What if Performing Your Disaster Recovery Plan Was as Simple as Cooking Spaghetti ?

The Cloud DR Cookbook

Are you ready to innovate?

By Alexandre Lanoue

Introduction........................................1

Chapter 1 : An overview of the Digital Enterprise............................................2

● Cloud● Analytic● Mobile ● Social● Internet of things

Chapter 2 : Business resiliency in a box.......................................................4

Chapter 3 : The branch in a box as a use case......................................................5

Chapter 4 : How do you get started?...............................................6

Conclusion..........................................7

Table of contents

Cloud

RPO

RTO

Workload

Stategy

Management

Introduction

The emergence of the third platform is fundamentally changing how we live, work and interact. These digital forces have altered user expectations and require enterprises to rethink client employee experiences. However, how do enterprises leverage this new digital technologies when it's already difficult for IT team to complete existing workloads while keeping infrastructure and skillsets up to date.

This struggle is magnified when the time comes to plan a proper business resiliency plan. Where traditional backup and disaster recovery methods may have been valid for the last few decades, explosion data growth and the increasing complexity of business applications are now challenges that every CIOs in the world is facing. Although every business strives to achieve agility and scalability, these goals are not always easy to obtain, but digital enterprise technologies may hold the key to success.

The purpose of this ebook is to introduce how Digital Enterprise concepts could be leveraged to overcome these challenges and prepare enterprises for tomorrow's business resiliency requirements.

1

The Digital Enterprise is a fairly new concept. IBM, HP and many other tech-companies describe it a transformation of the business model. The digital enterprise accelerates growth by reinventing the way people interact with and within organizations. According to IBM, the Digital Enterprise should leverage five technologies : Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Internet of Things.

The Five Technology Components that Support a Digital Enterprise

An overview of The Digital Enterprise

2

Cloud

The Cloud is not simply about hosting an infrastructure; it’s about getting the technology businesses need on demand. By adopting a scalable, hybrid cloud strategy, organizations are able to speed the deployment of very complex software and hardware implementations. With the cloud, companies can cut projects timelines that used to take months down to a matter of days.

The cloud also brings a dimension of cost-savings to businesses. For the first time ever, organizations have the ability to transform

project capitalization requirements into

operational financial models. By eliminating the initial capital investments originally needed to deploy new technologies, for instance, companies gain fast and positive ROIs on projects. With a “pay per use” pricing model, companies can also more easily scale their cloud infrastructures to match growing

or shrinking IT needs.

Analytic

For most people, analytics are defined as data warehousing, big data and business intelligence. This is only a piece of the puzzle, however. Analytics is not solely about processing a large amount of data in a very short period of time, or applying business rules based on algorithms. Rather, the greatest value in analytics comes down to the ability to extract insights from data so that businesses can better understand the current and past performance of their organization.

All of this is achieved by using descriptive or diagnostic analytical processing. Predictive and prescriptive analytics also allow companies to accurately estimate what will happen in the future. Using predictive analytics, a business leader could glimpse possible future scenarios, which would allow them to make the best, most-informed decisions possible for their organization. Companies can also harness the power of analytics in a business context by empowering all employees to make insight-based decisions rather than relying on instinct and past actions.

Mobile

Mobile access from tablets or smart phones has put the latest information at the fingertips of the user. For the first time in human history, employees have access to the data they need at the moment they need it. This is extremely valuable to employees who travel.

An executive that travels to a new country, for instance, has the power to make a decision or approve a contract while they are out of the country on a business trip. Overall, mobile brings convenience and flexibility to business processes and , we should not forget that the true value of mobile technology is to improves productivity.

Social

Social media platforms have become a part of everyday life. In the business world, social is about connecting people together to unleash the power of the collective intelligence. By amplifying the value of human connections, organizations are able to uncover creative ways to solve issues, find experts, share information faster and develop engaging dialogues to strengthen relationships.

By making people the centre of its operations, an organization can not only create personalized digital experience, but they can also engage in a conversation with employees. As a result, organizations can cultivate a culture of trust and innovation.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things refers to the devices and software that connect our world. The idea of security is central to the Internet of Things. By opening an organization to the outside world through new applications and other widely accessed technologies, it becomes exposed to threats. As a result, organizations must be prepared to “seek and destroy” these threats before they suffer the consequences.

And as devastating as the threat of a virus or security breach can be to an organization’s overall ability to perform, the damage can also be detrimental to an organization’s reputation.

