Tackling Business Disruptions With Effective BCP Solutions

Unplanned business disruptions come in many forms and sizes resulting in tremendous losses.  With enterprises becoming increasingly reliant on technology to conduct their business, BCP has gained all the more importance. As it is usually too late to implement a BCP solution when a disruptive event occurs, there is always a loss of productivity and revenue. The ability of an organization to recover from a disaster is directly related to the degree of BCP [Business Continuity Planning] that has taken place before the disaster. Business Continuity Plan solutions are critical to the transparent and continuous operation of all types of businesses.

Business Continuity Planning is a proactive planning process that ensures critical services or products are delivered during a disruption, and it must include plans, measures and arrangements to ensure the continuous delivery of critical services and products, which permits the organization to recover its facility, data and assets. By implementing a Business Continuity Plan your business will increase its recovery capabilities dramatically. And that means you can make the right decisions quickly, cut downtime and minimize financial losses.  Addressing the business continuity needs of office workers is important. These employees work at their desks, and when they work outside of the office they are usually without remote access to corporate resources.

While data protection and disaster recovery are key components of business continuity, business continuity must incorporate a full array of critical functions to keep your literal and virtual doors open for business. With a good BCP, there is no disruption of business in the event of an emergency, for both SSL VPN users and remote desktop access as well. As there are significant “hidden” losses caused by these mundane disruptions, it is important to have an effective solution in place.

Creating and maintaining a BCP helps ensure that an institution has the resources and information that needed to deal with any emergencies. Effective business continuity planning solutions are reliant on both the competence and appropriate levels of expertise from within the organization. There is also an improvement in overall organizational efficiency and in the identifying the relationship of assets and human and financial resources to critical services and deliverables.

No matter what type of remote access solution you choose, it is a superior business tool used to increase productivity by enabling easy file access during commutes, travel, after-hours work, business meetings and more. The flexibility of remote access allows for a mobile workplace has made it an essential part of business continuity.

A properly funded, well-prioritized BCP solution combined with a regular program of testing and disaster recovery drills, can help to safeguard an organization.

Related Links

BYOD

Business Continuity Planning -Safety In face of Adversities

Every business irrespective of being a small and medium one or a large conglomerate is a profit oriented one. Technological innovations deployed in the business environment aids in globalized expansion of the business and leads to revenue generation and increased profits. However, any disruptions either minor or major may have serious impact on the day-to-day business operations.

Foreseeing business disruptions or the time when disaster strikes in an unknown factor and the globally bound organizations today are faced by the challenge of maintaining business continuity in face of all storm. Business continuity planning is one of the main strategies taken up by the global organization. Spread across geographical boundaries and remotely distant locations, these organizations need to be ready to face any disruptions in the business operations while ensuring that work goes on without any serious impact.

Business disruptions may result from various reasons such as epidemics, transit strikes, cyber-attacks, natural calamities etc. Under such circumstances a detailed remote access strategy and business continuity planning (BCP) will help the global enterprises to deal with emergency situations and help them to avoid loss of productivity or revenue. The remote access solution must be one that would help enterprises with:

* Secure anytime, anywhere access leading to uninterrupted business continuity
* Maximum performance, automated VPN provisioning
* Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

A continuous delivery of critical services and products, demands that organizations need to have the facility that permits them to recover data, application and assets in a real-time access mode. As Gartner's analyst suggests that the most critical success factor to any business continuity plan is fast re-establishment of business processes. However, if the disaster recovery plans do not include Remote Desktop Access, no amount of technology can save business operations. Hence the real-time access to information will facilitate the employees to continue work from any location, allow business partners and suppliers an uninterrupted access to important information. Such actions will minimize the disruption levels of business processes and applications.

With large number of vendors offering business continuity planning solutions, enterprises need to make the most of the benefits to ensure productivity at all times. The enterprises needs to decide on appropriate ones and service types required for the business environment. The availability of applications from the corporate network and remote desktop access will help mitigate business disruptions. Application availability solutions from leading service provider’s offer load balancers and WAN optimization controllers for any fail-over for WAN links, devices and data centers.

However, the enterprises need to ensure that anytime anywhere remote access to business critical information also poses issues of data and network security. Thus service providers of business continuity planning solutions also need to ensure that the corporate network are equipped with secure access gateways that can support multiple access.


Other Links
Application Delivery Controllers
RDP

 

Load Balancers for the New Age Corporate Environment

The business world today makes use of every available technology to withstand the aggressive competition prevalent in the environment.  With the growth in the use of various applications, across corporate environment, the IT departments have explored the possibilities of using dedicated servers. These are computer systems which are part of the corporate network and are kept apart for specific jobs so as to fasten the access and processing time. However, with the increasing demands on the part of the customers and business, every application adds up to more loading of the servers.

