There is a lot of hype surrounding cloud and I'm usually not one to join the hype but in the case of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services (I'm trying to use the IT service continuity but it hasn't caught on yet), these service are available today and they address major pain points in IT operations and organizations of all sizes can leverage these services, not just small and medium businesses.
Storage-as-a-Service is relatively new. Today the main value proposition is as a cloud target for on-premise deployments of backup and archiving software. If you have a need to retain data for extended periods of time (1 year plus in most cases) tape is still the more cost effective option given it's low capital acquisition cost and removability. If you have long term data retention needs and you want to eliminate tape, that's where a cloud storage target comes in. Electronically vault that data to a storage-as-service provider who can store that data at cents per GB. You just can't beat the economies of scale these providers are able to achieve.
If you're a small business and you don't have the staff to implement and manage a backup solution or if you're an enterprise and you're looking for a PC backup or a remote office backup solution, I think it's worthwhile to compare the three year total cost of ownership of an on-premise solution versus backup-as-a-service.
If you lack a recovery data center or if you're looking for more a cost-effective solution for your Windows and Linux x86 server farms, I recommend that you evaluate new virtual recovery services. And for anyone who is about to renew their DR services contract, you should evaluate these new services before you resign for another three years of tape-based recovery to oversubscribed, shared IT hardware. These services fill the gap between DR services that rely on replication to dedicated IT hardware which are far too expensive for most organization and tape-based recovery to shared IT hardware, which while affordable, do not meet the recovery time and recovery point requirements of organizations from small to large and acoross industries.
And of course, if you're focused on the availability and recovery of email in particular, well there is a laundry list of service providers that focus cloud-based services for email from including continuity of service, recovery, archiving and if you wanted to, just move your email to the cloud period.
These services already have a toehold in the US but in order to expand into Canada and to Europe, these service providers are busily opening up data centers in these regions. In Canada and the EU, data privacy laws restrict the transfer of data containing personally identifiable information out of region or to a country that doesn't meet the standard of its own privacy laws.
Perhaps I'm too bullish on these services, perhaps organizations still have security concerns with cloud-based services but I think evey IT operations professional must now seriously consider these services when evaluating any backup or DR offering.
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Not a moment too soon, libraries, universities, and publishers across the globe have flicked the switch on a collaborative digital archiving project that promises to preserve important scholarly content forever.
The severe flooding across the Midwest has caused at least 24 deaths and while there are no exact estimates, the damages are expected to be in the billions of dollars. This is the second time in the last 15 years there has been a supposed “100 year flood” of the Mississippi River. The flooding has caused inestimable financial and emotional losses for residents, and some might not return to the area. Those businesses that do not directly rely on the Mississippi for their operations and the surrounding area – like shipping and farming -- need to decide if they’ll re-build in the flood plains of the Mississippi. The answer is likely no.
NAC is an ever evolving topic in its
definition and understanding. For me, NAC remains a curiosity. Our clients
crave deploying it, but remain stymied by its ever evolving nature. NAC today
is about enforcement, policy, and posture. Adding to the mix of these features
is better identity for your users and asset management for your non-computing
network attached end points. This last issue is actually becoming a real sore
point as more IP enabled devices start to show up on your network. IT managers
are brainstorming ways to track, monitor and manage end point devices such as
printers, faxes, IP phones, badge readers, HVAC systems, wireless access
points, etc. Yet most NAC solutions
today don’t adequately extend access control to these non-computing endpoints.
In fact, many just require you create a white-list and allow these devices to
bypass any authentication and access control framework.
On April 10, 2008,
It’s official, the future of information management and
infrastructure is software as a service (SaaS). Today, Dell announced its
intent to acquire the powerhouse in email continuity and archiving, MessageOne.
This acquisition will give Dell the cornerstone that it needs to build out its
own suite of SaaS offerings. Dell clearly didn’t want to be left out of race as
it watched Iron Mountain successfully building out its
SaaS offerings and watched its competitors and partners complete significant acquisitions
in the market including Seagate Services’ acquisition of Evault, EMC’s
acquisition of
Microsoft recently released the final version of Exchange Server 2007 SP1, bringing many features into production that didn’t make the cut for the original RTM. Some of the more notable enhancements include improvements to Outlook Web Access (OWA) and the management console and native IPv6 support. Arguably the most significant addition is Standby Continuous Replication (SCR). SCR enables organizations to replicate storage groups to stand-by servers or clusters at remote or secondary data centers. The SCR target can be manually activated if there is a failure at the primary data center. Existing disaster recovery (DR) solutions using native Microsoft tools were scarce and complex, especially compared to other platforms like Domino. To date, third parties like Symantec, NetApp, and Mimosa Systems have filled the gap for customers looking for true rapid failover in site-level failures, but some companies like to see more native options. SCR could be an interesting alternative for firms looking to balance cost and their recovery SLA's. It will be interesting to see how quickly firms integrate this into their DR planning and what kind of issues or limitations, if any, they come across.