Insights On Recovering From Disaster...BaaS And DRaaS

Below discusses the benefits of a cloud-based DR solution....  

WHY DISASTER RECOVERY? 

Evolve IP knows we are facing an ever-changing threat landscape. We have all the traditional concepts of what constitutes a disaster whether that’s a regional or geographic issue. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tornados as well as human-made disasters such as power or network interruption, intentional malice, accidental loss, and negligence are catalysts for Disaster Recovery. The new reality is that ransomware and new zero-day malware variants are the biggest threat facing modern IT departments. Evolve IP believes that while having all the right security solutions in place is important the best method of protection is recoverability.  So, what constitutes a recovery window for a client environment?  

• Recovery Time Objective (RT0) – How much downtime is acceptable, and have you quantified the cost of the acceptable downtime on a per-application basis? 
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – How much data loss is acceptable to the business and have you quantified the cost of the acceptable loss?  

RTO and RPO are a factor for both disaster recovery and backup. To determine which is the right solution you’ll have to look at a few different things:  

• Service Levels  
• Application Availability and Impact 
• Retention  
• Recovery Options 
• Failover/Failback Capabilities 

Evolve IP approaches backup and disaster recovery by providing the full spectrum of the solution. They believe in scalability and the continuum of client administration, they can go anywhere in the spectrum from fully self-administered to full management. Evolve IP does the same when it comes to their disaster recovery and backup solutions, there are varying degrees of protection available through different solutions.  

DISASTER RECOVERY OR BACKUP?  

Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity; it is preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure vital to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. It ensures that data is available quickly after an outage. Backup, on the other hand, refers to the copying and archiving of computer data so it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The backup system contains at least one copy of all data worth saving, and the data storage requirements can be significant. Organizing this storage space and managing the backup process can be a complicated undertaking. The primary difference between disaster recovery and backup Is that the former is focused on continuing operations with minimal interruption while the latter is focused on restoring operations in the wake of an interruption.  

       Disaster Recovery delivers very aggressive service levels 

• Recovery point objectives of seconds  
• Recovery time objectives of minutes 

Backup delivers service levels that are better suited for a tier 3 application  

• Can you lose 12-24 hours of data? 
• Can the business survive without the application for 12 hours or more? 

Both backup and disaster recovery can leverage ‘replication’ technology in their solutions. What differentiates them is what can be done with the resulting data: 

Another difference between disaster recovery and backup is retention. Here is how they differ in this area:  

THE EVOLVE IP DIFFERENCE  

To help organizations manage costs while receiving contractually guaranteed recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO), Evolve IP applies a tiered approach to DRaaS services. Based on needs and resources, clients can choose between self-managed and managed DRaaS.  With the additional layering of Managed IT, customers are provided full stack, end-to-end application disaster recovery as well as configuration changes in protected environments. With their diverse service portfolio ensures you can recover all the data you need as soon as you need it. So, why Evolve IP?  

• Blue-Chip Vendors – Their Suite is composed of Blue-Chip vendor verified, support and integrated solutions. They use the technologies, tools, and interfaces your team trusts and your executives know including Veam, Zerto, VMware, Nimble, EMC and more. 
• The Evolve IP Compliance Cloud – Verified through third-party compliance auditors, The Compliance Cloud includes true client isolation, encryption in transit and at rest, private VLANs, firewalls and more. 
• Best-of-Breed Solutions – Noted as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, our DR Suite is analyst-acclaimed, vendor-validated and client recommended. 
• Custom Tailored Solutions – Evolve IP will architect what other CSP’s will not, for example, a robust reverse replication solution. Additionally, they accommodate legacy systems like AS400, by providing rack space, power, and network integration. 
• World-Class, Compliant Architecture – Evolve IP’s compliant cloud solutions and intellectual property are built on top of the world’s leading technologies, leverage our globally redundant data centers, and run over the industry’s most robust network architecture. 
• The Evolve IP OneCloud – They are the only provider that can deploy both cloud computing and cloud communications in a secure, virtual private environment. Leveraging Evolve IP for multiple services compounds the ROI of your IT investment by improving efficiencies, decreasing costs and eliminating cloud sprawl. 

