When determining a budget for your company’s Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, you must consider the impacts of infrastructure downtime. Understanding the costs associated with productivity loss, customer satisfaction concerns, employee morale, potential revenue loss and the possibility of losing clients will allow you to set a budget that protects your business.

Determining the Cost of Downtime

The most accurate way to determine the cost of downtime is to determine how many hours your company experienced downtime in a set period of time. Once you have collected the total hours of downtime, consider the number of offices and the number of employees you have, along with the average hourly salary. This will allow you to calculate the hourly cost of disruptions to business operations.

It’s imperative to consider all three factors – number of offices; number of employees, and average hourly salary – when determining the cost of downtime. An interruption to business continuity affects employees within your entire organization as they will be unable to access vital business applications which will contribute to a sizeable loss to productivity.

Determine Your Company’s Forbearance to Data Loss

The next step is to analyze your business’ compliance requirements and to compare them with the downtime tolerances as stated by the law. If your industry is in the healthcare, financial, legal or government industries, you will need to look through the regulatory requirements. HIPA and PIPEDA have implemented specific guidelines with regards to how company data must be stored and made available, and it is imperative to comply with these requirements to avoid the risk of legal complications.

Your company compliance policies on digital data protection will also help you understand your organization’s forbearance to data loss. These policies often state what data retention policies must be in place, and are key to protecting your company’s valuable information.

Additionally, all laws regarding file access controls, sharing controls and retention settings should be clearly defined in your compliance policies.

Determine Your Company’s Recovery Goals

Using the information collected from the two previous steps, determine recovery objectives that can be executed in the event of a disaster. These objectives will help you determine the necessary recovery procedures and timeframes to minimize downtime.

It’s crucial that your disaster recovery plan includes a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO).  The RTO details the maximum time allotted to recover systems after a disaster event occurs, whereas the RPO pertains to the maximum permitted age of the data when recovering your operative system, or the maximum data loss recorded by time.

Importance of a Quality Disaster Recovery Plan

With a superior disaster recovery plan put in place, your company will experience minimal losses in revenue and productivity in the case of a disaster event occurring. The budget you allocate to your plan must be based on your company’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to ensure an optimal plan of action to minimizing the impacts of downtime, and the risk of legal and financial issues.

To learn more about determining the risks associated with your IT infrastructure crashing and how to create a powerful disaster recovery plan, speak with a Zycom specialist today. Zycom offers premium services that enable your business to focus on key competencies, while our experts focus on ensuring a smooth transition of your data to the cloud.

Adapting to the digital age is imperative to the success of any business. “The cloud”, as the tech industry as named it, refers to software and services that run on the internet as opposed to locally on a computer. It’s advanced technology that improves IT maintenance, performance, scalability, and efficiency, while also reducing IT costs. However, switching your business over to the cloud isn’t as simple as signing into your web browser. First, there are some steps to take to prepare your IT infrastructure for this digital transformation.

Assessing Your Business

Before migrating to the cloud, you must ensure your IT infrastructure is properly prepared for the migration to avoid any delays or discrepancies during the migration process. This includes assessing your environment and business needs to determine what the best cloud solution provider is for your business.

There are private cloud solutions, public and hybrid, all of which offer unique benefits, usability and security. Private clouds are often the premium option for businesses as they offer superior security and data storing capabilities.

Now, in terms of storage space, the cloud is highly recognized for its scalability, offering different options based on your specific needs. Though, it all starts with first, assessing your business and determining how you’ll be using the cloud.

Different Cloud Uses and Benefits

Migrating your business over to the cloud will grant you with a plethora of advantages. Not only is the cloud economic and convenience, but it can also improve business operations, productivity, and security. Depending on the cloud solution provider you choose, you’ll also receive additional benefits.

Big Data Analytics

Collecting data is a key component of many business’ success. Companies such as Facebook and Amazon rely on collective massive amounts of data to determine valuable information on their customers. You can do the similar with the cloud, making it easier to make data-based decisions regarding crucial components to your success, such as marketing and sales.

Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN)

SD-WAN clouds integrate with your current network to enhance business operations and connectivity, while also addressing major issues you may experience without a cloud solution.

Virtual Desktops (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

VDI and DaaS cloud solutions are particularly beneficial for workplaces where employees bring their own devices, whether it’s a laptop, tablet or smartphone. This cloud solution provider makes it easy to standardize security and the type of content that can be accessed on each device.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

With IaaS, you can forgo major expenses associated with building and maintaining infrastructures. With this cloud use, you’re able to host data in a cloud solution provider’s data center.

Email

Something as simple as emails can be migrated over to the cloud, freeing up valuable space on your devices to increase speed, performance and flexibility. With an email cloud solution provider, important data can be shared with the entire team, sans an abundance of forwarded emails.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is one of the core cloud uses, as disaster recovery is imperative to every business. Having the ability to quickly recover data and get your business back up and running can reduce downtime in the event of a disaster.

Backup as a Service (BaaS)

It’s recommended that every business should invest in the 3-2-1 rule – having multiple copies of your data on two types of media and 1 offsite cloud solution. BaaS solutions provide a safe and secure backup of your data, enabling quick restoration in the event of a disaster.

Private Cloud, Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud

Cloud solution providers offer data hosting on three types of environments –  a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud. Understanding the differences between the three types of clouds is imperative to finding the right cloud solution provider for your business.

As a quick reference, a public cloud solution provider makes data available to the public through the Internet, such as Google Docs. Private cloud solutions are run on a private internal network or internet, and hybrid cloud solutions are a combination of the two.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS technology is a powerful tool for storing, organizing and maintaining data. The automation tools and customer relationship management services that come with SaaS can improve your business’ efficiency.

Finding the Best Cloud Solution Provider

Determining which cloud solution provider is best for your business depends on a variety of factors. In addition to going over the different cloud uses mentioned previously, some things to consider include:

• Security
• Compliance
• Manageability
• Service Levels
• Costs
• Platform/mobile compatibility
• Scalability
• Container capabilities

Without proper preparation, migrating to the cloud could negatively affect performance and efficiency. Contact Zycom Technology today for more information on the process of cloud migration and how to utilize this advanced technology to further your business.

As technology advances, it’s imperative that your digital infrastructure and business operations follow in suit.  Implementing Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a realistic option for all organizations interested in improving their IT datacenter while also digitalizing and preparing their business for future technology.

Preparing to Migrate

If you are considering moving to HCI, baselining your current infrastructure against best practices to maximize success for migration to your new environment is key.  Understanding what components of your current software and driver stacks will move with your business workloads to HCI are important.  Are there opportunities to right size or optimize existing applications, databases and operating environments to leverage HCI best practices?

You have HCI but are you supportable?

Whilst, HCI offers a simplified enterprise cloud infrastructure that collapses data center computing, storage, management and networking, simplicity can lead to complexity.  HCI solutions, such as Nutanix, automate much of the previously complex data center management tasks into 1-click operations.  For automation to flourish there are dependencies between your commoditized hardware and drivers and hypervisor and software that must be taken into account.  In a landscape of automation, the finer details of compatibility and supportability can be easily overlooked.

If you are like most of our customers, you are running and supporting your business and the law of Murphy did not allow you to keep up on everything HCI once installed.  Your HCI just works, but time has passed since you last updated your HCI firmware, software or hypervisor.  Are you still in a vendor supported operational state?  Are there new features that will enhance your HCI solution?  Are you multiple versions behind and need to catch up?

Enter the HCI Health Check to get you baselined and back on track with a plan.

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How a Healthy HCI Can Improve Infrastructure

Before upgrading your data center with HCI software, it’s crucial to execute a health check to make sure everything is aligned properly for success.  What features will enhance your virtual workloads and is there any impact during the process?  Known issues may pop up from time to time that you may or may not have experienced, but it’s always better to be cautious.

Getting current with compatible versions will give you peace of mind before launching automated upgrades, knowing that your business’ most valuable data is capable and safe.

