(c)iStock.com/vchal

The most common objection I come across when discussing disaster recovery (DR) is, “Oh, well we don’t get hurricanes or floods or anything like that, so we don’t need DR”. To which I always reply “That’s all well and good, but do you have humans? What about hardware and power? Do you have HVAC in your data centre?”

A disaster can be any number of things and yes, whilst nature can definitely be a cause, in research that Opinion Matters undertook on behalf of iland in 2016, we found that it actually accounts for only 20% of outages. Our research also found that more often than not, disaster also comes in the form of operational failures (53%) and human error (52%). It is actually as a result of the latter two factors that the most outages occur.

When people think of disasters, they tend to think dramatically and on a large scale of incidents capable of taking out an entire data centre for long periods of time. In actual fact, when businesses leverage DR solutions, it tends to be because of much more isolated and smaller issues that have impacted the business. Perhaps only a couple of systems or mission critical applications have gone down; entire IT systems don’t need to implode before one’s eyes to warrant a disaster. It is the smaller disasters that we really need to be focusing on as it’s usually a build-up of these which results in a cascading effect which can then have a bigger impact on the business.

We have many customers that will failover just one or two systems. Maybe a patch went wrong, or a virus occurred and the best thing to do was to keep the system running, fail the affected machine over to keep the application running and fail back when systems are repaired. It doesn’t always have to be on a massive scale. By grouping VMs supporting multi-tier applications into virtual protection groups, you can perform partial failovers within that group, reducing cost and simplifying failback.

Significant disruptions to IT systems, however, do happen and can take a heavy toll on the business; hence the importance of having a reliable DR plan in place. Of course, there are the obvious implications of a disaster such as interruptions to trade, service and loss in revenue. But, perhaps what you might not have considered is the effect on employee morale and additionally on customer confidence. In order to reduce disruptions such as these, a proactive and strategic approach to disaster recovery is required.

Five or ten years ago, the solution to DR felt heavy and complex and, as a result, many organisations put it in the ‘too hard or expensive’ basket and DR was put off to next month or the next quarter, maybe even the next year. In the last few years, however, cloud-based disaster recovery options have given organisations new and more affordable route to protecting their businesses.

As companies started to virtualise and people start moving to the cloud, we found that other parts of the datacentre weren’t keeping up. Efficiency was increasing but replication was still lagging, still embedded in the hardware layer. This not only made it difficult to work with an external vendor, as matching hardware requirements could not be met but, it also meant that everything had to be replicated, rather than just the data that companies were interested in. As a result, the investment in digitisation was being undermined as resources were being wasted. iland’s DR software, powered by Zerto, allows for replication to take place in the hypervisor at the VM level, providing its users with a far more efficient solution.

So what should you look for in a DRaaS solution?  In my mind, excellent technical support is key in enabling users to craft a complete DR solution that meets their cost requirements and risk tolerance, whilst also ensuring that the solution will be implemented quickly and tailored for success within their organisation. A successful DRaaS solution should also allow for testing by the user themselves to make sure their plan actually works. Finally, a DRaaS solution should be able extend the security measures and compliance rules already present on premise into the cloud.

As I mentioned earlier we commissioned a survey of 250 IT decision makers with responsibility for DR from medium to large companies in the UK. From outage experiences to achievable recovery times to failover confidence levels and barriers to adoption of cloud-based DR, the survey revealed a wealth of insights that can serve as benchmarks for developing a successful disaster recovery strategy. If you would be interested in finding out more about the results of the survey, the full report can be found here.

Read more: Why you can’t let disaster recovery slide off your IT budget in 2017

(c)iStock.com/vchal

The most common objection I come across when discussing disaster recovery (DR) is, “Oh, well we don’t get hurricanes or floods or anything like that, so we don’t need DR”. To which I always reply “That’s all well and good, but do you have humans? What about hardware and power? Do you have HVAC in your data centre?”

A disaster can be any number of things and yes, whilst nature can definitely be a cause, in research that Opinion Matters undertook on behalf of iland in 2016, we found that it actually accounts for only 20% of outages. Our research also found that more often than not, disaster also comes in the form of operational failures (53%) and human error (52%). It is actually as a result of the latter two factors that the most outages occur.

When people think of disasters, they tend to think dramatically and on a large scale of incidents capable of taking out an entire data centre for long periods of time. In actual fact, when businesses leverage DR solutions, it tends to be because of much more isolated and smaller issues that have impacted the business. Perhaps only a couple of systems or mission critical applications have gone down; entire IT systems don’t need to implode before one’s eyes to warrant a disaster. It is the smaller disasters that we really need to be focusing on as it’s usually a build-up of these which results in a cascading effect which can then have a bigger impact on the business.

