Business continuity through remote desktop access solutions

Our modern day business world is evolving and is becoming much more advanced and globalized, with multiple teams working across various time zones. As a result of which, the traditional 9am to 5pm job set up is becoming or rather has become obsolete. That is not all. The customary meeting taking place in boardrooms or conference room too are being replaced by online collaborations and conversations that today is an easy task with the help of remote access solutions and SSL VPN tools. Remote access through VPN solutions helps business persons to manage their business anytime from anywhere.

Business continuity is an essential element of every corporate set up. As business continuity planning today is a crucial aspect of every business, it is imperative that companies invest in enterprise class remote desktop solutions that assist in leveraging technologies that are secure and scalable. Compliance too is an important factor as to why government agencies mandate sensible BCP Government mandates. Also the regulatory compliance needs several organizations to have auditable, secure admission to critical data even when there are unforeseen events taking place.

Unplanned PTO is one of the many kinds of business hindrances. There are a few employees who opt in for PTO when there is no other choice to be away from the office and yet continue their work. The other reason that can be listed that, employees are required to handle some household issues as well. Hence, an employer might as well consider that opting in for a PTO day is the best possible solution to keep the work on. On the other hand, unplanned PTO might also impact on a company’s bottom line.

Therefore, when employees take an unplanned PTO it practically might not be possible to cover up an entire day’s work responsibilities. The outcome could be in the form of accumulated tasks that are neglected for an entire day and might also delay in critical business processes. Planned PTO is accountable for the budget, whereas unplanned PTO impacts the company revenues. It is estimated based on the yearly productivity, total employee count and the average count of the PTO’s taken by each employee per year.

Today leading solution providers have come up with business continuity through remote desktop access solutions. Regardless of the type of solution that you might choose, you need to ensure that it results in increasing the overall productivity and helps in file access. Advanced remote desktop solutions help to resolve business bottlenecks and helps in business continuity planning with its secure remote access to office desktops and computing devices. It provides a secure and simple access to the desktop platform and has a simple-to-use architecture. The solution is perfect for workers who need to attend their personal and professional tasks without neglecting either of them.

Other Links

Application Delivery Controller

Business Continuity Planning to Avoid Disruptions and Interruptions

Every enterprise face a number of disasters that ranges from minor to catastrophic. These disasters can cost enterprises money since disruptions and interruptions lead to lost revenues and additional expenses, which finally results in reduced profits.

Every enterprise face a number of disasters that ranges from minor to catastrophic. These disasters can cost enterprises money since disruptions and interruptions lead to lost revenues and additional expenses, which finally results in reduced profits. Besides that, enterprises have to face customer defections as well as loss of reputation and goodwill. This makes it necessary for the implementation of a business continuity plan that is effective enough to cover the occurrence of events such as equipment failure, application failure or corruption of database, malicious software attack, hacking or other internet attacks, social unrest or terrorist attacks, disruption of power supply or telecommunication, natural disasters, fire, and human error, sabotage or strike.

Wikipedia defines Business Continuity Planning (BCP) as a strategy that "identifies an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, while maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity". Simply put, BCP is a collection of documents, procedures and instructions that help businesses to respond proactively to accidents, disasters, and emergencies so that business operations do not face any disruptions or interruptions.

The BCP process comprises of 6 key stages namely

* Project Initiation

In this phase, business continuity objective and policies are defined and drawn up.

* Business Analysis

In this phase, risk analysis and business impact analysis are performed. Then different business continuity strategies are identified and after performing cost-benefit analysis, the best strategy is selected. The budget for the BCP is also developed in this phase.

* Design and Development of the Business Plan

This phase involves the development of backup and recovery strategies, scenarios to execute plan, and escalation, notification and plan activation criteria.

* Implementation or Creating the plan

This phase involves the preparation of Emergency Response Procedures, Command Center Activation Procedures, Detailed Recovery Procedures, Vendors Contracts and Purchase of Recovery Resources and so on.

* Testing

This phase involves the exercise of program, objectives, plans, scenarios and actual exercise plan. In this phase, training and corporate awareness are also taken care of.

* Maintenance or Updating the plan

This phase involves the review and updating of the business plan.

BCP is essential in today's scenario where the business environment is hyper competitive and volatile. BCP is easy now as enterprises have the support of business continuity solutions that offers availability and remote access solutions. This helps enterprises to not only have its core business systems up and running but also ensure that its employees always have access to the core systems.

Other Links

Application Availability

WAN Optimization Controller

Why Do You Need An Application Delivery Controller?

IT enterprises are constantly under pressure to offer efficient performing services at an inexpensive rate. Therefore, a continuous series of small incremental IT enhancement is not going to be adequate enough for making IT services to be agile and cost-efficient. What is therefore needed is a radically new approach on how IT services needs to be offered aiming towards incremental improvements. 

An approach that has been most IT organizations have adopted is that of server virtualization. The main benefit of this is that it enables IT enterprises to consolidate the servers. The outcome generally is a minimization of expenses and agility. For instance, the moment a server has been virtualized, it is possible to provision virtual machines (VM) dynamically and to shift these VM’s amidst the physical servers. This is possible both within disparate data centers or a given data center without any service interruption. However, though VM’s can be shifted between physical servers within a few seconds/minutes it can take a couple of days to reconfigure the assisting architecture. IT enterprises are not able to leverage the complete value of server virtualization unless the infrastructure elements that assist a VM can be reconfigured or shifted to assist the VM once shifted. 