As technology moved ahead to provide the globalized business world anytime anywhere access to the corporate network through BYOD options, the possibility of the servers being overloaded only increased.  Such overloading of the servers would lead to  network getting clogged leading to reduced  speed in  performing the functions with a reduced access rate to the entire systems in the network.  This calls for the need of load balancers with a specific significance for busy Internet services wherein a software program helps tracking the clients access services and forwards requests to the "back-end" servers thus enhancing the performance of the website.

Wikipedia defines load balancing as "a computer networking methodology that distributes workload across multiple computers or computer clusters, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. This increases the performance of servers and  leads to optimal utilization while  ensuring  that no particular server is burdened. Corporate networks of global enterprises, with vast data and application storage and data transfer activity,  small and medium business enterprises  and e-commerce websites resort to  load balancers.

In an era of technological innovation with remote desktop access available to increase the mobility of the workforce,  load balancers are an important element in a network and helps in evenly disseminating service or processing requests across numerous devices within the  network. Dedicated hardware, software and servers carry on these functions.

Depending on the factors such as speed of the network and server response time, load balancers requires work distribution between two or more dedicated servers. The new age load balancing solutions offered by leading service providers helps organizations leverage on the parallel multi-core processing with cost-efficient performance. Further these appliances offer the client organization a number of advantages which include :

• Aids in global and local server load balancing with  datacenter scalability.
• Facilitates swift implementation of optimized arrangements with application specific configurations and certifications guidelines
• Provides a  high-end application compatible  traffic management while catering for optimized delivery IP services and crucial business applications
• Safeguards applications without influencing performance with the help of firewalls and proxy designs.

The new age server load balancing appliances  which are designed for the modern data center, cloud and virtual environments help to boost application performance for both small and medium enterprises as well as large service providers.

Other Links

Application Delivery Controller 

Tablet Access

Unplanned PTOs- Ensure Business Continuity with Remote Access Solutions

When most enterprises talk about business disruptions, they equate it to major-scale events or catastrophic disasters such as H1N1 outbreak, earthquake, volcano, hurricane, power failures, or terrorist attacks. Hence, they engage in a form of business continuity planning (BCP) to protect against interruptions that disrupt continuous business operations. Even IT system crashes, communication failures and supply chain problems are included in the list of business disruptions. However, what these enterprises fail to surmise is that even events considered as minor and mundane can result in losses. Bad traffic, seasonal snowstorms, and even employees taking the occasional unplanned PTO (paid time off) are often categorized as mundane events. However, these mundane disruptions cost businesses money – a fact that even enterprises are not aware of. Let’s look at the impact of a mundane event like unplanned PTO on an enterprise’s bottom line.

PTO or Paid time off is a bank of hours that an employee uses at his/her discretion. Employees take unplanned PTOs in order to take care of an issue at home such as a sick child or waiting for a delivery or contractor. Here employees take PTOs to deal with some personal issues. However, there are situations where employees are forced to take PTOs for no personal reasons. Take for instance, seasonal snowstorms, bad traffic, transit strikes and so on where employees have no option but to be away from the office and work. These are events that can (and do) happen on any given day and prevent employees from getting to the office.

Unlike planned PTOs informed in advance and accounted for in the budget, unplanned PTOs affect an enterprise badly. These unplanned PTOs result in losses, which are greater than most would imagine. This is because employees take PTO without prior notice and therefore it may not be possible to adequately back fill their role. This results in neglected tasks and delayed critical business processes. Hence, what enterprises must do is not only develop business plans for critical as well as minor events but also deploy RDP remote desktop access solutions to ensure business continuity. Such a move would help save revenue by allowing employees to get to work, even when they cannot get to the office.

In the absence of remote desktop access solutions, the so-called ‘mundane’ events are not so mundane at all.

Other Links

BYOD

Mobilize All Applications with Advanced Desktop Solutions for BYOD

In this technology driven environment, many workers want tablet access to business applications, often from personal devices. Apps have become quite important in the last few years, making our work and life much simpler and easier. Enterprises may have numerous applications, but the security and cost implications of mobilizing every application can get daunting.

Many organizations are exposed to problems such as security gaps, compliance issues and rising IT complexity without proper solutions in place. To enable tablet remote access to personal iPad or Android devices, enterprises need a RDP solution that can be installed in the corporate network and integrates with Active Directory or similar to establish user credentials for secure access.

With a good appliance solution you can have Remote Desktop access that will make you more productive and generative, allowing an employee to work from anywhere and at any time. Deploying such a solution will enable tablet remote access for employees, and also allow enterprises to get a cost-effective solution that is fully secure and fully under IT control and at the same time provides full application availability, supports a bring your own device strategy and is simple to deploy, manage and use.

The BYOD phenomenon can make a tremendous difference and along with a good appliance solution that facilitates Remote Desktop access, employees can be more productive. These bring your own device solutions provide an efficient, cost-effective means to support tablets in the enterprise while preventing data leakage and providing full application availability. 