We have many customers that will failover just one or two systems. Maybe a patch went wrong, or a virus occurred and the best thing to do was to keep the system running, fail the affected machine over to keep the application running and fail back when systems are repaired. It doesn’t always have to be on a massive scale. By grouping VMs supporting multi-tier applications into virtual protection groups, you can perform partial failovers within that group, reducing cost and simplifying failback.

Significant disruptions to IT systems, however, do happen and can take a heavy toll on the business; hence the importance of having a reliable DR plan in place. Of course, there are the obvious implications of a disaster such as interruptions to trade, service and loss in revenue. But, perhaps what you might not have considered is the effect on employee morale and additionally on customer confidence. In order to reduce disruptions such as these, a proactive and strategic approach to disaster recovery is required.

Five or ten years ago, the solution to DR felt heavy and complex and, as a result, many organisations put it in the ‘too hard or expensive’ basket and DR was put off to next month or the next quarter, maybe even the next year. In the last few years, however, cloud-based disaster recovery options have given organisations new and more affordable route to protecting their businesses.

As companies started to virtualise and people start moving to the cloud, we found that other parts of the datacentre weren’t keeping up. Efficiency was increasing but replication was still lagging, still embedded in the hardware layer. This not only made it difficult to work with an external vendor, as matching hardware requirements could not be met but, it also meant that everything had to be replicated, rather than just the data that companies were interested in. As a result, the investment in digitisation was being undermined as resources were being wasted. iland’s DR software, powered by Zerto, allows for replication to take place in the hypervisor at the VM level, providing its users with a far more efficient solution.

So what should you look for in a DRaaS solution?  In my mind, excellent technical support is key in enabling users to craft a complete DR solution that meets their cost requirements and risk tolerance, whilst also ensuring that the solution will be implemented quickly and tailored for success within their organisation. A successful DRaaS solution should also allow for testing by the user themselves to make sure their plan actually works. Finally, a DRaaS solution should be able extend the security measures and compliance rules already present on premise into the cloud.

As I mentioned earlier we commissioned a survey of 250 IT decision makers with responsibility for DR from medium to large companies in the UK. From outage experiences to achievable recovery times to failover confidence levels and barriers to adoption of cloud-based DR, the survey revealed a wealth of insights that can serve as benchmarks for developing a successful disaster recovery strategy. If you would be interested in finding out more about the results of the survey, the full report can be found here.

Read more: Why you can’t let disaster recovery slide off your IT budget in 2017

The idea behind this session is my blog post – 5 Logstash Alternatives – which is unfortunately too short to do the presented log shippers justice.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Radu Gheorghe, Software Engineer at Sematext Group, will talk more about the things that matter: kinds of buffers, protocols, ways of parsing, correlating and de-duplicating messages, as well as supported inputs and outputs. And of course performance. All this should let you know which log shippers work well for which kinds of use-cases.

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Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year.
And many would say, not a moment too soon. With a series of tumultuous elections around the world and an unusual number of celebrity passings, it’s been a rough year.
But there is at least one bright spot from 2016: Intellyx’s digital transformation prognostications were close to spot on!
As is our tradition, each year we review last year’s predictions and make all new fresh ones! This year, it is my turn to review Jason’s 2016 predictions and let you know what I see happening in the coming year.

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(c)iStock.com/maxkabakov

An overwhelming 94% of cloud apps in enterprises across EMEA are not enterprise-ready, while two thirds of overall cloud services are not up to scratch, according to the latest research from Netskope.

The findings, which appear in the company’s latest quarterly cloud report, found that 82.4% of services do not encrypt data at rest, 66.4% of cloud services do not specify that the customers owns the data in their terms of services, while 42% do not allow admins to enforce password controls.

The report arrives amidst the backdrop of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect in May of next year. Netskope warns that businesses are potentially falling behind in their efforts to become au fait with the legislation; 40% of services analysed back up to a secondary location, the company says, not all of which are GDPR-compliant.

“Until very recently, organisations had to take an all-or-nothing approach to allowing cloud services,” said Sanjay Beri, Netskope founder and CEO. “If they sanctioned a cloud storage service for corporate use, they also needed to accept any additional personal instances of that cloud storage service or block the service entirely.

“As our customers make cloud services a strategic advantage for their businesses, when it comes to governing and securing those services, they are realising granular policies can ensure that sensitive data does not leak from the sanctioned instance of a corporate cloud service to an unsanctioned one,” Beri added.

The report also examined wider cloud trends. More than 90% of Netskope customers use IaaS services, predominantly AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, with enterprises using on average four IaaS services, while Office 365 remains the number one app with Slack continuing to rise up the top 20.

In February last year, Netskope reported that more than 4% of enterprises have sanctioned cloud apps laced with malware.