Archive for category: Blog

The unavailability of tools such as Trello, Slack, Adobe Cloud and Grammarly crippled the creative industry during the widespread outage. Equally, even Microsoft’s Office 365 recently left European users unable to access Exchange Online leaving many unable to access their email accounts. Meanwhile, security breaches at Equifax have left their reputation in tatters.

These are just a few examples of high-profile incidents that have highlighted how any business can go offline and become invisible to their customers at any moment in time. In a world of endless options, fickle users will then visit your competitor. These are the inconvenient truths that businesses are facing and why reputation is increasingly topping the list of business priorities.

However, to prepare for the unexpected and the inevitable impact on your business to ensure that all IT services are up and running within minutes is much easier than you might think. The days of needing expensive secondary data centers, duplicate IT equipment and lengthy wait periods interrupting your operations and impacting your business are thankfully behind us.The problems of having an always online business are well documented. But how to achieve the elusive business resiliency and disaster recovery strategy is a topic that often leaves more questions than answers.

Understanding that business continuity is critical to your commercial survival is the first step that will set your organisation on the road to stability. With SecondSite, we provide an affordable real-time replication solution that will seamlessly integrate into your disaster recovery plan.

Rather than having one single point of failure, we replicate your virtualised IT environment into Zettagrid’s cloud and do the heavy lifting for you. Failing over to a different zone takes away the risk and ensures that all services remain online until your primary site recovers.

The most attractive feature for IT departments is that users will be blissfully unaware that you have failed over into the cloud. Rather than wasting time managing communications or appeasing key stakeholders with regular updates, IT can concentrate on resolving the issues at hand while its business as usual for everyone else.

Although many organisations already have a disaster recovery plan, recovering from a backup is traditionally a painful and time-consuming process. In an always-online economy, businesses no longer have the luxury of going offline in a world where time is the new currency.

Ensuring that data synchronisation, accessibility, and a recovery site is in place for your virtual environment is the new belts and braces approach required to increase the availability of all services and applications. But, there is much more to achieving business resiliency than having a virtual get out of jail free card when disaster strikes.

Ensuring that you can determine and communicate compliance across your company, boardroom or even auditors is equally as important. Regular reports that highlight exactly what information and applications are always available is one of the most important aspects of achieving high availability and amazing business resiliency.

A neglected recovery plan that is tested or revisited every few years has never been an effective strategy. Equally having all your eggs in one basket whether it be in-house or cloud only is also a recipe for disaster.

The secret sauce to effective business resilience is having the ability to deploy, test and recover faster when the inevitable happens. It is imperative that any real-time disaster recovery replication solution should replicate into multiple zones to avoid going offline in an always-online digital world.

It has become crucial to understand the costs and implications of downtime during an outage. We understand that the top of businesses wish lists will be a scalable and quick disaster recovery solution that is both reliable and affordable for organisations of any size.

Can you say with confidence that your operations will be free from interruption for the foreseeable future? Is your organisation’s productivity and reputation safe from harm? And are you prepared for a disaster?

Zettagrid’s award-winning Disaster Recovery Solutions is bringing much-needed innovation to the disaster recovery space to efficiently deliver organisational resilience. But what are your experiences and insights in this area? We would love to have a conversation to understand what challenges your business is facing and how we can help you overcome them.

Find out more information about Disaster Recovery Solutions by visiting the Zettagrid Indonesia website.

As with all technology undertakings, proper due diligence, planning, testing and re-testing should take place before the actual migration starts. A good migration strategy should always contain:

•    A full analysis of the undertaking with a detailed project plan with all the necessary project management controls

•    A financial analysis of the true costs before the migration commences which should include the once-off project costs as well as the regular cloud costs that the business will incur.

•    Analysis of all the applications and services that will be running on the new cloud platform to ensure the user experience is not degraded in any way.

•    A deep understanding of the cloud migration process to ensure a smooth transition with very little impact to the business and its users.

•    Security standards and compliance regimens.

•    Real-time, in-depth monitoring of the new cloud environment to ensure visibility during the migration.

These activities aren’t always undertaken by organisations who want to incorporate cloud into their strategy.

Here are five mistakes to avoid when migrating to the cloud:

1. Having no plan

The popular adage of ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ is true for most undertakings but is crucial for cloud migrations.

Due to the complexity involved and the many moving parts of IT environments today, simply starting a migration without carefully planning each step will lead to some form of business disruption or at the very least a migration that takes longer than it should.

Systems today are interdependent and the project team must take cognisance of these dependencies when planning which systems, applications or servers to move first and in which order. If the environment is going to be migrated live then some solution should also be put in place to ensure the two environments co-exist and communicate to ensure no interruptions.