The appliance-based solution that you invest in must be enterprise owned and operated and not open the corporate network to third party networks. It must allow Tablet remote desktop connectivity to the end-user iPad and Android devices using SSL. A conventional PC work environment must be allowed to all employees unlike server-based computing. All employees enterprise-wide must be provided with complete application availability without any need for new hardware or software, licenses or application environments.

As tablets and remote devices are “off-network”, security and compliance policies on office PCs must be extended and maintained. This way data never leaves the network, never mixes with personal data and never exists on remote devices. It must leverage the existing desktop, application and security infrastructure. Look for a solution that is cost-effective and can be set up in as little a few hours and is capable of achieving ROI in the time it takes to set up alternate solutions.

Other Links

Server Load Balancing

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

Reasons to Consider a BYOD Strategy

BYOD also known as Bring Your Own Device has been a latest buzzword in the IT landscape. However, prior to implementing it is essential to understand the reason behind supporting it. Most common BYOD business objectives revolve around minimizing mobile expenses or enhance the overall organization productivity or perhaps both. In the recent times, many companies have shared their case studies on BYOD best practices that help other organizations pick up necessary guidelines.

However, if minimizing mobile expenses are your sole BYOD business aim, then you need to convince your employees to pay not only for their own devices but also include some other elements of voice and data service expenses, even though those services are used for other business purposes. Though it might just appear unlikely for business workers to accept employee pays BYOD model, the fact remains that such an arrangement can and does work. There have been instances where enterprises have replaced 100’s and even 1000’s of company owned Blackberry devices with BYOD iOS and Android devices, all of it with an “employee pays” approach.

This apart, it  is also crucial to respect employee privacy. It is a must for the success of any BYOD program, but more so if a company is opting in for the “employee pays” mode. Not unlike customers’ experiences and expectation revolving around the use of laptops. PC’s and broadband services for work causes, an “employee pay” approach actually works. However, it might face complexities if the enterprise expects to monitor and limit what they can do when they are operating in a “personal” mode. Today the most security-conscious and regulated and government agencies too can broadly assist BYOD and cater to their data loss prevention, security and compliance requirements and at the same time ensure employee privacy.

Today's top notch solution providers have come up with remote desktop access solutions for tablet access as well as BYOD. As opposed to the SSL VPN’s this solution allows the employees to access the virtual and physical office desktops from any remote location while keeping remote devices of the network. Irrespective of whether the user is at home, a meeting, at a client seminar hall or on the site, or on their android, iPhone or iPad device they can operate just as easily as they would if they were in an office having access to all the required documents.

Today employees wish to have tablet access to business applications for their personal devices so that they can balance work and home. Innovative, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) service providers with their innovative solutions offer an effective, meaningful and cost-efficient method to assist tablets in the organization while averting data leakage and offering complete application accessibility.

Other Links

IT Help Desk Software

Mobile Workforce and BYOD, the Newest Trends in the Industry

The influx of new communication devices and solutions in the corporate environment resulted in the workforce becoming increasingly mobile. Take for instance, remote desktop access and SSL VPNs, which has made it possible for the workforce to make the choice with respect to location and time. Similarly, very many technological innovations have made the concept of office obsolete. The concept of 9 to 5 job is outdated, since it is no longer practicable in an environment that is highly competitive and volatile. Today employees do not need an office atmosphere to be productive. It is the era of mobile offices where the employees choose the office location, which can be their home, library, coffee shop, public Internet kiosk, airport lounges so on and so forth.

One of the important advantages of mobile officing is greater productivity. Employees who are part of the mobile workforce are ready to put in extra hours, as mobile officing helps them to maintain a healthy balance between personal and professional lives. Moreover, as employees can take their office wherever they go they succeed in managing their workloads more efficiently. They are productive to such an extent that they are ready to use their own personal devices for work resulting in a new trend termed as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

BYOD or rather BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) as employees use not only their personally owned hardware devices but also the software used on the device for their office work, is rapidly catching on as more and more companies are embracing it. Adopting BYOD is definitely an added advantage for companies that already have a mobile workforce. Let’s see how.

Reduced Expenses

With a mobile workforce, companies are already enjoying reduced capital cost for offices and reduced infrastructure costs. And with BYOD, companies get to enjoy reduced operational and maintenance costs since embracing BYOD have relieved them from the responsibility of providing employees with latest computing equipments. Hence, there is no worry about IT provisioning.

Increased Productivity

Mobile officing increases the productivity of the employees as they put in those hours that would have otherwise spent on commuting. Moreover, there is low absenteeism. And with BYOD, employees get to work with the most modern technological devices that help to get their work done quickly and efficiently. BYOD also helps in managing multi site projects as it facilitates easy collaboration and communication between team members.

The concept of mobile workforce, BYOD was unimaginable 10 years ago. However, today it is the reality.

Other Links

RDP

iPad Remote Desktop