An essential component of the infrastructure that assists a VM is the application delivery controller (ADC). Numerous IT enterprises have successfully implemented ADC’s in an attempt to enhance application performance. An ADC enhances application performance by remaining in front of a server and offering service requests to the members of the server farm.

This is done based on the criteria for instance the load that a single server is processing presently. Another way by which an ADC enhances application performance is by conducting computationally intensive tasks, like TCP or SSL processing by freeing up by server resources. Furthermore, an ADC has the capacity to accelerate the application performance offered through the wide area network (WAN) by deploying optimization methods such as reverse caching and compression.

Today eminent service providers specializing in load balancers have introduced high-end ADC’s that offer the following benefits:

* Minimize the single points of failure

* Enhance performance by disseminating traffic amidst numerous servers

* Enhances user experience and minimizes server overhead with SSL acceleration

* Guarantees data-access and application consistency

* Helps in optimizing resources by effectively allocating traffic depending on application types

Therefore, deploying an advanced ADC solution from a leading market player for ensuring systematic traffic management and optimizing application and web performance is an efficient way to avert server downtime issues.

Other Links

eClinicalWorks Load Balancing

Application Performance 

Business Continuity Planning to Avoid Disruptions and Interruptions

Every enterprise face a number of disasters that ranges from minor to catastrophic. These disasters can cost enterprises money since disruptions and interruptions lead to lost revenues and additional expenses, which finally results in reduced profits. Besides that, enterprises have to face customer defections as well as loss of reputation and goodwill. This makes it necessary for the implementation of a business continuity plan that is effective enough to cover the occurrence of events such as equipment failure, application failure or corruption of database, malicious software attack, hacking or other internet attacks, social unrest or terrorist attacks, disruption of power supply or telecommunication, natural disasters, fire, and human error, sabotage or strike.

Wikipedia defines Business Continuity Planning (BCP) as a strategy that “identifies an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, while maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity”. Simply put, BCP is a collection of documents, procedures and instructions that help businesses to respond proactively to accidents, disasters, and emergencies so that business operations do not face any disruptions or interruptions.

The BCP process comprises of 6 key stages namely

* Project Initiation

In this phase, business continuity objective and policies are defined and drawn up.

* Business Analysis

In this phase, risk analysis and business impact analysis are performed. Then different business continuity strategies are identified and after performing cost-benefit analysis, the best strategy is selected. The budget for the BCP is also developed in this phase.

* Design and Development of the Business Plan

This phase involves the development of backup and recovery strategies, scenarios to execute plan, and escalation, notification and plan activation criteria.

* Implementation or Creating the plan

This phase involves the preparation of Emergency Response Procedures, Command Center Activation Procedures, Detailed Recovery Procedures, Vendors Contracts and Purchase of Recovery Resources and so on.

* Testing

This phase involves the exercise of program, objectives, plans, scenarios and actual exercise plan. In this phase, training and corporate awareness are also taken care of.

* Maintenance or Updating the plan

This phase involves the review and updating of the business plan.

BCP is essential in today’s scenario where the business environment is hyper competitive and volatile. BCP is easy now as enterprises have the support of business continuity solutions that offers availability and remote access solutions. This helps enterprises to not only have its core business systems up and running but also ensure that its employees always have access to the core systems.

Other Links

RDP

Application Delivery Controllers for Secure Network Access

The globalized business world today is marked by a communication connectivity mechanism called networking. The highly technology enabled environment makes networking possible across organizational branches, offices, vendors and customers across wide distances and beyond geographical boundaries. However, failure at any point or slow response times across the widely networked organization hinders the complete application productivity levels.

Software development enterprises have worked out number of web and network enabled application platforms, which become unstable and face performance issues due to networking problems. Application delivery controllers come in as a rescue system under such circumstances. The ADC's help organizations with better performance and reliability levels of web applications.

The application infrastructure installed within an organizational network is expected to provide end-users with the good user experience. Unstable performance levels of the applications leads to missed opportunities, financial drain and a tarnished image for the corporates. The application delivery controllers with its many features work towards enhancing the performance, consistency and security of the networked services. Placed between a router or firewall and the web farm in data centers, these try to reduce the load off the web server similar to the functioning of a load balancer.

With innovative features like advanced routing and content manipulation this new age load balancers help organizations to meet the demands for remote desktop access, iPad Remote Desktop scalability, high availability and performance. Acting as a single entry gateway to all the applications in the network, ADC's can check the formation of protocol messages, filter out attack signatures and validate requests. Further, it can also filter and authenticate responses as they pass through the network.

In an era when there is a tremendous growth of the mobile internet through smart phones and tablets, customers raise demands for remote desktop access through these hand held devices or any BYOD options. This creates the need for a wider connectivity levels. Has accelerated demand for continuous connectivity to business applications. Technology innovations such as the application delivery controllers facilitate organizations to meet up to such demands.

ADC's are built with features which facilitates compression, cache, connection, multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload and content switching combined with fundamental server load balancing. However, today as organizations are more focused on improving the delivery of applications, service providers of ADC's help to make applications secure, accessible and fast. The new age ADC's offer price-performance, functionality, and economies-of-scale for all organizations irrespective of the size.  Further, as technology advances, these application delivery controllers are also engineered to thrive in the new age data center and provide support for features like visualization, delivery of IP data services and cloud service delivery.

Other Links

Business Continuity Planning