Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

A Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan cannot be an afterthought. Giving yourself peace of mind that your business's most important data is safe from network or hard drive failure, fire or water damage, or even theft would provide a much smoother experience during an otherwise chaotic time of crisis.

Whether you need a complete failover replication of your business' IT environment or just specific data, a Disaster Recovery service would save you downtime and keep your business on track in cases of power failures and other natural disasters. Service-affecting scenarios have potential to be costly for both your business and the face of your brand but a good BC/DR service could be the difference maker. Although the two services are related and offer similar benefits there is a subtle differences between the two.

Business Continuity:

• Ensures that you can continue making money after smaller scale interruptions such as illness, loss of key staff, partner problems, or other similar challenges.

Disaster Recovery:

• Involves the processes of resuming business after a troublesome event, such as a destructive earthquake or tropical storm.

Benefits:

• Increases availability for business continuity.
• Increased retrieval time for sites, systems, databases, and files with disaster recovery.
• Significantly reduce primary storage capacity (often up to 50%).
• Maximize ROI through capitalizing on existing IT infrastructure.

The key to a successful Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan is already having a plan in action, which ensures easy accessibility to, and availability of operations and data before any disasters strike. With a more recent shift to backup and disaster recovery options within the Cloud services it’s never been easier to protect your business no matter what events may come your way.

Please call us at 888-972-BLUE or Click Here to let us know the best way to contact you.

Image Source: Witthaya Phonsawat/ www.freedigitalphotos.net

How does Cloud Server improve your Backups and Security?

Massive in-house servers are quickly becoming a thing of the past as Cloud services continue to develop. With flexible solutions available from every top provider in the industry, there is an ideal solution for your business.

In addition to avoiding steep overhead costs typically paired with the implementation of new technology, Cloud services offer convenient fully managed solutions designed to cut costs, frustration, labor, and overall, a great deal of time. As an Internet connection is one of the few actual necessities for the deployment of Cloud services, it’s no longer a constant struggle to manage installations, patching, upgrading and maintaining various software configurations throughout your business. Cloud services further avoid costly downtime with simple configurations and an array of easy-to-use tools.

Benefits:

• Immediate Deployment : Cloud services are available instantly and avoid costly waiting time associated with the construction of large data centers.
• Easy-to-use : Lightweight web-based platforms from providers make organizing and maintaining your Cloud a breeze.
• Improved Data Protection : Due to industry-leading security measures and encryption, Cloud-based data is highly secure and assures that your data is protected and recoverable.
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership : Predictable subscription pricing and minimal (if any) capital expenses keep overall costs low.
• Reduced Energy Consumption : Along with reducing your carbon footprint, Cloud services additionally save you money in the form of utilities. There’s no need for expensive cooling, ventilation systems, or security in-house as Cloud providers take care of all of that in their state-of-the-art storage centers.
• Scalability : As your business grows your storage needs are also going to grow. Since storage is Cloud-based, increasing your storage capacity is painless.

Top providers now offer the customization your business needs and the accessibility and reliability you demand. Cloud services could be the solution you’ve been searching for to improve your Backups and enhance Security for your business.

What do you think about this blog? Have you used Cloud Services into your business? Share your experiences and thoughts with us.

How to decrease your Data Center Costs?

Are you struggling to find ways to decrease your data center costs?

Would you like to learn techniques to minimize your data center costs?

Operating and maintaining a data center is certainly not a cheap or easy task. There are however, a handful of ways, some simpler than others, to significantly decrease the overall costs of your data center.

