One of the biggest concerns around hybrid cloud for organizations is data security. According to Gartner, 38 percent of companies who don’t plan to use public cloud cited security and privacy as the main reasons. It’s very logical (and necessary) to ask how the cloud will protect your most valuable asset – your data. What are the biggest security challenges in hybrid cloud adoption? According to experts, the biggest security concerns in a hybrid environment are compliance, lack of encryption, poor …

Online Tech recently hosted a webinar on virtual private clouds and how they help your business. Our panelists were Aaron Lake, senior solutions architect, and Kurt Schaldenbrand, product design manager. Together, they have more than 40 years of experience designing and building applications for a variety of platforms and were happy to lend their expertise. Schaldenbrand and Lake gave a comprehensive overview of Online Tech’s virtual private cloud offering and how the easy self-serve options within the client portal, OTPortal, …

Disaster recovery used to be one of the first items cut from IT budgets, citing time and expense to implement, monitor, manage and maintain something you probably wouldn’t need. But disaster recovery has come a long way, and those reasons are antiquated. However, if you’re looking at cutting IT costs, here are five reasons to keep disaster recovery off the chopping block: It’s a cost-effective option: No more excuses that it’s too expensive and time consuming to have. Thanks to cloud …

Picture this: The second quarter of 2008. My sales vice president and I were doing a pipeline review with our sales team. Every person reported that most of their IT disaster recovery opportunities were in a holding pattern. Companies were defunding DR in preparation of tough economic times. In other words, our prospects were saying disaster recovery was not necessary to continue collecting revenue. Why was this important in our Q2 2008 pipeline meeting? Because as the bottom fell out …

A key component of a successful disaster recovery plan is testing it. Testing once a year is usually not enough, and you’ll want to make sure you can run a proper failover when you need to. A failover is when you move from one environment to another. In disaster recovery terminology, it’s used to mean the transfer from a production environment to a recovery one. A failover is a huge process, and there are many complications that can arise from it. …

When doing research about disaster recovery, you may come across some key terms that are unfamiliar. The following is a glossary designed to help you navigate the waters of disaster recovery. Disaster recovery: A subset of business continuity, disaster recovery is how your organization will recover and maintain operations during and after a disaster has been declared. Disasters can come in all forms, from fires and floods to electrical outages, cyber attacks, and administrative failures. Disaster recovery plans are critical …

Your organization’s data is money unaccounted for on the balance sheet, and it must be protected. A secure production site with no single point of failure goes a long way, but disaster recovery is the insurance that keeps you running in case of a fire, cyber attack, or accidental database wipe. Many factors, most importantly cloud economics, have been a driving factor in the growth of disaster recovery, making it imperative to business continuity. You need simple data protection. There …

Disaster recovery is more than a luxury, it’s imperative to an overall business continuity plan. But it can be overwhelming and expensive to implement. However, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is becoming the answer to the many woes of traditional IT disaster recovery. Disaster recovery spending has been on the rise since 2014, with 46 percent of TechTarget’s annual IT Priorities survey respondents saying it was a top priority for their budgets in 2014. In a separate study by CIO …

In a previous post, I outlined the complexities of your disaster recovery infrastructure. There is a LOT to think about, and for many decision makers, the whole process can be overwhelming and feel a lot like you’re at sea with no life jacket. But there is help at hand. The key is finding an expert – whether a partner, full service provider, or industry guru – who has built and continues to manage complex primary and DR infrastructures. Disaster Recovery as a Service …

Why has the demand for disaster recovery always existed? It’s because even though data is not accounted for on the balance sheet, data is valuable. And the value of data has risen exponentially, becoming the lifeblood of organizations. Disaster recovery is a key component in protecting the value of data as an asset for the business. In this post, I’ll discuss the historical problems behind disaster recovery and how it is now cost effective, simple and easy. Historically, the problem with disaster recovery …