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Don’t Improvise Your Way Through Disaster Recovery
/in Blog, Business Continuity /by lindsayGiven the importance of disaster recovery (DR), you don’t want to improvise through the planning—or worse, through the execution. Here are some best practices to make sure your disaster recovery follows an effective script:
1. Assign staff to disaster recovery
It sounds obvious, but if you don’t have staff assigned to disaster recovery, it isn’t anybody’s job, and it won’t get done. You need staff who are dedicated and empowered to make sure disaster recovery is properly planned. This isn’t limited to technology staff either; business employees have roles and responsibility in disaster recovery as well.
2. Develop a detailed plan
If you don’t want to improvise, you need a documented plan. The full contents of a DR plan are beyond the scope of this short blog post, but you need to start by identifying all of your IT resources. Evaluate the impact of an outage on each application and use that to determine your DR priorities. Then assess how much time you can tolerate the application being down and how much data you can afford to lose. Use those numbers to guide you in developing a cost-effective recovery strategy. Document the recovery steps in detail, and make sure the recovery plan will be available in case of a disaster.
3. Test your recovery plan
It’s far better to discover your DR plan won’t work during a test rather than during a disaster. Schedule time to test your plan, at least annually. There are different ways of approaching testing, ranging from a table read-through of the documentation to fully executing the steps to failover and resume operations at a secondary site. The more your test simulates a real disaster, the more reliable results you’ll get. Track the time it takes to recover as well as the accuracy of the documented procedures. After the test, collect feedback from all participants on what worked and what didn’t, and use it to update the document.
4. Update the plan
Changes in your business and your technology mean the plan that worked last year may not work this year. Allocate time to review and update your plan every year—even better, make updating the plan part of your change management process and don’t sign off on deployments until the recovery process is documented.
5. Don’t go it alone
For many businesses, leveraging Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a good choice that makes disaster recovery faster and more reliable. With DRaaS, you get a high level of automation and support from the provider to help guide you through the process of defining and implementing a recovery strategy.
Another way to avoid going it alone is to work with an IT services firm like CCS Technology Group. Our disaster recovery and business continuity services help you protect your data, reduce downtime, and survive a crisis. Contact us to learn how CCS Technology Group can help you write your disaster recovery script.
Additional Disaster Recovery Resources
Craft An Effective Disaster Recovery Plan
5 Changes to Make When You Switch to Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Backups Are Not A Disaster Recovery Solution
9 Ways to Get Cloud Costs Under Control
/in Blog, Cloud /by lindsayMany companies turn to cloud services in an attempt to control computing costs, but it’s just as easy to rack up high expenses in the cloud. It can be hard to manage cloud costs because the lack of visibility, self-service functionality, and dynamic changes to services make knowing what’s going on in your cloud difficult. Here are 9 things you can do to make sure your cloud computing bill doesn’t grow unexpectedly large:
1. Choose the right size services
With cloud, your costs directly reflect the capacity of your resources, so it’s best to choose the smallest systems that meet your needs. You don’t have to worry about lengthy delays in adding additional capacity, so don’t use larger disks, more memory, or faster CPUs when they aren’t needed. If you’re using cloud for archiving, choose slower, cheaper storage for data you aren’t likely to need fast or frequently.
2. Find the right strategy for paying for cloud
Paying for what you use as you use it, the stereotypical “subscription” model of cloud, may not be the most cost-effective method of purchasing cloud resources. If you can commit to cloud usage, you may get a discount for reserved instances or simply prepaying. If you have great flexibility, you may get a discount when you bid for spot instances.
3. Find the right place for your cloud
Deciding where to put your cloud isn’t just about choosing the cloud vendor. Vendors may have multiple regions where clouds are available, and the costs are not always the same everywhere. If your workload doesn’t need to be in the same region as the users, for performance or data residency reasons, consider deploying applications out of town.
4. Choose higher-level cloud offerings
When you choose Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), you remain responsible for much of the low-level infrastructure maintenance and support. You can reduce your responsibility and your support costs by choosing higher-level cloud services, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Using serverless application also eliminates costs associated with instances.
5. Use automation as much as possible
Automation can reduce costs by making your staff more productive as they perform their functions. Automation can also help you save money by enforcing cost-saving policies, such as shutting down instances at end of day.
6. Don’t pay for idle time
Although it’s become a cliché to say business today is 24x7x365, not every application is needed 24x7x365. Since you pay for the resources you use, you’ll save significant money by not keeping resources active when they aren’t needed. Shutdown processes and processors at end of day, and also shutdown test and development systems permanently when the project ends.
7. Don’t use cloud to store data if it won’t be used there
While cloud storage is accessible, be aware that cloud vendors make it much easier and cheaper to put data into the cloud than to take it out.
8. Don’t forget free trials come with end dates
Many cloud services have a free trial period. Just remember you’ll start paying once the trial ends. If you decide you don’t need the service, be sure to shut it down before you’re charged.
9. Use tools to gain visibility
You can’t control costs when you can’t see where your spending is going. Cloud providers offer detailed breakdowns of charges. You can also use third-party tools to consolidate all your billing data and highlight changes to your cloud that result in new charges.
Get help using cloud with support from CCS Technology Group. Contact us to learn how our cloud solutions can help you leverage cloud cost-effectively.
Additional Cloud Resources
6 Ways to Keep Your Cloud Secure
Calculating the ROI of Moving to the Cloud
Why SMBs Should Upgrade to the Cloud
Don’t Let These Obstacles Get in the Way of Your IT Security
/in Blog, Business Continuity, Security /by lindsayInformation security should be a top priority for any business. You don’t make any money by having good information security practices, but you can lose a lot of money if you don’t: this year, the average cost per record of a data breach was $150, according to the Ponemon Institute. Multiply that number by the size of your database and you can see how the costs quickly mount up.
So if a lack of information security can be so costly, why are there so many data breaches? One reason is that it’s impossible for any defense to be 100 percent effective; there’s always the risk that one malware author will get lucky and break through. But more often, it’s because although companies know information security is important, it isn’t really a priority. There are too many obstacles that get in the way of implementing effective security:
Security services from CCS Technology Group can help you overcome these challenges. Our proactive approach closes holes that make you vulnerable to current attacks and implements layered security and defense in depth strategies that help guard against future attacks. Contact us to learn more about how CCS Technology Group can help you protect your business.
Additional IT Security Resources
Closing the Most Common Cybersecurity Holes
The Key Features to Look for In Your Firewall
Phishing 101: What it is, how it works and how to avoid it