Zycom HCI Health Check Services

Zycom offers HCI health checks that can help your organization prepare your HCI solution stack for upgrades. The service identifies any gaps and areas that need improvements and provides you with recommendations to ensure optimal performance.

Here are some things you’ll want to determine in the meantime before making any changes:

• Which version of VDI broker is supported with your version of hypervisor?
• Is your hypervisor supported by an HCI solution?
• If so, which version of HCI solution is compatible with your hypervisor?
• Which hardware firmware is supported for your type of HCI solution?
• Which network drivers are supported for your HCI solution?

Zycom will perform a baseline review and health check service of the major components of the hyper-converged solution based on the industry’s best practices. This ensures your software is ready to upgrade to HCI in order to maximize performance and increase agility in your business.

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What is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure?

In order to understand the benefits of a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), you must first understand how it compares to traditional alternatives. In a standard data center, traffic is directed to a collection of servers that accommodate virtual machines. These servers need to access the storage area network through the storage controller before retaining or storing data.

An HCI offers a more manageable infrastructure as it brings together separate elements into a unified whole – the hypervisor, server, and storage are combined into one single node. This removes the storage area network completely, and the infrastructure is controlled centrally by one piece of software.

In conclusion, traditional data centers are a series of servers spread out, and an HCI is a software-defined storage that brings everything together in one node. They deliver and simplify storage, computing, networking, management, virtualization, and data protection into one unified storage, offering processes and tools for an efficient and more manageable IT infrastructure.

Benefits of Upgrading to an HCI Infrastructure

When you upgrade to an HCI enterprise cloud solution, you receive more out of your business operations for less. The increased simplicity and reliability that comes with an HCI infrastructure, combined with the minimal recurring costs, hyper-converged systems provide a pivotal point for all types of businesses that come with additional benefits:

Increased Simplicity for Superior Business Operations

Utilizing an HCI data center can enhance dexterity throughout your business operations. An HCI infrastructure makes it easier to manage your data center as it provides you with a stack of software in one node. The storage nodes act as one redundant collection of storage and should one go down, the rest will be unaffected. This creates a highly-reliable data center that offers immense simplicity, and with increased simplicity comes better automation and interconnection compatibility and dependency.

Easier Collaborations and Migration of Data

With an HCI infrastructure, all of your workloads fall under the same managerial umbrella. This simplifies the process of transporting data to different locations, essential for digitalized businesses who rely on collaborations and teamwork.

Increased Reliability and Data Protection

HCI data centers also streamline the process of adding and removing nodes to correspond with your resource demands. Since HCIs are node-based infrastructures, this makes it easy to scale up your data center.

Additionally, hyper-converged systems simplify the process of restoring data, offering you enhance data protection throughout your business.

Economic Solution for any IT Department

There is less equipment to purchase, support and maintain with an HCI data center, making it an affordable solution for any IT department. The recurring costs are minimal, yet the benefits are greater than the standard data center.

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The way you operate your computing systems is imperative to the overall efficiency, productivity and success of your business. With many major tech companies investing in containers, you’ve likely been wondering if VMs are up to par. While containers are greatly popular, virtual machines are still a plausible option. Though, both VMs and containers present their own unique benefits and drawbacks. In order to determine which option is best for your enterprise, you must first understand the pros and cons and major differences between VMs and containers.

What are VMs?

Virtual Machines (VMs) is a simulation of a computing system. VMs make it possible to run the various computing applications that appear to be many different computers on a hardware, all on one computer. Despite being all on one computer, each VM has its own operating system and the hardware is then virtualized. This results in a large amount of system resources being used but results in an economical advantage as opposed to running individual computers.

Benefits of VMs

Companies who have undergone or plan to execute a digital transformation need to visualize their server in order to operate to full potential. From cloud computing services to virtualization technology, VMs allow companies of all sizes to increase efficiencies while lowering costs by embracing VMs.

