Years ago, disaster recovery discussions focused primarily on whether it was necessary. Organizations looking for basic off-site data protection sought solutions that allowed for on-demand backup and retrieval of VMs from the remote location. However, remote replication doesn’t equate to disaster recovery. For true failover protection, you need a true Disaster Recovery solution option that allows VMs to operate directly from the remote site. Businesses now realize the difference and are implementing DR to preserve their business operations during a disrupting event.

In today’s era of digital transformation however, basic recovery is no longer sufficient for businesses to maintain continuity. Modern disaster recovery solutions must not only facilitate rapid failover but also ensure that operations during recovery are as efficient as the normal day-to-day activities in the primary environment. As a result, organizations now strive to eliminate bottlenecks not just in their regular network operations, but also in their disaster recovery processes. The goal is to achieve seamless transition and performance during failover, mirroring the efficiency of standard operations. This approach ensures that businesses can maintain designated productivity and service levels even in the face of unexpected disruptions.

Watch: Achieve A Game Winning Strategy With WEI & Nutanix

The Nutanix Difference

Nutanix recognizes this need, which is why they’ve taken a more innovative approach to DR that addresses these modern challenges. While Nutanix offers a complete data replication option, it also offers a true disaster recovery option that separates itself from the competition. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on specialized hardware or custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), Nutanix’s DR solution is software-based. This approach offers several key benefits:

1. Hardware Independence: The solution can run on a wide range of standard x86 hardware, making it easier to maintain DR capabilities across diverse environments.
2. Greater Flexibility: Being software-defined allows for greater flexibility in adapting to new and evolving DR requirements without hardware constraints.
3. Enhanced Scalability: The system can grow in sync with your operations without complex hardware-specific configurations.
4. Cost-Effectiveness: By leveraging commodity hardware, Nutanix often provides more cost-effective DR solutions compared to systems requiring specialized hardware.

Nutanix employs a distributed replication strategy across its entire system. In this architecture, each node in the Nutanix cluster manages a portion of the overall metadata, with all nodes processing metadata through a software-defined system. This balanced, distributed metadata approach is key to Nutanix’s scalable and efficient DR solution:

• Workload Distribution: Prevents any single point of failure or performance bottleneck.
• Parallel Processing: With metadata distributed across nodes, operations related to DR (like replication and snapshot management) can be processed in parallel, which improves overall performance.
• Scalable Performance: As new nodes are added to the cluster, the metadata processing capability scales linearly, ensuring that DR operations remain efficient even as the system grows.
• Reduced Network Traffic: Since each node has access to a portion of the metadata locally, it reduces the need for constant inter-node communication, which is particularly beneficial in DR scenarios where network bandwidth might be constrained.

Supported Deployment Options

The distributed architecture of the Nutanix DR system supports several architectural options. Choosing the appropriate deployment model is your first decision:

• Two-Way Mirroring: Workloads are mirrored between sites, ensuring both can handle active traffic. In other words, Site B is the data protection target for selected workloads running on Site A, while Site A serves as the target for Site B.
• Hub-and-Spoke: This many-to-one model is ideal for organizations seeking to centralize replication across multiple sites. It’s particularly well-suited for enterprises with Remote and Branch Office (ROBO) setups. In this configuration, multiple remote sites (spokes) replicate data to a central location (hub).
• Cloud Connect: Enables organizations without an offsite backup location to leverage public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), for cloud-based disaster recovery. With , you can deploy a Nutanix cluster in a public cloud environment which will provide the same level of data protection and disaster recovery capabilities as on-premises deployments.
• Single-Node Backup Target: Nutanix offers a cost-effective single-node backup solution tailored for small and mid-sized businesses. This solution leverages the same underlying disaster recovery technology used in Nutanix’s larger deployment models. It provides protection against single-drive failures and supports native end-to-end backup processes.

General Best Practices

Once you have decided on the best deployment model for your needs, here are some general best practices:

• When using a single node backup target, limit protection domains to fewer than 30 VMs and limit backup retention to a three-month policy. Nutanix recommends a policy that includes seven daily, four weekly, and three-monthly backups.
• Use Cloud Connect for workloads with a log change rate and limit each protection domain to one VM to speed up restores. Set recovery point objective (RPO) no lower than four hours.
• Other best practices include storing all VM files on Nutanix storage to maintain consistency, scheduling snapshots during off-peak hours to minimize performance impact and grouping dependent applications into consistency groups for .

Final Thoughts

For more best practices or to explore cutting-edge DR solutions and determine the best fit for your organization’s needs, reach out to WEI today. Our dedicated disaster recovery engineers are available to discuss innovative options and best practices tailored to your business requirements. Schedule a consultation to learn how you can enhance your DR strategy with the latest technologies and approaches.

Next Steps: A leading federal credit union faced aging infrastructure, rising costs, and scalability challenges that jeopardized the reliability of its critical systems. To modernize its IT environment, they partnered with WEI to deploy a Nutanix-based hyperconverged solution, replacing outdated hardware and ensuring future growth with enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. Downloadand learn how WEI can transform your IT infrastructure!

The post Maximize Your Nutanix DR Strategy With Exclusive Expert Insights appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Several weeks ago, I was vacationing in Florida just after Hurricane Milton made landfall and rendered millions without electricity, gasoline, phone service, or internet. These recent devastating storms are a stark reminder of the critical importance of disaster recovery (DR) in today’s business landscape. An irony of modernization is that our increasing dependence on technology opens the door to more business disruption. While natural disasters have long been a primary driver for DR initiatives, the rise of ransomware attacks has exposed new vulnerabilities in our increasingly digital businesses.

Disaster Recovery Is No Longer Hypothetical

The threat landscape has expanded beyond traditional concerns. In addition to natural disasters, businesses face risks from cyberattacks, power outages, and hardware failures. As the frequency and variety of potentially disruptive events increase, the likelihood of needing to rely on a DR solution becomes less of a hypothetical scenario and more of an inevitable reality. According to a 2021 survey, nearly one in three businesses experienced an outage over a two-year period, and 61% reported outages that cost them more than $100,000 at some point. Disaster recovery is also a growing concern amid compliance requirements, as data loss can lead to financial and other penalties.

Disaster Recovery Challenges

At the core of disaster recovery lies the critical ability to restore data. Data is both transformative and complex. Business leaders expect all data to always be available to foster new initiatives and projects. They want nearly everything to be retained because they see potential value in a greater array of data types. If you could simply store all data in a single cloud repository, that request would be easy enough. Unfortunately, there are many challenges:

• On-Premises Considerations: Despite the cloud trend, 37% of organizations still run data protection exclusively on-premises, and 47% for government organizations do the same.
• Regulatory Requirements: Some agencies mandate that data be kept in-house due to control capabilities and specific requirements. Others set minimum retention periods for certain types of data.
• Hybrid Complexity: Hybrid environments involve managing data and applications across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures, making DR planning and execution more complex.

According to the mentioned study, 28% of survey respondents identified meeting disaster recovery requirements as a challenge. Only data capacity and growth were of greater concern. DR is a growing challenge in the era of transformational digital data.

Businesses Turn To Hybrid DR

Hybrid computing introduces significant complexities to DR strategies:

• Organizations must carefully balance on-premises and cloud-based solutions to meet their DR needs.
• Managing complex storage implementations across different environments becomes a challenging task often requiring specialized skills and tools.
• Ensuring the security and availability of critical data across multiple locations demands a comprehensive approach to data protection and access control.

Organizations can no longer rely on traditional on-prem DR solutions. That is why they are turning to more modernized solutions, according to a :

• 63% of organizations are using cloud services for data protection.
• 41% use a hybrid cloud deployment for data protection.
• 22% exclusively use cloud-based backup services like DRaaS.

Greater Flexibility And Enhanced Resilience

In the same way hybrid has transformed enterprises, it is now changing the game for DR. The shift to hybrid DR is not just about saving time and money. It is about making your whole system more resilient. Since most companies already use both on-site and off-site infrastructure, being able to keep data in multiple places just makes sense.