To be a digital enterprise, a company needs to do more than simply deploy these five bundled technologies across their organization. Becoming a digital enterprise comes down to strategy. It's about designing and building business processes that take advantage of these five technologies in unison – all for the sake of ensuring the successful longevity and operational efficiency of a business.

Business resiliencyin a box

4

For an organization to compete in today’s competitive markets, it needs to be able to stand up against ever-evolving threats and operational inefficiencies. Developing a good business resiliency plan that is supported by the five digital enterprise technologies is a part of that.

Cloud solutions are one of the simplest ways to build business resiliency today. Cloud solutions range from private on-premise clouds to public clouds or even hybrid (or mixed) clouds that contain elements of both public and on-premise cloud environments. After deciding which method is best for a business, companies need to decide how to store applications and application data. They also have to decide their ideal level of vault resiliency and estimate a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), or the time it takes to recover information and systems once they go offline.

Regarding backup, it is important that companies utilize the latest technologies, such as block level backup instead of file level backup. It is also important that the chosen technology supports frequent incremental backups. This will allow considerable reduction in the amount of backup data being stored to the vault over time, which will reduce storage needs.

For those concerned with an incremental, forever backup strategy, the latest technology, such as IBM Spectrum Protect or IBM Cloud Managed Backup, allows companies to virtually “re-create” a full backup of data and systems at any point in time. This allows businesses to comply with the most complicated retention policies.

The vault resiliency is also another critical aspect. An organization could implement the best backup solution, but if the vault itself is not protected, the overall business resiliency plan will be affected. The level of protection that a business chooses to implement will have a major impact on their restore time objective. What people often forget is that it may take a lot of time and effort to make the vault ready for the restore process.

Traditional off-site tape may still be a supported solution by many technology brands, but companies should explore the affordability of cloud infrastructures. Cloud object storage, for instance, hosts a copy of an organization’s backup vault. Another affordable cloud solution utilizes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to host a backup server replica. IaaS, such as SoftLayer IaaS, could also be considered as a low-cost disaster recovery solution.

4

The Office Branchin a box as a use case

Cloud technologies can also be used to connect multiple office locations. For instance, consider an organization with several branch offices that all require backups for their critical applications. In most cases, a disaster recovery system is needed to protect the data and servers of every branch. To ensure all business branches are protected and resilient against data loss, a central office or data center may need to function as the universal manager.

Fortunately, digital enterprise technologies equip companies with the right tools to manage multiple office branches. Scalable models, for instance, provide companies with the ability to get fast, dedicated links to a central data centre. When it comes to the link between the branch office and the central office, it may be a very costly and complex scenario depending on the locations and the distance between them.

By leveraging the network of an Infrastructure as a Service provider, such as SoftLayer, however, companies can reduce the cost of their network expenses. By creating a VPN or dedicated link from each location to the closest POP, organizations can then leverage the high bandwidth, high availability network of an IaaS provider to relay data. Also, as described in the previous chapter, companies can also leverage cloud object storage or public/dedicated IaaS servers to host a replica of data backups.

5

6

How do you get Started?

The first step towards becoming a digital enterprise is to properly plan and prepare a solid business case. It may be easy to see the possibility of value, but to gain quantifiable, value-driven results, companies must choose their investments wisely. Here are some of the top business resiliency solutions – fuelled by digital enterprise technologies – that finance departments should consider:

DR Planning and Prioritization

● Depending on the nature of a business, recovering all applications in a timely manner may not be feasible, so it becomes necessary to prioritize, plan and test backup recovery strategies. This ensures the most important aspects of a business are back up and running first, which in turn reduces the lost costs associated with outages.

● The Ability to Streamline Acquisitions. A scalable backup and restore solution combined with a cloud disaster recovery solution can facilitate the tasks involved in the undertaking of a company fusion or acquisition.

● Low TCO. Have you considered that a cloud business resiliency plan may be “cheaper” than a traditional solution while being more efficient. Don't forget that a Cloud solutions are typically driven by an OPEX model as opposed to a CAPEX model. In many cases, the annuity cloud model will propose a lower TCO.

Conclusion

7

The emergence of digital enterprise technology has tremendously changed the resiliency of businesses in almost every industry by making enterprise-grade I.T. resources accessible for organizations of every size. As a result, organizations should consider leveraging the cloud for their business resiliency plan to reduce implementation cost while improving the business recovery times.Ready to explore how digital enterprise technology has the power to transform the efficiency and costs of your business? Reach out to an SIA Innovations expert today!