Additional benefits of embracing VMs in your IT infrastructure include:

• Ability to establish management tools
• All operating system resources are available to applications
• Ability to establish security tools
• Familiar security controls

What are Containers

Containers are a growing trend within the computing industry. Instead of virtualizing the computing systems within a computer, containers only virtualize the operating system. Each container shares the binaries, libraries and host OS kernel, all of which are read-only. This immediately reduces the amount of system resources that are used. In essence, you’re able to get more out of your operations, by using less.

Benefits of Containers

Sharing operating resources, such as the ones mentioned previously, decreases the need to recreate the OS code. This allows for a server to run various workloads all with one single installation, resulting in time and money saved. Containers can also be used to create portable and consistent environments for development, testing, and deployment.

Since containers share the OS system, they are significantly lighter than VMs and take only a couple of seconds to boot up.

Additional benefits of embracing containers in your IT infrastructure include:

• Reduced size
• Decreased IT management resources
• Faster start-up
• Simplified security updates
• Less coding is required to transfer, migrate and upload workloads

What are the Major Differences Between VMs and Containers

VMs notoriously take up a large volume of system resources, which is one of the major differences between VMs and Containers. Since each VM operates on its own operating system, it quickly takes up a lot of RAM and CPU cycles.  Containers, on the other hand, only virtualize the operating system, making them exceptionally light and only megabytes in size. This also extends into the benefit of being able to start the computer in seconds, as opposed to several minutes when using VMs.

Here’s a quick look at the main differences between the two:

• Containers are lighter
• VMs have limited performance
• VMs run in its own OS; containers share the host OS
• VMs virtualize at a hardware-level; containers only virtualize the OS
• Containers startup in milliseconds, compared to minutes with VMs
• VMs take up a lot of resources; containers require less memory space
• VMs are fully isolated due to the individualized OS

What’s the Better Choice?

VMs and containers present their own unique pros and cons to IT infrastructures.  VMs are an affordable option that may be the better choice if you’re running applications that require access to all of the operating system’s resources. They are also beneficial when you’re running several applications on servers or when you have a vast array of operating systems to manage.

Containers are typically the better and most popular choice, particularly for businesses who want to maximize the number of apps running, using minimal servers.

Nunatix

With Nutanix, you can easily manage your virtualization environment by hosting Docker containers in a VMs, bringing simplicity based on a “build, run, and deploy” principle. You can take advantage of container migration, streamline network and security configurations and harness persistent storage for both local registries and containers.

Here’s a quick look at the benefits of Nunatix:

• Single, easy-to-manage virtualization
• Built for simplicity
• Packages applications and their possessions into flexible, highly portable virtual containers
• Allows for container migration on VMs
• Persistent storage for containers and local registries
• Streamlined network
• Security configuration

Nuntanix supports many of the most popular container platforms, such as Docker containers on AHV, as well as VMs. It’s a versatile option that is ideal for every enterprise looking for rapid deployment and scale.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) Cyber Defense or SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) or both?

Cybercriminals continue to come up with innovative ways to attack companies’ infrastructures, more so in the last year than ever before. Instead of hacking an infrastructure to plant a virus, cybercriminals have taken their tactics to the next level, executing cloud ransom attacks, as well as manipulation and exploitation tactics in return for access to your own IT infrastructure. This raises the question as to whether traditional cyber defense systems are equipped to detect and respond to such unique threats quick to reduce the reduce the risk of damage. Artificial Intelligence Cyber Defense has the answer.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cyber Defense

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the digital world and the way in which businesses operate. With AI, enterprises are able to leverage businesses advantages, such as increased productivity as a result of faster operation times and automated efficiencies. Though, the risk of cyber threats remain as cybercriminals view digitization as an opportunity to hack digital infrastructures, such as the Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and software systems. Traditional security systems are not equipped to handle the increased and innovative attacks from cybercriminals.