One of the keys to hybrid DR is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). HCI provides a common management plane across hybrid cloud environments and can help to minimize the outages related to hardware and software failures through its standardized architecture. Some HCI platforms, such as Nutanix, offer multiple snapshot types for greater flexibility in disaster recovery strategies. Nutanix provides two main types of snapshots:

• Full Snapshots: Used for asynchronous replication when RPO is 60 minutes or greater, keeping system resource usage low for extended periods with multiple snapshots.
• Lightweight Snapshots (LWS): Used for NearSync replication with RPO between 1-15 minutes, reducing metadata overhead and improving storage performance by decreasing I/O operations from long snapshot chains.

This flexibility is particularly valuable as enterprises increasingly seek to minimize their RPO and RTO times, where RPO measures the interval between backups and RTO measures the time between an outage and data recovery. The inherent flexibility of the Nutanix architecture is also evident in its distributed processing capabilities as well:

• Each node has its own virtual storage controller and access to local metadata.
• This design allows replication to scale along with the system because as you add more nodes, you add more processing power for replication.
• Every node participates in the replication process, which helps prevent performance hotspots in the cluster.
• Nutanix is designed to easily stretch between on-prem and the cloud, providing an approach where you can move data and workloads around as needed. By having your Nutanix infrastructure configured in this fashion allows for a simple to use and cohesive platform that can protect your data and also orchestrate the recovery shall the need arise.

This distributed approach allows for better scalability and performance compared to traditional systems that might have centralized bottlenecks or rely on specialized hardware.

Watch: Achieve A Game Winning Strategy With WEI & Nutanix

Final Thoughts

Nutanix leverages hybrid cloud environments to provide deeper resiliency and flexibility in data retention across multiple locations. Businesses that have embraced their approach have experienced numerous benefits in the DR efforts including:

• Elastic scaling
• Efficient snapshot management
• Simplified hybrid deployment
• Improved recovery times
• Integrated ransomware protection

As part of the Nutanix Elite Partner ecosystem, WEI can deliver a comprehensive disaster recovery solution tailored to your hybrid enterprise needs. Our innovative approach leverages Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) to seamlessly integrate on-premises and cloud environments that provides the resiliency and flexibility you need to ensure that your DR strategy aligns with both your infrastructure requirements and business objectives.

Next Steps: A leading federal credit union faced aging infrastructure, rising costs, and scalability challenges that jeopardized the reliability of its critical systems. To modernize its IT environment, they partnered with WEI to deploy a Nutanix-based hyperconverged solution, replacing outdated hardware and ensuring future growth with enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. and learn how WEI can transform your IT infrastructure!

*Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Data Management and Disaster Recovery 2021

The post Why Disaster Recovery Matters For Business Survival In The Hybrid Cloud Era appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

The digital ecosystem is booming with innovation, driven by a surge in applications and enterprise hybrid cloud adoption. From high-fidelity 10K video, real-time gaming, AI-powered automation, and IoT expansion, to immersive VR/AR experiences, businesses need agile and secure networks to support a number of cutting-edge applications. Additionally, the rise of 5G requires secure and adaptable network infrastructure.

To address these challenges, organizations are increasingly turning to software-defined networking (SDN) frameworks. SDN offers agility across data centers, whether private or hybrid cloud networks, to improve business outcomes. Let’s identify and explore some solutions that provide a comprehensive, secure, and open SDN approach to navigate the complexities of the modern digital landscape.

The Roadblocks to Digital Transformation

Many organizations are still grappling with network architectures designed for a bygone era. These legacy systems suffer from several key shortcomings that impede digital transformation efforts:

• Manual Configuration: Traditionally, network configuration tasks were performed manually, line by line. This approach is time-consuming, error-prone, and creates a significant burden for IT staff. As the network grows and evolves, the complexity of manual configuration increases exponentially.
• Slow Application Deployment: Provisioning new applications or network resources in a manual environment can be a lengthy process. This delay in application deployment can significantly impact time-to-market initiatives and hinder the organization’s ability to respond to changing business needs.
• Inconsistent Security: Traditional networks often rely on a patchwork of cybersecurity controls implemented at different points. This inconsistency creates major vulnerabilities and makes it difficult to enforce siloed security policies. Furthermore, manual processes for security configuration are prone to human error, further increasing breach risk.
• Limited Visibility: Legacy monitoring tools often provide limited visibility into network traffic and application performance. This makes it difficult to identify and troubleshoot problems proactively, leading to downtime and disruptions.

SDN offers a solution by separating the control plane, which dictates network intelligence, from the data plane, which handles the physical movement of data packets. This separation allows for programmatic configuration and automation, empowering organizations to achieve greater network agility across data centers and cloud environments.

SDN Solutions for the Enterprise

Organizations rely on agile, secure, and efficient networks to drive successful transformations. , a leading SDN solution, disrupts traditional data center management with its application-centric approach. By centralizing network policies, Cisco ACI streamlines operations and simplifies complex data center networks. This powerful framework extends beyond data centers, seamlessly integrating with wide area networks (WANs), campus networks, and even cloud environments.

Cisco ACI offers a trifecta of benefits:

• Network Optimization: Centralized policies simplify and automate operations, bringing order to complex data center networks.
• Enhanced Security: Extensive cybersecurity measures, zero-trust principles, and automated policy enforcement safeguard your business.
• Multi-cloud Acceleration: Seamless connectivity across on-premises and cloud environments fosters agility and simplifies managing workloads in enterprise hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

This comprehensive approach empowers businesses with several key advantages: dynamic network provisioning, robust cybersecurity, and automated infrastructure services – all fueled by automation and policy-based control. Ultimately, translates to streamlined application deployment, agile IT operations, and accelerated digital transformation for organizations.

Key Use Cases for Cisco ACI

Cisco ACI empowers organizations to streamline network management and fortify security – contributing to successful digital transformation. This unique solution tackles several key challenges faced by modern IT organizations:

• Security Through Microsegmentation And A Zero-Trust Policy: Cisco ACI enhances network security with a zero-trust model and microsegmentation to reduce attack surfaces. Organizations can enforce strict security policies and ensure continuous compliance with business rules by segmenting the network into isolated segments.
• Unified Network Management: Cisco ACI delivers a single-view management platform to provide comprehensive network visibility into health, performance, and overall operational status. Embedded automation and operations tools further modernize your workflow by ensuring consistency and efficiency. The net effect is increased network visibility, expedited operations, and significant error reduction.
• Private Cloud Networking: Cisco ACI unlocks business agility by seamlessly integrating with industry-standard virtualization platforms. This creates a cloud-like experience within your on-premises data center. This translates to a dynamic private cloud network that automatically adjusts to your application lifecycle in real-time, enabling the swift deployment of critical applications. Cisco ACI delivers enhanced network agility, faster application delivery and deployment, and reduced time for network changes.
• Automation and Integrations: The platform optimizes network administration workflows by leveraging APIs and integrating with ecosystem partners. This programmability reduces errors and accelerates the rate of change, allowing increased operational efficiency, reduced operational costs through automation, and more time for strategic initiatives.
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Readiness: Leveraging Cisco ACI’s workload portability across geographically distributed data centers, organizations can achieve exceptional business continuity. This strategic approach ensures application availability during outages, simplifies migrations, and empowers robust business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans. The benefits translate to sustained application uptime and a significantly reduced risk of downtime, ultimately safeguarding mission-critical operations.
• Public and Private Cloud Integration: Cisco ACI empowers businesses to leverage the full potential of multi-cloud environments by ensuring consistent network and cybersecurity policies across on-premises data centers and public clouds (like ACI cloud). This uniformity translates to reduced risk and increased agility. Organizations can expect a multitude of advantages:
  • Seamless public cloud integration
  • Uniform application of network and security rules
  • Faster time-to-market
  • Reduced hybrid cloud connection errors

Selecting the Perfect Partner for SDN Solution Implementation

In selecting a Cisco ACI solutions provider and partner, a critical factor is expertise tailored to your organization’s specific needs. The ideal partner will possess not only a comprehensive understanding of your business goals but also proven experience with the Cisco ACI platform itself.

WEI stands out as a leader with our extensive experience and in-depth knowledge of Cisco ACI. We are dedicated to empowering organizations in maximizing the platform’s capabilities so you can achieve seamless integration, robust security, and enhanced operational efficiency – all within your Cisco ACI environment.

