• Keeping Mean Tweets at Bay
• Virtual Redundancies for Organizational Resiliency
• Cloud Spurs Datacenter Infrastructure Management
• Who Owns the Datacenter?
• Matching IT Finances to Business Finances
• The Best Cloud for Business

Keeping Mean Tweets at Bay

There’s a reason that every organization should have a business continuity plan: the impact of interruption is far-reaching. In the case of a cybercriminal hack, one study – the 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study – found that the astronomical expense was indicated by the average expense per record compromised: $154.

Unfortunately, hackers typically aren’t just looking for one record. In fact, the 1.023 billion records that were stolen during 2014 were based on only 1541 breaches, indicates a report from Gemalto – representing a rise of 78% over the previous year.

Cost is not the only thing that organizations have to worry about when a breach occurs. The cost study also looked at loss of credibility, finding that 55% of firms that don’t have continuity plans in place prior to attacks reported that their brand lost value as well.

Before Facebook and Twitter got up to speed, companies were fine setting their recovery time objectives at a few hours. The rise of social media, though, makes those few hours feel like an eternity, says technologist Laurence Guihard-Joly. Word of a hack now spreads fast.

“Because availability has never been more critical, and because cloud computing can dramatically reduce recovery-time objectives,” adds Guihard-Joly, “resiliency improvement is often the first, best use of cloud technologies.”

In light of the above, it is critical that businesses espouse datacenter approaches that allow them to get the most for their money at the same time that they can become optimally redundant.

Virtual Redundancies for Organizational Resiliency

The cloud has become extraordinarily popular primarily because it’s cheap and flexible, so the technological commitment is far less pronounced than when buying your own back-end hardware. Since you can create a redundant system within a cloud-hosted environment, that represents savings that many businesses don’t consider. To make an on-premises system resilient necessitates actual physical redundancies, which is far more expensive.

There are three primary models of cloud computing, from an infrastructural perspective: private, public, and hybrid. Hybrid is a strategy that is becoming more prevalent. It can either blend private and public clouds or combine public cloud with a legacy system.

The real challenge with a hybrid model is integration, explains Guihard-Joly: “The relationships between the hybrid cloud solution and the physical datacenter solution must be fully understood, documented, and incorporated into the IT datacenter strategy to ensure optimal design, operational efficiency, and lowest capital cost for the client.”

Cloud Spurs Datacenter Infrastructure Management

In the case of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud scenarios, datacenters must be managed through more sophisticated means. That’s the realm of datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM). According to Gartner, DCIM tools “monitor, measure, manage and/or control data center utilization and energy consumption of all IT-related equipment (such as servers, storage and network switches) and facility infrastructure components (such as power distribution units [PDUs] and computer room air conditioners [CRACs]).”

DCIM is preferred by many businesses to make their infrastructure as redundant as possible while keeping it cost-effective. The basic goal of these systems is to transition from solving problems manually to doing so through automation, fueled by the predictive insight of analytics.

Who Owns the Datacenter?

Many companies have decided they do not want to have to continue with 100% of the responsibility for datacenter ownership and management. The basic models are:

• Company owns datacenter (with cloud integrated)
• Company leases datacenter (with cloud integrated)
• Company colocates datacenter (with cloud integrated)
• Entire business operates through the cloud.

Since the general IT environment is adapting so rapidly and since cloud providers have so much to offer (particularly those that also offer physical architectures), it’s becoming more popular to push the IT to external systems. One of the primary examples is General Electric, which now deploys more than 90% of its new applications in the public cloud.

Matching IT Finances to Business Finances

The optimum course of action requires an organizational-wide financial model that considers the demands of the business and the technological means of meeting them. Not only that, though, enterprises also need to hire an expert who can follow the model properly and provide financial assistance. Additionally, startups that have a quality business model set in place can get funding for their company and IT operations by trying various financing options like bank loans, investors, equity, alternative funding, and more. In that case, the company may have to outsource accounts and business finance management to ensure they earn profits consistently to pay off any debts.

Early-stage businesses might not need to engage an accountant to handle their financial records since such documents might be too tiny to maintain. However, when the firm expands, it will need to recruit an accountant with the help of companies similar to www.accountantfor.co.uk, who can efficiently provide businesses insights into the general financial health of the business, present a detailed analysis of their cash flow, highlight areas for development, and keep them organized and exact while paying taxes.

Coming back to the financial model, it’s essential that it is thorough. From this, businesses will be able to see their financials clearly and be able to receive the assistance needed to keep everything at an even level, this may mean speaking to tax experts at Golden Apple Agency or an agency within the nearest location so that the numbers can be calculated correctly. “The financial model must consider factors such as real estate costs, capital expenditures, and operating expenses, among others,” says Guihard-Joly. “A comprehensive IT financial model that is fully aligned with the business financials to support all transformations is absolutely essential.”

The Best Cloud for Business

With the right business continuity plan in place, firms will be able to achieve the high-availability that’s now necessary to defend against the rapidly emerging threats. The technology used to implement cloud computing also must be top-tier.

All of Superb Internet’s cloud solutions are benchmark-tested using PassMark, achieving performance ratings that are typically 4 times better than AWS and SoftLayer for IaaS plans with similar specs. Get true 100% high-availability cloud.

By Kent Roberts