Multiple Availability Zones. What Does This Mean For Your Business?

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availability zone

 

Risk is inherent in any undertaking and the risk of IT failure in business is a threat organisations need to take seriously. There are dire consequences for not having some form of risk mitigation in place for IT failures.

Data Protection + High Availability = Business Survival

IT failures are unpredictable and could originate from anywhere

There are many potential failures which could affect an IT environment. These failures could be as a result of local failure incidents such as user errors, hardware component or full system failures. Failures could also result from full environment-wide disasters which could range from a full data centre or site failure to a catastrophe negatively impacting an entire city or region.

Backups first

Data and System backups are the bare minima an organisation needs when implementing a risk mitigation strategy for IT failures and disasters. However, in a world where uptime is directly related to profit and reputation, legacy backups will no longer suffice.

Disaster Recovery next

Businesses today at very least need an enterprise-grade disaster recovery solution. However, to ensure maximum uptime and true resilience in the face of a disaster, businesses should augment their disaster recovery solution with a robust and resilient business continuity service enabled and delivered through high availability.

Ultimately you need Business Continuity

True disaster recovery business continuity solutions must mitigate all downtime risks and ensure systems remain available. Each risk, no matter its size, origin or impact affects the availability of online systems.

Failures which impact the availability of online systems have a real business impact and could affect the viability of a going concern due to the negative effect system down time has on revenue and brand reputation.

Cloud Disaster Recovery is resilient and affordable

Cloud service providers like Zettagrid offer industry leading cloud-based disaster recovery business continuity solutions at a cost affordable to most organisations.

Service providers must ensure they build redundancy into their platform

True enterprise cloud disaster recovery business continuity service providers need to have their own built-in redundancy to ensure they can offer their customers true high-availability.

Zettagrid meets these criteria and guarantees its service through its multiple availability zones.

Service providers also need to have geo-redundancy

Enterprise disaster recovery solutions commit to high levels of redundancy and availability to mitigate against predictable downtime risks such as user error or hardware failure.

However, it is often large-scale unpredictable disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis etc. which could have the largest negative impact on most businesses. To mitigate this risk, cloud service providers need to ensure they have a geographically dispersed redundant platform.

Zettagrid leads the way with geo-redundant availability zones

Zettagrid runs multiple availability zones, located in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Jakarta and Cibitung with each running separate isolated instances of their infrastructure to mitigate the risk of a large-scale disaster affecting an entire city or region.

These multiple availability zones not only protect the Zettagrid cloud but also contain key benefits for Zettagrid customers.

Find out more information about Zettagrid cloud service by visiting the Zettagrid Indonesia website.

*This article originally taken from blog.zettagrid.com

How Scalable Licensing And Infrastructure Benefits Your Business

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infrastructure benefits

 

Scalability = Operational Flexibility

Scalability is a systems characteristic which enables a platform hosting a system to automatically muster additional computing resources as the system workload increases.

In a cloud world, a scalable system is a system which is able to automatically provision additional computing resources such as processor, memory and bandwidth as the demand for computing resources from the hosted system increases.

Scalability meets user expectations

Users interacting with online services expect systems to be perpetually available, function at peak performance levels and have a user interface design which is aesthetically pleasing, intuitive and simple to use.

Scalability’s purpose as a feature of online services is to ensure a system is able to function at the performance levels expected by its users.

Scalability and its impact on availability

Downtime in an online world is not good for business. Ensuring systems availability has multiple real-world business benefits which impact the profitability and brand reputation of an organisation.

In today’s business world, all revenue-based transactions are processed via an IT system or application. This is true for both online e-commerce type transactions as well as traditional invoice runs on an in-house financial application. If a revenue-generating system is down the business cannot make money.

Scalability ensures online systems availability during periods where services are under heavy load. Services which are not able to scale will ultimately stop responding and go offline when all the allocated computing resources for the system have been consumed. The system can only start responding again if existing locked resources are released or additional resources added.

Scalability, therefore, benefits businesses by ensuring services and applications stay online and functional.

Poor performance and unavailability are punished in an online world

Most modern organisations interact with their customers through some form of online platform.

Social media has enabled organisations to interact with their customers on many different levels which have strengthened customer relationships. However, social media has also given consumers a platform to voice their grievances to the organisation while broadcasting these to other customers.

Poor application performance and service unavailability are heavily punished on social media. Businesses should, therefore, ensure they constantly strive to deliver an online service which performs well above the expectations set by its users.

By configuring their applications with a scalable architecture, organisations can ensure their applications perform admirably under heavy load.

Zettagrid’s cloud is built for scalability

Delivering Australia’s most advanced self-service cloud hosting platform with solutions such as application hosting as well as public, private and hybrid cloud offerings, Zettagrid is well placed to resolve scalability issues for businesses.