Final Thoughts

In today’s digital landscape, traditional networks struggle to keep pace with evolving business needs. Cisco ACI acts as a bridge, enabling secure automation and streamlined management for complex cloud environments (including private cloud networks and enterprise hybrid cloud deployments). This ensures your network remains agile and adaptable. Partnering with a company like WEI unlocks the full potential of your digital transformation journey, delivering security, agility, and operational excellence. Contact our team to learn more.

Next steps: As businesses undergo digital transformation, the need for updated corporate networks and IT architectures becomes critical. Cisco ACI aids this shift by providing a network foundation that integrates with cloud environments and adapts to changing business needs.

It offers policy-driven automation to streamline infrastructure deployment and management, facilitates workload transfers across various frameworks, and enhances security. This technology simplifies and speeds up the application deployment process, helping organizations manage digital transformation complexities and prepare for future challenges.

below to find out more about this proven solution.

The post Transforming Data Center Operations: Ensuring Security And Agility In The Digital Age appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Imagine your IT organization as a ship sailing the seas. Equipped with a sturdy hull, a reliable power source, and a skilled crew, you’re ready to handle any potential threats that appear during your ocean voyage. However, massive waves from an incoming storm unexpectedly hit, which destroys your ship and sweeps away everything onboard. Despite team’s intense preparation, your vessel and its crew are caught off guard for this specific disaster, leaving survival uncertain.

Although rarer than it once was, the above scenario mirrors the potential impact of a ransomware attack on your business. You may have a strong IT infrastructure to streamline many business challenges, but what if a hidden ransomware attack wipes out your data, tools, and accessibility? This happens to businesses of all sizes daily, costing millions of dollars and damaging brand reputations. As a last form or protection, IT leaders are turning to backup solutions that protect businesses from cyber threats. In this blog post, we discuss the features of a reputable backup service to ensure full-time cyber-resiliency.

Cyber Attacks Looming Ahead

Ransomware attacks are on the rise. It’s not just costly, but also jeopardizes business continuity, affect customer satisfaction, and expose you to legal and regulatory risks. found that 85% of organizations faced at least once such occurrence in 2023, and most of them more than once. Almost half of these organizations’ data was lost, so they had to restore it from valuable backups. Talk about the importance of this last resort! 

However, cybercriminals genuinely want to make sure you pay the ransom. This is why they go , even before they delete or encrypt your files or infect an organization’s network. The key to hitting your cybersecurity goals is having a reliable backup solution in place to keep business data safe. Let’s explore. 

Mastering Cyber-Resilience With A Backup Solution

Various backup solutions are available in the market with WEI being familiar with many reputable platforms. When selecting one to augment your ransomware and overall cybersecurity posture, the key features to look for in a meaningful backup solution include:

• Data Security: Ensure the chosen backup solution employs encryption for data at rest and in transit. It should also have measures in place to prevent unauthorized access or modifications.
• Malware Detection: The backup solution should include a feature capable of scanning your data for potential threats. Immediate alerts should be provided for any suspicious activity or infections.
• Automated Recovery: Look for a backup solution that facilitates quick and easy data restoration, minimizing downtime and data loss through automated recovery processes.
• Hybrid Cloud Capabilities: Opt for a backup solution that supports various environments, including on-premises, cloud, or hybrid setups. This flexibility allows seamless backup and restoration of data across different platforms.

The effectiveness of a cyber-resilience strategy lies in choosing a robust backup solution, and stands out as one of the industry’s top choices.

What Veeam Brings To The Table

The latest introduces a new layer of security and ransomware protection for enterprises. It addresses concerns on data security, malware detection, automated recovery, and hybrid cloud capabilities.

Veeam offers the flexibility to backup and restore data across different environments, and . You can use Veeam to back up object storage data to any desired location. This gives more flexibility and control over your strategy and protects data from disasters, corruption, or ransomware attacks.

The empowers organizations to:

1. Be Vigilant: The backup process uses an AI-powered built-in malware detection engine to detect and identify cyber threats. This new feature enables your team to perform proactive threat hunting, as backup anomalies are instantly reported in your SIEM tools and . If needed, reach out for a second opinion from your trusted SIEM tool before you recover, using the new . This API allows your SIEM tool to mark recovery points as clean, infected, or suspicious.
2. Be Protected: The Veeam Data platform update 23H2 enables advanced for secure data storage and transfer. This way, only you can decrypt your data, even if stolen. You can also make your backups immutable, even by ransomware, to restore your data from a safe backup during an attack. Furthermore, disconnect backups from the network and limit access only to  authorized users to prevent ransomware from reaching and compromising your backups.
3. Be Resilient: technology helps you minimize downtime and data loss. Whether your environment is on-premises, cloud, or hybrid, you have the luxury of choosing the best recovery method for your data – from granular to full – and restore operations from any point in time.

The presents a responsive suite of data security features to prepare organizations for worst-case scenarios, including the ransomware.

Final Thoughts

As a billion dollar industry, ransomware attacks cause devastating consequences for enterprise data and operations. To protect against such threats, organizations require a flexible and resilient backup solution. Veeam’s latest Data Protection update is a reliable security platform that provides a comprehensive solution to combat ransomware.

With Veeam, you can face a sea of cyber challenges with confidence. Contact us today to learn how we can help you implement Veeam’s Data Protection solution.

Next Steps: Download our tech brief titled It dives into the five steps required for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post Three Benefits Of Veeam’s Data Protection Update To Your Cybersecurity Strategy appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

The financial services sector is dealing with new challenges as they race to digitize for a better customer experience and high-performing branch operations. Unfortunately, cyber criminals are capitalizing on the increased complexity.

To address these concerns, financial institutions are turning to SD-WAN for a more efficient and secure network setup. This accelerates digital transformation and paves the way for the implementation of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. In this article, we explore how combining a high-quality SD-WAN with a robust security strategy can address the current challenges in this sector.

Modern Challenges Of The Financial Industry

The financial industry encounters a multifaceted set of challenges that hinder digital transformation, thus affecting both operational efficiency and security. These challenges include:

1. Infrastructure And Technological Challenges

Most banks still rely on outdated multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks that connect their branches to the main office. As a result, many are experiencing network problems, especially during mergers, restructuring, and acquisitions. This puts the banking industry at a . Expanding to additional branch locations also introduces the following complications:

• Increased time and energy pressures when setting up MPLS circuits
• Insufficient network bandwidth for disaster response and recovery
• Budget constraints in the IT department that hinder network infrastructure modernization

These obstacles, along with slow and unreliable data center connections and infrastructure, hamstring the migration of crucial business applications to the cloud.

2. Cybersecurity Threats Amid Digital Adoption

Rapid technological advancements require financial institutions to and improve the overall customer experience through:

• Transitioning routine transactions to online platforms
• The integration of self-service options in branches

Additionally, with rising transaction volumes and migration to the cloud, the financial services industry has become a prime target for cybercrime, including theft of funds and personal information, DDoS attacks, and ransomware.

3. Regulatory Compliance

The financial services industry operates under designed to protect consumers from fraud and maintain transparency. Organizations must comply with these standards, even in the face of resource limitations and potential threats.

Five Benefits Of SD-WAN To Financial Organizations

To overcome these challenges, it is essential to execute a comprehensive enterprise initiative. Implementing an advanced SD-WAN platform such as HPE empowers the financial services sector to step fully into the next generation of cloud technology. We’ve summarized five proven benefits of SD-WAN below.

1. Simplified And Cost-Efficient Network Infrastructure

Legacy MPLS services limit the migration of cloud-hosted applications, and requires IT teams to backhaul traffic to main data centers for security. This results in added latency and operational difficulties for remote branches. The edge platform streamlines operations by:

• Actively utilizing cost-effective broadband internet and 4/5G LTE services
• Overcoming reliability issues through features like Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Packet Order Correction (POC)
• Implementing tunnel bonding and dynamic path control

HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect enables financial institutions to transition from complex architectures to cost-effective network infrastructure, with real-time performance monitoring.

2. Quick Expansion And Roll-Out

Traditional MPLS services are not equipped to handle the added bandwidth used to expand branches and upgrade ATMs. However, EdgeConnect delivers private line-like performance through:

• Enabling cost-effective and swift deployment within a couple of weeks
• Improving network efficiency with features like path conditioning and zero-touch provisioning

Even without previous IT knowledge, anyone from the IT team can easily set up the EdgeConnect SD-WAN appliance from any remote site.

