data is captured via web transactions) and recovery times are longer.
Netflix has now shifted to Amazon Web Services for its streaming service after experiencing an outage in its DVD operation in 2008 when it couldn’t ship to customers for three days because of a major database corruption. Netflix says the cloud allows it to meet increasing demand at a lower price than it would have paid if it still operated its own data centres. It has tested Amazon’s systems robustly with disaster recovery plans “Chaos Monkey”, “Simian Army” and “Chaos Kong” which simulated an outage affecting an entire Amazon region.
Traditionally it has been difficult for organizations like Netflix to migrate to the cloud for disaster recovery as they have grappled with how to move petabytes of data that is transactional and hence continually in use. With technology such as WANdisco’s Fusion active replication making it easy to move large volumes of data to the cloud whilst continuing with transactions, companies can now move critical applications and processes seamlessly enabling disaster recovery migration. In certain circumstances a move to the cloud even offers a chance to upgrade security with industry recognized audits making it much more secure than on site servers.
Society’s growing reliance on crucial computer systems mean that even short periods of downtime can result in significant financial loss or in some cases even put human lives at risk. In spite of this, many companies have been reluctant to allocate funding for Disaster Recovery as management often does not fully understand the risks. Time and time again network computing infrastructure has proven inadequate. Cloud computing offers an opportunity to step up to a higher level of recovery capability at a cost that is palatable to nearly any sized business. The economics of disaster recovery in the cloud are such that businesses today cannot afford not to use it.
Written by David Richards, Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive of WANdisco.
Dropbox celebrates 500 million users
Just over nine years since the launch of its file hosting service Dropbox has announced it has reached the milestone of 500 million users.
According to the company, Dropbox users have created 3.3 billion connections by sharing with each other. To date, the company’s marketing policy seems to revolve around word-of-mouth, as 44% of new accounts were opened when existing users introduced people to the service.
Founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, the early idea arose after Houston repeatedly forgot his USB flash drive. Initially a personal tool for Houston, the potential was soon realized and shortly thereafter seed funding was provided from startup fund Y Combinator.
After initially focusing on the consumer market, Dropbox officially ventured into the B2B space during 2011 and has continued to grow in recent years. Having evolved into Dropbox for Business and then adding Dropbox for Enterprise last year, the service is now used is more than 8 million businesses, with 150,000 using the premium service. Strong growth is expected to continue as 25,000 corporate customers bolster the ranks each quarter.
Dropbox still boasts a strong US following, though recent growth has come from worldwide markets. The team highlighted that 75% of users are based outside the US, with the majority of the last 100 million coming from Germany, US, India, Brazil and the UK.
While Dropbox has received substantial international growth, the brand still experiences resistance from Chinese authorities. The service was banned in the country from May 2010, with most in the community considering the censorship evidence of Dropbox’s growing international popularity and influence. The service was unblocked between February and June 2014, before being reinstated on the censored list. Today, it still remains unclear as to why Dropbox was uncensored for this period.
While user growth has continued, Dropbox has come under scrutiny in recent months following rival Box’s January 2015 IPO, which valued the company significantly lower than expected. The news has put pressure on Dropbox, whose last funding round valued it at $10 billion, though many believe the current value to be substantially lower.
Executives at Dropbox have rigorously defended its position, market capabilities and future outlook, highlighting user growth as a demonstration of market demand. Dennis Woodside recently commented to Forbes “We are continuing the scaling of the business across both consumer and enterprise.”
Citrix Web Interface Transformation to Citrix StoreFront
Citrix Web Interface Transformation to Citrix StoreFront Of the hundreds of virtualization products that Citrix put forward over the past 25 years, XenApp is certainly the most popular one. Whereas XenApp publishes session based applications to remote devices, XenDesktop publishes full VDI desktops. Bridging the link between XenApp applications and the desktops offered by XenDesktop, […]
The post Citrix Web Interface Transformation to Citrix StoreFront appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Set the Default Platform for Your Browser and Email
Guest blog by Sylvester Sebastian Nino, Parallels Support Team Set the default platform for your browser and email Lets speak some truth: We all have our favorites, but there isn’t a perfect browser on the market – they all have “perfect” elements, but are scattered among many browsers. While Safari makes sharing easier, it hasn’t completely sorted […]
The post Set the Default Platform for Your Browser and Email appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Using Software Abstraction and Commodity Storage Hardware in Hyper-Scale Centers | @CloudExpo #Cloud
There are many challenges involved in architecting a resilient, scalable storage infrastructure for the next generation of hyper-scale modern data centers.
In our previous blog post, we covered how to build a disaggregated storage model out of commodity hardware for lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in today’s hyper-scale data centers. Deploying commodity hardware usually requires an intelligent orchestration and management software like FreeStor® to provide an abstraction layer separating heterogeneous storage hardware from the applications.
KPMG and @ISC2 to Survey Federal Cybersecurity Executives | @CloudExpo #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that (ISC)²® (“ISC-squared”) will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
(ISC)²® and KPMG LLP have announced they will survey federal cybersecurity executives on the state of cybersecurity in the federal government.
WMG Bets on @Interoute Networked Cloud Infrastructure | @CloudExpo #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe’s largest networks and a global cloud services platform, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York.
Interoute has announced that WMG has chosen the Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC) zone in Milan to provide the high capacity and low-latency networked cloud solution for its online gaming platform.
2016 Requires Bold Decisions on Cloud By @SarahLahav | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The companies that are succeeding with their use of public cloud services are sharing similar stories online and at industry conferences about what they consider to be the leading drivers of their progress. These are usually in the form of bold, strategic decisions that demonstrate different thinking to where they were some years ago.
These bold decisions reflect the changing focus on cloud to above that of the original Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model and toward the NoOps, higher-order cloud services such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Decisions such as adopting server-less models, embracing an open source software (OSS) approach as part of becoming a “software company,” and choosing to break with decades of IT supplier relationships – they all have a profound impact across the industry.
Microsoft strengthens cloud offering by bringing SQL Server to Linux
Microsoft is bringing its SQL Server to Linux, enabling SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud.
The move has surprised some corners of the industry, as Microsoft moves away from its tradition of creating business software that runs only on the Windows operating system. It has historically been difficult to manage certain Microsoft products on anything other than a Windows server.
Microsoft has always sold PC software which can be run on competitor’s machines, though Chief Executive Satya Nadella broadened the horizons of the business upon appointment through a number of different initiatives. One of the most notable moves was decoupling Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system from Windows and this weeks’ announcement seems to continue the trend.
The news has been lauded by most as an astute move, strengthening Microsoft’s position in the market. According to Gartner, the number of Linux servers shipped increased from 3.6 million in 2014 from 2.4 million in 2011. Microsoft in the same period saw its shipments drop from 6.5 million to 6.2 million. The move opens up a new wave of potential customers for Microsoft and reduces concerns of lock-in situations.
Microsoft EVP, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Scott Guthrie commented on the company’s official blog “SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution,” he said “One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.”
The announcement also detailed a number of key features for SQL Server 2016, focused around the critical avenues of data and security. Security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory are one of the USPs, building on Microsoft’s marketing messages over the last 12 months.
Furthering efforts to diversify the business, Microsoft announced that it would be acquiring mobile app development platform provider Xamarin, last week.
Incorporating Xamarin into the Microsoft business will enhance its base of developer tools and services, once again building on the theme of broadening market appeal and opening new customer avenues for the tech giant.