It’s official! We’re partners!

Today is a big day for us. Data Domain announced this morning that Simply Continuous was selected as one of their new service provider partners. I feel like Sally Field at the 1985 Oscars. “You like me, you really like me!”

So why is the announcement so important? It means that we can deliver Data Domain’s stellar data deduplication and compression technology as an IT disaster recovery managed service to companies like you.

For more details about the partnership, check out Data Domain’s press release. To learn more about our managed service featuring Data Domain, check out Data Protect Vault for Data Domain.

Introducing the Essential Disaster Recovery Template

Do you subscribe to TechRepublic newsletters?  Well I do and I noticed a section where TechRepublic listed “disaster recovery template” as one of their top searches.  Curious, I popped over to their website to find out what the results were.  One of the most important steps a company can take to protect themselves is to properly plan for a disaster.  And planning for recovery is often a complicated and time consuming process.  The good news is that there are several extensive whitepapers on the topic.  Some whitepapers exceed 20 pages.  However, we agree with some TechRepublic forum feedback  - most DR templates are just too long and complicated for a first step.

So we decided to remedy the situation by creating a 2 page disaster recovery template that can be used to summarize a company’s most important disaster recovery information.  We distilled the most important information into bite-sized chunks so that you can quickly complete the template and post it where it will be readily available in the event of a disruption.

Download it today by visiting our resource center.

Location, Location, Location

I’ve heard some interesting stories from customers and sales reps about where companies store their backup data.  One IT Director took the weekly backup data home with him each weekend.  And then one day, while he was on vacation in Mexico, there was an outage at work and there was no way to retrieve the backup data.  The good intentioned IT Director wanted to offset the risk by storing the data offsite.  But was his home really the safest place for the company’s data? 

Today, take a moment to consider “is my backup data in a safe location?” 

Flooding in Iowa,twisters in Nebraska, and power outages in Michigan are just some of the disasters making headlines this summer.  If it seems that everywhere you turn, there’s a natural disaster just waiting to happen, consider getting the advise from a company like Risk Management Solutions to help you decide the safest place for your data.  “RMS is the world’s leading provider of products, services, and expertise for the quantification and management of catastrophe risk.”  They have several cool maps on their website including one that depicts the regions with the most risk associated with natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and hailstorms. Check it out below.

Judging by the map, Arizona is a safe place to put a datacenter for disaster recovery purposes.  If you’re relying on truck-based vaulting and you don’t live in the area, perhaps AZ is impractical for storage.  However, if you’re smart and relying on online backup, AZ is starting to look a lot more attractive.

Is your backup data in a safe location? 

Backup Basics – Encrypt Your Data

I received an email from a co-worker yesterday and thought I’d share it with you. 

 Subject Line: Another reason not to use truck-based vaulting services! 

Besides the fact that truck-based vaulting is going to get very, very expensive because of rising fuel costs… losing tapes seems to be an increasing problem for off-site tape backup service providers. 

“Bank of New York Mellon Corp. officials last week confirmed that a box of unencrypted data storage tapes holding personal information of more than 4.5 million individuals was lost more than three months ago by a third-party vendor during transport to an off-site facility,” reported Brian Fonseca from Computerworld. 

Ouch!!!!!!   Someone forgot the “IT 101″ of off-site tape vaulting - encrypt your tapes!!

10 Items For Your Disaster Recovery Wish List

In a TechRepublic article, author Rick Vanover provides a quick disaster recovery wish list.  I could just hear the legions of IT managers saying their “Amens and Halleluja’s” when reading Rick’s list. 

There are 2 items that especially rang true to me. 

Item number 3, “Everything starts with DR in mind” is probably the most challenging to accomplish. It’s one thing to think about disaster recovery during your nightly backup but it’s another thing to ensure all IT systems and policies comply with disaster recovery requirements.  To do so requires changing the mindset of your IT department as well as your executive team.  Without the support of the executive team, proper disaster recovery planning, implementation AND testing is nearly impossible to achieve. 

Item #10, “All things are possible for the small environment, too.”  Our mission at Simply Continuous is to create IT disaster recovery products and services for small and medium enterprises.  Rick accurately describes that technologies such as virtualization have enabled the small enterprise to achieve disaster recovery objectives.  However, we know that small IT departments are already taxed with doing more for less.  So adding one more technology like virtualization to their list to learn can be overwhelming and take IT resources away from other mission critical activities. 

For the companies who don’t have the resources to develop the domain expertise to successfully implement and maintain their virtual servers, Simply Continuous offers a managed service called AppAlive.  We’re experts at virtualization so you don’t have to be. 

The list is helpful when fine-tuning your existing plan or just getting started.  Compare your wish list with Rick’s by visiting http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=339.

Simply Continuous Launches Channel Partner Program

I’m excited to announce that we launched our Simply Continuous Channel Partner Program today.  This is an important step in delivering our IT disaster recovery services to customers so that they are fully prepared to resume and keep their businesses running during times of unplanned outages and crises. 

The new channel partner program provides partners with sales tools, training and incentives that will help them leverage their relationships with customers to sell and grow incremental data backup and disaster recovery business. 

Joining our program is easy!  Become a partner today.

Rise In Remote Workers Can Help Kick-Start Or Markedly Improve Your Disaster Recovery Position.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area - home to expensive gas, long commutes, and rising bridge tolls.  I’m lucky. I commute to work by the Transbay bus system and telecommute from home one day a week.  But many other workers have no other option but to commute by car to their workplace.  In the words of the great Chaka Khan, “I feel for you.”  With the rise in gas prices, commuters and the companies they work for must be wondering if the “virtual workplace” is for them. 