3. Optimized Backup And Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery plans commonly involve storing remote data backups at a considerable distance from the primary site, which can result in potential latency issues. To address this, organizations can opt for additional softwares like HPE to improve backup and disaster recovery performance. This enhancement is achieved through the acceleration of the TCP protocol and the incorporation of data deduplication and compression algorithms.

The platform proves effective even with substantial data sets, significantly reducing backup time, while simultaneously expediting recovery processes and optimizing bandwidth.

4. Secured Access And Customer Data

To guarantee compliance, financial institutions must secure customer data in cloud applications. This entails shifting from the conventional practice of backhauling cloud traffic to embracing a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. , as a fundamental element of SASE, provides unified branch security, zero-trust segmentation, and automated orchestration with third-party cloud security providers. These functionalities work cohesively to streamline network infrastructure, enhance security measures, and optimize overall operational efficiency.

5. PCI DSS Compliance

Incidents of card transaction fraud losses for merchants and ATM cardholders continue to increase over the years. In response to this escalating threat, PCI DSS outlines to mitigate credit card fraud, which is now a mandatory for any organization handling cardholder data. The EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform supports compliance with nine of these requirements. This kind of compliance provide a secure environment with robust data protection for financial institutions in the cloud.

Final Thoughts

In the changing world of digital finance, the increasing threat of cybersecurity demands financial institutions to prioritize secure and reliable network connections. Unfortunately, various challenges and conflicting priorities often lead to neglecting network infrastructure, especially during cloud migration.

To tackle these challenges, financial institutions need to adopt a flexible SASE approach – using EdgeConnect SD-WAN as a foundation for cloud-hosted security solutions. By partnering with experts like WEI, this strategic approach enables organizations to smoothly undergo digital transformation, cut costs, and manage cybersecurity risks effectively. If you’re ready to explore these possibilities, reach out to our team to get started.

Next Steps: Just about every business we talk with has long-term remote workforce initiatives, and security has become a larger focal point of each conversation because devices are no longer protected by the traditional enterprise perimeter. Don’t leave security to chance with your remote workforce. See how HPE Aruba Networking is solving the challenge with their Remote Access Points, and find out just how easy their RAPs are to implement and manage in our tech brief below.

The post Five Proven Use Cases For SD-WAN In The Financial Services Industry appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

When recording a significant event where every moment matters, would you choose a video camera or a standard camera? A video camera, complete with expansive memory, makes frame-by-frame recording possible. In contrast, a standard camera only takes occasional photos and fails to capture the in-between moments that define an event in its entirety.

For business operations to be complemented by a comprehensive disaster recovery solution, competent IT leaders would prefer a solution that is akin to the video camera analogy. In essence, it is about capturing the entire spectrum of your business processes without unnecessary gaps and blind spots. However, many organizations still use snapshot-based legacy solutions, like the mentioned standard camera, that only capture one single image at a time, potentially missing ongoing events that are critical.

CDP vs Snapshots

Zerto Disaster Recovery (DR) is a leading DR solution due to its modernized approach that utilizes continuous data protection (CDP). CDP involves the capture of all changes as they occur and replicate these changes to backup storage. Remember, continuous recording is the only way that IT leaders can ensure every single data change is captured and recovered.

Yet, there was a time in which organizations accepted less in the form of snapshot protection. Snapshots are point-in-time images of data taken at periodic intervals, capturing data or the state of a system at a particular moment. The problem is that you need more than that one moment in time, and because time is money, you are leaving money on the table when settling for snapshots. Businesses cannot afford periodic recovery. It demands continuous recovery, which is what Zerto delivers.

Recovery Point Objectives

The goal of DR is to swiftly restore an organization’s critical operations following an unforeseen incident, thereby limiting both data loss and downtime. This overarching aim is encapsulated in two key objectives:

• The recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss an organization is willing to accept in the event of a disruption. As an example, an RPO of three hours means that in the event of a disaster, your organization can tolerate losing three hours’ worth of data.
• The recover time objective (RTO) is the duration in which business processes must be restored to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a disruptive event. For example, a company may determine they must recover and resume functions within two hours of a disaster.

Continuous data protection enhances RPO and RTO more effectively than snapshot-based methods by endlessly capturing and replicating data changes in real-time. With CDP, data loss is minimized to almost zero in the event of a disruption, as the most recent changes are already saved, significantly improving the RPO. Additionally, since the data is continuously updated and readily available, the time required to restore operations and data after a disaster is significantly reduced. Whichever way you look at it, CDP leads to faster recovery times and that includes all the pieces to your operations puzzle.

More About Zerto

A longtime partner of WEI, Zerto stands out with its true CDP solution to offer industry-leading RPO and RTO for companies that cannot tolerate business disruption. With Zerto DR, enterprises have the capability to recover anything at any point in time, within a granularity of seconds. What makes this possible is Zerto’s unique journaling technology. This approach not only ensures continuous data availability but also results in storage efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent, heavy snapshots. Key benefits of Zerto’s CDP solution include:

• No negative impact on production performance as Zerto’s CDP process operates seamlessly without affecting the production environment.
• Simplified operations without the need for complex scheduling thanks to Zerto’s continuous and automatic data protection approach.
• Minimized risk of data loss, with comprehensive and gap-free data recording.
• Reduced management overhead for storage arrays, enhancing efficiency and reducing operational complexities.

With Zerto, you gain a robust and efficient disaster recovery solution that addresses common challenges associated with traditional data protection methods.

Zerto Protects Your Applications, Too

Data alone does not do any good if you cannot act on it. It is your mission-critical applications that work with your data and create value from it, which means backing up the application environment is a must. This pertains to not just backing up files and folders, but also your virtual machine environment. This includes items such as the preconfigured boot-order of your VMs or the network and IP address configuration of their network environment. If you want to know just how resilient Zerto is when it comes to VM environments, it can handle VM counts in the five digits. That is what you call an encompassing solution.

Choosing Zerto and GreenLake Together

Choosing Zerto’s journaling technology for effective CDP stands out as a superior alternative to traditional snapshot methods. The decision to adopt this advanced approach is just the first step however, because the next critical choice is determining how best to integrate this technology into your operational environment. This is where the partnership between HPE GreenLake and Zerto becomes pivotal, offering Disaster Recovery CDP as a comprehensive service.

HPE GreenLake, renowned for delivering flexible OPEX solutions, now incorporates Zerto’s CDP, thereby streamlining the adoption process. This collaboration enables a shift away from traditional on-premises deployment or reliance on managed service providers (MSPs), offering a SaaS-based solution that fits into a diverse edge-to-cloud platform. With HPE GreenLake and Zerto, achieving RPOs in seconds and RTOs in minutes becomes a streamlined, efficient process, enhancing your DR capabilities within the HPE GreenLake ecosystem.

The integration with HPE GreenLake also means global accessibility to Disaster Recovery solutions via the Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC). This unified console allows for the management of all mission-critical and business-critical assets in one place, offering a simplified, comprehensive view. By consolidating these functions, HPE GreenLake not only enhances operational efficiency but also optimizes expenditures. With the ease at which these as-a-service solutions can be consumed, any other way of acquiring DR may seem as archaic as, well, snapshotting your environment.

Talk to WEI to learn how HPE GreenLake and Zerto can collaboratively to ensure the relentless progression of your business activities.

The post Is There A Better Way To Consume Disaster Recovery? appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

In the fast-moving world of data security, a resilient and dependable backup solution is an absolute necessity. For more than a decade, and Veeam have teamed up to offer top-notch products that communicate seamlessly together. The two have harnessed their expertise to combine their highly differentiated products into scalable and cost-effective backup solutions, thus enabling enterprises to achieve the performance and efficiency needed to realize their backup, recovery, and disaster recovery (DR) goals.

What exactly makes this partnership so unique? We explore how solution has revolutionized data backup, recovery, and disaster recovery.

ExaGrid And Veeam: A Symbiotic Relationship

ExaGrid’s appliances are designed to work seamlessly with Veeam’s Data Mover, thanks to the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover. This integration adds a range of advanced features, including:

• Sure Backup
• Virtual Lab
• Instant Virtual Machine (VM) Recovery
• Data Replication And Copying

This combination of features and teamwork between the two partners sets them apart in the competitive world of backup solutions in several ways:

1. Decreased Long-Term Retention Costs

The , when used in tandem with the Veeam Availability Suite, provides a powerful solution for businesses to significantly cut their costs. This combination is renowned for its ability to deliver the industry’s fastest backups and restores, reducing these processes from minutes to mere seconds.