Techniques to Decrease Data Center Costs:

• Decommission Comatose Servers : Far too often data centers run every server in the facility even though certain servers aren't doing any computing. An easy way to reduce electricity costs is to put unused servers to sleep.
• Consolidate : Whether Servers are 85% full or only 5% they still pull full power. Since servers typically only utilize 5% to 15% percent of the total capacity, consolidating lightly used servers can substantially reduce electricity costs.
• Organize : Large organizations often find duplicated files and data within their servers. With some simple organization, storage utilization can lead to further consolidating and possible decommission of additional servers.
• Energy Efficient Technologies : Newer and more efficient servers use up to 30% less power than older more traditional servers.
• Arrange : If your servers are arranged to all face the same direction this is an easy fix! By arranging servers in a front facing front (cool-cool) followed by back facing back (hot-hot) manner, airflow is more evenly distributed and servers on the perimeter are not absorbing any additional heat.
• Structured Cabling to Increase Airflow : In comparison to unstructured cabling, structured cabling makes all the difference. Increased airflow keeps your servers uniformly ventilated and often reduces the need for aggressive cooling.
• Adjust Temperature : In 2008, the ASHRAE established a new range of temperatures ideal for data centers. Although many data centers are regularly kept at a mere 55° the recommended range is now between 65° and 85°. By adjusting temperature you can save up to 5% on each 1° temperature increase.
• Variable Speed Fan Drives : Variable speed fan drives constantly vary speed to the necessary power and cooling settings to keep your data center right where you want it to be.
• Virtualize Servers : Cloud solutions are continually gaining respect and popularity in the industry. Security has been the biggest concern in the past for Cloud storage and although no storage solutions are immune to security risks, the Cloud may now be even more secure than many in-house data centers.

What do you think about these techniques? What other techniques are you using to decrease your data center cost? Share your thoughts and new techniques in the comment.

The Cloud, Class of Service and the Life of a Data Packet

Cloud technology has finally emerged from a thought, or want, to something that has experienced rapid adoption among corporations. Conversations have thus transformed from "When" or "If" the business would enable their own cloud to what applications have been placed in the cloud, and how they are getting there. Our focus is now built upon how quickly we can connect businesses to their applications and the differences between public and private connectivity options. The success of simple cloud strategies has motivated corporations to move more applications off-site with multi-cloud strategies.

We want our clients to be prepared for the cloud. What are some things they should consider, and what providers will do the best job for them?

First, redundancy must be designed in the network. You will experience a network outage at some point. How will your data move around the outage you experience? A single connection to the cloud is not a strategy that will drive success of your cloud. High availability connectivity options between the cloud and your customer premises provide connectivity redundancy to your cloud services.

Second, private connectivity isn't necessarily more expensive than the public Internet. Increases in bandwidth commitments add to increased costs in using the service. Private Internet connectivity to the cloud allows users to increase the predictability and throughput to the cloud decreasing their bandwidth commitment.

Third, with many different options available for our clients between Internet, MPLS, Point to Point, and Direct Connect services. Each type of service offers different levels of delay, jitter, and control qualities specific to the individual solution. In sending data to and from a cloud, the most consistent access is a dedicated network cloud connection.

As the Cloud continues to increase in its use it is important to understand the applications sent over the network, and type of packets they entail. As packet size increases on your network enterprises must optimize their network connectivity, shaping their bandwidth around the applications on their network. Without a network strategy, your cloud strategy will fail.

At Fastblue we've been able to work with our partners to move our clients to the AWS Cloud and Windows Azure Cloud while supporting their efforts in sending data to the cloud. Our services have helped enterprises scale to their needs with a secure, quick, and high-performing network connection to the cloud.

Where is your Cloud network strategy today? Email eric@fastblue.com for more information.

First Published at www.fastblue.com

About Eric Swanstrom

Eric Swanstrom is a Sales and Account Manager at Fastblue Communications. Fastblue is a Premier Managed Cloud, Telecom, and Internet Security Provider.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategy and Vision

A common theme shared by all of our clients is a challenge and concern to keep their business and IT environment running should there be an event that could impact their services. The possibility of power outages, network failure, or server failure is all problems that face our customers. Many of our clients have built some level of DR/BC with Redundant Internet, or Backup in the cloud, but it is rarely used and often falls out of favor, as these services are not always utilized. The use of newer Cloud services such as Virtualization and Mobility along with redundant network connectivity clients are able to act proactively in protecting themselves from an outage.

How Fastblue defines Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery:

• Disaster Recovery: Tools, and services put into effect to ensure key business components that become unavailable can be restored in as little time as possible and done in a manner that prevents data/information losses while restoring services in as little downtime as possible.


