cloud-infrastructure

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery– Why Critical?

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:42:17 +0100

In a technology enabled world, every business is dependent on the digital information available at the fingertips. Further with back up storage servers and devices technology has also paved way for the development of a number of ways and means to enable enterprises safeguard their critical information. Nevertheless, every business faces down times and major unknowns, thus making it vital for the enterprises to have appropriate plans to ensure continuity of business come what may.

With most of the enterprises bitten by the global bug, the global business landscape makes it all the more crucial for the enterprises to call for a business continuity and disaster recovery plan as a strategic initiative. However, statistics from the records of the Underwriters Guide showcases that as early as 2007, there were only around only 6 % of enterprises have bounced back after huge data losses. 43% of the ones hit by disasters never reopened and around 51% closed business within a period of 2 years. Wikipedia defines disaster recovery and business continuity as an organization’s ability to recover from a disaster or any unexpected event and resume normal operations.

The global enterprises in wake of the highly competitive business environment tend to provide their employees, vendors and customers anytime anywhere access to the network. Further, globalization of the enterprises has led to an increase in the expanse of data that are transferred through the corporate networks. With issues of security of information in the form of unauthorized access and data leakage upsurging, most of the global enterprises make use of data centers that offer dedicated servers or cloud computing services. However, it thus becomes imperative that enterprises need to protect themselves from any catastrophic data losses and even in the event of any natural or man made disaster should be able to bounce back within days.

An effective business continuity and disaster recovery plan would therefore be one that will be dependent on the industry and factors such as complexity of the organization in relation to its location, number of employees, supply chain, systems recovery etc. The leading IT service providers however, have designed and developed robust and systematic business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that will not only retrieve lost data swiftly and smoothly, but also protect businesses against unpredictable losses. The disaster recovery plans so designed offers enterprises security against natural disasters, accidental deletion of critical data as well as system failure.

The business continuity and disaster recovery plan from the leaders in the industry sector helps enterprises restore the integrity of their IT infrastructure and data , thus enabling faster resumption of operations. This process also helps enterprises to minimize damages to brand reputation.

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Network penetration testing

Monitor Security Network and Systems with Network Penetration Testing

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 08:52:58 +0100

Every day there is news of a website being hacked and the personal details of hundreds and millions of users being exposed. No enterprise or organization is safe in today’s business set up where data breach incidents are growing every day. Though external threats do exist, according to Forrester, “Most data breach incidents come from inside.” As per the findings of Forrester, of the different data breach incidents reported external attacks only represented approximately 25 percent, lost or stolen devices accounted for 31 percent while inadvertent misuse by an employee accounted for 27 percent. This shows that 58 percent of incidents aren't caused by malicious entities. Besides that, as per the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, a dictionary of publicly known information security vulnerabilities and exposures, there are 60,000+ common vulnerabilities, 900+ common weaknesses, 1014+ common configuration errors, over 150,000 security related events, and a large number of application related errors.

With threats and vulnerabilities manifesting themselves in the least expected place at the least expected hour, enterprises need a solution that provides the ability to continuously monitor and manage their security network and systems without locking them into any upfront investment. This is possible by partnering with managed service providers who provide vulnerability assessment and network penetration testing services. A hybrid solution which blends automated testing with security expert analysis, this solution identifies all possible attack vectors and makes it convenient to run tests over the Internet anywhere, anytime. Here is a look at some of the features and benefits of the vulnerability assessment and network penetration testing (VAPT) services provided by the leading managed services in India.

Covering all WASC, OWASP Top 10, CVE / NVDB / SANS Top 20 vulnerabilities including data-in-motion leakages
Coverage of all attack paths through loophole correlation
Threat Modeling and expert validation along with automated exploitation
Automated Testing
Business logic verification
Online vulnerability management dashboard
Transparent, monthly/quarterly charges
PCI and ISO27001 compliance friendly reporting
Research driven delivery
Comprehensive Testing for Applications and Networks
Identifies the weakest link in the chain
Eliminates false positives and prioritizes real threats
Detection of attack paths missed through manual testing. Facilitates regular and frequent scans
Secures against business logic flaws
Flexible scheduling, online access to reports or through encrypted email
Extremely low TCO
Increased ROI on IT security
Access to zero-day vulnerability research

Thus with vulnerability assessment and network penetration testing, enterprises can feel safe in today’s world of unforeseen traps in the form of vulnerabilities and threats.