Combining Veeam backups with ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover and ExaGrid’s support of Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repositories (SOBR) significantly optimizes data management. This means ExaGrid leverages Veeam deduplication and dedupe-friendly compression to achieve faster data restores and virtual machine boots. This process reduces the deduplication ratio from 2:1 to an impressive 14:1, resulting in substantial storage and cost savings for long-term retention.

Furthermore, this solution features a scalable storage system that can seamlessly grow alongside your expanding data needs. This empowers businesses to efficiently manage data and avoid excessive storage costs.

2. Fast Backup And Recovery

Speed is of the essence when it comes to data backup and recovery. With Veeam-to-Veeam communication, data is moved and restored 30% faster than other methods. Even the process of starting virtual machines takes seconds to a few minutes at most.

Additionally, with the release of , the Veeam Fast Clone feature is now running 30 times faster than the previous version. Its capability to perform synthetic full backups on ExaGrid appliances is an innovative advancement.

This means that when you need to resynthesize synthetic full backups into ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, the process is now incredibly fast. This translates to having the quickest data restores and virtual machine boots in the entire industry.

3. Scalability And Cloud-Readiness

The growing volume of data we produce poses a significant challenge for companies struggling to maintain an efficient data backup system. However, the ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides a solution to this problem with future-proof scalability. In other words, as your data grows, your backup system won’t be left behind.

The beauty of this scalability is its simplicity. When your data expands, just add another ExaGrid appliance to your setup to make more storage space. This way, your backup system can smoothly handle your growing data needs without any trouble or complex adjustments.

4. Comprehensive Security And Ransomware Protection

ExaGrid and Veeam understand that keeping your data safe is a top priority. They’ve put in place a viable architecture to protect your information. This system includes various important features, such as:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Only the people who should have access to your data can get to it.
• Two-Factor Authentication: Now, it will be extra hard for anyone to access your data without your permission.
• Secure HTTPS And TLS Certificates: This feature keeps your data safe during transmission.
• IP-Based Whitelists: With this option, only trusted devices are allowed to connect to network.
• Extensive Monitoring: This ensures your data is consistently protected on all your devices.
• Self-Encrypting Drives And WAN Encryption: This extra layer of security provides added layers of protection. Think of it like putting another lock on the door to your data.

This combination of security measures makes the ExaGrid-Veeam solution a robust defense against potential threats, like ransomware.

Final Thoughts

ExaGrid and Veeam’s extensive partnership offers a top-tier backup solution that’s three times faster than competitors. It includes maintenance, support, and serviceability without hidden costs, unifying premier products and IT architectures seamlessly.

If data management and protection is part of your business strategy, contact WEI to kickstart your data and disaster recovery journey. It’s time to elevate your data protection with tiered backup storage for improved performance, cost efficiency, and scalability.

Next Steps: Download our tech brief titled It dives into the five steps required for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post Four Ways Veeam and ExaGrid Support Your Data Protection and Backup Strategy appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Picture this: You’ve just been involved in a minor car accident. Thankfully, you have car insurance, and while you hoped to never use it, it sits available at a moment’s notice. In the business world, that’s the essence of (DRaaS). It’s like insurance for your critical data and applications: it might seem unnecessary at first, but when disaster strikes, you’ll be grateful for the investment.

DRaaS is currently one of the leading managed services due to its unparalleled benefits, customizability, and alignment with specific business objectives. In this article, we will explore its rising popularity and the significant value it offers to enterprises.

The DR Revolution

Let’s quickly begin with the origins of the 3-2-1 rule, which can be traced back to the 1960s. It was during this period that early iterations of the computer entered our everyday world. With the 3-2-1 rule, a third copy of an organization’s most critical data would be stored off-site for disaster recovery purposes. This could be due to a natural disaster or a data breach. Though not in the form of cassette tapes or CDs, this 3-2-1 practice is still very popular today, give or take a few nuances.

Before the days of virtualization, businesses were required to uphold a second data center, which meant investing in extra servers and infrastructure. Moreover, keeping everything synchronized and managing replication across various locations was a burdensome task, particularly with physical hosts. All these factors led to the doubling of infrastructure and expenses associated with DR, making it less feasible for organizations with limited IT agility.

However, the emergence of virtual machines (VMs) and the public cloud marked a shift in the DR landscape. With the introduction of orchestration tools, workflows and recovery processes are now automated – including IP and network changes. This automation simplifies the DR process and makes it more manageable and cost-effective for businesses, allowing them to achieve resilience without the burden of excessive expenses.

As technology advanced, public cloud providers teamed up with VMs to offer , enabling businesses to run VMs in the cloud. This breakthrough led to the introduction of DRaaS to deliver flexibility and stability to workloads.

The era of hybrid cloud and the advent of modern and natural threats paved the way for newer DRaaS platforms so it is important that businesses keep their disaster recovery plans up to speed. says, “The value WEI brings to the table is the expertise in running these newer DR-as-a-Service solutions across various public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform).”

This specialized skill set of understanding networking, security, and other ancillary services from various cloud providers enables WEI to deliver tailored solutions that meet various business requirements.

3 Reasons To Embrace DRaaS

DRaaS comes in different forms, and provides a host of benefits for any type of business, including:

• Scalability: Whether an enterprise runs 1 or 500 VMs, has 20 servers or 100 servers, understanding the business requirements allows for tailored DRaaS tiers that align with existing VM design and needs. , a network virtualization software, plays a vital role in making the service flexible by enabling multiple networks with the same IP range. This streamlines the DR process and ensures a smoother and more forecasted recovery experience for different customers with overlapping IP ranges. Of course, understanding the business requirements of DR-as-a-Service opens up new avenues of discussion where we can really get into the costing model and determine the importance of applications. The need to be recovered at all, versus the need to be recovered in a day, four hours or even a week. The quicker the recovery time, the more expensive the end solution.
• Cost-effectiveness: Moving to an operational expense model eliminates the need for a license to run it and to own and maintain physical equipment, making DRaaS a more affordable option.
• Efficiency in operations: Opting for the as-a-Service option for DR streamlines manpower allocation compared to maintaining a second data center or working through unnecessary IT personnel skill gaps The security and recoverability features of a public cloud also eliminate the need for physical site maintenance.

DRaaS is an attractive solution, but it’s not one-size-fits-all. It should always align with a business’s specific needs and requirements. The key is defining what applications need in terms of availability and recoverability.

What’s Next For DRaaS?

DRaaS is not going anywhere, and IT leaders should take note. Many WEI customers have experienced pain points that could have been prevented with a reliable and tested DRaaS plan. A robust DRaaS plan plays a critical role in minimizing the impacts of disasters, ensuring business resilience, and preparing for the future.

Business leaders should explore possible scenarios when planning to employ DRaaS. highlights these questions to start the conversation around DR:

• What am I planning for?
• How am I planning to recover my workloads should the worst thing happen?

As DR solutions have advanced to become more accessible and cost-effective, he emphasizes DRaaS’ significance as an “insurance policy” for protecting critical data and applications.

The integration of virtual machines (VMs) and personalized DRaaS in the public cloud environment provides businesses with reliable protection and peace of mind amid the ever-growing threats of ransomware, phishing, malware, and growing natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes.

Final Thoughts

At WEI, we understand that each business is unique, and with increasingly escalating cyber threats, DRaaS is becoming a top priority for companies aiming to establish robust IT infrastructures. Having this service in place is something every business will be grateful for, as it provides the assurance of enhanced resilience and protection against potential disruptions.

Whether you choose VMware on-premises or in the cloud, our dedicated professionals can offer expert advice on managing your workloads to meet your objectives and ensure you’re ready for any unforeseen circumstances.

Next steps: WEI’s Mark Gabryjelski, who has been practicing VMware since 2000, and ESX since 2002, explains in the video below why it is wise to regularly perform an optimization assessment on an enterprise’s cluster infrastructure.