• Business Continuity: Creating, and executing a plan that involves all aspects of the company, ensuring that the organization continues to run at almost full capacity with almost no interruption. The goal of BC is to form a sustainable plan for the systems, infrastructure, and people that form your company.

The prevalence of the cloud has increased our customer's agility in forming DR/BC strategies. Through reduced Internet bandwidth costs, and reduced cloud backup/storage, recovery, virtualization costs our customers from the SMB to the Enterprise all have access to cutting edge technology. The emergence of services such as cloud backup, and cloud storage have increased the continuity of our clients with off-site data that is automatically replicated in the cloud.

Fastblue forms a customized BC/DR solution with our clients, working closely with strategic partners to help create our solution. We believe in an evolving solution set that enables organizations to reach near zero RFO and RTO for their business services. In representing partners such as Savvis/CenturyLink, RapidScale, Navisite and more we are able to leverage cutting edge technologies to build our clients a DR/BC solution built around them. This is achieved through services such as Desktop as a service, preventing downtime in the event of hardware failure. As more services are off-loaded to the cloud we will need to ensure connectivity to the cloud.

Regardless of your current business space, we have the advice and partnerships needed to form a powerful BC/DR plan.

First Published at fastblue.com

About Eric Swanstrom

Eric Swanstrom is a Sales and Account Manager at Fastblue Communications. Fastblue is a Premier Managed Cloud, Telecom, and Internet Security Provider.

Security to the Cloud

Cloud computing is taking over in the field of business IT solutions. Almost all of us have had experience using a Cloud before. Any application that you log into and use on the Internet rather than directly on your machine is likely a good example of a Cloud hosted application. The most common example here is a web mail server. Perhaps your business or university or even personal email is host on a web mail server. The benefit of this is that you can access your mail easily from any device with an internet connection and you can store an incredible amount of data without even making a dent in your machine’s own storage capacity.

On a larger scale, many businesses are adopting Cloud services to run their day to day operations and also for long term data storage. Many business owners choose to employ the Cloud because it is a great cost effective option and it allows their employees to collaborate easily. Also, it frees the business of some of the tasks associated with installing, running and maintaining applications for employees. When a new employee comes on board your internal IT person no longer needs to set them up with a slew of necessary apps. Now your new employee just needs to be connected to your Cloud software and he can hit the ground running.

Unfortunately, when talking about the Cloud we cannot neglect to address the onslaught of security concerns that come with this new technology. All of your business' private information and data are out there in the Cloud, no longer safely locked behind closed door in your office. One thing that business owners can take comfort in is that the Cloud companies that manage all of your secure information are truly only as good as their reputation. Cloud computing service providers need to keep your information private or else they would lose all of their clients. For this reason we know that Cloud companies have engineers working day and night to better their security features and prevent all possible leaks and attacks. Another thing to consider is that, as users, it is our responsibility to take advantage of the security features that we have. Cloud companies offer us a variety of authentication techniques. The most obvious authentication technique is the password. Please do not take this lightly. Taking the time to lock your computers and portals is critical. It is also important to create difficult to crack alphanumeric passwords and to keep these passwords private. Additionally, Cloud companies often offer an authorization format allowing the business owner to grant each employee limited access so they can only access information necessary to their specific job.

It is important that we use Cloud computing responsibly and make sure to protect ourselves and our work. If you would like information about additional tools that you can use to protect your business within the Cloud please contact us at Fastblue.

Click Here to Contact Us for Cloud Services

First Published at fastblue.com

Image Source: Victor Habbick / Freedigitalphotos.net

About Casey Wedge

My names Casey Wedge and I've been with Fastblue for a few years now. I've maintained a few different positions within the company and although I’m currently the Regional Manager of Sales I'm very fond of writing and like to stay up to date on what's going on in the world of Telecom.

Aside from work, I've played hockey my whole life so I'm decent on the rink and a very average mountain biker. Breakfast foods are my favorite and I enjoy spending time with many fellow UCSB Gaucho Alums – Olé!