Unfortunately, disasters happen. Cyberattacks have held the top spot for the most common and most impactful causes of business outages across organizations for the fourth straight year, according to Veeam’s 2024 Data Protection Trends Report. These results can be catastrophic for organizations that don’t have the proper plans in place. One of the most critical duties of any IT leader is to understand and prepare for business interruptions by developing strategies, plans, and procedures to keep the business afloat if (and when) a disaster takes place.

What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is a proactive approach to ensure a company’s critical functions can continue to operate during a natural disaster, crisis, or other disruption. These plans involve identifying potential risks, like wildfires, floods, cyber-attacks, or even supply chain issues, and developing procedures that can help mitigate risks and maintain business-as-usual operations.

Business continuity planning is an essential puzzle piece in risk management and allows organizations to adapt, and even thrive while navigating unexpected events.

What to Include in a Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan (BCP) should address the overall protection and response to disasters. It typically includes measures to protect critical data and infrastructure (including IT systems, processes, people, and facilities), maintain communication with stakeholders and authorities, and resume normal business operations as quickly as possible. Some elements to consider incorporating into your BCP include:

1. A Critical Function and Business Impact Analysis: Write down and analyze the critical functions needed for your business to continue operating. Estimate how your business will be impacted if any mission-critical functions or infrastructure goes down.
2. A Threat Assessment: Develop a list of all potential risks that could threaten your business and result in severe disruptions. Categorize threat levels by examining risk tolerances and risk appetite so you can better understand which fall outside of the acceptable range.
3. A Strategy List: Create a detailed list of the strategies and mitigation activities you can launch that will protect your mission-critical functions from the potential threats that were previously identified and analyzed. This should also include a plan for continuing operations in an alternate workspace if the primary location is impacted by an unplanned disruption.
4. Important Contacts and Communication Guidelines: Document key points of contact (as well as assign a second-in-command if the primary person is unavailable) who will handle disruptive events and ensure all employees have access to their information. Additionally, set guidelines around how employees can communicate with internal staff, external suppliers, partners, government authorities, customers, and any other stakeholders if systems go down during an event.
5. Scheduled Testing and Documentation: Regularly test different types of scenarios to ensure your strategies work and you’re able to maintain (or quickly bring back) core business functions. Carefully document each test and analyze it against key metrics and indicators to see if there’s a need for any adjustments.

What is Disaster Recovery?

While business continuity focuses on mitigating risks and keeping organizations running during a disaster, think of disaster recovery as a major pillar that revolves around:

• Maintaining data resiliency and safely recovering data after a disruptive event
• Minimizing downtime and data loss
• Restoring critical IT infrastructure and business operations as quickly as possible after a disaster strikes

What to Include in a Disaster Recovery Plan

When building out a Disaster Recovery plan, it’s important to create and follow a specific checklist to ensure you take an organized, detailed approach to protect and restore your organization’s important functions. Some of the components you should include within your DR plan include:

• A list of mission-critical data and systems that need to be prioritized during recovery
• An outline of backup and recovery procedures
• Plans for redundancy in infrastructure and data systems to minimize downtime during disruptions
• If Disaster Recovery will be in the cloud vs. on-premises
• What third-party services, like Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) or Backup as a Service (BaaS) should be included to strengthen data recovery and protection efforts
• Incident response and management actions
• Crisis communication guidelines
• Disaster recovery testing to ensure it meets RPO and RTO objectives

Keep in mind that these are just a few elements to include. For a more detailed list, read through TierPoint’s Disaster Recovery plan checklist here.

4 Key Differences Between Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery

When comparing business continuity vs disaster recovery, there are some key distinctions between the two.

What an organization decides to prioritize or focus on will depend on the nature of the business and what is likely to minimize disruption and support key processes. For example, businesses that rely heavily on technology may want to prioritize disaster recovery planning, but business continuity planning may be more important for companies that depend on supply chain management.

Scope and Focus

BCP is a broader approach that encompasses the entire organization and focuses on ensuring the organization can continue to deliver products and services in the face of any disruption or disaster. Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on recovering and restoring IT systems, data and infrastructure after a disaster, ensuring the organization can get back to running normally. Business continuity planning is well-suited for ensuring the continuity of the supply chain, especially when businesses are reliant on specific suppliers or require timely deliveries, with and without specific disasters and disruptions.

Timing

One of the main differences between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is timing – when is the plan activated? BC focuses on maintaining a functional level of operations before and during an event and, ideally, immediately after. DR outlines how to respond immediately after the disaster has occurred and what needs to be done to resume business-as-usual operations.

Goals

Ultimately, each process has different goals. The goal of Business Continuity planning is to outline how to limit downtime while DR plans focus on restoring IT systems and infrastructure as safely and successfully as possible to shorten downtime, stop insufficient system functions, and minimize data loss.