The post 3 Reasons To Embrace DRaaS For Your Business appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

In the era of remote working cybersecurity risks, evolving IoT, increased cloud services, and revolving ransomware, businesses require reliable IT infrastructure to protect their data and ensure continuity of operations. According to Veeam’s report, 79% of IT leaders see a “Protection Gap” between tolerable data loss and how IT protects their data. Addressing this gap usually involves an upgrade of various disaster recovery services for production and protection. To tackle this concern, enterprises are better off subscribing to (DRaaS) rather than for cost efficiency, scalability, and reliability.

How Does DRaaS Work?

DRaaS is an effective cloud computing solution that provides organizations with a comprehensive and cost-effective way to back up their data remotely. Traditional disaster recovery (DR) solutions require companies to buy extra equipment and pay for maintenance costs, which is often expensive. DRaaS is different because it is economical, scalable, and reliable.

DRaaS typically involves the use of multiple cloud providers to replicate data between physical or virtual locations for disaster recovery purposes. This ensures the organizations’ continuous operations through regular backups of data and the ability to quickly deploy the necessary resources when needed, thus reducing downtime and costs in the event of an emergency.

Why Choose DRaaS For Your Business?

Through the expertise of third-party providers, DRaaS is an ideal solution for businesses looking for cost-efficient, scalable, reliable and secure data protection platforms during security threats or natural disasters – making it the ideal choice for enhancing any enterprise’s data protection and disaster recovery strategy. Our team has identified three effective reasons for your IT and business executives to consider DRaaS:

Cost Efficiency Of DRaaS

DRaaS is a better and more financially responsible alternative to traditional disaster recovery solutions. By leveraging DRaaS, companies don’t have to deal with additional equipment or maintenance costs, contributing to significant operational savings.

Based on Trends in Data Protection report, businesses that employ DRaaS protocols have the potential to save up to 70% on their IT budget. Apart from savings, DRaaS guarantees the recovery of data in the event of a disaster, which ensures business continuity. Therefore, DRaaS offers a reliable and cost-efficient way for companies to stay afloat, sustainably recover from disasters, and maintain their operations in the long run.

Scalability Of DRaaS

Traditional disaster recovery solutions require companies to invest in extra equipment and pay for maintenance costs, which become quite pricey during scale-ups. DRaaS allows businesses to scale their storage space based on changing needs. This approach utilizes scalable storage, meaning that instead of requiring the purchase of hardware and maintenance, businesses adjust storage based on their growth.

Furthermore, DRaaS enhances security measures by ensuring the safety of business data in the event of a disaster or threat. This allows businesses to remain confident in the security of their sensitive information. DRaaS provides peace of mind and eliminates the stress of data recovery and protection.

Reliability And Security Of DRaaS

Ransomware attacks affect more than annually. With data protection becoming a priority, DRaaS is a relevant solution to ensure continuous availability during a malicious event. DRaaS is a modern data backup solution that offers optimal resource allocation. DRaaS protects your data with advanced encryption and cloud computing technologies, providing an additional layer of security.

In case of a disaster, recovery time objectives (RTOs) are crucial to business continuity. Unlike traditional DR solutions, DRaaS guarantees a significant reduction of RTOs from hours to minutes or even seconds. Additionally, the built-in multi-site redundancy and uptime guarantees of DRaaS streamline workflows, minimizing the disruption to your enterprise’s productivity. As such, DRaaS is an instrumental tool for businesses with limited resources for data protection plans.

Final Thoughts

With its secure and automated backup capabilities, DRaaS provides an insurance policy against any potential threats or crises. ensures data is protected and ready to be quickly restored in the event of an emergency. Companies of all sizes benefit from using DRaaS to keep valuable data safe and secure.

At WEI, we highly recommend this option as a vital component of any business continuity and disaster recovery plan. If you’d like to assess how a DRaaS strategy will work for you, contact us today.

Next Steps: Download our tech brief titled It dives into the five steps required for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post The Future of Disaster Recovery: Three Reasons Enterprises Need DRaaS appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

says that 64% of IT leaders cite improved data security for their organization as their top objective over the next 12 months. And for good reason. As technology continues to evolve, it’s not a matter of if an enterprise will have a ransomware attack but when it will happen. With technological advances, it’s not just enterprises that benefit, cyber criminals do as well.

Because of this assumed risk, it is not enough to only have the right technology in place; your enterprise must have a tried and true disaster recovery (DR) strategy laid out ahead of time. complements industry best practices to provide your enterprise with the strategy and technology it needs to safeguard against ransomware attacks that are costly to your data and public reputation.

Five Ransomware Best Practices

When putting together your enterprise’s disaster recovery strategy, here are the five best practices to protect against ransomware.

1. Identify: Determine what environments exist, the risks associated with those environments, and how they impact your enterprise.
2. Protect: Understand what you’re protecting your enterprise against so you can develop appropriate safeguards and contain the impact of potential ransomware attacks.
3. Detect: Accurately and efficiently identifying ransomware will help ensure your team creates an effective and timely action plan.
4. Respond: Develop and implement actions to take in a detected cybersecurity incident. The faster and more effectively you respond to a threat, the faster you can stop it in its tracks, mitigate its damage, and reduce any potential financial impact.
5. Recover: In the event of an attack, timely recovery to normal operations reduces the impact on the enterprise. Make sure you maintain plans for resilience and restore any impaired capabilities or services due to a

Your Enterprise Disaster Recovery Strategy

Your enterprise’s disaster recovery strategies must be thoroughly documented and tested to ensure their effectiveness. This is something Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator does automatically. With this tool, your mission-critical workloads with near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) to applications that have been neglected due to a lack of resources can be included in an automated disaster recovery process.

By deploying DR Orchestrator as part of your enterprise disaster recovery plan, your cybersecurity team will have the improved ability to:

• Reduce Risk. DR Orchestrator is a simple, powerful tool that has proven its ability to manage a disaster recovery plan through testing and documenting risks.
• Save Time. Free your IT teams to focus on other mission-critical areas in your enterprise. DR Orchestrator can automate the most time-intensive aspects of disaster recovery planning, such as creating and updating documentation and testing.
• Restore Confidently. From a single app to an entire site, with DR Orchestrator, you can meet RPO and recovery time objective requirements with one-click failover, failback, and restores.

Veeam’s DR Orchestrator Capabilities

DR Orchestrator’s robust feature set reduces risk, saves downtime, and restores data with:

1. Automatic documentation. Generate and create dynamic disaster recovery documentation to prove readiness and compliance.
2. Automated testing. With zero-impact disaster recovery tests, scheduled or on demand, you ensure required recovery time objectives and RPOs can be met.
3. Application verification. After a recovery event, common enterprise applications are examined to verify they are running as expected.
4. Role-based access control. You control the level of access app owners and operations teams have.
5. Instant test lab. With the instant test lab, you can utilize disaster recovery resources for patch testing or anything else without impacting production.
6. Wizard-driven planning. Quickly build comprehensive disaster recovery strategy plans for apps and sites that are automatically updated and verified.
7. One-click recovery. With just one click, you can recover single apps or an entire site from anywhere.

Put Veeam DR Orchestrator To Work For Your Enterprise

With comprehensive support for enterprise applications and infrastructure, Veeam DR Orchestrator can take your disaster recovery strategy to the next level with its robust suite of features. WEI will help you through the process and create a customized solution to protect your enterprise against ransomware. Contact WEI today to get started.

Next Steps: Download our NEW tech brief titled It further explains the 5 mentioned steps for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

The post Is Your Disaster Recovery Strategy Next Level? appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

It seems like we never have enough time to get everything done that we need to do during our time off. Before you know it, the weekend’s over and there’s still items left on our “to-do” list. That’s certainly the way it is for . If you’re a backup administrator, you know the routine too well. Full and incremental backups take an enormous amount of time. They also consume a lot of resources and bandwidth. Because of their negative impact on production environments, we schedule backup jobs during off-peak hours. The problem is that window just never seems to be quite long enough and with burgeoning data repositories and an expanding application portfolio, that window seems to only get smaller. Face it, scheduling backups in the hope they complete in time without interfering with one another is stressful. Administrators can only hope the last backup job completes before users begin to trickle in Monday morning. If not, users will be competing with those same backup jobs for network bandwidth and server utilization resources and the help desk phones begin to ring.

