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According to the latest research from Pluribus Networks, building private clouds is of “critical importance” to effectively utilising public cloud services.

The research, which polled 134 IT professionals and business decision makers who attended this year’s VMworld, found that there was nothing to split public and private clouds among respondents as technologies which will impact their company the most in the future.

43% said public and private cloud respectively were most likely to impact their company over the next three years, followed by 41% for virtual desktop infrastructure and 30% for converged infrastructure. Yet the research also noted only 14% ‘strongly agreed’ that their IT department was set up to meet the needs of the business, putting doubt over new technologies being used.

One area of investment which is a little less important for today is the network; three times as many respondents say the network is a strategic rather than tactical investment. Yet 42% of respondents are adopting software defined networking (SDN) to meet their application challenges, ahead of converged infrastructure (38%), big data (32%), and containers (30%0.

“It turns out most IT organisations are looking for the roadmap to begin their digital transformation journey, and the discussion about wide-scale adoption of public cloud versus building a private cloud in-house becomes a major part of their investigation,” said Mark Harris, vice president of marketing at Pluribus Networks in a statement.

“As their research progresses, they realise that each of these cloud approaches share one thing in common: they each offer the means to bring new business services online quickly and cost-effectively. They also realise that the hybrid mix of private and public cloud is a function of existing capacity and future needs,” Harris added. “It is a pure business planning process.”

Writing for CIO.com earlier this week, cloud computing influencer Bernard Golden noted that most IT organisations will “in the long run intuit the economic unviability of private clouds” aside from certain scenarios, such as data sovereignty. “On-premises infrastructure will inevitably shrink to a fraction of what is currently installed, with much pain realised by the legacy vendor/on-premises infrastructure staff coalition as this dynamic plays out,” Golden added.

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A ‘significant’ disconnect exists between C-level executives and IT professionals when it comes to an organisation’s ability to recover from a disaster, according to new research from Evolve IP.

The study, which polled more than 500 executives and IT professionals, argued that while almost seven in 10 of the C-suite believe their company is ‘very prepared’ to recover from a disaster, the figure translates less well when it comes to IT pros (44%).

The study also found a clear link between disaster recovery (DR) compliance and an ability to recover IT assets if an incident occurs. More than two thirds (67%) of respondents in the banking industry noted their confidence – in an industry where DR compliance was noted by 97% of those polled – compared with 58% of government who were ‘very prepared’ and 55% in technology. Yet the exception which proves the rule is in the healthcare industry; while 89% of respondents said they had DR compliance requirements, just over half felt prepared to recover from an outage.

One in three (33%) companies said they had suffered from at least one incident or outage that required disaster recovery, with hardware failure and server room issues being the primary reason for failover, as reported by almost half (48%) of those polled. Perhaps more worryingly, the number of deliberate attacks as the cause for disasters doubled when compared to similar survey results from 2014.

“In the years Evolve IP has conducted the survey, we’re assured by the fact that companies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect critical business assets from a major outage: malicious or unintentional, human error, hardware failure or a natural disaster,” said Scott Kinka, chief technology officer and founding partner of Evolve IP.

“More companies are avoiding risky backup policies considered ‘good enough’ in years past, using backup tape or replicating data to a secondary mirror site less than 50miles from their main data centre, for instance,” Kinka added. “Instead, we’ve seen notable growth in the number of companies developing a disaster recovery plan and educating themselves to the benefits of new DR approaches like DRaaS.”

Writing for this publication earlier this week, Donald Bowker of Sungard AS discussed the right times and methods for testing disaster recovery plans. “Faults and setbacks that come to light during a DE test can be distressing but by testing your DRP you will identify these issues before they become a problem and have the opportunity to fix them,” he wrote. “By making disaster recovery planning a priority and testing your procedures regularly, your business will be fully prepared for any setbacks.”

SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftNet Solutions will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SoftNet Solutions specializes in Enterprise Solutions for Hadoop and Big Data. It offers customers the most open, robust, and value-conscious portfolio of solutions, services, and tools for the shortest route to success with Big Data. The unique differentiator is the ability to architect and implement a complete Big Data architecture specific to your use case. SoftNet Solutions is a premier choice to work with all your Big Data needs from infrastructure up to business consulting.

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Even though seven out of 10 organisations have at least one application in the cloud today, adoption continues to go up, according to the latest verdict from IDG Enterprise.

The survey, which polled 925 respondents and was conducted among the audiences of six of the company’s brands, including CIO, InfoWorld and ComputerWorld, shows interesting comparisons when put aside the same study from five years ago; back then, just over half (51%) of those polled had at least one app in the cloud.

