Business Continuity Week: What the Experts Have To Say
The VAR Guy has gathered insights on how channel partners can best develop their own business continuity plans from four experts in the IT industry.
This week, the Business Continuity Institute is celebrating Business Continuity Awareness Week, an annual event designed to stress the importance of developing a reliable and predicable strategy for running your business in light of any anticipated (or unanticipated) incidents. The VAR Guy has gathered insights on how channel partners can best develop their own business continuity plans from four experts in the IT industry.
"Modern businesses depend on data, software applications and the Internet to increase their velocity and volume of business, making IT downtime increasingly expensive. With around 91 percent of US data centers experiencing unplanned outages in the last two years at a cost of $7,900 per minute, downtime simply is not affordable for any business.
Console servers play a vital role in a comprehensive business continuity protocol. The new generation of advanced modular console servers with user-swappable serial and USB ports are a cost-effective and space-efficient solution for out-of-band management of both legacy and next generation IT infrastructure equipment.”
"Return on investment comes down to delivering what the business needs at the lowest cost per terabyte of capacity, virtual machine, or other business metric that is important to the organization. The key to demonstrating the value in business continuity is to build IT infrastructure that can cost-effectively provide high availability and disaster recovery, while enabling businesses to move data, VMs and application workloads between multiple sites.
As many organizations operate on tight budgets, the challenge becomes building an effective infrastructure that can keep up with the growing storage and high availability requirements. To address these increasing demands, enterprises need to modernize data centers using software-defined storage as the foundation to prepare for the demands of tomorrow. As part of this, advanced replication and stretched cluster technology can assure any organization that all business critical systems will remain available at all times without breaking the bank.”
“It has been nearly 15 years since 9/11, and many IT organizations still do not have the business continuity infrastructure they require. Why? Mostly because having disaster recovery has been too complicated and costly. The adoption of cloud including Amazon S3 for object storage is fixing this, as developers of new applications now build apps to route around failures and remain available no matter what happens to the underlying infrastructure.
The result is really downtime avoidance rather than disaster recovery. Business continuity is like the transmission in a car, where IT teams needed to manually change gears during disasters. Now with pervasive automatic transmissions, applications shift themselves when changes dictate. Storage options like Amazon S3 as well as private cloud storage exist to support modern applications, even combining both for hybrid deployments. Humans using classic technology are bad at disaster recovery, where with object storage and the right private cloud storage, apps are great at it.”
"As business leaders continue to invest in virtual desktop infrastructure, their IT departments must deliver to virtual desktop users the same rich experience they’re accustomed to having on physical machines. Performance and availability – perceived and actual – is an essential component in that overall user experience. A poorly designed, built or maintained virtual desktop environment will increase the risk of downtime and massive loss of productivity for all users.
Having the ability to quickly plan, test and automate deployment of virtual desktops allows IT departments to identify issues before rollout and quickly recover from unexpected SLA impacts caused by something as simple as an application or OS patch. The automated management of the VDI lifecycle is key to network stability and the ability to remain agile when the constant change of hosted desktops and applications are imminent.”
"As business leaders continue to invest in virtual desktop infrastructure, their IT departments must deliver to virtual desktop users the same rich experience they’re accustomed to having on physical machines. Performance and availability – perceived and actual – is an essential component in that overall user experience. A poorly designed, built or maintained virtual desktop environment will increase the risk of downtime and massive loss of productivity for all users.
Having the ability to quickly plan, test and automate deployment of virtual desktops allows IT departments to identify issues before rollout and quickly recover from unexpected SLA impacts caused by something as simple as an application or OS patch. The automated management of the VDI lifecycle is key to network stability and the ability to remain agile when the constant change of hosted desktops and applications are imminent.”
The VAR Guy has gathered insights on how channel partners can best develop their own business continuity plans from four experts in the IT industry.
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