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Data centre

Understanding the Benefits of Infrastructure as a Service

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:59:25 +0100

Infrastructure as a Service, one of the three main categories of cloud computing service that allows you to lease and manage computing infrastructure for your business needs. There are a number of enterprises that are transforming their IT infrastructure from multiple independent data centers to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, where shared pools of storage are made available to end-users on a self-service basis. When implemented properly, this strategy introduces the much needed in the data center.

Infrastructure as a service frees an organization to leverage and focus their time and resources in bringing innovations in applications and solutions and is suitable for businesses of any size. It gives smaller organizations access to systems and computing power that might otherwise be beyond their means, and it helps large organizations bring down their capital and IT support costs. IaaS also lowers the financial and logistical barriers for startup businesses to enter the market and push their products and services to customers in a fraction of the standard time frame. The IaaS model allows startups to start small and grow to any size on the pay-as-you-go plan.

Making your enterprise, mobile, elastic and global Iaas, helps you manage your systems from anywhere, you can shrink and grow your computing infrastructure as needed and you can keep your global customers happy with zero downtime. And, since the organization is not tied to a server room or data center, the location becomes irrelevant. You can work from home and your employees can be spread across the globe. Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) helps agencies realize cost savings and efficiencies while modernizing and expanding their IT capabilities without spending capital resources on infrastructure.

Cloud Computing is becoming more widely utilized, making it important for organizations to understand ways to maximize benefits and minimize risks of a move to the cloud. If you’re considering moving to an IaaS solution or you’re part of a startup, look for a service provider that is capable of aligning IT with business goals to achieve more than a simple reduction of costs. The cloud computing provider must offer the depth and breadth of expertise to professionally manage your critical IT infrastructure and help streamline your IT operations using global standards such as ITIL and also provide you the flexibility to manage IT costs and operations tailored to your business requirements. Look for experience, longevity, availability, customer service and customer satisfaction in your quest to migrate to the cloud.

Reasons For Choosing Managed Hosting Services

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:26:24 +0100

Going by its name, Managed Hosting services refers to the hosting plans that are designed by the hosting solution provider. In the web hosting market, today the cost for managed hosting packages vary according to the needs and service offerings by service companies. The generic low end managed hosting plan ideally deploys VPS hosting. On the other hand advanced plans often use an upgraded version of a dedicated hosting plan. Owing to the huge price range, it is crucial to understand the kind of services and features that you can expect from managed hosting services.

So what does it mean by a “fully” managed hosting service? Simply put, when web hosting plans are promoting their managed hosting schemes, they generally make use of the term “fully managed”. This term is generally very relative. One can think that the plan is completely managed whilst the others might feel that the technical assistance they get from the solution provider is not really sufficient. Hence one often assumes that a high priced plan is equivalent to greater technical assistance.

Therefore, in a “fully managed” hosting plan, your website will be managed by expert webmasters on a daily basis. Hence, there is no need to be concerned about any kind of server downtimes and other technical glitches. All you need to do is pay and then get the updates from your solution provider.

Benefits of Managed Hosting Services

Generally, managed hosting is ideal for small and medium sized business firms as it is extremely expensive to hire a webmaster full-time in order to maintain corporate websites. Maintain a business website and having maximum uptime is critical these days, managed hosting is the apt solution for businesses to outsource the technical demands to the professionals from web hosting firms. Though the managed hosting services are more expensive than shared hosting services, end users can avail greater resources and time for maintaining their corporate website.

If your IT is giving troubles and making you incur costly expenditures then you can never progress in this competitive market. Therefore, in order to expand your business seamlessly you need to partner with a web hosting solution provider that makes it easy for you to grow without taking the hassles of setting up and managing the critical mission IT architecture. Some of the services offered by these solution providers are as follows:

· Co-location Services

· Dedicated Hosting

· Bandwidth Services

· Load Balancing

· Advanced Firewall Services

· Disaster Recovery Services

· Cloud Computing Services

The internet datacenters offered by the services providers will cater to every IT infrastructure demand. Furthermore, they also offer 24 x 7 assistance along with other global facilities, such as industry leading SLA’s and an expert team that helps you attain a competitive edge over other market players.

