Disaster recovery solutions supports a company’s ability to maintain its operations after an adverse effect. Today the success of a business is determined by its vast and sustaining clientele and the launching of innovative products. A focus on company resiliency has been added to these corporate growth techniques; that’s where disaster recovery solutions and business continuity comes into the picture. IDC conducted a survey sponsored by Zerto and found that 79% of the companies who surveyed activated a disaster response, 83% experienced data corruption from an attack, and nearly 60% experienced unrecoverable data. They come in handy to help a company figure out various challenges while meeting organizational objectives.

Different methods for disaster recovery for your business

Every organization, from small enterprises to giant corporations, has become increasingly reliant on digital technology to bring in money, offer services, and support clients who always want applications and data to be accessible. The decision makers understand that mission-critical data should always be accessible; even noncritical data has become tremendously important.

There are different ways to approach disaster recovery, here are some of the common ones in the industry:

• Active active disaster recovery: Also known as stretched clustering, in this mode of DR the deployment of a second identical live infrastructure which continually repeats with the first site. The load is synchronously shared between the system and the site, which means that when disasters occur the backup is instantly available. Due to the simplicity of the concept, speed, and ease in which recovery occurs, it is usually the first choice of many decision makers. 
• Active passive disaster recovery: An active-passive DR solution offers an environment that is not intended to be live for IT production until the company declares to be in a disaster. This setup offers a warm site, which basically ensures that core processes are constantly backed up and available instantly when a disaster occurs, but the site may experience some delay. This DR setup creates large initial cost savings on hardware. Often times, businesses will remodel their legacy IT equipment and servers for their DR site to realize even greater financial benefit. 
• Active replicated disaster recovery: Applications that are not mission-critical and need not be recovered instantly can be stored in a cold site in an Active-Replicated setup. Disaster recovery replication should be continuous and continuing because, in the event of a disaster, you must fail over your most recent, mission-critical IT operations to the DR software and hardware as soon as is reasonable. This is the most budget-friendly setup which can be used to store data that may not be accessed often but recovery times will take longer. 

UnitedLayer’s DR services enable enterprises to be resilient and respond quickly to these critical situations faster. So that you can operate your business without any interruptions. 

Ways to assess your disaster recovery process

Disaster recovery metrics can be straightforward and self-explanatory or complicated and multidimensional, which essentially means that their definitions might change based on the context in which they are used. There are two common indicators, nevertheless, that can help any business continuity plan:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO, which is typically expressed in hours, refers to the longest period of downtime a system will experience. Therefore, if you give your content management system a 24-hour RTO, it means that if it fails at noon on Wednesday, your IT staff must bring it back online by noon on Thursday. This measure is very adaptable because it may be used with different operating systems, applications, and storage activities.
   
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO establishes the maximum amount of data that a system can lose, usually measured in hours. Consider giving your customer relationship management system a one-hour RPO. This calls for taking backups at least once an hour and stating that you’re only willing to lose data that was generated between the most recent backup and the failure event—a maximum of one hour’s worth of data. Depending on the application, this measure can vary significantly and may have a significant impact on how you restore your systems.

UnitedLayer’s DR solutions offer solutions for business continuity with sub-minute response times, allowing customers to create unique Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) in accordance with their unique business needs. 

Ensure business continuity for your data with UnitedLayer

With cloud disaster recovery-as-a-service, you get a lot of advantages such as saving time/capital, more data backup locations, ease of implementation with high reliability, and scalability. Modern network architecture at UnitedLayer means that any problems or defects will be swiftly found and resolved by our experienced support and managed DR services.

The following is a simple cloud disaster recovery plan that will assist enterprises considering cloud disaster recovery for the first time and are unsure of where to start:

• Get familiar with your infrastructure and its potential risks: It is crucial to consider your IT infrastructure, including your resources, tools, and data. It’s also important to determine where all of this is kept and how much it’s worth. once you’ve resolved this issue. You must now assess the hazards that could have an impact on everything. Natural disasters, data theft, and power outages are just a few examples of risks.
   
• Carry out a Business Impact Analysis: The next item on the list is a business impact analysis. This can help you recognize the constraints on your company’s ability to operate after a crisis. With Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) you will be able to assess this factor.
   
• Conduct a DR plan depending on your RTO and RPO: You may concentrate on creating a system to achieve your DR objectives now that your RPO and RTO have been established. You can use approaches such as backup and restore, pilot light approach, full replication of the cloud, multicloud option, or warm standby to implement your disaster recovery management. To your advantage, you can combine these strategies or employ them solely depending on your company’s needs.
   
• Contact the right cloud partner: After carefully weighing your options, your next move should be to choose a reputable cloud service provider who can assist with the deployment. The disaster recovery (DR) solutions offered by UnitedLayer are extremely safe and adhere to all the strict compliance regulations, including HIPAA and PCI. Additionally, hardware and software upgrades as well as 24/7/365 support and maintenance are offered for data housed on the UnitedLayer infrastructure.