Organisations have the option to provision their services on Zettagrid’s cloud platform by subscribing to their virtual data centre or virtual server services which are built on VMware.

Zettagrid virtual servers have the added benefit of being fully customizable and give users the option to configure the computing resources of their virtual machine as they see fit with no templates or images which lock them down to specific configurations.
Should customers ever need to scale a Zettagrid virtual server they can easily do so at any time via the Zettagrid self-service portal.

Create a hybrid cloud with Zettagrid to facilitate on-premise scalability

Organisations could opt to create a hybrid cloud between their on-premise private cloud and the Zettagrid platform. This configuration gives customers the flexibility to move workloads between their two environments as demand fluctuates.

For periods of high demand, they can run their workload on Zettagrid’s platform which can scale to the resource requirements required.

Once demand decreases customers can simply migrate their workloads back to their private on-premise private cloud.

Scalability is good for business

The business benefits of scalability are clear and tangible. Scalability ensures you can make money and keep your customers happy when your systems are at their busiest.  Scalability is a major business benefit delivered by Zettagrid cloud. Organisations can rest assured that their systems stay online and responsive when they need them to.

Find out more information about Zettagrid cloud service by visiting the Zettagrid Indonesia website.

*This article originally taken from blog.zettagrid.com

Monitor Your Infrastructure With Real Time Metrics, How To?

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monitor real time

 

Proactive IT environment monitoring is essential in an online world where business success is equal to system uptime. Proactive monitoring means improved availability.

Organisations need to monitor their IT environments to ensure they are running optimally and identify any issues which could cause a failure down the line. In addition, IT environment health monitoring gives organisations the peace of mind they are providing an efficient and consistent service to their end users.

Total visibility of all interdependent systems is vital

In any IT environment problems which may cause service interruption are not immediately visible and tend to build up over a period of time.

Having total visibility of IT infrastructure services and their interdependencies is paramount in preventing issues and helps organisations make informed decisions about their IT environment.

Monitoring helps gather data and set performance benchmarks

IT infrastructure monitoring is not the only key to ensuring proactive alerting of negative incidents. Monitoring and gathering performance data over time is a key input into shaping IT strategy. As technology changes and business needs evolve monitoring IT infrastructure enables organisations to benchmark their IT systems performance and then use this information to plan for upgrades, enhancements and migrations.

Proactive analysis of IT system means organisations have a better chance of preventing major disruptions. Regular health checks on infrastructure and alerts which indicate where certain measurements are deviating from historical benchmarks can identify any discrepancies within systems and assist in proactively rectifying issues before they negatively impact business operations. The key outcome of proactive monitoring is the focus and effort of IT operations have shifted from fighting fires to preventing outages.

IT monitoring can also aid organisations in fine-tuning their infrastructure to ensure peak performance and efficiency is achieved. Close monitoring can highlight how systems interact and proactively identify any areas that are vulnerable or underperforming. By identifying bottlenecks and potential areas of danger, organisations can then use this information to enhance their services and prevent any system outages.

Monitoring is not an IT activity, it’s a business tool

Effective IT infrastructure monitoring enables data driven decision making, identifies issues early, improves the productivity and performance of IT systems, helps organisations plan for growth and ultimately helps prevent or reduce the negative effects of system downtime.

Zettagrid monitoring delivers insights

Zettagrid gives customers access to real-time monitoring of their entire environment through their status page. This service also gives customers the option to subscribe to updates which proactively alerts them should any incident occur which may have an impact on their environment.

The Zettagrid real-time status reports give customers a view of the current state of the primary Zettagrid services such as the operations centre, internet transit and DNS status. In addition, this dashboard also monitors the principal services at each of the Zettagrid locations in Australia and Jakarta.

Scheduled maintenance notices give customers prior notice to any maintenance being done on the Zettagrid platform which may affect their running services and real-time system metrics provide insight into the current bandwidth network utilisation.

Zettagrid also posts past incidents on their status page which give details into incidents which have affected the Zettagrid platform and how these were resolved, giving their customers full transparency into the environment running their critical IT services.

Real-time monitoring and historical metrics, 24/7

Customers are also able to monitor the real-time metrics of their Zettagrid services via the Zettagrid self-service portal.

Real-time and historical metrics are available at any time, so customers can monitor the performance of their virtual machines.

Ready to get your finger on the pulse with real-time monitoring?

Contact us to discuss how real-time monitoring metrics can improve your business decision making.

We’re happy to help.

Find out more information about Zettagrid cloud service by visiting the Zettagrid Indonesia website.

*This article originally taken from blog.zettagrid.com