Complexity and Cost

And then there is the complexity of everything we have to protect. Applications are increasingly dispersed across multiple VMs along with an under layer of dependencies, creating complex application chains that must be completely restored to fully recover from an incident. To address the challenge of narrowing backup windows, traditional backup vendors have created their own distributed solutions, further adding to the complexity of it all. All of this adds to the nervous question of whether a speedy recovery on demand is truly possible, whether that’s a complete restore or the granular recovery of a few files. That’s why so much time is spent monitoring the backup processes, time that could be better spent creating value for the organization. 

Zerto Eliminates the Backup Window

and protection software takes the stress out of backing up your data. There’s no need to sweat about whether the backup job will finish in time. That’s because their continuous data replication is constantly working, replicating every change that is generated within your environment in real time. No more mammoth backup streams being pushed through your network. Zerto backs up little bits at a time, creating what is referred to as recovery point objectives every few seconds. In other words, the slightest data change creates an RPO. No more intense backup processes that consume the resources of the servers you are trying to protect either.

Granular and Accurate Recovery

Let’s face it, backup restoration using point-in-time copies used in traditional backup technology is like taking a spin at the roulette wheel. It’s impossible to avoid recovery gaps as data changes since the last backup job are lost. Then there is the wasted time of restoring more data than you need to restore. Zerto eliminates these large recovery gaps and wasted labors because every data change is replicated in real time. This gives you the ability to restore your data down to the precise second. If a disruption occurred at 9:45 AM, you can restore your data back to 9:44 AM. At most, you lose windows of seconds, not hours, as is the case with traditional backups.

The ability to restore back with pinpoint accuracy is critically important for consistent recovery efforts of multi-VM applications that must be protected as one logical entity. Now you can spin up each application VM from the exact same recovery point, ensuring application consistency. Of course, not every instance calls for this type of split-second recovery. copies are still relevant for those organization needing to store data for long retention periods due to compliance requirements. For those longer retention periods, traditional backup copies are offloaded to secondary storage according to your schedule needs.

Simplified Backup Architecture

Zerto was created with simplicity in mind. It’s designed to fit into nearly any environment regardless of infrastructure because its technology is agnostic. Its purpose-built software appliance installs on any host where virtual or Kubernetes applications are to be protected so it doesn’t require dedicated hardware. It’s small footprint and low overhead components make it easy to scale out to potentially protecting petabytes of data and thousands of VMS. Despite its vast coverage potential, it doesn’t require weeks of intensive training to master it. is a single software experience that can accommodate a full slate of needs across the entire data management and protection spectrum. All of this translates into a future-proof solution and a reduced TCO.

The Power of Zerto and HPE Together

It’s easy to see how is changing the backup technology landscape. That’s why HPE recently completed its acquisition of Zerto. Says Tom Black, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Storage:

“Our customers continue to face complexity in managing and protecting their data. Zerto’s best-in-class talent and technology expands HPE’s data management and disaster recovery capabilities, giving customers the ability to protect their data and recover in minutes from ransomware attacks. We are thrilled to welcome Zerto to the HPE family.” 

Zerto’s cloud data management and protection software will remain available as a standalone service, but is also available now as a service through the HPE GreenLake platform and the Data Services Cloud Console. If you’d like to learn how Zerto can help you de-stress about your backups and disaster recovery efforts, then contact us at WEI where our storage SMEs can educate you about this exciting backup methodology and architecture that is reshaping the industry.

Next Steps: Learn more about how to effectively plan for backup recovery strategies in our white paper below.

The post HPE Introduces a Less Stressful Approach to Backups appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

As storage volumes continue to grow and enterprises make use of secondary storage to manage corporate data, they also need to backup these storage solutions. However, incorporating secondary storage into an enterprise-wide backup and recovery strategy is not always simple.

Integrated backup solutions, which have been around for some time, are purpose-built to be deployed rapidly and reduce the need for IT to manage separate silos of data. However, while they are popular for legacy infrastructure, and can also be applied to cloud and hyper-converged infrastructure, they add unnecessary layers of complexity for administrators, leading to problems with operability and access.

Nevertheless, this secondary data, which may not be needed on a day-to-day basis, still needs to be quickly accessible when the time arises, and needs to be adequately backed up to prevent data loss.

So, how can enterprises effectively backup secondary storage without burdening IT? By using with HYCU.

Making secondary storage backup simple

We’ve explained why backing up secondary storage can be complicated. Now, let’s talk about how Nutanix Mine with HYCU makes it easy.

By combining the simplicity benefits of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, extended to secondary storage through , with backup services, you get a solution that eliminates the need for siloed infrastructure and makes backup a native service of the platform.

The solution is ideal for large organizations and service providers who are looking for a self-service option. Backup and recovery are effortless and by leveraging Nutanix Replication, unnecessary backup traffic over WAN is totally eliminated.

It offers total coverage for enterprise workloads, reduces the burden on IT by removing the need for a dedicated backup team and allows the entire backup infrastructure to be managed from one console.

Implementation is also quick and easy. The solution makes use of the interface, so IT teams already familiar with Nutanix solutions will not need additional training or resources to manage the secondary storage array. Even for those not already familiar with Nutanix, deployment is simple and the solution is built for easy management.

IT leaders will also be pleased by the overall low total cost of ownership, largely thanks to being an all-inclusive solution that does not require the purchase of additional licenses for the backup appliance.

Are you interested? Take Nutanix Mine with HYCU for a test drive

As , Nutanix Test Drive 2.5 now includes integration with Nutanix Mine with HYCU.

Nutanix Test Drive lets enterprises try out Nutanix platforms quickly and easily through a web browser. Enterprises can take a guided tour of the solution which, according to Nutanix, focuses on:

• How the physical and virtual components of Mine fit together
• The integration between Nutanix Prism and HYCU in a simplified dashboard
• The various Mine-specific and generic backup constructs within HYCU
• How to configure and execute backup and recovery

If you’d like to test drive the solution for yourself, you can get started with the webpage.

If you’d rather explore outside of the guided tour, you can close the on-screen prompts at any time. Nutanix Engineers are also available through text chat at any time to answer questions regarding the solution.

Ready to learn more about Nutanix Mine with HYCU?

Nutanix Mine with HYCU, a appliance, is built upon the foundations of Nutanix’s platform strength and HYCU’s natively integrated backup service. By combining the two, the platform provides complete coverage and offers single-pane-of-glass management. The low cost of ownership and overall simplicity of implementation and deployment makes this an ideal solution for any enterprise looking to reduce the backup burden on IT and save resources. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.

The post Backup Your Secondary Storage with Nutanix Mine with HYCU appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

When it comes to pieces of the IT puzzle where skimping or going with the option that’s just “good enough” will inevitably come back to haunt you, backup and disaster recovery tops the list.

, a global leader in backup and replication software, and , an innovator of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), have teamed up to offer Veeam Backup for Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) giving enterprises data resiliency, protection and unparalleled data access, regardless of the workload type or location.

Before we jump into the additional benefits of this partner solution, let’s talk a bit about each of them individually.

Veeam Backup Replication V10

Veeam’s is an industry-leading BUDR solution that offers availability for cloud, virtual, and physical workloads though a simple management console. Backups are easy to recover, reducing operational costs and getting enterprises back on their feet faster.

In their latest update, Veeam added a host of , including network attached storage (NAS) capabilities for data protection and recovery, storage snapshots support, and a forever-incremental backup engine.

To help enterprises defend again ransomware attacks, Veeam also added an immutable backups feature, which protects recent backup copies from unauthorized changes or deletions though S3 Object Lock.

Nutanix AHV

is a native hypervisor solution which integrates with Nutanix’s enterprise Cloud OS stack. It offers secure, enterprise-grade virtualization to give enterprises an easy way to manage storage, with the added the benefits of built-in security practices, low operational costs and optimal performance for even the most demanding applications.

To reduce the IT burden, Nutanix prioritized ease-of-use, allowing administrators to effortlessly manage storage and virtualization all from one place.

Use cases include server visualization for Linux distributions and Microsoft server and desktop operating systems, VDI and DaaS, infrastructure and databases, and remote or branch offices.

The perfect backup and data protection pair: Veeam backup for Nutanix AHV

While both solutions are effective options on their own, combining them offers enterprises a new, agentless approach for virtualized environments.

Management functionality, including job management scheduling, data compression and duplication, retention policies, and other backup and restore activities, is conducted within the AHV Proxy, leaving the Veeam backup server to operate as a repository, reducing overall complexity.