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Outsourcing Datacenter Solutions

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 08:48:53 +0100

Recently, the modern day data center facilities have changed as an essential architecture for hosting computing systems and other associated components, for instance storage systems, telecommunications that generally includes redundant data communications, security devices and environmental controls. In addition to that, fire security and HVAC systems too have assumed significance owing to maintenance and recovery.

The majority of organizations today are witnessed a concern of whether to outsource of build data center facilities. Whatever needs to be the decision, it is essential to assess and weigh from the perspective of the core strengths that are required to increase performance and enterprise delivery through a sustained focus on the core value practices. Recently, several insignificant aspects have clouded their perspective. The primary difference is that when a practice is business critical, it automatically gets maximum attention and focus.

Hence, the focus and time of an IT group preferably needs to be on the practices and activities that provide strategic benefits to an enterprise and allow resources to be focused only on certain core areas. Therefore, the decision to outsource data center solutions should be evaluated carefully from a strategic point of view. In addition to that, one must keep in mind other business perspectives as well. Aspects for instance facility requirement estimations and budget considerations too need to be considered equally.

Whilst on this, it is essential that companies also assess their present IT architecture management services as well. It is important to understand if they are enabling the company or expand or are restricting it with costly maintenance options and other hassles such as complaining engineers and shrinking storage space. If the answer is yes, then the company certainly requires efficient data center solutions that allows the IT team to concentrate on expansion.

Service providers specializing in cloud computing services today have come up with efficient datacenter solutions that include the following services:-

· Co-location services

· Dedicated hosting services

· Bandwidth services

· Load balancing services

· Disaster recovery services

· Advanced firewall services

Therefore, in terms of expansion there is always a better and smarter route map. When you join hands with an experienced service provider you can be free from the hassles of setting up and managing the mission critical IT architecture. Effective data center solutions fulfills all IT requirements from shared hosting services, dedicated hosting, back up solutions, firewall recovery and many more. Furthermore there is 24x7 assistance with advanced facilities, industry leading SLA’s and an experienced team that enables you to attain a competitive edge.

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Effective Shared Hosting Solutions Meet All IT Infrastructure Requirements

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:18:00 +0100

Your IT infrastructure needs to help you grow and not weigh your business your down with expensive maintenance requirements.With the shrinking storage space, the squeaking overloaded servers, the complaining engineers, there is a greater need to be geared up to meet today's highly competitive environment. When small businesses decide to embark on an Internet presence for the first time, one of the first decisions they have to make is what type of web hosting solution to go for. Every owner of the company whether big or small, always want excellent services at cost effective rates, and shared hosting can prove to be very beneficial. Shared hosting can be beneficial to a variety of different users who need access to hosting that is easy to use and fits well within their budget constraints. There are wide options of hosting services in the market.

Shared hosting specially for small business enterprises, are considered the best affordable plan available in the market. While you may not necessarily fit well within a shared hosting environment there is a reason shared hosting is the most popular. It is the most affordable option available for paid hosting solutions. Most individuals, small businesses, medium sized businesses and moderately trafficked web sites will thrive in a shared hosting environment.

The truth about shared web hosting services is that they are the most popular hosting services out there, but if you don't get one of the best companies for your hosting, you will struggle. There are many companies that offer shared hosting and you will not struggle to find a package that will work for you. A common mistake that many small hosting companies looking for web hosting services tend to make is purchasing hosting that they need or which is not sufficient for their requirements.

With shared hosting solutions, companies do not have to worry about managing the technicality of the server. The benefits of Shared hosting services ensure that enterprises get plenty of time to concentrate on their business, and relegate any issues related to hosting services to the hosting service provider. The service provider must provide an adequate number of site building tools to ensure that you can adequately construct your website at the minimum possible extra expense, and must also provide complete technical support.

Although shared hosting services are the most obvious choice businesses, it is imperative to conduct a complete research to find out which hosting plan best suits your business. Choosing the right web hosting package for your business is a task that needs research and planning.

Ensure that the solution you choose meets all your business needs and successfully fulfill your data center’s IT infrastructure requirements.