How Artificial Intelligence Cyber Defense is Transforming How Companies Deal with Security Threats

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cyber Defense, on the other hand, takes cybersecurity to the next level to protect enterprises from digital threats. From cloud ransom attacks to cybercrime exploitation, AI Cyber Defense systems offer optimal protection from past, present and future cybercriminal tactics. These systems use smarter automated security systems that detect threats and respond to them before they pose a risk to your infrastructure. AI Cyber Defense continues to learn for themselves and use AI algorithms to identify outliers from typical patterns which not only protects your enterprise from today’s threats but also, from potential ones in the future. These systems detect threats that can’t be predicted by an IT individual, while also acting faster than any security practitioner to prevent costly damage.

Benefits of AI Cyber Defense Darktrace System

Darktrace is an innovative, intuitive and impressive AI cyber defense system that makes protecting your business’ most valuable data simple. The automated system uses mathematics and algorithms to see threats earlier or as they’re happening, offering quick and efficient protection to threats that other security systems aren’t equipped to find.

What is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a type of security management that uses Security Event Management (SEM) and Security Information Management (SIM) in one security management system. This type of software is designed to collect and combine data that’s generated through an enterprise’s infrastructure, from the host systems to the network, applications and security devices, such as antivirus programs and firewalls. SIEM systems then use the information gathered to identify, categorize and analyze various events, and produce reports and to send alerts on security-related situations.

While SIEM systems have been a strong force against cybercriminals in the past, they are not as equipped to deal with the new and advanced threats when compared to AI Cyber Defense Systems.

AI Cyber Defense system can be used alongside a SIEM and will enhance its value. However, this type of defense is exceptionally powerful and well-equipped to handle all security threats on its own, and in faster time than other security systems. AI Cyber Defense systems also allow companies with limited resources to do more with less; paying for two security systems is not needed for optimal protection.
Darktrace is the world-leading cyber-threat company that enhances the security surrounding your enterprises’ infrastructure. For more information, speak with one of our specialists today.

Zycom showed up in full force to the inaugural CDN Channel Innovation Awards on September 19, 2018!The innovation awards turned out to be a great night and recognized some of the most innovative solutions across Canada.  Zycom is excited to announce that we were recognized for a pair of awards commending our top projects of 2017. Our unique solutions ended up landing Zycom both a Diamond and Gold Award.

Multiple achievements being awarded to Zycom:

Diamond for Best Education Solution

This award honors the solution provider with the most innovative education solution for the year.

Why we won:

Zycom was tasked with creating a cloud strategy for the Limestone District School Board in Kingston, specifically to update its student information system (SIS). Overall the SIS lacked the data and disaster recovery capabilities that a system tracking 19,000 students should always have. The switch to a cloud-based solution, which houses the data of all students, reduced the school boards IT costs by 70% or roughly $70,000 per year.

Read more about this here.

Gold for Top (Federal/Provincial/Municipal) Government Solution

This award recognizes the most innovative and problem-solving hardware, networking, mobile, cloud, big data or software-defined solution for a federal, provincial or municipal government, or crown agency.

Why we won:

The City of Greater Sudbury along with Nutanix and Zycom, came up with a way to deploy a 3node Dell XC Nutanix solution in an innovative way via a stretch cluster, due to the low latency of fibre links and the SCADA applications very low network traffic requirements. That solution would see a node at each of 3 plants being connected via fibre with the SCADA application, virtualized and now resilient between plants (i.e., replicated VMs with Nutanix software). Resulting in a viable and secure solution that can be easily backed up and eliminating downtime and dispatch. This means that should the CGS lose connectivity to a SCADA server that has remote wells and treatment centers reporting to it, the lost server instance will migrate to an alternate node at one of the other primary sites. Thus, the City’s networking and routing capabilities allow the affected remote reporting sites to continue to be monitored, and SCADA operational visibility is maintained for all outside wells and lift stations.

In Addition to applying of a software-defined solution to solve a monitoring uptime requirement for SCADA, the same technology was applied to a technology refresh of tier-3 infrastructure resulting in the IT Department at the City of Sudbury being able to save and return $600,000 in capital funding back to the municipal government.

Read more about these solutions via our case study here.

The event was a great experience overall; nights like this are exactly what gives us the confidence to continue to innovate and disrupt the industry.

Read the official press release of the event.