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.

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Application Availability

WAN Optimization Controller

Learning How to Optimize Load Balancers

Being the fundamental function for managing a website, load balancers don’t run well without being configured properly. Loan balancing basically divides the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers to ensure that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, all users get served faster. Here are a few ways to optimize the functioning of load balancers.

•         Establish the application session type

Many load balancers have numerous types of persistent sessions, like shopping carts or other types of applications. It's often better to use persistent sessions, if an application makes calls to other servers. Whenever a persistent connection is used, even if the user session is moved from one server in the pool to another, the back-end connection to the database needs to be preserved. For this, the load balancer maintains a session information for all users and decides how long to keep user sessions alive. While many persistent sessions can use up memory resources on the load balancer, it is best to set a maximum session length.

•         Be prepared for emergencies

When servers are unavailable, configure e-mail and SNMP trap alerts for major incidents.This helps detect the difficulty in the system and provides information when the environment is degraded. To ensure that hardware problems don't take the system completely offline, weigh the cost and complexity issues of clustering or other high-availability solutions. IT managers can script tests for each server in a load-balancer pool to make sure that if  the load on that server will be transferred to another server in the pool server, if the service stops responding.

•         Determine the network activity

Capture the bandwidth used by each service, the hits on each service, so that this data offers a historical perspective on network traffic. This can enable IT managers to recognize the trends and proactively add capacity whenever required to keep from overloading the system. Measuring the network activity can also help in detecting problems when they occur.

•         Restrict the traffic

With the help of access lists, restrict the traffic going through the load balancer. Although server groups actually have multiple servers to handle to high volumes of traffic, it is server load balancing that aids  in the allocation of traffic across network servers in a more or less even spread, thereby ensuring that there is no overload of one server.

Load balancers can intelligently analyze the wide area connections and accordingly allocate bandwidth, for business-critical applications. As load balancing appliances have the potential to handle more than one function, use the right  load balancing techniques to optimize system performance through higher application availability and scalability.

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BYOD

Remote Desktop

Remote Access Solutions for a Well Established and Assured Future in Business

The modes of operating a business are undergoing sea changes with the help of technology. The internet has helped in the creation of virtual business environments for uninterrupted remote access controls. As the world is discovering more innovative technological breakthroughs conducting a business through web enabled devices and remote devices have become the most sought after option. This option has created good opportunities for the home workers and mobile employees to carry on their work through secure remote access solutions and leveraged new earning potentials for businesses.

The remote access option boosts business productivity as it helps the users access the business applications securely on any remote device. A high level of visibility is provided that helps in controlling the processes efficiently. The remote access solutions are cost-efficient and easy to deploy as well as manage thus dispelling all concerns related to application availability. The IT administrators have a choice of registering desktops manually or through dynamic self-registration by the users, and these processes are deployed quickly.

Businesses are guaranteed optimum performances and high availability due to the use of hardware appliances that belong to the Universal Access Controller category known for its high-speed hardware SSL encryption and built-in active clustering. The appliances provide clientless web based access for easy use and deployment, effective authentication and authorization procedures as well as auditing of accessed applications and resources that are identity based.

It provides businesses with a sturdy and reliable architecture with highly integrated capabilities and enforcement of stringent authentication measures to ensure a secured environment. The solutions encourage compatibility amongst the devices and applications and ensure secured end-point controls. Due to the increasing popularity of new web browsers and remote access devices the secure remote access solutions can easily handle any number of client platforms without affecting the applications’ performance thus ensuring high quality and consistent user experience. The remote access solution is an energy saving solution that helps businesses to reduce their costs and cause less detrimental effects on the environment.

Molding a business according to the changing dynamics of the business environment is essential and very challenging. Thus businesses have to implement solutions that can help attain exceptional scores in scalability, flexibility and availability so that productivity is enhanced leading to better performances and higher customer satisfaction levels. Remote access solutions have provided a platform with seamless integration and collaboration capabilities, and commendable security parameters for enhanced business continuity and prosperous returns.

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Cloud computing 

SSL Accelerators

Application Delivery Controller – Utilities of New Age ADC’s

To define in elementary terms, an application delivery controller (ADC) is primarily a network equipment within the datacenter that assists in carrying out regular tasks performed by web portals themselves in an attempt to eradicate load away from the web servers. Many of them offer load balancing as well. They are generally situated between the web farm and the router/firewall. In most cases, the ADC is best described as a new age load balancer. They end up delivering greater advanced features, for instance advanced routing strategies, high end organized server health controlling, and content manipulation. Other features that you will find in application delivery controllers are follows:-

* Compression
* Cache
* Connection multiplexing
* Application layer security
* SSL offload
* Content switching combined with fundamental server load balancing

Numerous IT companies have now introduced innovative application development controller solutions and applications today that function in order to enhance the availability, security and performance of IP data services and applications. In addition to that, the server efficiency is maximized, thereby minimizing the expense and intricacy in the data center.

The ADC devices help to leverage energy-efficient components, hardware-quickening prototypes, 10-Gigabyte Ethernet connectivity and state-of-the-art multicore processing.

These next generation appliances provide scalability, industry-leading features, and economies of scale and price performance from small-scale concerns to huge global service providers. Others benefits are listed below:-

* Ability for application control, optimization, security and cloud level performance
* Comprehensible safety for compliance and legal policies
* Improvement to a level of 500 percent in application performance
* Extensible and agile software architecture that is well aligned with quick data center transformation
* Helps in “anywhere-to-anywhere” connectivity to produce the best in revenue-generation service creation and employee productivity
* A two- way integration with monitoring and management systems for optimizing the presentation of virtualized and conventional data center technology

The new age application development controllers are designed and structured to perform their best in modern data center environments. There are equipped with cutting-edge technologies and features that are significant for enterprise application delivery, delivery of upcoming IP data services, virtualization and cloud service delivery.

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ADN Platform

Application Availability