Process

BCP is a continuous process that involves running risk assessments, creating business impact analysis, and developing mitigation strategies to lessen downtime while DR focuses on preparing how to recover IT systems and infrastructure after a disaster has taken place.

Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery: Does Your Organization Need Both?

In short: Yes.

Typically, DR is a subset of BC. It’s not highly important, but crucial for organizations to have both BC and DR plans in place. While they have different focuses and goals, they complement each other and are both critical for ensuring that you can confidently respond to and recover from a disaster or disruption.

Business continuity addresses the “during” state of a disruption, while disaster recovery takes care of the “after.” During a crisis, BC plans can keep vital operations moving, whereas DR works to quickly recover data and infrastructure after a crisis has ended. Broader disruptions, including supply chain issues and power outages, can be covered by a BC plan, whereas a DR plan is more focused on catastrophic events, such as cyberattacks and fires.

Having both business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place offer a more holistic approach to maximizing uptime and minimizing the impact of any and all downtime. DR plans can also be more specific, but they do often employ BC strategies in their approach, including data backups.

Combining BC and DR plans can ensure peace of mind and a sense of stability during stressful events and sets necessary safeguards against critical data loss and major interruptions.

7 Risks of Not Having a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery Plan

There are many risks associated with not having a comprehensive BC and/or DR plan in place, such as:

Increased Threats to Business Operations

Not outlining and understanding how threats and risks can affect your business can be detrimental, and a lack of preparedness can cause doors to permanently close. Risk assessment and mitigation is fundamental to both BC and DR planning. The process involves identifying threats, analyzing the potential likelihood of a risk occurring and its expected impact, and prioritizing based on these factors. By knowing what might pose a risk to a business, you can apply preventative measures that may reduce the need for more advanced BC and DR measures down the road.

Loss of Revenue

Disruptions in business operations can lead to a loss of revenue, which can be particularly damaging for small businesses. A significant loss in revenue doesn’t just result in a downturn in numbers, it can also cause leadership to have to make some difficult decisions around employee offerings, staffing, service offerings, and pricing.

Damage to Brand Reputation and Loss of Competitive Advantage

An organization’s failure to respond quickly and effectively to, and during, disastrous events can hurt its reputation with customers, stakeholders, and even internal employees. Also, businesses without proper plans in place may lose their competitive advantage to competitors who boast a better level of preparedness.

Legal and Regulatory Penalties

Most companies are required by law to follow certain business continuity, compliance and regulatory guidelines. A failure to comply with legal or regulatory requirements related to BC and DR can result in fines or legal action.

Increased Recovery Time

Without a DR plan in place, an organization may take longer to recover from an interruption, which can further impact revenue and productivity. Additionally, without a BC plan, it’s difficult for IT leaders to prioritize critical functions that need to continue running in some capacity during an interruption in operations.

Increased Costs

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over 3 years.

While the initial cost of creating and maintaining a business continuity or disaster recovery plan might seem like an unnecessary expense, the lack of one can lead to a hidden financial storm when disaster strikes. Responding to an interruption without a plan in place can result in increased costs for:

• Repairs
• Recovery
• Remediation efforts

Data Loss

Not having a backup plan for critical data can result in permanent loss of data, which can have serious consequences for the organization. Data loss can cause things like:

• Damaged brand trust and reputation
• Loss of revenue
• Decreased productivity, especially if data must be re-created
• Legal issues
• And more

Be Proactive in Your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

BC and DR are crucial for any organization to survive and thrive in the face of unexpected events. By proactively identifying potential risks, developing comprehensive plans, and regularly testing and updating BC and DR plans, you can decrease downtime, protect your brand reputation, and safeguard your bottom line.

Disasters can strike at any moment and with the right preparation and DRaaS in place, you can be ready to face them head-on. Don’t wait until it’s too late – start planning today by downloading TierPoint’s Ultimate Guide to Running Your Business Through Uncertainty and Disruption to ensure the future success of your business.

Fortunately, a good disaster recovery (DR) solution can mitigate downtime as well as ensure your organization’s cyber resilience during a disaster or cyberattack.

Disaster Recovery solutions vary considerably, with the best ones capable of recovering nearly 100% of applications and data. However, the better the Disaster Recovery solution, the more costly and labor-intensive it tends to be. Traditional Disaster Recovery requires:

• investments in on or off-site data centers
• servers and other hardware
• Disaster Recovery software licenses
• and IT staff with DR expertise

Another option for Disaster Recovery is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a complete recovery environment in the cloud, enabling rapid failover and recovery. The infrastructure and DR environment are owned and managed by the DRaaS provider. Organizations pay a monthly fee to maintain their recovery site, including ongoing data replication and disaster recovery testing. 

