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.

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BYOD

Managing Risks with Business Continuity Planning

Every business enterprise is created with the sole aim of gaining profits from the business. However, this legal entity is a risky affair and is prone to disruptions. Business disruptions can come in from various sources including natural ones. In the technology driven world today with radical environmental changes, the risk to the continuity of business is even more. The unplanned events may leave lasting impressions on both small and medium enterprises as well as global organizations. The brave heart entrepreneur and business enterprise thus needs to be always prepared to face the disruptions and keeps options ready to ensure business continuity come what may.

Today, as part of   smart business operations, enterprises opt to have in place strategies for business continuity as part of operations management.  The business continuity planning (BCP) is meant to identify an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and prepare the assets to provide effective prevention and recovery mechanism for the organization, while maintaining a competitive advantage. Wikipedia defines the business continuity plan as a road map for continuing operations under adverse conditions irrespective of this being natural or man-made.

For enterprise that are totally technology dependent any small system errors and bug in the complex programs can bring their entire business to a standstill.  Thus the business continuity strategy works to provide a framework for resilience building and tends to protect the interest of key stakeholders. Traditionally what the business continuity plans looked at is methods to protect the business in face of physical damages to equipment, products and disruption of services. However, with the globalized business world so driven by technology, even the absence of the key staff can cause equivalent effects on the business.

Today the business continuity planning strategies should be one that would help global enterprises face emergency situations without loss of productivity and profit. The technological innovations have paved way for new age enterprises to provide remote desktop  access to their distantly located employees and key personnel. Such remote access solution is best if it can facilitate enterprises with:
 

• Anytime, anywhere access for employees to familiar workstation  and business critical resources

• Real-time and secure access gateways to the corporate network and critical data  for the partners and vendors

• Performance consistency for the entire workforce

• Automated VPN provisioning

• Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

Enterprises make use of remote access and BYOD solutions to increases the mobility of the workforce and ensure business continuity. But along with the increased mobility they also need to cater for cost-efficient performance of the corporate network infrastructure. Load balancers play a major role in disseminating process requests of the workforce across the wide networks irrespective of the device and location.  The modern day innovative load balancers help enterprises to leverage on the multi-core processing and ensure a scalable business continuity planning through cost-efficient performance. 

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Server Load Balancing

Tablet Access

Reaping The Benefits Of WAN Optimization Controllers

Though ensuring acceptable and standard application delivery has always been a crucial aspect, historically it was never a top priority for IT enterprises. It underwent a change many years back when the IT organizations started to focus in a dedicated manner on application delivery on a huge part of responding to the performance challenges related to supporting applications that were in turn delay sensitive and supporting huge file transfers between branch offices and headquarters. A major medium through which IT enterprises were responding to these performance challenges was by implementing WAN optimization controllers.

 

In most cases, WAN optimization controllers were deployed as a “stand-alone” hardware-based device. Owing to the mass adoption of Virtualization, IT enterprises today are witnessing a new kind of application delivery challenges. For instance, successful desktop Virtualization is a crucial factor that will compel IT enterprises to support a significant increase in delay sensitive WAN traffic. In order to aid this situation service providers specializing in RDP remote access have introduced WAN optimization controllers with multiple features, that helps in:

 

* Minimizing the remote application response times by up to 95%

* Minimizing the network bandwidth utilization by up to 95%

* Is purpose-built to bring down the impact of network congestion, latency and packet loss that combines to significantly slow end-user response times

* The Application-specific WAN optimization blueprints and specific protocol optimization helps in reducing redundant, chatty protocol traffic

* Stream-based differencing averts transmission of content already in the local data store and the compression techniques minimizes the amount of data on the wire

* Is available in hardware and virtual appliance form factors, that helps to achieve ROI within a less time frame

* Supports 50% more speeded up connections

* The virtual appliances make use of minimal system resource, can stay with other applications and scale linearly with the addition of CPU cores, memory and disks

* Helps in easier management of virtual and physical deployment, transparent addressing, statistical performance dashboard and auto discovery

* Offers centralized provisioning and management by incorporating with Virtualization management systems

 

Furthermore, advanced WAN optimization controllers make use of a combination of application acceleration, packet compression, network acceleration, protocol optimization and caching to speed up the applications and minimize the expense of delivering applications across wide area networks.

 

Other Links

Server Load Balancing

Application Delivery Controllers

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.


