Colocation Solutions Featured Article

Virtualization Opens Up Opportunities for Cost-Effective BCDR Plans

By Erin Harrison, Senior Editor

Businesses rely on keeping people and information connected no matter where or when unplanned problems occur. With security top of mind for today’s IT decision makers, companies need a disaster/recovery plan that covers the systems, infrastructure and processes that prepare organizations for disruptive events to ensure critical data remains securely stored.

 

First, to understand the differences between “business continuity” and “disaster recovery,” it’s important to discern the properties that are distinct to each business plan.

 

“Business continuity” revolves around maintaining network uptime and critical operations during disaster-type situations – both natural and man-made. “Disaster recovery”, on the other hand, involves timely recovery of operations that have been disrupted because of a disaster situation – and systems are brought back in a sequential order based on levels of importance, according to Telx, a colocation and technical support company based in New York City with four facilities in the metro area.

 

According to Telx company officials, a solid disaster recovery plan includes diverse, reliable and secure networks to access the disaster recovery facility and get information to the people who need it as well as ways to keep valuable customers and business’ data backed-up and safe.

 

Given that data storage is one of the fastest growing parts of the IT budget, new applications that are tough to get approved and take time to implement have led to a breakdown of the relationship between IT and business users, and ultimately has contributed to the growth of cloud-based services, according to Rose Klimovich, vice president of product development of Telx.

 

Data security as it relates to disaster recovery is a key area of concern, especially if you consider the boom in cloud services and the impact virtualization can have on business continuity plans. According to IT research firm Gartner (News - Alert), worldwide cloud services revenue will grow to $150.1 billion in 2013. Given this forecast, colocation providers such as Telx must be able to respond accordingly.

 

The company currently has 15 colocation facilities in North America and more than 700 telecommunications carriers, ISPs, content providers and enterprises rely on Telx’s team to support their infrastructure and BC/DR needs. With virtualization business continuity solutions, businesses can add high availability and disaster recovery options.

 

One of the challenges most companies encounter when they’re trying to put together a disaster recovery plan is to do so in the most cost-effective way possible. If you are a customer with a data center with hundreds of servers, for example, and you tried to replicate that in a “stand-by” kind of way, it can be very costly to keep up 24 hours a day, which often results in companies balking at business continuity plans. However, there is a different way of accomplishing the same goal using cloud-based services.

 

Taking the approach of: “I might want to buy a little bit of this now, but if I have a problem, I might want to buy a lot of this at the same time,” rather than a philosophy of building the required servers, storage devices, etc., allows you to essentially pay as you go, or “pay as you need it,” Klimovich explained.

 

With cloud computing, when the data center goes offline due to power outage, cloud servers are in place versus physically utilizing servers that are sitting in a redundant data center.

 

When creating a BC/DR plan, one of the first objectives is to determine which servers are the most critical to ensure data security between servers – whether it be financial or HR data, or data from any other area in a company. In order to connect the correct users to the correct data and ensure they are able to get to the data, it should go without saying a high level of security must be in place.

 

“When you are moving data from one server to the next, you need to make sure the data is encrypted while it’s moving around between virtual servers. This has been one of the big security issues related to virtualization that initially this kind of security didn’t exist at all and now some of it does exist, but you need to make sure you put it in place as you move to a virtualized environment,” Klimovich said.

 

 “When you move to the cloud, and get rid of these barricades, the data is sitting in a totally public environment. You need to make sure that the cloud provider you have is in a secure location, like a collocation center, and they make sure that data from one customer can’t touch data from another customer,” she added.

 

Given that services "in the cloud" is still relatively uncharted territory, small- and medium-sized businesses are tapping into this resource as the capital outlay is significantly smaller, and larger companies, Klimovich said, are starting to test new ways of achieving cost-savings; cloud services afford those opportunities.

 

“Smaller companies are using this initially, so rather than building out a facility when you don’t know whether all your applications are going to work, it’s easier to use the cloud instead of have all that build-out,” Klimovich explained.

 

Ultimately, colocation providers can help with IT BC/DR planning “because their facilities are inherently a secure location with redundancy, backup power, 24/7 support/maintenance operations, already in place, so they are a secure facility,” said Klimovich. “This can help limit some of the BC/DR initiatives that the company itself has to put into place, because the colocation provider has already taken those steps and amortized the costs across all of its clients.”

 

Telx recently announced that Florida-based Host.net (News - Alert) is expanding its space in Telx’s facility in Atlanta to bring new colocation, cloud computing and storage services to businesses in greater Atlanta. The agreement also extends Host.net’s relationship with Telx, which also includes PoPs for Host.net’s 10G multinational network in Telx facilities in Phoenix; San Francisco; and New York.

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For more information on business continuity/disaster recovery, visit Telx’s Colocation/Data Centers community on TMCnet.

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Erin Harrison is a Senior Editor with TMC. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Harrison