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

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.

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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.

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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.

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Business Continuity Planning

Improve Network Performance with Effective Load Balancing Appliances

With the increase in the size of an enterprise, there is an increase in the strain on the databases, network servers, and other crucial areas. Especially effective for organizations that use multiple data centers and server farms, load balancing solutions monitor the workload of servers and help to direct users.

With the increase in the size of an enterprise, there is an increase in the strain on the databases, network servers, and other crucial areas. Especially effective for organizations that use multiple data centers and server farms, load balancing solutions monitor the workload of servers and help to direct users. It addresses traffic spikes that can compromise the functionality, security, and capability of your network. By assuring that the resources are not overloaded, load balancing appliances enable a network to increase its consistency and performance. They are essential to maintain a standard process of network performance.

To maintain a standard method for network performance, it is important to invest in an active load balancing solution. This ensures that the resources and requests are distributed efficiently through the servers that are accessible. Advanced load balancing appliances utilizes technology that is effectively executed with every network. Besides meeting the fundamental requirements, these devices aid in enhancing the performance and consistency. Most large enterprises often use specifically built hardware-based load balancers, while smaller organizations usually get the best out of virtual load balancers.

To allocate the necessary tasks, load balancers go through a series of steps. Most load balancing methods vary greatly between different networks and organizations depending on the needs of the organization and the equipment available to perform the task. On the basis of the hardware and organizational needs, it is essential to implement and customize these solutions with a reputable service provider. As each network faces different challenges and works within different constraints, link load balancers help in astutely analyzing the wide area connections and accordingly allocate bandwidth, for business-critical applications.

A majority of businesses rely on internet sites to run optimally 24/7, and the responsibility lies with the IT staff to provide 100 percent operational-ready solutions. In order to enhance business productivity and reduce the risk of Internet and improve network performance, many enterprises are adapting intelligent load balancers to their networks. 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 availability and scalability.

Organizations thus need to make use of effective server load balancing appliances which would enhance application performance and ensure returns on investment. Leading service providers with expertise in Application Delivery Networking have designed and developed innovative load balancing appliances that helps to monitor the data center devices and IP data services as well.

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Business Continuity Planning

Reasons To Invest In Innovative Load Balancers

If you have been thinking about opting in for load balancing solutions, then apart from its features and advantages it is essential to have an in-depth understanding about the load balancing process itself and the it can be used for web security. Simply put, load balancing the process of evenly disseminating the work amongst various computers. The procedure has the following benefits:

•  Bringing down the load on individual systems
•  Bringing down the response time
•  Increasing the network utilization
•  Helps to enhance reliability 
•  Enables scaling
•  Improves user satisfaction 

An innovative load balancers helps end users and organizations in maintaining a systematic practice of routing the incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic to either of the various servers for managing access to websites. It also comprises traffic scanning for malware, phishing, spyware and other unessential content. Load balancers helps to resolve the following concerns:

• Helps in more seat addition i.e. horizontal scalability
• Helps in balancing the load of one or more local servers i.e. Server Load Balancing or SLB
• Helps in balancing the load across globally-distributed servers i.e. Global Server Load Balancing or GSLB
• Helps to balance across multiple security devices i.e. Firewall Load Balancing
• Fault tolerance
• High accessibility

Top notch service providers of application delivery controllers programs and solution have come up with advanced load balancers that help the end users to leverage parallel multi-core processing to be able to cost-effectively generate industry leading functionality upon a rich application acceleration and load balancing feature suited for unparalleled overall ownership value. Benefits of load balancing appliances are:

* There are global and local server load balancing along with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime as well as data center scalability

* There is advanced application traffic management for optimized delivery of business crucial applications and other IP services

* There is the offloading of application and Web servers for high efficiency, capacity as well as return on investment

* There is integrated TCP connection multiplexing, high-speed HTTP processing, compression and caching for a 5X improvement in application functionality

* SSL acceleration for safeguarding data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and enhancing application performance

* There are reverse-proxy infrastructure with an advanced packet-inspection firewall for securing applications without influencing the performance

* There are application-specific criteria and configuration guidelines for quick implementation of optimized configurations

Advanced load balancing appliances help to enhance the overall application performance and speeds up the return-on-investment (ROI) for small and large scale enterprises.

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RDP

Server Uptime With ADC Solutions

Regardless of the fact, whether an organization has an e-commerce web portal or offers services that are based on the information offered through optimal application performance, web applications is essential for partners, employees and consumers. However, as soon as the user traffic spikes and the servers gets bogged down by compute-intensive SSL transactions, memory overloads, huge data file requests and hackers, third party intruders trying to flood servers, the application and site functionality can either slow, grind or altogether crash down. Similarly, when end users are not able to access an enterprise application or are experiencing network downtime, experiencing long waits it can literally have a detrimental impact on the business. 

Though it appears to be way simpler to throw extra hardware at the concern, this however is not the apt and suggested way when the traffic is not directed properly to the best performing resource. At the same time, it is neither economical for businesses. Hence, there remains a question as to how IT managers ensure application and web uptime and speed to attain optimal performance out of a data center device, keeping the expenses less. The expense of guaranteeing high web application architecture accessibility, speed, secure operations and performance speed can be significantly minimized with the help of application delivery controllers (ADC) and server load balancers.  

Application delivery controllers help in monitoring heavy traffic loads on engaging servers and re-route the data to the servers by averting crashes and keeps the traffic flowing. Modern ADC solutions are equipped to offer performance along with scalability and are aligned with the demands of cloud and mobile computing. Furthermore, they have the agility to extract maximum ROI and efficiency from the application architecture. 

Eminent solution providers of application delivery controllers have come up with solutions that address challenges witnessed by organizations in various areas of cloud service delivery and application delivery. These solutions are available to end users as “purpose-built” appliances or in the form of software engineered for virtual platforms. These devices merge scalability with transformative features at industry leading price points, offer unparalleled value along with ROI as opposed to alternative solutions. 

Thus we see that deploying in a high-end ADC solution can help organizations in efficient traffic management and help to optimize application and web performance that gives them a competitive edge over others. Furthermore, the company can also decipher cost-efficient and creative ways for optimum speed and server uptime. 

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Business Continuity Planning