To learn more and request a free quote....simply ask here:

Disaster Recovery Solutions

Data Recovery: How To Recover From A Hard Drive Failure

Context:

Unfortunately, most home users, and many business users, do not back up their systems. Moreover, many small businesses have older back-up procedures that are often ineffective for recovering files.
Of course, you can run down to your neighborhood electronics store and purchase a replacement drive for your computer, but what about your data on the failed hard drive? How important was it? Did you save it or back it up?

What to do:

If you need to recover data on the hard drive, the first thing to do is avoid trying to reboot or doing anything that involves the drive. Doing so can actually do more damage to your data.

The only irreversible data loss is caused by overwriting bits, physical damage to the drive platters or destruction of the magnetization of the platters, which seldom happens in the real world. In the majority of cases, the malfunction is caused by a damaged circuit board, failure of a mechanical component and crash of internal software system track or firmware.

In the case of actual hard drive failure, only a data recovery professional can get your data back. And the fact that you cannot access your data through your operating system does not necessarily mean that your data is lost.

As a "rule of thumb," if you hear a clicking sound emitting from your hard drive, or if the computer's S.M.A.R.T. function indicates an error during the boot process, something is wrong. You should immediately stop using the hard drive in order to avoid causing further damage and, potentially, rendering the information on the hard drive unrecoverable.

After receiving your failed hard drive, a data recovery specialist's first step will be to try and save an image of the damaged drive onto another drive. This image drive, not the actual damaged drive, is where the data recovery specialist will try to recover the lost data.

The next step in the imaging process is to determine if the hard-drive failure was an actual malfunction, a system corruption or a system track issue.

System corruption and system track issues are normally fixed by using a specialist's data recovery software. System corruption or system track recoveries do not require processing in a clean room environment.

Conclusion:

Unfortunately, damage to a drive's circuit board or failure of the head drives is not uncommon. In each of these failures, a data recovery specialist should work on the system only in a clean room environment. There, the specialist can substitute parts such as drive electronics, internal components, read/write arms, writing/reading heads, spindle motors or spindle bearings from a donor drive in order to gain access to the data on the failed hard drive. In most cases, the data recovery specialist is able to retrieve and return the lost data.

By Loveleen Talwar

Tailored IT Solutions For Disaster Recovery ARE Possible...You Just Need To Know Where To Look

NaviSite, part of Spectrum Enterprise, is committed to operational and service excellence. NaviSite’s state-of-the-art data centers, and unique access to Spectrum Enterprise’s network infrastructure. NaviSite can deliver customized IT solutions tailored to your current business requirements and in support of your future growth objectives. They also have over twelve years as a VMware partner and have over 150 VMware certifications.

NaviSite knows that there’s never a one-size-fits-all application. You can’t protect everything with just one simple replication solution. Often you’re going to mix and match different kinds of replication technologies, backup technologies, recovery points, and recovery time objectives. NaviSite offers a portfolio of solutions and they can work with clients to tailor the solutions to their applications and their workloads. They can design a disaster recovery plan around this.            

If you’re a VMware-based business, you know it can be a challenge to find a secure replication solution that avoids the complexity of third-party tools. Today that’s no longer the case. With VMware vCloud Availability brought to you by NaviSite, you can replicate business-critical data seamlessly and securely from within your VMware environment, avoiding the usual pitfalls of additional setup and configuration. Some of these solution’s highlights are:

• Integrated with NaviSite’s VMware vCloud Director-based cloud and your existing vCenter interface.
• Connects securely without a VPN or special network connectivity. 
• Fast RTO in as little as 5 minutes, RPO is as little as 15 minutes.
• Cost effective usage-based pricing, and licenses included. 