We know this is the case for x86 environments but is this still true for environments based on IBM Power Systems? In this post, we explore how DRaaS works for IBM Power Systems as an effective approach to protecting critical systems. 

Does DRaaS work for IBM Power Systems?

DRaaS for IBM Power Systems environments is like DRaaS for x86 environments. A managed DRaaS solution is hosted and maintained on IBM Power Systems servers within secure data centers. With this solution, customers get the benefit of a managed Disaster Recovery environment with IBM hardware and expertise. All at a fraction of the cost of a private DR solution.

IBM supports several methods for replicating data, including logical replication, SAN to SAN, or virtual tape libraries (VTL).

• Logical replication, which makes use of IBM’s built-in journaling capabilities, continuously copies the most recent data to the recovery site. It’s possible to capture data and transactions almost immediately after they’re written to the production environment.
• SAN to SAN replication in the cloud is a slightly lower-cost method often used for large volumes of data. Transactions written to the local SAN are copied to a remote virtual SAN in the provider’s cloud.
• Virtual tape replication is digital, virtual disk space designed to emulate tape drives but faster.

Any of those data replication technologies can be used in a DRaaS-for-IBM environment.

The cost of DRaaS will depend mainly on how much data, and how fast, an organization needs to recover. Different businesses have different recovery needs. An e-commerce company will want to recover every last transaction, while a brick and mortar furniture store might be able to lose a few hours of transactions without substantially hurting business.

If you need to get your IT systems restored within minutes: you’ll pay more for it than if you can wait an hour or so.

If you can’t afford to lose more than a second or so of data: your DRaaS costs will be higher than someone willing to lose an hour’s worth of data.

The value of managed DRaaS for IBM Power Systems

Managing your own Disaster Recovery environment is possible, but costly and time-consuming. It gets more costly and time-consuming the better the Disaster Recovery environment. Experiencing any of these scenarios with your in-house IBM Power Systems environment?

• Infrastructure costs for power, space, and equipment are growing
• IT budgets are constantly shrinking
• Finding IBM expertise is challenging. Finding staff with IBM and Disaster Recovery expertise is even more challenging.

Managed DRaaS providers can take the burden of infrastructure costs (while turning your cap-ex costs into op-ex costs), right-size a DR solution for your business with your budget in mind and provide that IBM expertise – all so your IT staff can focus on other IT projects important to your organization.

Get Help with Disaster Recovery for IBM Power Systems

DRaaS helps businesses optimize data resiliency and risk management. With our partners, we provide IBM Disaster Recovery Service for IBM Power Systems. Our service offers real-time replication and continuous monitoring, as well as IBM and DRaaS experts to assist in disaster recovery planning and service selection. Together, we handle maintenance, hardware upgrades, software licenses, storage, networking, hybrid cloud environments, and monitoring to create a seamless DRaaS experience for our customers. 

Learn more about IBM Disaster Recovery and DRaaS for IBM Power Systems.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why Use IBM Power Systems in the Cloud?

Cloud based IBM applications and/or data have several significant advantages:

1. Distributed workforce

With so many employees working from home, it’s important to have a reliable way for them to access applications and data. One advantage of cloud infrastructure is its ability to provide application access for widely distributed and remote end users.

By connecting to the cloud through a virtual private network (VPN) over the Internet, employees can access systems from any location. For example, DSC’s ezHost service for IBM Power Systems provides public internet access with support for VPNs and other private network connections such as MPLS or metro Ethernet.

2. Disaster recovery

Using the cloud for data backup and disaster recovery can ensure that your IBM applications will never suffer extended downtime. Many cloud providers offer managed Disaster Recovery as a Service, so they manage and execute most of the backup and DR processes.

There are typically several levels of disaster recovery to choose, a critical step of your disaster recovery plan checklist is creating a list that encompasses your systems, how quickly your system needs to be backed up and the amount of data you can afford to lose, etc. Some systems, such as an ecommerce database or reservation ticketing system, can’t afford any downtime or any loss of data. Others might lose a day’s worth of data without repercussions.

3. Technology refresh

The cloud also gives IBM Power Systems customers affordable access to the newest hardware–namely IBM’s Power9 processor-based servers designed for high performance applications such as machine learning. By using a cloud provider’s IBM infrastructure, you can avoid investing in your own hardware upgrades.

You also avoid the work of procuring, maintaining, and upgrading all that hardware. Cloud customers also have access to new, innovative technologies. Many cloud services providers offer a range of technology services for developers, such as machine learning and analytics.

4. IBM and cloud expertise

Using cloud management services frees in-house IT staff from hardware and software maintenance tasks, so they can focus on more important, strategic IT projects. In addition, cloud providers have employees with expertise in cloud migration, AIX and IBM i application development, and other technologies.

