Archive for July, 2012

Disasters Have a Way of Making You “Wake Up” and Rethink Recovery

Posted: July 23, 2012, 8:09 pm

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Hurricane Preparedness When I was a kid growing up in the Southeastern United States, I spent a lot of time in the back of my Mom’s lime-green Dodge station wagon, accompanying her on her many business trips to Miami, Florida. I used to love it when I got asked to go, because a) it meant I could miss school; and b) it meant I could eat as many of those delicious Florida mangoes as I wanted.

I remember driving back with her once during a hurricane – she thought she could “get ahead of it” and get home to Savannah before it got too bad. Well, she was wrong.

The storm seemed to descend from nowhere, and things got so windy, rainy, and gusty that we had to pull over to the side of the road to wait it out. It was actually very scary as she and I sat huddled together in the back seat, witnessing the awesome powers of nature crash through the world around us.

Suddenly, we heard a loud CRACK, followed by the sound of glass breaking. When I turned around to look behind us, I saw that a mango had crashed through our back windshield, creating a giant, gaping hole. I remember being delighted, as it meant I could eat another of my favorite fruits, but my Mom was pretty upset.

Fast forward an unspecified number of years (no chance I’m divulging my age), and now I am working at SunGard Availability Services. When I read this case study on how a series of 2004 hurricanes had forced Florida Hospital to “wake up” and rethink their disaster recovery capabilities, it brought back this memory for me.

While the hurricanes did not force Florida Hospital into a declaration of disaster, it did force them to face the unpleasant truth that they did not have the staff, or the time, or the expertise in place to meet their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs). Which is why one of the largest healthcare providers in the entire state turned to SunGard Availability Services for help. In particular, they are now relying on SunGard’s proven expertise to manage all of the aspects associated with testing and recovering their data in the event of a disaster (our “Managed Recovery Program”).

Now that I’m a Mom, I’m actually somewhat appalled at the risk my mother took with me. While I love the idea of mangoes flying unbidden into my kid’s lap, I would never drive home during a hurricane, with or without her. So I’m glad Florida Hospital looked themselves in the mirror and figured it out; it shows a greatness of vision, I think, as well as the wisdom to take responsibility for their destiny and the willingness to take concrete actions to fortify their future.

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You can’t predict a disaster, but you can decide how prepared you’ll be.  To help our customers keep their systems, business processes and people in operation in the face of the increasing threat presented by hurricane seasons, we’ve developed a free Hurricane Planning Toolkit—available now, for a limited time.  Download the FREE Hurricane Preparedness Toolkit 

 

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Posted in cloud-based recovery, Disaster Recovery, Mobile Recovery Services, Recovery As a Service

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Citrix Synergy 2012: @SunGardAS Supports @Cloudstack

Posted: July 23, 2012, 4:21 pm

By: Chip Childers, Principal Engineer, SunGard Availability Services

In May 2012, at the Citrix Synergy 2012 general session in San Francisco, Indu Kodukula, EVP products and CTO announced SunGard’s support for CloudStack. Specifically, he announced (1) the addition of committers, (2) the decision to build and deliver a production cloud on CloudStack, and (3) the commitment to ship DR process packs as part of CloudStack (You can view a recording of his presentation here – go to time marker 1:16:00).

Why did we do this? In short, we believe that CloudStack is a great foundation for enterprise-grade cloud computing. We love the fact that it’s an Apache project, not just the Apache license; we love the explicit commitment to be compatible with the AWS APIs, we love the tight project and program management and we love the deliberate focus on addressing enterprise use cases. And the fact that CloudStack supports multiple hypervisors (obviously Xen, but also vSphere 4 and 5) is a really big deal.

During the coming year, we plan to partner with Citrix on some exciting projects, so stay tuned!

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Posted in Cloud

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Network Security Threats on SMBs: What You Need to Know

Posted: July 3, 2012, 2:20 pm

By JP Blaho

The Internet, over the last two decades, has helped create a different way of interacting, transferring knowledge, and conducting business.  It has helped create a level playing field in which companies of any size, and from anywhere in the world, can compete for a consumer’s business.  This has also introduced a completely new form of risk– network security.

Network security has become one of the fastest growing sectors within IT because of the growing number of cybercriminals.  This black-market has designed a business model where the focus is on breaking into businesses via the Internet.  The intent is mainly to exploit their targets for money: whether it’s through holding a company’s network hostage via a DDoS attack, or stealing company data to sell to someone else.  The level of success achieved by cybercriminals has grown to scale so that it has become a volume business which has been estimated to be in the billions of dollars annually.  This does not bode well for organizations, especially those in the mid-market space.

As taught in Economics 101, economies of scale is good for the business achieving it, and dangerous to those who are not shielded from this success.  Initially cybercriminals were looking for and attacking organizations with large brands, solid reputations, and deep pockets.  Attention was not given to the smaller organizations whose transactions over the Internet were considered low volume.  Now that these cybercriminals have achieved a volume-based business, they are able to scale their attack to many companies of all sizes.  Would you rather sell one product for one hundred dollars or one thousand products for one dollar?  This is where cybercrime has moved.  Instead of hunting for the whales, they are casting large nets into the water.  Instead of attacking and breaching one large company, they are attacking and breaching hundreds if not thousands of organizations – many of whom do not even know the breach has occurred.

The other change is that these attacks are no longer immediate and noticeable.  The level of sophistication inherent in today’s security landscape is so intricate that cybercriminals can lay dormant for weeks or months, or slowly collect bits of data at levels which are hardly detectible.  This does not bode well for any company, but especially for the small and medium-sized organization.  Fortunately, there are many affordable tools and services out there to help SMBs monitor and prevent these attacks.  I will discuss these resources in my next post.

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Posted in Availability Services, IaaS, Operational Resilience

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