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Cloud Computing in India

Changing Trends In Cloud Computing Services

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 09:59:05 +0100

For few the “Cloud” is just another modern day technological craze. Similarly, for many enterprises cloud computing is the way out of their IT woes. In the recent past cloud computing has taken a center stage in the technology landscape. It has been gaining momentum and its growth over the past few years have been very impressive.

The modern day cloud computing providers have been offering new and better scopes where business can go beyond cost savings and can also set up their own applications on the cloud. The year 2011, had witnessed business houses and other enterprises gradually shifting to the cloud based infrastructure and this pragmatic adoption continued all through 2012 as well. It has been estimated that cloud computing will end up being the key generator for optimizing data center expenditures and more consumers would resort to the Cloud as a quicker and cheaper option to migrate to an “IT enabled” ecosystem. Within the enterprise landscape Cloud Computing is estimated to evolve further as organizations and even the government will resort to cloud computing for efficient data management and optimum expenses.

Many organizations are of opinion that empowering an individual and having a mobile workforce is the way to attain a great synergy in providing mobility that will witness convergence with cloud computing in the forthcoming years. Today organizations and governments are continuing to look for services that help to leverage the power of the cloud simultaneously making sure that they cater to the required levels of performance, security and accessibility.

Companies specializing in Cloud computing services today provide online provisioning and management and can offer the real power of the cloud at your fingertips. With regards to the services, these companies are positioned uniquely and some are unmatched in the domain of cloud infrastructure service space. The companies have experience in offering robustness’ of cloud infrastructures, managed services, provides the total IT infrastructure cloud. Their Turnkey IT Operations simplifies the present day architecture for several enterprises and offer a total management of applications and infrastructure effortlessly.

Cloud computing providers have strengthened their base in India over the past few years. If you have any query or requirement, then these companies initially offer you a “request-information” form to get started and then you can choose a plan as your requirement. The services are offered mostly as IaaS i.e. Infrastructure as a Service. There are Service Level Agreements too that make sure that consumers can depend on the Cloud IT architecture with the same confidence and assurance that they have on any physical IT architecture.

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Data Centers in India

Infrastructure as a Service- Building a Competent Enterprise

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:14:20 +0100

The technological innovations over the years has facilitated wide range of IT infrastructure to be deployed in the new age enterprises. Nevertheless, a complex IT infrastructure along with security challenges will pull down the operational performance levels of the enterprises. Further with the growth of e-commerce the electronic transfer of digital data has gained momentum across both b2b and b2c market.

With the expansion of enterprises world-wide, the distant and mobile workforce is allowed remote desktop access. However, the decision making functions, separate infrastructure and security issues cause delays in service delivery. The need for constant upgrading of infrastructure and security issues have paved way for the wide use of exclusive data centers deployed by the service providers. Most of the small and medium business enterprises depend on the services of the data centers. The advent of cloud computing services and the growing popularity of IT based services, has brought in developments leading to data centers and service providers offering Infrastructure as a Service.

Infrastructure as a service ( IaaS), one of the features of cloud computing services can be termed as a provision model, which an enterprise outsource and is used for assisting operations, such as hardware, servers, storage and other networking components. This results in IT services that can easily be customized to the ever-changing business needs. With the infrastructure not residing on the premises, there are no hindrances to the decision to adopt new technology. Further as IT infrastructure, hardware, facilities, and administration being traditionally the domain of IT departments, infrastructure as a service takes these components off site, and unifies them into a scalable package manageable through one interface.

By introducing such innovative infrastructure-as-a-service solutions and applications, the service providers assists the client enterprises to host their mission critical applications and also help to streamline and deploy the IT infrastructure in an organized way. The characteristics that distinguish the IaaS include dynamic scaling, Internet connectivity, desktop virtualization, mechanization of administrative tasks along with billing model and utility computing services. Besides these the enterprises that avail these services accrues advantages such as

* Bringing predictability to IT expenses

* 20-30% minimization in cost of IT operations

* IT expenses being directly associated to Infrastructure rather than people

The infrastructure as a service solutions assist enterprises in establishing comprehensive cloud ecosystem and also help to boost up the business. Further the ease and versatility in operations and business processes facilitates maintaining costs at a fixed level and saves the organization from incurring any unnecessary costs for hardware or software upgrading. For the small and medium business enterprises to the outsourcing infrastructure as a service solution from leading data center service providers has worked out to be very beneficial.