Customers benefit from having access to this pool of subject matter experts and save on the cost of employing their own experts. It’s also an advantage in a market where fewer IT professionals have skills in AIX, IBM i, and other legacy platforms. Power Systems professionals are increasingly difficult to recruit. 

5. Scalable pricing

The cloud uses subscription-based billing, so IT costs shift from capital expenses to operating expenses. That predictability makes budget planning easier. Cloud services are also priced on-demand. This means a customer can decide to add more IBM Power virtual servers or storage capacity if needed, and decrease them when demand is low.

That’s especially attractive to businesses that experience seasonal fluctuation in IT usage, as well as application developers working on new programs. An engineer can spin up a new development and testing environment without purchasing any on-premises hardware or software, and then delete it when done.

6. Extend capacity

Even if you don’t plan to migrate your core IBM Power Systems applications to the cloud, you can still use it to extend your infrastructure to support new workloads. The existing on-premises Power Systems environment can be connected to new cloud resources via IBM’s Cloud Direct network services or a third-party network service such as TierPoint’s Cloud Connect Express. How DRaaS Enhances IBM Power Systems’ Resiliency. 

Providers Help Get IBM Power Systems to the Cloud

There are multiple ways to take advantage of cloud services while retaining on-premises systems. A cloud services provider can help you plan your migration to the cloud. Look for providers with experience in IBM Power Systems and customers in your industry, so they’ll be familiar with your company’s needs.

The industry-leading cloud service providers typically offer:

• robust and redundant communications networks
• resiliency and guaranteed uptime
• scalable infrastructure
• physical and operational security
• proof of compliance with government regulations
• Support for multicloud and/or hybrid cloud environments (public cloud, private cloud, colocation, etc.)

If you have employees or supply chain partners in different parts of the country, also look for providers with on-ramps to major public cloud providers.

Data Storage Corporation (DSC) is a provider specializing in IBM iSeries disaster recovery and helps organizations protect their data, minimize downtime and recover and restore data within their objectives. TierPoint is a leading provider of secure, connected data center and cloud solutions. Together, they provide a comprehensive solution for managing IBM iSeries migration, hosting and disaster recovery. Learn more about how you can protect your IBM iSeries environment and migrate to the cloud.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is data center interconnection?

Data center interconnection is dedicated network connectivity that spans your data centers, permitting your apps, data, and users to connect reliably and quickly. With interconnection services, data center facilities offer services where customers can connect between various facilities across a regional or nationwide network. If you work with a provider that offers data center connectivity, resources can become available closer to your users via private lines, ethernet, and waves. This decreases latency and improves your users’ internet service experience. While the focus used to be on connecting first-tier markets, many centers can directly connect to second- and third-tier markets as well.  

At any of these locations that are interconnected, you’re also likely to have support available for all assets under one roof, including a colocation data center, cloud services, and network assets. Plus, when you’re looking for processing and coverage in specific geographies, you can narrow in on providers that have data centers closest to your users.  

How can data center interconnectivity benefit your business?

Edge computing enhances user experience

With edge computing, the close proximity of a data center to a user is what helps make for the best user experience (UX). You get high speeds and lower latency. While the service started in Tier 1 cities, those with the largest populations, Software-Defined Networking helped extend edge computing out to additional Tier 1 cities as well as Tier 2 cities and beyond. 

Edge computing has been developing for decades. It started with content delivery networks (CDNs) in the 1990s and continued to take shape with peer-to-peer overlay networks (P2P) in the early 2000s, public clouds in the mid-2000s, and fog computing in the 2010s. These earlier technologies contributed to the eventual development of edge technology in different ways, including balancing workloads between machines and improving network distribution.  

The U.S. edge computing market is expected to reach $3.2 billion by 2025. With edge computing, businesses are able to better cater to a remote workforce, process data from IoT devices, and reduce the load and actual weight of devices such as wearables and vehicles due to this closer data processing. The edge is where people and devices connect to the internet. It represents the location of all connected devices worldwide. When your business delivers computing to the edge, you’re better serving your customers exactly where they are.  

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity improves resilience

Before choosing a data center provider, you should be asking questions around reliability and resiliency. Downtime can be expensive, and relying on a provider that doesn’t have contingency plans for outages and downtime can be costly for your business. 

Make sure you know about the type of network connectivity provided, how resilient the center is, how data and disaster recovery is handled, and types of cloud service or connectivity options available at the site, among other things. You can survive carrier outages unscathed if the center you’re working with is connected to other facilities, has buildings designed to withstand disaster, and has plans to offload data to another center should something unforeseen occur.  