2. Not understanding the costs

With the proliferation of cloud service providers on the market comes a proliferation of pricing models which are often very complex and make costing estimations at the outset of a cloud migration strategy very difficult to calculate.

It’s important to calculate your costs based on resource usage, something that is very difficult to do when you come from an on premise environment. For example, do you know how many read/writes your database server performs in each month?

This is an important metric to know if you choose a service provider who is going to bill you per read/write transaction. A busy month for your database server will blow your budget. Where possible choose a service provider with a predictable billing model or keep daily checks on your subscription costs so that you can pre-empt billing surprises at month end.

3. Having no clear process

As mentioned previously, migrating an IT environment with many moving interdependent parts which may also need to remain in production while migration takes place is a complex process to manage.

The cloud migration market over the past few years has spawned multiple cloud migration technology solutions and cloud migration services organisations which understand this complexity and help you migrate to the cloud while keeping risk to a minimum.

As these organisations have already performed multiple migrations and learnt lessons along the way they are in a good position to guide you through this to ensure you achieve project success while mitigating your project risk.

4. Making security and compliance an afterthought

Often organisations migrate IT workloads to the cloud leaving essential components such as security and compliance as matters that will be dealt with once the migration has been completed. As with all IT projects security and compliance must form part of the planning phase and be baked into the solution before it is moved to production.

Trying to retrofit these crucial elements once the project has been delivered is more costly and increases your project risk. In a worst-case scenario, you may have migrated your entire infrastructure to the cloud only to find out the cloud you selected is non-compliant with legislation that you must comply with. This would mean you would have to migrate elsewhere.

5. Not maintaining visibility into and control over your cloud based services

Moving to the cloud means that you will be relinquishing some control of your critical infrastructure to the cloud service provider. Management and monitoring systems are now more critical than ever to ensure your IT environment runs smoothly and any incidents are responded to proactively and efficiently with as little disruption as possible.

With parts of your infrastructure not visible to you any longer it is key to have a monitoring solution that measures service availability and is also able to span hybrid cloud environments so that you are able to monitor on premise infrastructure as well as cloud infrastructure from a single console. This ‘single pane of glass’ is especially key during the migration phase when you have multiple moving parts migrating at different times and you need to ensure minimum disruption and an efficient migration.

Success is 20% Skills and 80% Strategy

In conclusion to successfully migrate to the cloud and avoid the five mistakes we have covered you need a cloud migration strategy. This strategy should include a detailed plan, accurate forecasted costs, a good process with security and compliance built in and a solution to ensure you have insight into your systems while the migration is taking place.

Contact us to help you define your cloud migration strategy so that you can avoid these mistakes and benefit from all of the value that the cloud has to offer.

The reality facing organisations of all sizes is a lack of resources or expertise around their increasingly complex cloud or hybrid environment. Naturally, most businesses are turning to their providers for both protection and leadership.

When the ‘WannaCry’ ransomware virus affected 200,000 organisations in 150 countries, it acted as a wake-up call to those that were guilty of taking security for granted. Any reputable cloud provider should have the agility to react faster than your business by using the latest advancements in technology to be proactive towards security threats rather than reactive.

Armed with superior knowledge and skills, they should be working with you to make your business more efficient. Collaboration is crucial to securing the support your business needs to thrive. Leaders should start looking at their cloud provider as a research and development team too.

The apocalyptic headlines around the ‘WannaCry’ attack failed to tell the whole story. The reports highlighted how many organisations were neglecting their core responsibilities. For example, regular backups of data that allow you to roll back to the moment before an attack is considered the best protection from ransomware.

Availability

Availability should also never be taken for granted. As we enter a mobile first and always-online digital age, customers have increasingly high, and some might argue unrealistic expectation levels. But, when your business goes offline, don’t expect your audience to wait around patiently until service has been restored.

The inconvenient truth is that any downtime will not only hurt sales but will also damage your reputation. Ultimately, the inability to serve your audience can quickly lead to widespread negative publicity about your brand. When a customer begins to associate your business with frequent downtime issues, your name quickly becomes tarnished.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Warren Buffet

Website monitoring can detect and alert you of any potential issues that could be responsible for taking the site offline. Having a proactive rather than a reactive mindset can dramatically reduce the risks associated with any potential website failures.

After years of living in denial, most leaders now nervously accept that it’s no longer a matter of if a cybersecurity breach or attack will happen, but when. An effective disaster recovery plan is crucial to ensuring you remain open for business 24/7 when the inevitable occurs.