Using Cloud for Disaster Recovery

The base premise of disaster recovery is the way you handle your business in case your primary business site meets a disaster. In my opinion, disaster recovery can be considered as an IT subset of the overall Business Continuity Planning including non IT factors of business as well.

When an organization chooses to host applications on cloud, it automatically gets into the first level of disaster recovery. The application along with all its data is already in a remote data center and the loss of your primary business premise does not affect access to applications and data. They can still be accessed from any other computer and internet connection.

You can also opt for a disaster recovery site for your service provider. This could add to the budget but ensures your data safety and continuity even if their data center is in trouble.

For a low cost disaster recovery option, Ace Data Abhraya would be the right choice for organizations where investment in full online disaster recovery site is still a long way to go. Ace Data Abhraya offers unique backup propositions wherein your backed up data can be used remotely in the event of a primary site disaster, while it continues to offer all the benefits of daily backups which are compressed and deduplicated on-premise to minimize the load on the bandwidth.

In the coming days, we would explain how using Ace Data Abhraya in different deployment scenarios helps organizations achieve disaster recovery for their critical data.

Cloud Eases out Infrastructure Deployment

Remember those old days of the need to have your own computers and servers depending on what you want to do. I have seen many programmers not getting enough resources for practicing and enhancing their skills due to constraints related to the infrastructure requirement.

Cloud computing has brought a paradigm shift into this. Getting IT infrastructure has become so easy today using the backend virtualization techniques. Sitting in your living room, you can now order for a new server online and pay by your credit card on a periodical rental system. You can choose flexible configuration and operating system licensed along with it. Once your task is over, you can choose to discard this server and stop paying further. This is not same as rental server since you are not getting anything physical with you and you do not need a mini Data Center to host it.

The configurations could be flexible and enhanced on-the-fly without waiting for a delivery cycle.

For developers, even the development platforms and respective licenses can be obtained the same way making it easy for them to use a platform. This is not only good for SMBs and IT organizations, it is good for students as well.

Is Virtualization the driving factor for Cloud Computing?

Virtualization has been prevalent for decades in various forms. In the recent times, virtualization of servers and desktops over x86-platform has made a significant change in the way IT was being used. Virtualization gives you the flexibility of using multiple virtual servers created out of dynamic resources from a few physical servers. Resource allocation and re-allocation is very convenient, and most of the functions happen online. Most of these functions can be automated based on usage pattern.

For technologists finding ways of sharing resources, virtualization came up as a blessing. Cloud computing allows different organizations/departments to provision and utilize virtual servers for their own individual use while residing on the same physical hardware. The physical hardware hosted at a service provider’s Data Center allows access to different virtual servers separately.

Virtualization platforms have in-built auto-provisioning, security features and billing systems which charge based on periodic usage. Many service providers have developed web based self-service portals that allow users to create and use their own servers without any external intervention.

So sit back and create your own server with custom configuration and reap the dual benefits of virtualization and cloud computing.

Backup or Archive – What suits your need best?

Many organizations have been equating long term retention of backups as archiving whereas backup and archiving are too separate things and should not be treated as same or interchangeable.

Archiving helps reduce the backup load by moving the older data from the production systems to an archival system. This reduces the amount of data on the production systems enhancing performance and reducing backup window for the production systems.

While moving the data, the archival application leaves a stub on the production system. For mailing applications, individual emails are moved from production system reducing the production mailbox size and load considerably. When the user accesses the data from production system, he actually accesses the stub which in turn accesses the data from archival system to fetch it for him. The archival applications offer flexibility in terms of automatically choosing what to archive based on the size, attachments, date & time of creation or access etc. The other advantage is the long term retention of data without any load on production systems and its availability in its native format when you need it.

Backup on the other hand helps preserve multiple copies of the production data on a different media to help in the event of loss of production data. Backup does not move any data from production systems and does not reduce any load there. Moreover, backups are not stored in the native format; you need to recover them back to the native format from the backup device.

Does Agentless Backup makes sense?

Traditionally, all backup applications need agents on each desktop & server to be backed up for processing and running algorithms like compression, deduplication & encryption (if applicable). When we position our Abhraya Backup Vault service with agentless architecture, many people get doubtful. Abhraya Cloud Backup Vault has overcome this and works in its own unique way.

Being agentless brings some key benefits to the production systems:

1.     Speed of deployment is enhanced as you do not need to wait for off-peak hours and risk of reboot while deploying the solution.

2.     Limits the memory and processor utilization on the production system as it’s the TCP/IP or Unix-SSH that provides the data to the central Backup Vault Client. All other algorithms are the function of Backup Vault Client not the production server.

3.     Ease of upgrades by upgrading only the central Backup Vault client and not the production server. The transition is smooth enough that it does not need to disturb the production system working.

4.     Ease of troubleshooting & supporting as all logs & errors are generated on the central server only. You don’t need to login to production servers for these.

I believe this new architecture of a backup application is making it more convenient to deploy and manage a backup infrastructure putting negligible load on the production servers & applications.

How Workforce Mobility is Threatening Your Precious Data

The usage of laptops long overtook the usage of desktop computers, and tablets & smartphones have already overtaken the usage of laptops. What this means is that your data – from emails, documents and presentations to project plans and financial data is spread all over the world. Theft, accidental damage or sheer negligence on someone's part can lead to loss of crucial data.
People are forgetful, lazy and ignorant in technical nuances about their devices. To expect them to keep their devices backed up and secure all the time is not a practical idea. Something better has be thought of and devised to overcome this problem.
Using Agentless Architecture, backup and recovery services like Ace Data Abhraya Cloud Backup Vault ensure that transparently to users of static devices, the data is properly backed up based on the rules setup by the system administrator. Mobile users only need to install a small client software, and once setup, can forget about their backup worries. The moment they are connected, the backup will automatically start and keep it uptodate. In case of a device loss, virtual device can be setup to get back to business urgently, and data image can be restored to a dissimilar device for further work.
All this within the strict and universally compliant security framework. 
To know more, visit our website www.ace-data.com.