Hybrid solutions increase options for your workload deployments

Hybrid solutions include a combination of cloud and on-premises solutions, or multiple clouds off-premise. Expanding how your data is processed in this way can also keep you from feeling limited by cloud based applications or an on-premise center. With 58% of companies already using or planning to use hybrid infrastructure in the near future, thinking about what hybrid may look like for you is a step in the right direction, and data center interconnection can lend a hand.  

Data Center Interconnection providers may also offer cloud onramps to public cloud providers. Cloud onramps are dedicated cloud connectivity for the major public cloud services. Think of it as data center interconnection for the public cloud providers. 

Achieve resilience and high performance with a data center provider

As a data center provider, TierPoint offers all of the interconnectivity businesses need to effectively run their IT environment, no matter your needs. We offer a full suite of data centers across the U.S., so wherever your users are, we have them covered.  

Are you wondering what building a data center on-premises vs. off-premises would cost? Check out our Data Center Build vs. Buy calculator. 

Almost all organizations today depend on their data backups, software, and the internet to conduct business. When those resources are unavailable, business grinds to a halt. Smart CIOs have disaster recovery and business continuity strategies and plan to quickly move business operations to a colocation data center during a disaster.

Colocation is safer by design

Colocation has become more popular as concerns over cyberattacks and climate change have grown. CEOs and CIOs want to achieve IT resilience, so their companies can continue to operate despite disruptions. IDC defines IT resilience as “the ability to protect data during planned disruptive events, effectively react to unplanned events, and accelerate data-oriented business initiatives.”

Colocation helps ensure IT resilience by providing disaster-resistant infrastructure and redundant IT systems, power, and networking. Many state-of-the-art colocation data centers also provide a backup workspace for customers impacted by a disaster.

Severe weather events and other disasters cost $155 billion globally in 2018. Likewise, cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by the end of 2021.

Moving a company’s primary IT equipment or data storage systems to a colocation facility is an attractive option for CIOs concerned about data loss and downtime. It reduces the need to invest CAPEX or financial resources to build, staff, and maintain an on-premises data center.

Having a colocation partner that is experienced in disaster preparedness can be a relief when a major event happens. Just ask Sam Bayer, CEO of Corevist, an eCommerce platform provider for manufacturers. Located in Raleigh, NC, the company has weathered several major storms in the past few years.

“Hurricanes in the area cause us and our customers a lot of stress,” noted Bayer.

When Hurricane Florence (a Category 4 storm) came ashore in 2018, Bayer was able to reassure customers that the IT systems were safe and secure in TierPoint’s Raleigh data center.

“We had confidence because [TierPoint’s people] were managing the situation,” said Bayer.

In fact, Corevist suffered no downtime at all, despite the storm causing $17 billion in damage elsewhere in the state.

3 reasons colocation is an effective disaster recovery solution

The biggest benefits of colocation for a disaster recovery strategy are:

Cost

For many businesses, maintaining an on-premises to manage data and applications can be expensive (think: internet connectivity, network equipment, real estate, power, etc.) One of the great advantages of colocation is that it allows multiple businesses to share in the cost of facility maintenance and operations.

Physical resilience

A colocation facility will be much better equipped to protect IT systems and data in a natural disaster than the average company can afford to be. It should also have redundancy built throughout the IT infrastructure. Read more about modern data center infrastructure must-haves. Depending on your geographic region, look for evidence it is built to withstand local disasters, such as a Category 4 or 5 hurricane and EF4 or 5 tornadoes.

The provider should be certified on IT industry standards such as:

• ISO 22301, an international standard for business continuity management for natural and man-made disasters, environmental accidents, and technology failures.
• The Uptime Institute’s Tier certifications for Tier IV-fault tolerant site infrastructure or Tier III-concurrently maintainable site infrastructure
• Trusted Site Infrastructure (TSI) – a list of requirements on ten different areas of a data center including areas such as environment, construction, fire-handling, security, cabling, energy, air, organization, and documentation.

Advanced security

Good colocation data centers have advanced security features. Physical security should include 24-hour electronic monitoring with onsite staff, locked cages for customer equipment, and access controlled by two-factor authentication. Two security standards that providers should meet are:

• The Center for Internet Security best practices on privacy and security.
• ISO 27001 — Information Security Management System (ISMS) for managing sensitive company information.

A colocation provider may also offer managed security services to protect against large-scale cybersecurity attacks. Managed security services can help IT departments stop cyberattacks before they do major damage to prevent and mitigate threats.

Improve your resilience against disasters

IT resilience is a critical factor in business success. Downtime can cost a company lost revenues as well as loss of customer trust and damage to the brand image. IT resilience and business continuity are driving businesses to colocation services as a key element of their disaster recovery plan.

Originally published in March 2019, this post was updated on June 1, 2021, to reflect changes in stats and to add more information on colocation and disaster recovery trends.

Why Pennsylvania for a data center?