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Application Delivery Controllers
RDP

 

Load Balancers And Their Role in Global Environment

A technological innovation over the period has facilitated the business enterprises with digital workspaces. The corporate offices work through highly networked environment and use large number of software applications for the day-to-day operational requirements. Further with globalization, these enterprises have also expanded globally with distantly located regions. However, real-time connectivity between all the far-off offices and remotely working project teams are maintained with the help of dedicated servers.

The technological enhancements further made it possible for the offshore teams, outsourced vendors and remote workforce to access the corporate network irrespective of the distance and device. Such anytime anywhere access to the various applications, files and folders from the office workstation and business critical data and information taxes the servers and the network when loaded with increasing demands. Added to this the BYOD apps available only increases the load on the servers and clogging of the network leading to reduced speed and performance. Under such circumstances, load balancers help the enterprises in easing out the situations.

Load balancers are generally used in heavy traffic laden computer networks like the Internet and corporate networks of multinational companies. Defined as a computer networking methodology load balancing helps to distribute the workload across multiple resources to achieve optimal utilization with maximum throughput, and minimum response time. , and avoid overload. Dedicated hardware, software and servers carry on these functions. The software program helps to track the front-end client’s access services and forwards requests to the back-end servers to enhance website performance as well as reduce the burden of a particular server.  

Further with most of the global enterprises having distantly located project teams working either in offshore locations or forms a part of the mobile workforce, providing them with remote desktop access and to the corporate data becomes very important. Networks of large corporate houses or small and medium enterprises or data centers with vast amount of data and application storage and transfer resort to use of load balancers.

For the new age enterprises load balancers  offers essential benefits such as:

●  Minimized load on individual systems with reduced response time
●  Maximum network utilization
●  It enhances reliability and improves user satisfaction.

However, with issues relating to web securities, the load balancers intelligently routes the hypertext transfer protocol traffic to servers which are involved in controlling access to websites. Besides these also scan the traffic for any spyware, phishing attacks and malicious components entering the network thus ensuring an efficient system of business continuity planning. 

Other Links

Server Load Balancing

SSL VPNs

Optimize Data Transfer Efficiency with WAN Optimization Controllers

WAN Optimization Controllers are appliances that optimize data-transfer efficiencies across a wide area network (WAN). It is a collection of techniques that optimize bandwidth to improve the end user's experience. WAN optimization controllers use a combination of techniques such as compression, latency optimization, forward error correction, caching / proxy, deduplication, traffic shaping, application acceleration, network acceleration equalizing, protocol spoofing, connection limits, simple rate limits to accelerate applications and reduce the cost of delivering applications over wide area networks.

Normally enterprise users experience great performance when using applications and services over a LAN. However, they face problems when accessing remotely the same applications and services over the WAN. Accessing applications across a WAN introduces network congestion, latency, and packet loss that can dramatically slow remote end user response time. Many IT organizations increase their spending by adding more network bandwidth to address these issues, only to find that poor application response time over the WAN has not changed. Moreover, with the addition of Virtualization, many enterprises are consolidating servers into corporate data centers. However, the consolidation of applications out of the branches and into the data center puts even more strain on the corporate WAN. In some cases, this degrades end user response time even further. That is where WAN or network optimization appliances come useful. The following are some of the benefits of using the best of breed WAN optimization controllers.

* Reduces remote application response times by up to 95%

* Reduces network bandwidth utilization by up to 95%

* Purpose-built to reduce the impact of network congestion, latency and packet loss which combine to dramatically slow end-user response times

* Application-specific WAN optimization blueprints and specific protocol optimization eliminates redundant, chatty protocol traffic

* Stream-based differencing avoids transmission of content already in the local data store, while compression techniques reduce the amount of data on the wire

* Window resizing, persistent connections and small packet aggregation dramatically improve overall TCP performance

* Supports 50% more accelerated connections as compared to alternative appliances

* Virtual appliances use minimal system resources, can reside with other applications and scale linearly with the addition of CPU cores, memory and disks

* Enables easier management of virtual and physical deployment, transparent addressing, statistical performance dashboard and auto discovery

* Provides centralized provisioning and management through integration with Virtualization management systems

Thus by deploying WAN optimization controllers, enterprises can ensure a premium application experience for all users and achieve rapid ROI by lowering overall bandwidth costs.

Other Links

Tablet Access

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