Increasingly, organisations are using multiple cloud models; private, public, and hybrid were cited by 62%, 60% and 26% of respondents respectively. Almost half (45%) of survey respondents say they use storage as a service models, while a third (33%) are planning to deploy disaster recovery as a service. 27% said they were planning on rolling out storage as a service, with the same number cited for database and mobility as a service.

The study also examined buying patterns within different businesses. Perhaps not surprisingly, the CIO (90% of respondents) dominates the enterprise cloud purchase influence, ahead of IT architects (84%), while for small and medium businesses the CEO (81%) is in charge, ahead of the CIO (79%) and the CFO (71%).

As ever, security remains a challenge. When it comes to cloud migration, sensitivity of data was cited by the most respondents as a critical or very important consideration with 82%, ahead of how important the application is to daily business operations (76%) and the cost of migration (74%).

Overall, however, the consensus is positive. “We are at a time where companies are not asking if cloud should be used, but how,” said Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer at IDG Enterprise. “Enterprises are leading the way on what is possible. Given their human and capital resources they are able to fully test cloud options to help them innovate and provide strong solutions to their customers.”

You can find out more about the IDG 2016 cloud computing survey here.

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When is the right time to test your disaster recovery plans (DRP)?

You should test your DRP in line with any changes to your business. The plan should be updated and changed when new personnel, tech or operational systems are introduced so that it reflects the current state of your company. Whether this is once a month or once a year, the DRP should be an ever-changing document that takes into account any major business alterations as and when they occur. 

One way of ensuring your DRP is regularly reviewed is by including it in your managed recovery program and organising a testing schedule around this. It is advised that businesses make time for at least one full scale test a year. 

Getting ready to test your DRP

Preparing for a DRP test is important as it ensures your business can get the most out of the results.  One of the key things to remember is that there should be no way that a single person can be a point of failure. This means making sure all procedures can be carried out by at least two people and that the team are not relying on any input from the DRP creators to perform a task. This means that if any member of the team is away when a disaster occurs whether due to sickness, vacation time or that they no longer work at the company, there is always a backup in place.

You should also prepare to fully detail and review the test so that your business has a complete record of any changes that need to be made or problems that need investigating. To do this you will need a copy of the DRP and an observer who has a good understanding of the document to take notes during the procedures and to time how long the test takes to complete. Both strengths and weaknesses should be recorded as well as any unexpected results. If possible, it is also helpful to measure the impact on the business of staff and systems being unavailable, as this can have an effect on how much time you allow for DR.

How to test your DRP

A full scale test of your DRP can be a huge drain on money and resources so it is understandable that a lot of businesses put off this kind of test to avoid disruption. However, it is possible to maintain an up to date DRP in other ways that are less disruptive to your business.

1. DRP review: In a plan review, DR planners should meet with management to review the existing DRP and identify any changes or updates that need to be made to reflect the current state of business. New procedures should respond to changes in the company and any major adjustments made to the DRP during a review should be flagged up for a tabletop or full scale test to ensure that they work.

2. Tabletop test: In a tabletop test, all team members should be involved and talk through the steps taken to achieve a set objective in a disaster scenario. Each step should be described in detail; with the responsible team members describing what actions they would take to complete each procedure. This is a good chance to identify any gaps in personnel knowledge that require extra training, and to rehearse the DRP in a more realistic setting.

3. Full scale test: A full scale test is the best way to validate your DRP and should be made to be as realistic as possible. Spend some time and money simulating a disaster scenario and lay out objectives for your team to respond to, even keeping the fact that the exercise is a drill secret from them. Implement all recovery and backup systems and fully restart networks if necessary. By creating a realistic disaster zone, you will best be able to see how the team and systems will hold up in the event of a true catastrophe and this is hugely beneficial. Use the information gathered from a full scale test to really identify areas of weakness in your DRP and target your resources towards resolving these issues effectively so that your business is fully prepared if disaster strikes.

Problems with the DRP

Faults and setbacks that come to light during a DR test can be distressing but by testing your DRP you will identify these issues before they become a problem and have the opportunity to fix them.

Record any incidents carefully and make time to fully investigate the cause behind each one so that the DR team can suggest a solution that stops it from happening again. Once the issues are resolved you will need to repeat a full scale test to ensure that the solutions work effectively and are compatible with the rest of the DRP. You may need to do this a few times to get the right result so make sure all changes are properly recorded.

By making disaster recovery planning a priority and testing your procedures regularly, your business will be fully prepared for any setbacks. Find out if your company’s DRP will hold up by speaking to IT service providers and consultants before putting them in place.

Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions.
In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, will discuss the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to “every day,” on-demand. They will also review two “free infrastructure” programs available to startups and innovators.

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