When developing a data center location strategy and selecting a data center location, it’s not always about what the location offers. Just as often, it’s what the location doesn’t have that makes it suitable for housing sensitive workloads and meeting high-availability computing needs. Pennsylvania is one such location:

• Not a very seismically active part of the country.
• Surrounded by hills, thus less likelihood of tornados.
• Not as susceptible to flooding as other parts of the country

Population density within Pennsylvania is also low compared to many other Northeastern states. Philadelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania (1.5M people), but the number of people per square mile is less than half that of New York City. Especially when coupled with a high volume of business traffic, bandwidth used by consumers in a densely populated area can put a strain on network availability. For businesses that need reliable connectivity and lots of bandwidth, low population density is a big benefit.

While less populated, Pennsylvania is still very close to major centers of business. Three of the major markets served by Pennsylvania data centers include New York City, Baltimore, and the District of Columbia. The furthest commute from some of the popular Pennsylvania data center locations to these major metros is just over three hours; the shortest is less than an hour.

Businesses that choose to colocate will typically own (or lease) their hardware and often take all or most of the day-to-day responsibility for managing it. It’s very important to these companies that the data center is within a relatively easy commute. Distance is also a critical factor when choosing a disaster recovery site. They want their disaster recovery data center to be close enough to visit if they need to, but far enough away that it remains unaffected by a regional disruption.

The benefits of Pennsylvania for data center colocation

We’ve talked about the benefits of housing your data in a Pennsylvania data center. Let’s now turn to how a colocation facility in Pennsylvania can help meet some of an organization’s other critical requirements.

Security and compliance

Companies that choose colocation services are often trying to balance security and compliance with cost structure. They want to decommission their on-premises data center and convert at least some of their CapEx into OpEx. However, maintaining responsibility for the hardware they own or lease gives them a better sense of control.

Online gaming is another type of business served by Pennsylvania data centers. Dave Callan, TierPoint’s V.P. of Sales for the Atlantic Region recently wrote about how colocating equipment in Pennsylvania can help these businesses achieve their IT goals. Read his full blog post here: Online Gaming in PA: Finding the Right Data Center Provider

High availability and low latency

Many hospitals and major financial institutions choose to house their equipment in data centers located in Pennsylvania. These organizations have high availability requirements, and they need low latency connections so they can create a better customer experience. All of the benefits of housing workloads in a Pennsylvania data center that we have already mentioned are vitally important to them.

Managed Services

Banks and hospitals also have stringent compliance and security requirements, and they often feel most comfortable taking a hands-on approach to their hardware. Data center colocation in Pennsylvania gives organizations like these the best of both worlds. Data center providers often offer additional managed services, remote hands, and IT security monitoring, to help fill gaps when staff can’t be there in person.

Business Continuity options

Business continuity workspace is another benefit of data center colocation with a provider. Data center providers often allocate hundreds of seats and meeting room space for clients to use in the event of a disaster.

During COVID-19, many businesses were forced to rethink their work-from-home policies, and they discovered it was possible to send at least a portion of their workforce home. However, a different type of disaster could quickly impact connectivity to the home, and business continuity workspace gives these employees a place to go.

Our five key Pennsylvania colocation data center regions

In our experience, we found these regions to be the best data center locations for our clients. Here are some of the benefits:

Valley Forge

Our Valley Forge data center houses over 600 clients in a 137K square foot facility and offers every product in our portfolio. While many of these customers house their primary workloads in Valley Forge, the data center is also used as a recovery site for many businesses based in Baltimore.

Allentown

Our Allentown-TekPark data center, at 122K square feet, is often the choice for our D.C. clients. Although it’s a little further away than Baltimore, TekPark is set up to handle the level of computing power required by these clients. In fact, we just completed a major power upgrade to this facility to increase computing density, ensure redundant power, and make it hyperscale-ready.

Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem

Our data centers on Courtney Street and LeHigh Valley in Bethlehem are smaller sites, with 25.9K and 27.7K square feet respectively. A few hours outside the major metro zones, many of our customers choose Bethlehem for disaster recovery, so we’ve configured these data centers to handle their high-compute needs.

Philadelphia

At 25.7K square feet, our Philadelphia data center is also a great disaster recovery site, but its strategic location in the Philadelphia Navy Yard also makes it a popular choice for a primary production site.

All five of our Pennsylvania data centers are connected by a dark fiber network ring that can provide sub-2ms connections. We also have dark fiber connectivity down to 401 North Broad in Philadelphia and up to 60 Hudson and 11 8th Ave in New York City. Our fast connections to these well-known data centers allow us to offer faster recovery times to clients using our Pennsylvania data centers for disaster recovery.