For those companies feeling pressure from current and prospective employees to expand your telecommuting program, do it.  But before you do, get prepared.  Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic, wrote a short article about the topic and provides several links to resources on how to get your IT department prepared for remote employees.

What Bill doesn’t mention are the additional considerations to think about when adopting this type of technology.  You may decide to upgrade your VPN to accommodate the increase in remote workers but the VPN can also be your company’s communication lifeline in the event of a disruption or disaster.  You can mitigate risk by including a few disaster recovery scenarios during your planning, testing and implementation phases of your project and you can do so with little effort.  While disaster recovery isn’t the primary focus of the implementation, it can be part of it.

If you’re finding it difficult to change the mindset of your management team to dedicate proper resources toward IT disaster recovery, it is definitely possible to piggy back onto other projects, like remote workers, a VPN upgrade or other IT project. A low incremental cost project can help plant the seed and from there you may start seeing a change in management’s thinking.

The Business Case for Disaster Recovery

In a recent ComputerWorld article, Forrester analyst Stephanie Balarous said “IT managers must still do a better job at convincing business leaders to invest in disaster recovery systems.”  She provided some great tips to build a solid business case and we’ve come up with a few of our own.

Stephanie’s Tips

1. “Consider disaster recovery investment as a rolling upgrade that consistently augments existing infrastructure and application investments rather than a one-time event that can be delayed.”
2. Consider non-natural disruptions such as a power or hardware failure as more common causes for declaring a disaster rather than catastrophic events such as a hurricane, flood, or earthquake.  By doing so, you paint a more realistic picture for business executives.
3. “Sit down with corporate department heads to map out how an outage – whether temporary or extended – would affect operations, customers and revenues.  From that, the managers should build a business report quantifying the risks, and what tools are needed to meet those risks.”

Simply Continuous Tips

1. Invest in a multi-purpose solution.  For example, you’re planning a server consolidation project and are evaluating your technology options.  As you consider your technology options, how about broadening the application of that technology and see if it can be used for disaster recovery purposes as well as your server consolidation project?  By choosing a multi-purpose technology like virtualization, it’s easier to convince the executive team to adopt it.  They may not approve both IT projects but at least you have laid the groundwork for making disaster recovery improvements.
2. Invest in a disaster recovery solution that can put you on a path of continuous protection.  You maybe relying on onsite tape backup as the crux of your disaster recovery strategy and have determined you need to upgrade to continuous backup and off-site redundancy.  The migration path from onsite tape backup to offsite redundancy is a huge undertaking and requires additional capital and expertise.  Choose a solution that can get you there in easy to manage increments and preferably with one vendor who can manage the process for you. 
3. Add “compliance” to your vocabulary and include it in your pitch.  Compliance is a language that executives understand, especially the CFO or corporate controller.  For example, if your company has plans to go public in the next 12 to 18 months, there are several BC/DR plans you need to have in place before the IPO.  Brush up on the regulations and include them in your business proposal.

See a tip that’s missing?  Share it by leaving a comment below.

Virtualization State of the Union by Alessandro Perilli

I just finished watching a presentation by Alessandro Perilli at SYS-CON’s Virtualization Conference and Expo 2007 East.  It’s packed with useful info like the 9 challenges of virtualization and virtualization emerging trends.  I was especially interested hearing what Alessandro had to say about emerging trends which is at the end of the presentation.  According to Alessandro, over the next 3 years there will be an increase in application virtualization as well as an increase in vendors who provide SaaS and infrastructure leasing solutions.  As you can imagine, these trends made my ears perk up.

While Alessandro broke the emerging trends down into different features, Simply Continuous has bundled them all into one solution specifically designed to address IT disaster recovery needs. The solution is called AppAlive. It’s nice to know that we’re part of the emerging trend although I’m not sure “infrastructure leasing solutions” makes great marketing speak. There are a lot of businesses out there that would like to open a 2nd datacenter and utilize virtualization technology but don’t have the expertise or resources to maintain it. That’s why AppAlive and our other services make so much sense to companies who would like the benefits of a 2nd datacenter with virtualization but don’t want to significantly increase their IT costs.

To learn more about virtualization trends watch Alessandro’s State of the Union presentation.  I give it two thumbs up.

To learn how Simply Continuous can remotely protect and recovery your business applications, visit our AppAlive services page.  I give AppAlive two thumbs up but I’m clearly biased.

GTD’s David Allen and Disaster Recovery Planning

If you’re like most IT executives who are relying on tape backup as the crux of your disaster recovery strategy, you may agree, it’s not much of a strategy at all.  And perhaps you are left wondering late at night, “How are we going to keep the email up and running in the event of fill in the blank?”  Soon after what seems to be a passing thought, those OTHER fires consume much of your time.  Where DO those fires and crises come from anyway?

“Usually from not-so-urgent things that people ignore because they are distracted by the crises of the moment.  Then ignored, they cause the next fires and crises,” writes Getting Things Done author David Allen. Mr. Allen wrote a great piece in a recent issue of the Huffington Post entitled “The Curse of the Eternally Urgent.”  His tips are relevant to anyone who maybe putting something off for tomorrow instead of completing the task/project today.  Sound like someone you know?

After chatting with a few IT guys, I’m starting to understand how putting off disaster recovery planning is easy to do. Especially when you’re working at a growing company and those pesky fires appear.  You know what worked in the beginning (i.e. tapes), won’t work today.  But take Mr. Allen’s advice and complete the project in a series of action items. “I think you’ll find that many big and important projects have a two-minute-or-less next action on them. You can move several big and important projects forward, and feel better about making progress, by doing a few two-minute-or-less next actions,” writes Allen.

Before you rush off to design the perfect disaster recovery plan (or better yet, outsource it to experts like Simply Continuous), read Mr. Allen’s article.