By ajohnson May 28, 2008 @ 1:29 pm
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.
By ajohnson May 16, 2008 @ 10:24 am
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.
By ajohnson May 8, 2008 @ 12:18 pm
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
- “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.”
- 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.
- “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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