SAMPLE BUYER/USER PERSONAS

A lot more people are talking about DRaaS these days, and it will continue to be that way. The estimated growth for DRaaS between 2016 and 2021 is 45.9 percent. This is one of the reasons it is important for you to have conversations with your customer about this service. More customers today are based on a VMware platform. here are currently about 500,000 VMware clients globally with over fifty million VM’s. A lot of these clients are still running on-premise; this means that more and customers are starting to want to decrease the amount of hardware that they keep on-premise. VMware Cloud Platform (VCP) on AWS is months away from a full launch, but pricing is out. VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables you to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Below you can see some of the sample buyers in user business cases and what’s important to each of them: 

There are different pain points for a C-level executive and IT admin architect.  When it comes to C-level you will notice that a lot of the pain points come down to investments. On the other hand, IT admin pain points have more to do with adding value to the business, and staying up to date with new technologies and skills.

To learn more about how tailored IT solutions will benefit your business....and what the best solutions are for your applications and requirements, including from Navisite....simply ask us at the following link.  It's as easy as 1, 2, 3. 

Tailored IT Solutions 

Data Protection And Recovery....How To Get It Right

We can all agree that data is extremely valuable, so it seems reasonable to also say that data protection is important. Data protection and recovery is all about things that can be or are lost and how to find them or get them back. There are two main areas when it comes to data protection, backup and storage. The following are the two most fundamental considerations when it comes to this:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - How much data are you prepared to lose or can you lose?
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - How long are you prepared to wait or can you wait to have it?

These two things in the context of backup and DRaaS are similar, but they are not the same.  So what is different between them? It wasn’t that long ago that a really good disaster recovery strategy consisted of tapes, a hot site, or some express-ship gear. This is no longer true. The difference today between backup and DRaaS is that in the case of backup you’re generally backing up data only. DRaaS goes up the stack and covers data, your operating system, applications, and configurations. Having all of your data somewhere safe is very important, so backup is a common consumer product, but it might not be the best choice if you are a business looking to eliminate downtime. Keep in mind that backup is mainly useful when you are just trying to get files back. Some questions you should be asking yourself are:

• Do I have gear on which to reinstall OS and Applications?
• Do I have a place to house the DR gear?
• Are all configurations documented?

The economics are pretty simple—more protection costs more money. Essentially, if people want to spend a great deal of money on having their data protection strategy in place, they can count on having extremely low data loss. On the other hand, people who don’t want to spend money on this will have to deal with more data loss. The trick to having a good strategy is to balance the two things and to find a point where the business is well served by having some things protected in a faster way while other things are protected more slowly. It is important to remember that you do this because the business suffer badly if you have data loss or downtime.    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

BASIC CONSIDERATIONS OF BACKUP

TierPoint offers a full portfolio of managed and unmanaged backup services to help clients protect their data and adhere to relevant government compliance regulations. Backups have always been a critical component of business continuity programs. In case of a malfunctioning or infected disk, they offer a restore point that allows users to recover data before damage took place. Today, a big trend among businesses is to deploy them in conjunction with a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution to maximize protection and speed the restoration process. Want to learn more about what TierPoint’s backup offerings include? Click here. 

There are four fundamental questions you should be asking your clients when starting a conversation about backup:

1. What are you going to back up?

• Back up things that matter 
• Back up things that change

2. How often are you going to back up?

• Hourly? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? 
• Full backups? Incremental backups?

3. How long are you going to keep it?

• Retention schedule

4. Where are you going to keep it?

• On-site? Off-site? Disk? Tape?

THE BASICS OF DSAAR

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has moved beyond a preventative measure for data protection to be a strategic option that provides many benefits. IT organizations recognize that protecting corporate data and making sure it is available to users is one of their top priorities. TierPoint believes in providing organizations with an affordable and customizable DRaaS solution that lets you choose your personalized mix of cloud, colocation, and your own data center. So how does DSaaR work? 

These are a few questions you should be asking your clients when it comes to Disaster Recovery as a Service:

1. What are you going to protect?

• Best practice is to identify the workloads that are most important to shaping cost
• Complete DR strategy may have several components for different RTO and RPO

2. How do you identify what is most important?

• Do a Business Impact Analysis to identify what is most tied to critical business functions
• Document the needed boot order to most quickly get workloads back online

3. What else is important to have a good DR strategy?

• Test the strategy!

To learn more about all the options available to you for meeting your data protection and recovery requirements...including from TierPointe...simply ask us at the following link.  It's as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Data Protection And Recovery