These procedures also lessen the probability of emergencies occurring and the risk of data loss, both of which contribute to preserving and even enhancing the organization’s reputation. Learn more about UnitedLayer’s disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) today and improve your business resiliency disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) today and improve your business resiliency today! 

Data centers are at the heart of the digital transformation movement. According to recently released data from the global data center market, the sector will increase from USD 3.8 billion in 2020 to USD 5.9 billion in 2025. Businesses have opted to secure their data in remote off-site locations owned by third-party colocation providers. The reason is simple – colocation offers companies access to basic facilities including physical building space, power, cooling, physical security, and telco access for WAN support. However, as a business owner, you might have concerns regarding the services available to maintain your data performance and security once they’re housed elsewhere. As per ITIC’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey, a single hour of unplanned downtime costs $300,000 or more for 91 percent of mid-sized enterprises. Remote hands services offer remedies in such situations. 

Inner Workings Of Remote Hands Services

Remote hands data center services empower companies to assign IT management and maintenance tasks in a colocation facility to technicians hired by the provider. These are physical services where specialized, always-on-site data center experts maintain servers, cabling, and other owned hardware on your company’s behalf. Remote-hand services can replace or collaborate with staff or outside contractors. It allows customers to use the on-site labor and expertise and ensures that environments are highly optimized, constantly accessible, and robust. 

Data center staff can typically provide IT remote hand services including installing new equipment, replacing a failed drive, verifying the state of equipment, or even cycling a server’s power. However, these services may vary depending on the supplier. When it comes to UnitedLayer, our remote hand services consist of inventory audit, rack installation, cabling and wiring, shipping, and receiving for equipment/inventorying boxes of the data center. 

Need To Use Remote Hands

• Minimize downtime threat: There will be engineers on-site for troubleshooting situations like server refreshes or reboots, power supply failures, thermal management, and others. Without remote hands, these instances could affect business revenue and the ability to deliver services to customers. For example, when implementing mission-critical activities from servers in a colocation facility, such as ERP software, CRM software, remote collaboration tools, secure payment processing, or eCommerce websites, a response delay (easily brought on by backed-up traffic) is problematic. With remote hands services, experienced, highly skilled data center engineers are on-site around-the-clock; they can respond quickly when an alert is raised and complete scheduled maintenance on time.

Additionally, a deep understanding of the colocation tenant environments enables remote hands teams to optimize hardware more effectively. A value analysis may reveal that a remote hands service is a lower risk, more affordable way for an organization to maintain server uptime and excellent performance, guaranteeing superior performance all the time.

• Manage colocation budget efficiently: Businesses benefit from a specialized, 24/7 service at a lesser cost by being in a shared building, as opposed to having to pay salaries for a maintenance team or suffering premium emergency call-out contractor expenses. 

Your prearranged fee with a colocation provider will cover the costs of maintenance and emergency response. Since colocation tenants continue to be the owners of their own equipment, the only additional costs you will incur when using a remote hands service are those associated with replacement hardware. 

• Secure data based on industry regulations: There are many laws and regulations put in place for the technology industry every now and then. One such law is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) which says that the data must be secured at all costs. This regulation includes – securing and encrypting data at rest, securing and encrypting data in transit, and not using shared hardware and services.

Securing data also entails protecting the hardware that houses the data, essentially caging your servers. Controlling who gets access to the cages and the facility where they are kept is also necessary. Colocated data centers with remote hands services are used to comply with these laws and regulations.

• Give priority to resources: IT departments maintain corporate operations, and as digital transformation develops, they take up a crucial position at the strategic table. Therefore, instead of regular tasks and firefighting, organizations’ technical teams should concentrate on high-value jobs that contribute to sustainability and competitiveness. A company using colocation services can accomplish this by using remote hands services to handle the day-to-day operations and response.

A colocation remote hands service and a resilient and redundant infrastructure are recommended and necessary. Remote workers will decrease downtime for your organization and save you money. They will also free up in-house IT staff members so they can concentrate on managing important projects, optimizing IT operations, and more. This will enable you to offer greater levels of client service.

Choosing The Remote Hands Way

There is more to remote hands services than just a haphazard line item on an order sheet. It might be a useful service financially and in terms of advantages. You can decide what is ideal for your demands and budget using your own analysis. Once everything is documented, your data center maintenance costs will be more than planned. By utilizing your colocation provider’s on-site engineers and technicians, remote hands can provide a method to lower that cost and refocus your own resources. 

Not all colocation providers offer remote hands services and even the ones that do will have some limitations. UnitedLayer fills these gaps making sure that you get access to competent engineering and technical resources anywhere on the globe. We also have a complete set of managed services offering that empowers companies to get their hands off non-strategic operational tasks to our team of skilled engineers. Reach out to us today to learn more about how our remote hands service can fit your business needs. 

Today’s economy is powered by digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure must be as efficient and clean as possible to guarantee that today’s digital firms can operate sustainably for many years.

