Data Backup
Data Backup will remain a very necessary piece of protecting your ability to recover from a system failure. Data restoration is something that many organizations miss in assessing their ability to recover from a disaster. For zero productivity loss Business Continuity solutions, data replication becomes the focus.
As you move some of your computing services to a public Cloud service, backing up data generated in the cloud is another challenge. MK7 can help you modernize your back-up processes to allow for back-up of on-premises data, cloud generated data, and backing up on-premises data to the cloud.
Disaster Recovery
IT Disaster Recovery has traditionally described the ability to bring some portion of your workforce on-line with some portion of your typical IT resources. Terms like RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) are key measurements of what level of disaster recovery is acceptable.
Virtual Apps and Desktops changes the game with disaster recovery. Properly architected, your RPO can be nearly moments ago and the RTO can be minutes. This is what we describe as a modern IT environment.
Data Management
There are many aspects to Data Management including dealing with data sprawl, data deduplication, and data storage. MK7 can help you with improving your data management via software-defined storage solutions that allow for data movement across heterogenous storage devices to better utilize your storage infrastructure, but that's a different area of data management.
For Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery, data management has traditionally referred to your ability to quickly restore systems after some sort of system outage. The faster you can restore the applications and data, the lower the impact of the disruption.
We look at data management in a Business Continuity sense as efficient data replication to support multiple datacenters, either on-premises or cloud based, or all of the above in a hybrid multi-cloud architecture. With data replication, zero productivity loss “business as usual” can be achieved.
Data Connectivity
The concept of data connectivity is an essential puzzle piece in a high-performance virtual apps and desktops environment. As you architect your virtual solution, make sure that you're able to place your data stores as close to the virtual application or virtual desktop host as possible, with high-speed connectivity between the virtual host and the data store.
Poorly designed virtual environments, with bad placement of data stores, will severely degrade your overall system performance. This is especially important for cloud hosted VDI environments.
MK7 can help you avoid mistakes when it comes to architecting your virtual environment. We have several data connectivity options for your consideration, whether your solution will live on-premises, in any cloud, or in a hybrid environment.
Secure Remote Access
When you allow a portion of your workforce to access your IT environment remotely, this introduces inherent security risks that must be recognized and addressed. Your Secure Remote Access should not be a VPN connection! Rather, a specialized reverse proxy connection that allows your workers to access only the portions of your internal network that are needed to do their work is what you should be striving for.
If you're working with a single datacenter with virtual apps/desktops being hosted, the secure remote access is rather simple. When you decide to add your second, third (or more) sites to the architecture, your remote access solution should support advanced capabilities such as authenticating to the first responding site. This architecture is key to allowing for zero productivity loss in the case of one of your sites going down.
Virtual Apps and Desktops
The foundation of a modern Business Continuity solution is the adoption of virtual apps and desktops. The ability to access centrally managed apps/desktops from anywhere is essential. If you're already using virtual apps/desktops, then you're ahead of the game. Step two involves adding a second datacenter to replicate the centralized apps/desktops infrastructure, either in an active-active set-up, or as a burstable resource that can be instantly brought on-line. Data management is a critical piece to this puzzle.