In the event of a BUDR emergency, the restoration begins with the backup data, provided by the AHV Proxy though the use of snapshots. This allows for complete file and disk level restoration and the simplicity of the solution’s design guarantees fast recovery.

The flexibility of Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV offers a host of different options for backups, including converting them into VMDK, VHD or VHDX formats for use in various virtual or testing environments. Likewise, the unmatched performance of the solution and instant recovery options reduces disruptions and downtime, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted end-user experience.

With the recent updates to Veeam Backup Replication, Backup for Nutanix AHV also has , including:

• Console integration which displays job status, start/stop/disable jobs, and the option to launch the proxy web user interface.
• No additional licenses are required for the proxy appliance as the license management is solely performed by the Veeam Backup Replication server.
• New VeeamZIP support for AHV workloads, easily accessed through the Veeam Backup Replication console.

Additionally, the restore features of the solution also underwent improvements, including the addition of live file-level recovery through AHC FLR Appliance, entire VM restoration though Veeam’s universal VMK backup file format, AHV snapshot restores and the addition of instant VM recovery.

has also been integrated within the solution, as well as support, which provides protected VM reports on AHV backups.

Ready to discover the benefits of Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV?

Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV offers enterprises a way to modernize data centers through increase agility and simplicity with the confidence is data is highly available for your enterprise users. The solution is designed for ease-of-use and centralized management, reducing IT costs and time spent administering backups.

NEXT STEPS: Have you integrated cloud in your backup and DR strategy? You might be interested in exploring our white paper, , which covers:

• Best practices for protecting and restoring your data
• Where HA and replication technologies fit in your organization
• Questions to consider when switching to a cloud solution

Read the white paper today and please contact us to talk to our backup experts with any questions about modernizing your backup or improving your data protection strategy.

The post Why Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV is a Beautiful Thing appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Each Friday you can expect to see a new “Industry Info to Know” blog post from WEI consisting of a roundup of articles from industry experts, analysts, and our partners that we find insightful and helpful. We will also include links to industry news that you need to know about, news that will impact your business so you can plan ahead for it. We all need to help each other right now, we’re all in IT together.

As a team of trusted advisors to your company, we put a lot of effort into perfecting our practice. We are continuously learning, testing, and expanding our expertise across all facets of the enterprise IT landscape. That being said, we have an obligation to stay ahead of trends, look forward to the future of IT and provide insights to help our customers navigate the ever-evolving IT landscape.

There were a lot of great articles that caught our attention this week. Let’s take a look…

Industry News Insights

Remote access needs strategic planning right now
Regardless of the length of the current pandemic disruption, IT must plan for situations in which it will have to support a large distributed workforce. This Network World article discusses why IT pros should start work on a better remote-access architecture, focusing on secure access service edge (SASE).
Read more

Nutanix DR Multi Site Recovery
In a world where uncertainty is certain and IT disasters don’t come with a warning, IT leaders cannot afford to take the risk of not being prepared. Learn about how Nutanix supports three major DR topologies, with details for multi-site disaster scenarios and recovery workflows.
Read more

One of the goals of NetOps and DevOps teams is to optimize the application experience, but complex infrastructure and dynamic application flows pose challenges. In this post from Cisco, learn how Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud simplifies workflows by automating the tasks needed to deliver a better application experience.

How do you create a consistently functional remote work environment when faced with inconsistent home internet connections that your employees are using? This article from an HPE VP shares six best practices that can help you significantly improve the overall functionality of your remote work environment in the face of inconsistent last-mile connections.

This CIO.com article shares how corporate IT at Oshkosh Corporation has shifted its mindset from supporting core technologies to one that is more closely in tune with business objectives and customer needs. Plus, learn about 5 keys steps for digital transformation that helped them transition the business.

Cisco’s 2020 Global Networking Trends report provided a glimpse into what that future means for IT networking professionals. This article discusses new jobs that will emerge to address changing IT needs such as business translator, network guardian, network detective, and more.

This pandemic has reshaped the economy, the workforce and how technology supports all of it. CIOs are now looking to the future to prepare for the lingering effects it will have on business technology. See what CIO Dive has pulled together as some of the most pertinent stories to emerge from the last two months.

Industry Conferences Update

We are actively monitoring the status of industry tradeshows and conferences and will provide updates as they come in. We’ve been referring to this helpful roundup from SDxCentral: .

Assess your remote worker strategy today

We are finding that companies are all over the gamut when it comes to preparedness for remote workers at scale. WEI has experience and expertise in VDI and Desktop as a Service solutions from the industry’s leading vendors. We invite you to take us up on a VDI assessment or VDI Health Check up today.

How can we help?

We’ve been in tight communications with all customers and are providing peace of mind with the mantra, “Whatever you need, we’ll make IT work.” And we’ve answered the call, helping our customers with everything from supplying equipment, parts, cloud advice, architecture design, VDI, networking support, remote monitoring, staff augmentation services, and so much more… Contact us today to learn how we can help your business.

NEXT STEPS: Explore our other editions of the ‘Industry Info to Know’ Blog Series:

• Industry Info to Know – 05.01.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.24.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.17.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.10.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.03.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 03.27.20 Roundup

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The post Industry Info to Know – 05.08.20 Roundup appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

If a disaster were to hit your enterprise, would your data be protected? This information is the backbone of your organization so hopefully the answer to the questions is yes. However, if your disaster recovery plan is not what you would like it to be, or if it’s missing all together, it’s not too late to protect your data in the event of disaster.

Firstly, to have an effective disaster recovery plan your enterprise should follow the “3-2-1 rule.” This rule states that you need to keep three copies of your data, on two types of storage, with one copy being off-site. Getting backups off-site can be challenging, but disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) can help.

Why Your Enterprise Needs Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

As explains disaster recovery as a service, “It is the replication and& hosting of physical or by a third party to provide in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe.”

Where backup as a service (BaaS) requires you to pick and choose which files to store in the case of an emergency, disaster recovery as a service does not. DRaaS automatically copies and stores data in the cloud, allowing your employees to access the data they need to do their jobs even while in the middle of the disaster. This ability to work during a failure saves your enterprise from needing to shut down in the event of a catastrophe.

Disaster recovery as a service also does not require your enterprise to continually send files for backup, a requirement for BaaS. What does this mean? In the event that something happens to your servers, the data stored with a DRaaS provider, such as Veeam, is the most up-to-date information available.

Another obvious benefit of using disaster recovery as a service is that it saves your organization money and resources. A traditional DR plan involves a secondary physical location where you house a data center where your data is copied. Running a second site is costly and requires the time of your IT team to maintain – time and money that can be used elsewhere when using DRaaS.

According to , DRaaS removes the need for the following expenses:

• Owning or leasing space for a secondary data center
• Monthly costs associated with power, cooling, and internet bandwidth at the secondary site
• Purchase or lease of servers, storage, and network equipment for the secondary site
• Travel to and from data centers or on-site staff at the secondary data center

Veeam: An outstanding DRaaS Solution

WEI works with only the best in class tech partners to configure what fits your enterprise’s needs, such as . The is a backup software suite that combines the award-winning data protection and virtualization management expertise of Veeam Backup Replication and VeeamONE for VMware vSphere.

The Veeam Availability Suite provides organizations with five key capabilities that enable the “Always-On” Business:

• Rapid recovery of what you want, the way you want it
• Near-continuous data protection and fast disaster recovery
• Guaranteed recovery of file, application, or virtual server
• Backups that create an exact copy of the production environment
• Proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before impact

Veeam Availability Suite also provides monitoring and alerting tools so you can discover and be alerted to issues in your IT environment before they have a significant impact, and gives you complete visibility of the Veeam backup infrastructure.

Application-item recovery is simple and fast. Veeam allows you to zero in on exactly what you need to recover, and restore individual items directly from your backups.

By using a DRaaS provider like Veeam in partnership with WEI, you can rest assured that your vital information is protected in the event of a catastrophe. Need help figuring out which DRaaS solution is best for your enterprise? Contact us today for a personalized evaluation of your disaster recovery strategy.

NEXT STEPS: Want to learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service? Read our white paper, , to get started.

The post Why Your Enterprise Needs Disaster Recovery as a Service appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.