Tag Archives: Disaster Recovery

  • -

Disaster Recovery that won’t break the bank

Tags : 

Let’s face it, unexpected outages are the biggest cost you’ll never expect to pay. According to the Consulting group Gartner, only 35% of small to medium sized businesses have a disaster recovery plan of any type. This is a staggering statistic considering the cost of downtime is averaged at $84,000$90,000 per hour for SMB and a whopping $1.25b – $2.5b for large businesses. These statistics are not hard to find. Anyone who reads the latest trade mags can find this data online or in publication.

With these kinds of numbers facing businesses, how does an SMB leader overcome it?

The answer is face it, don’t avoid it. There is some good news however.

New innovations combining Shadow Copy, Virtualization and Cloud allow for some decently priced solutions that add resiliency from disaster and scale with business growth.

By combining your backup and DR, your business can create a comprehensive recovery system that will help protect you from outages due to virus attacks, data corruption, hardware failure and even full site failure. Companies that specialize in these solutions will install an appliance at your location that acts as the backup and DR device. The device starts by creating virtual image of your servers. In the event of an outage, that virtual image can be activated allowing a temporary virtual server to run from the DR appliance independent of the original server. Through snapshot technologies, changes in data at the block level are captured and applied to that virtual image. This allows you to stand up that virtual machine as it was at any give time within the backup frequency. These snapshots can be taken every 5 minutes or every day depending on the amount of data you can afford to lose.

This acts as revision control and near real-time backup.

What if the DR appliance fails? Well, that’s were the Cloud comes in. The DR providers configure their appliances to trickle feed the backup data to their data centers over a secure connection. Typically a VPN or private line is established in advance to a segmented part of the providers network which allows fast, secure off-site transmission of your backup data and also the ability to stand up the virtual recovery server in the Cloud. This allows you to resume operations from anywhere in the world.

If the device fails for some reason, the provider already has the data and will ship a replacement appliance overnight that is pre-configured and has all your data on it.

This may sound like an expensive solution, but it’s surprisingly affordable. A typical cost for a solution like this for a 250GB server is around $400-$800 per month. That’s less expensive than the cost of a tape drive with support, Enterprise backup software with support, loads of expensive tapes, someone’s labor to validate and test backups regularly and a secure way to transfer the offsite. Not to mention the extra DR capability you gain. Also, snapshot technologies have no restrictions by application type, file locks or file in use so the backups are much more reliable.

Combining your Backup and Disaster Recovery in this way can save you a lot of money and productivity loss from downtime. Any businesses that are still using tape backups or considering the cost of replicating their entire environment to a remote location (thereby doubling their capital costs) should consider a solution like this.

CBC Solutions is a holistic consulting company whose mission is to help businesses reduce risk and manage costs. We do this by assessing your environment with our expert team of IT veterans, then aligning best in breed providers from our extensive partner network with your business goals.

Contact CBC Solutions today to see how we can help!

CBC Solutions
info@55x.6e8.myftpupload.com
619-784-5211
www.cbcsolutions.biz


  • -

Using an RISP to ensure maximum uptime and a 600x increase in speed

Tags : 

Is your Internet connection a dependency for your business? Do you suffer from outages? Do you use Cloud based services that need to running at peak efficiency? If so, then an RISP can help. RISP is an acronym for Redundant Internet Service Provider. The service includes a device that sits between your internal network and your firewall. It manages connectivity to multiple Internet connections of your choosing.

In your business right now, you might have a high-speed connection of 30-100MBs for your main Internet already. By installing a second Internet connection, like a cable modem or DSL that is less expensive, the RISP will monitor both connections to determine which is the best one to send traffic on. In the event of an outage by one of the providers, the RISP can re-route traffic to the secondary connection in a seamless manner.

Additional services that the RISP provides is the ability to determine the best path to route traffic for a majority of cloud services. This provides an up to 600x increase in speed to services like Salesforce & other CRM services, Office365, Microsoft Azure and others.

By performing this monitoring, the RISP also monitors your providers connectivity in reference to the Service Level Agreement you have with them. In the event that your ISP has an outage, the RISP will provide a report that helps you get a credit from your service provider.

Pricing for this service starts at $49 a month and is highly scalable for larger deployments.

Technology like this used to be an expensive proposition, but now it’s affordable to virtually anyone.

If your business is dependent on the Internet, like most are, let us know. We can help CBC Solutions can architect a redundant service for you and broker a deal with you and the best RISP for your business. There is not obligation. Contact us for a risk-free assessment today.

CBC Solutions
619-784-5211
info@55x.6e8.myftpupload.com


Free yourself from the worry of technology and get back to running your business today!