Amazon already did it. With huge data centre installations and expertise to support its exclusively electronic commerce, it wasn’t a big leap to start providing cloud computing platform services and practically limitless data storage resources for other companies. Amazon Web Services now offer organisations the possibility to move their disaster recovery and business continuity into…
Usage-based payment systems are becoming increasingly common, but a recent variation in disaster recovery has an interesting twist. A new pricing model from a company called Asigra is based not on how much data an organisation backs up, but how much it restores. In particular, a ‘recovery performance score’ determines the amount of money a…
If your IT systems go down, you want a solution in operation ASAP – or within the limits imposed by criteria like your recovery point objective and your recovery time objective. The problem is that under stress and time pressure, the difficulty of correcting failure is magnified. Human emotion is the cause. It causes delays,…
How fast does your application need to be – how quickly do you need to be able to see a response after you enter a command? In some contexts, speed is not a critical factor. For instance, if you’re entering or retrieving accounting data, you don’t want to wait for half an hour, but anything…
A recent article on the website ZDNet.com describes how a health provider in Indiana, US, put in place IT virtualisation to manage a number of challenges, including disaster recovery planning. One of the big changes was moving from a situation where a breakdown in a physical server threatened the welfare of hundreds of individuals, to…
While cloud services have promised advantages of redundancy and resilience from the start, there is still the spectre of failure. Even the largest operators can be affected. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) suffered breakdowns in 2011 because of a wrongly applied change of configuration, and again in 2012 owing to ‘historic’ thunderstorms in the neighbourhood…