Most of you have been using the “cloud” longer than the term has even been around in the tech industry.  All of your personal Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL email accounts are cloud based – meaning your data is sent, received and stored virtually.

In today’s business world, this can benefit companies with reduced infrastructure and licensing costs, while increasing data capacity and capabilities.  As a scalable service, it is great for any size business because it is set up on a usage based billing system – you only pay for what you are using!

Learn even more at the Save IT presentation with us.

8:30am – 9:30am

Thursday May 12th, 2011

Sheraton Suites Orlando Airport

7550 Augusta National Drive

Orlando, Florida 32822

Virtualization saves money on many fronts by cutting costs on hardware, support hours, disaster recovery,  downtime.  A virtual environment makes a  company’s hardware independent and allows it to recover from hardware failures quickly with minimal interruption.

Virtualization saves money by allowing companies to use less files servers.  Companies using Virtualization reduced their server Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 74% and realized an ROI of over 300% within the 1^st 6 month of deploying virtualization software.  It also saved them money by reducing management time as the numbers of servers was tremendously reduced.

Virtualization also saves money by requiring fewer ports on switches and routers thus allowing companies to buy smaller routers and switches.   It also saves company in power consumption, cooling, and rack space.

When it comes time to upgrading to new hardware, migration costs are greatly reduced as well.   The only thing needed is to (All what’s required is copying) copy the virtual servers containers to the new host server

When deploying multiple physical servers in a virtual environment, a company can eliminate downtime by deploying a tool provided by the virtualization software allowing it to automatically transfer the virtual server container to another physical server in case of a server failure.   With multiple servers, networks become hardware independent thus greatly reducing the astronomical cost of downtime on terms of idle time and the paralysis of the organization in servicing its customers.

to learn more attend this frees Seminar by Diriga Techoologies

By Derek Slater

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events—whether those event might include a hurricane or simply a power outage caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. The CSO’s involvement in this process can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency. This primer (compiled from articles on CSOonline) explains the basic concepts of business continuity planning and also directs you to more resources on the topic. Last update: 7/1/2010.

The article covers a wide array of questions:

• What’s the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning?
• What does a disaster recovery and business continuity plan include?
• How do I get started?
• Is it really necessary to disrupt business by testing the plan?
• What kinds of things have companies discovered when testing a plan?
• What are the top mistakes that companies make in disaster recovery?
• I still have a binder with our Y2K plan. Will that work?
• Can we outsource our contingency measures?
• How can I sell this business continuity planning to other executives?
• How do I make sure the plans aren’t overkill for my company?

Q: “Disaster recovery” seems pretty self-explanatory. Is there any difference between that and “business continuity planning”?

A: Disaster recovery is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.

Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring “disaster recovery” because disaster seems an unlikely event. “Business continuity planning” suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep making money, not only after a natural calamity but also in the event of smaller disruptions including illness or departure of key staffers, supply chain partner problems or other challenges that businesses face from time to time.

Despite these distinctions, the two terms are often married under the acronym BC/DR because of their many common considerations.

What do these plans include?

All BC/DR plans need to encompass how employees will communicate, where they will go and how they will keep doing their jobs. The details can vary greatly, depending on the size and scope of a company and the way it does business. For some businesses, issues such as supply chain logistics are most crucial and are the focus on the plan. For others, information technology may play a more pivotal role, and the BC/DR plan may have more of a focus on systems recovery. For example, the plan at one global manufacturing company would restore critical mainframes with vital data at a backup site within four to six days of a disruptive event, obtain a mobile PBX unit with 3,000 telephones within two days, recover the company’s 1,000-plus LANs in order of business need, and set up a temporary call center for 100 agents at a nearby training facility.

But the critical point is that neither element can be ignored, and physical, IT and human resources plans cannot be developed in isolation from each other. (In this regard, BC/DR has much in common with security convergence.) At its heart, BC/DR is about constant communication.

Business, security and IT leaders should work together to determine what kind of plan is necessary and which systems and business units are most crucial to the company. Together, they should decide which people are responsible for declaring a disruptive event and mitigating its effects. Most importantly, the plan should establish a process for locating and communicating with employees after such an event. In a catastrophic event (Hurricane Katrina being a relatively recent example), the plan will also need to take into account that many of those employees will have more pressing concerns than getting back to work.

Where do I start?

A good first step is a business impact analysis (BIA). This will identify the business’s most crucial systems and processes and the effect an outage would have on the business. The greater the potential impact, the more money a company should spend to restore a system or process quickly. For instance, a stock trading company may decide to pay for completely redundant IT systems that would allow it to immediately start processing trades at another location. On the other hand, a manufacturing company may decide that it can wait 24 hours to resume shipping. A BIA will help companies set a restoration sequence to determine which parts of the business should be restored first.