Many of our clients take a hybrid approach to cloud computing (public and private), housing workloads in a mix of on-premises data centers, TierPoint cloud services, colocation, and disaster recovery sites. No matter what combination they choose, all of our Pennsylvania customers benefit from our security-first approach. This includes industry-standard security best practices such as checkpoints, gates, fences, 24x7x365 on-site personnel, badge/photo ID access, biometric access screening, secure cages, and full-building video capture.

Come and see one of our Pennsylvania colocation data centers

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of colocation, download our Strategic Guide to the Data Center and Colocation. This resource goes deeper into how colocation works, the advantages of colocation, and how colocation can help optimize a hybrid IT infrastructure.

Learn more about our data centers to understand why we’re one of the best colocation providers in Pennsylvania. To help you decide whether one of our Pennsylvania data centers is right for your needs, we’ve posted our data center spec sheets online:

• Valley Forge
• Allentown – TekPark
• Bethlehem – Courtney Street
• Bethlehem – Lehigh Valley
• Philadelphia

Are you ready to see one of the data centers for yourself? One of our expert advisors would be happy to give you an on-site tour of any of our Pennsylvania data centers.

Schedule a tour to learn more about our Pennsylvania data centers today.

How businesses will build business resilience in 2021

TierPoint’s Senior Vice President of Professional Services, Matt Brickey, sat down with Brian Leimbach, the President and CEO of CIO Advise, a technology consulting firm for small and mid-sized businesses, to discuss the ways in which IT departments responded to the pandemic and how they should go about restarting and reimagining their organizations to build business resilience for the future. Watch the full webinar: Respond, Restart, Reimagine: 3 phases to building business resiliency. Read some of the highlights below.

The 3rs of Business Continuity Strategy

Business continuity is the foundation of business resilience and is typically defined by a set of procedures that allow businesses to continue operating during a disaster. Having a business continuity strategy is essential for the adaptation of your workforce. These set of procedures, or the 3rs of a business continuity strategy are: Respond, Restart, Reimagine.

Respond: Adapting to a mix of remote and office workers

Matt Brickey: As we move into 2021, with vaccines on the horizon, it’s likely that many more workers will be returning to their offices. But not everyone will. IT organizations will be supporting both home-based and office-based workers, with many employees doing both. How should companies adapt to this new mobile workforce?

Brian Leimbach: The initial response last spring was reactionary. Companies had to figure out how to equip employees to work at home. Now, however, we need to make sure we have the flexibility to meet all circumstances, so employees can work wherever they are. Accountability will be important. You have to manage people remotely. Companies will need to use more results-driven management to maintain that accountability. The most successful organizations were those that had the Monday morning huddle or scrum meeting, where you ask what people are working on, how they’re doing, what help they need and, second, using collaboration tools like Teams to facility interaction, with chatrooms so people can stay in touch like they would in a normal business environment. I also recommend that companies implement more digital augmentation and automation in their operations, so they can quickly react to change. Change is inevitable, something like this will happen again since last March.

Returning to the office after continued remote work

Matt: What sort of plan do you advise for bringing people back into the office?

Brian: First you have to consider how to get workers back into the facility safely. Then you can bring people back in waves based on their business priority. Bring back the finance team first because they have to collect mail and pay the bills. Then decide who’s next. Monitor how employees feel about it because a lot of employees don’t want to go back to the workplace yet. Business leaders have to ensure the employee feels comfortable coming back. You also need a plan to retreat, because we’ve seen states partially re-open and close down again. So have a plan to send workers back before doing it.

Restart: Evolving technology and approaches to build business resilience

Matt: What are some of the emerging technologies that can help organizations be more digital and more mobile (and more resilient) in the future?

Brian: One is the growth of intelligent robots or chatbots. Bots are programmed to take over tasks you’d normally handle in a phone call. Other innovations are the telehealth and telemedicine apps that let you talk to a doctor instead of going on an office visit. I saw an interesting new Microsoft Power Platform App that combines local coronavirus statistics and regulations with employer content, notifications and alerts, and the ability for employees to report their status and make requests.

Matt: Many companies still practice face-to-face sales. Moving to a remote model has been a real challenge for them because they’re used to building customer relationships face to face. Do you have some advice for them?

Brian: The first thing we all need is more omnichannel technologies and collaborative tools so that salespeople can interact with clients in different ways and get in front of them more often. I also suggest tools that can track the entire sales process and automate it. As an example, a CRM application could send a quote to your manager who approves it, then it’s automatically emailed to the client, who signs it digitally and sends it right back. That’s a disruptive technology because that process could normally take a week or more. Finally, I’d look at using machine learning and AI to study your data and consider different strategies and technologies for omnichannel sales.

Reimagine: Accelerating digital transformation to address a changing landscape

Matt: You mentioned that about 80% of digital transformation projects have been accelerated this past year. Can you explain that?