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Datacenter- Streamlining Business Operations

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:19:07 +0100

The technological growth over the years has paved way for the growth of e-commerce. Enterprises today communicates digitally through the electronic transfer of critical data across the wide corporate networks. Further with enterprises expanding globally, there is an vast increase in the amount of data transferred and stored. For a continuous and the smooth functioning of the digital data transfers and storage, the enterprises need to be well equipped with world class IT infrastructure.

The growth of e-commerce and the dot-com bubble challenged the enterprises to faster internet connectivity and non-stop operation. The modern day enterprises in their attempt to cater for large data storage and retrieval had to install multiple servers and larger storage devices in exclusive locations or housed as separate units. Referred to as data center, Wikipedia defines this as "a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems including redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices".

Data centers are developed with aim to streamline the business operations, reduce complexity, improve performance and reliability leading to end-user satisfaction. Further with technological innovations, today's data centers are equipped to provide cloud computing services. However, for the small and medium enterprises installing such vast infrastructure is not a viable option. To avail world-class facilities the SME's depended on the internet data centers developed by the large conglomerates or service providers. For a smooth and effective data management, the data center service providers offer shared hosting services. This enables enterprises to place their data in the data center while focusing on other critical factors of the business.

With the aggressive competition and the technological growth, there has been a demand for world-class data centers. Leading service providers have designed and developed internet data centers which offers enterprises benefits such as :

· Cost effectiveness -as enterprises need not invest in expensive infrastructure, its upgrading and maintenance.

· Reliable Uptime - The use of air conditioning systems, UPS, power generators network routers, ensure that there is no hindrance.

· Security - Build to withstand natural disasters and monitored 24/7 ensures safety of the data stored and transferred.

· Business Continuity- with the critical business data and corporate information all housed separately and accessed through secure networks, ensures continuity of business even in face of any calamity

Other services offered by the data center service providers include server co-location Service, application hosting services, system administration and networking. By using the services, enterprises need not spend the time and money for server upgrading but can focus on the core business issues.

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Business continuity disaster recovery

Why Should Companies Invest In Collocation Services?

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 08:43:17 +0100

In today’s high evolving business platform, technology plays a crucial role. It is therefore, natural that enterprises would want to put their best in order to stay ahead of competitors. Operational concerns such as expenses, restricted resources and turn around time puts several hindrances in the path of increased IT operations. Though there is a requirement for companies to attain complete control on each single aspect of their business resources, it might not always be possible for companies to incur heavy investments in legacy management and not loosing valuable time to concentrate on the core aspects of the business.

Therefore, server colocation is an obvious solution that organizations resort to as it offers them with greater IT elasticity and agility. Apart from having total control over business resources and vital information, enterprises also attain scalable and neutral carrier architecture in various configurations in the data center. Thus colocation servers are the actual web servers that are stored in the datacenter of any web hosting organizations.

It has been observed that huge corporate houses and MNC’s with a large global network require controlled and reliable web based transaction. Such enterprises opt in for server configuration from the colocation service providers as per their business requirements. These servers cannot be managed round the clock; hence the servers are aptly designed to offer accessibility of data, security and business continuity disaster recovery plans for large scale companies. Today eminent companies specializing in colocation services in India offer a complete range of space options from cages to racks, with adequate power and bandwidth for web hosting applications. Some of the collocation service options include the following:

Rack space Features
· Per-server (U-wise) collocation service
· Quarter Rack
· Half Rack
· Full Racks
· Cage

Rack space Benefits
· Highest Uptime, i.e. 99.99% uptime SLA
· Custom-designed racks in per-device increments
· Highest levels of Security
· Robust Connectivity and carrier neutral data center

Monitoring
· URL and network monitoring
· MRTG, for online bandwidth utilization
· Web statistics and reports

Advanced Monitoring (optional)
· CPU Memory and file area utilization
· Process restarts
· Threshold alarms

Support
· Server reboots
· Business day advanced assistance
· 24x7 high-end support

With an advanced and efficient colocation services in India, you can have complete control that allows you to have your own server, reliable network, highest uptimes, improved safety and global support round the clock.

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Infrastructure as a Service

Dedicated Hosting India