Here are 10 absolute basics your plan should cover:

1. Develop and practice a contingency plan that includes a succession plan for your CEO.
2. Train backup employees to perform emergency tasks. The employees you count on to lead in an emergency will not always be available.
3. Determine offsite crisis meeting places and crisis communication plans for top executives. Practice crisis communication with employees, customers and the outside world.
4. Invest in an alternate means of communication in case the phone networks go down.
5. Make sure that all employees-as well as executives-are involved in the exercises so that they get practice in responding to an emergency.
6. Make business continuity exercises realistic enough to tap into employees’ emotions so that you can see how they’ll react when the situation gets stressful.
7. Form partnerships with local emergency response groups-firefighters, police and EMTs-to establish a good working relationship. Let them become familiar with your company and site.
8. Evaluate your company’s performance during each test, and work toward constant improvement. Continuity exercises should reveal weaknesses.
9. Test your continuity plan regularly to reveal and accommodate changes. Technology, personnel and facilities are in a constant state of flux at any company.

Hold it. Actual live-action tests would, themselves, be the “disruptive events.” If I get enough people involved in writing and examining our plans, won’t that be sufficient?

Let us give you an example of a company that thinks tabletops and paper simulations aren’t enough. And why their experience suggests they’re right.

When [former] CIO Steve Yates joined USAA, a financial services company, business continuity exercises existed only on paper. Every year or so, top-level staffers would gather in a conference room to role-play; they would spend a day examining different scenarios, talking them out-discussing how they thought the procedures should be defined and how they thought people would respond to them.

Live exercises were confined to the company’s technology assets. USAA would conduct periodic data recovery tests of different business units-like taking a piece of the life insurance department and recovering it from backup data.

Yates wondered if such passive exercises reflected reality. He also wondered if USAA’s employees would really know how to follow such a plan in a real emergency. When Sept. 11 came along, Yates realized that the company had to do more. “Sept. 11 forced us to raise the bar on ourselves,” said Yates.

Yates engaged outside consultants who suggested that the company build a second data center in the area as a backup. After weighing the costs and benefits of such a project, USAA initially concluded that it would be more efficient to rent space on the East Coast. But after the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when air traffic came to a halt, Yates knew it was foolhardy to have a data center so far away. Ironically, USAA was set to sign the lease contract the week of Sept. 11.

Instead, USAA built a center in Texas, only 200 miles away from its offices-close enough to drive to, but far enough away to pull power from a different grid and water from a different source. The company has also made plans to deploy critical employees to other office locations around the country.

Yates made site visits to companies such as FedEx, First Union, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia to hear about their approach to contingency planning. USAA also consulted with PR firm Fleishman-Hillard about how USAA, in a crisis situation, could communicate most effectively with its customers and employees.

Finally, Yates put together a series of large-scale business continuity exercises designed to test the performance of individual business units and the company at large in the event of wide-scale business disruption. When the company simulated a loss of the primary data center for its federal savings bank unit, Yates found that it was able to recover the systems, applications and all 19 of the third-party vendor connections. USAA also ran similar exercises with other business units.

For the main event, however, Yates wanted to test more than the company’s technology procedures; he wanted to incorporate the most unpredictable element in any contingency planning exercise: the people.

USAA ultimately found that employees who walked through the simulation were in a position to observe flaws in the plans and offer suggestions. Furthermore, those who practice for emergency situations are less likely to panic and more likely to remember the plan.

[Read More]

An expert on the subject, Michael Fauscette, recently presented his perspective that further exemplifies the importance of what Diriga offers.  We believe it is absolutely critical to mitigate the possibilities of your public defining your online presence and overall brand.

The dynamics of community are changing expectations. Exposure to higher community standards has always tended to raise individual standards, offline or on. Today though, with the widespread use of social networks and proliferation of social media outlets the collective voice is loud and has a very long reach. The more empowered I become, the more empowered I become, it’s a cycle that has an upward slope over time. In a people centric world, individuals are catching up faster than businesses, by the way, which is causing some friction (in some cases more like fire than friction actually). Customers are demanding more, employees are going around corporate policy to “get the job done”, partners and suppliers are looking for closer relationships. In fact, everywhere you turn people are talking about “relationships”. The word relationship is being redefined by the connectivity and real time nature of the web.

For many businesses these new behaviors are quite confusing. Practices, policies and procedures that customers used to accept (although they certainly didn’t like) now set off an explosion of negative sentiment online that has real business impact. Customers are refusing to “listen carefully because our menu options have changed”! When prospects do product or company research they turn to their trusted networks more often that company controlled channels. They publicly rate and berate the company and its products. If they call for service and get the “old supervisor shuffle” instead of action, they go off and make a viral video. And if the business doesn’t respond appropriately the customer becomes an ex-customer…which is unfortunate but the the rest of the story is that they don’t just leave quietly, they tell all of their networks about it.

[Read More]