At UnitedLayer, we are conscious that our customers rely on us as partners in their sustainability strategy. This motivated us to make a global climate-neutral pledge for our infrastructure by 2030 and to cut emissions throughout our operations and supply chain.

We have met several milestones aligned with the key pillars discussed below. In this blog, we’ll cover just a few of the many innovations we’re pursuing to make our data centers cleaner and more efficient.

According to Statista, “Given its high energy demand, 45% of total IT carbon footprint is caused by data centers across the globe.” 

Principles driving a Sustainable Data Center:

• Low-carbon energy
• Using Digital Tools
• Software-optimized and automated
• High-efficiency cooling

Low-carbon energy helps us scale data volumes without increasing emissions

While increasing the data centers‘ energy efficiency is a primary focus, we understand that energy use is unavoidable. We have set a goal of using only renewable energy in all our data centers worldwide. By achieving this, we will help our customers’ digital supply chains become greener and reduce our carbon impact.

Use digital tools available to optimize operations

With the introduction of the smart grid, the grid has become more autonomous, giving rise to peer-to-peer networks to facilitate energy flow and prevent disturbance. Digital technologies, such as digital substations for larger data centers, utility, and industrial use, are available to support protection and control requirements. Furthermore, digital asset management platforms can help data center operators evaluate the relative health of their essential power components, allowing them to shift away from planned maintenance or break/fix schemes and toward more proactive and predictive maintenance techniques.

Working smarter toward greater efficiency with software optimization

Using our UnityOneCloud tool, you can track and optimize the data center device’s carbon emissions and energy consumption with remote data center management functionalities. You can also reduce carbon emissions by optimizing the power required by the devices in the data center.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have become essential IT future-proofing concerns, much like sustainability plans. It only makes sense to employ sustainability and AI/ML since both are crucial to the future of IT. Automated data centers can utilize AI algorithms to collect essential data, analyze it to forecast sustainability indicators under various conditions, and adjust operations as necessary. These algorithms can also be used to automate power-aware workload orchestration, which balances power demand and schedules workloads according to the availability of renewable energy.

High-efficiency cooling helps limit energy waste

GET A CLOSER LOOK AT THE UNITEDLAYER SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY

We have barely touched the surface of UnitedLayer’s sustainability narrative in this blog. We’re proud of our advancements, but we’re not about to stop anytime soon. The story is being written every day.

We help enterprises get complete visibility and transparency of their carbon footprints and map their journey toward sustainability. To date, we have transformed a few hundred customers into achieving net zero carbon emissions, and the count is increasing daily. Our robust solutions, such as carbon-neutral recommendation engines, cognitive carbon analysis, dashboards, and reports, have already benefitted our customers in reducing their global carbon footprints.

To learn more about our product and services, click here!

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Sustainability with Data Center Carbon Footprint Analysis

Discord experienced outages on Tuesday, according to various user reports, social media accounts, and the website Down Detector. Discord’s outage began around 12 p.m. EST, causing disruptions on the popular chat app.

To fix this problem, Discord officials said that “We are aware of an issue causing message failures and are working on a fix”.

A thorough investigation from Discord started for the “API Errors and Push Notification Errors” at 12:16 p.m. EST and efforts were taken to find and remediate the issues. The incident report stated that a “root cause was also found in their streaming service” at 1:08 p.m. EST, involving a controlled restart, which would have resulted in a “brief disruption of streaming, which leads to the outage.”

Discord has already experienced multiple outages in 2022. This includes one as recently as February and a two-hour outage in January, which prevented users from joining calls or using chat functions. According to “USA Today,” Discord also experienced a major outage earlier in November 2021, along with Spotify, Snapchat, and Etsy, all affected by Google Cloud issues.

Here, in the case of Discord, they could have mitigated this issue if they had hosted their infrastructure on a private cloud. The reason is private clouds such as our G3 private cloud gives them greater control, visibility, and guaranteed up-time of 99.999% as compared to public clouds, which offer an uptime of 99.95%. Also, our G3 private cloud users get control to set up and manage Routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, PDU, WAN configuration, traffic engineering, BGP, security, DDoS mitigation, monitoring, alerting, and WAN optimization for guaranteed performance. Our users can observe and analyze the status of their devices, health, and performance for complete visibility of their infrastructure. This gives them an edge to mitigate issues quickly and not get stuck in vendor lock-ins, similar to what happened previously in the case of discord.

How Unitedlayer can help you?

UnitedLayer offers its users enterprise-grade G3 private cloud solutions where customers can host their application on dedicated private cloud servers powered by OpenStack, VMware, Hyper-V. It comes with all benefits of cloud computing with greater control and security of the enterprise-grade private cloud.

• We guarantee the availability of 99.999% with N+M clusters
• We offer fully flexible vCPU and RAM size configurations without lock-in on specific VM types, along with adaptive resizing.
• We provide high performance compute through all-flash storage ranging from 1K- 100K+ IOPS on 10g/40g/100g network fabric infrastructure.