Brian. I think again speed is what they’re trying to gain. People understand we need to get through this and come through stronger than we were. They’re looking at different markets; look at how the alcoholic beverage industry got into hand sanitizers. That’s a transformational business model right there. We’re living in a different world now, and it’s exciting. It’s pushing technology faster. You’ll see new markets emerging. It’ll be a fun ride so hang on.

Matt: What role should the CIO or CTO play in a company’s digital transformation, especially if it’s on an accelerated course?

Brian: An important part of the CIO/CTO role is being a good change agent. You have to ask, how do I help the change, how do I set the vision of where we need to go, and how are we going to get there? Then I need to get buy-in from people. The CIO has to be an integral part of any decision-making process. If your whole environment is moving to a mobile workforce work-from-anywhere environment, you’ve got to have the CIO and CTO prepare for that. So if you don’t have a seat at the board or executive table, you need to get invited now. The speed of change has really accelerated due to the pandemic, and this is your best opportunity to be part of that.

How is your business building resilience and adapting for 2021?

Business resilience is the name of the game in 2021. Whether it’s adapting your workforce to prolonged operations outside of the office or working towards moving them back into the office (safely), your business will need to accelerate digital transformation projects, adopt the right technology to enable your workforce, and develop a plan to support those employees where they are. To do so, following the 3rs of a business continuity strategy can be a starting point. At TierPoint, we offer products and solutions to address all of these business continuity, IT resilience and digital transformation challenges you may face in 2021 and beyond. Sign up for our free IT Strategy Workshop to see how we can help your business. Contact us to learn more.

That’s why resilience has become the watchword for 2020, and a top priority for CIOs everywhere. With the risk of disasters on the rise, IT resilience is critical to business survival. A resilient IT environment can not only survive a major disruption but can bounce back quickly from it. Employees can get back to work, business transactions can pick up where they left off, customers can communicate with service staff, and little to no data is lost. 

Business continuity and disaster recovery can help businesses achieve IT resilience. Below, we created a guide to the biggest trends & learnings we found in 2020.  

Disaster Recovery solutions differ

IT managers in 2020 spent time learning the differences in DR solutions.  

DR may be implemented in the cloud, in-house, or at a regional data center. In-house DR is more labor-intensive and costly than cloud DR, especially for a smaller business that lacks the budget to buy equipment, rent data center space, and pay salaries for DR experts. 

With cloud-based Disaster Recovery (or Disaster Recovery as a Service), the cloud provider owns and maintains the infrastructure. The DR software is deployed and maintained in the cloud—either by the customer or the cloud provider. DRaaS is cloud-based DR that is wholly owned and maintained by the provider for customers who pay a monthly subscription.  

One of the benefits of cloud-based DR is the resilience it can offer thanks to the redundancy built into cloud infrastructure—multiple power sources, network providers, servers, and so forth. Also, leading cloud providers maintain multiple data center locations, which ensures continued operations should one location go down. 

DRaaS is sometimes confused with Backup as a Service (BaaS). Like DRaaS, BaaS is owned and maintained by the provider, with customers paying a subscription fee for access. But unlike DRaaS, it protects only the data, not the applications.  

As the demand for fast-and-easy DR solutions has increased, so has the variety of DRaaS platforms and options.  For example, DRaaS is available for IBM I and AIX systems, IBM mainframes, as well as server-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud recovery. DRaaS features may include the ability to do frequent testing, for instance, or access to DR consulting services, user-friendly tools such as drag-and-drop orchestration, or multi-cloud replication to allow the customer to replicate a production environment to two different recovery environments. Some. 

The most important difference between different DRaaS options—or between any DR solution— is how quickly it can restore a system and how much data is saved or lost. These are measured by two metrics — recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). The RTO is the length of time from disaster to recovery, while RPO is the maximum amount of data that the business can afford to lose in a disaster.  

DR solutions typically provide tiered levels of recovery options so that customers can define which categories of data get priority for recovery. Tiering enables customers to save money by assigning less important data to a lower tier while ensuring the highest level of recovery to critical business data.  

• Demystifying the “Service” in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) 
• Is Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Better?  
• Four Common Myths about Disaster -Recovery-as-a-Service 
• What is Cloud to Cloud Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)?  
• How DRaaS Enhances IBM Power Systems Resilience 
• Forging Your Path to IT Resilience with Cloud and DRaaS  

Simplifying disaster recovery infrastructure with HCI

DRaaS is increasingly popular because it’s comparatively easy and low-cost to manage. But DRaaS does have one downside: The customer has little control over the infrastructure, configuration, or performance of the DRaaS environment. Fortunately, a new infrastructure model promises to make do-it-yourself DR a bit easier and cheaper to deploy and manage.  

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is an alternative infrastructure model for organizations that want greater control over their DR environment but without the complexity and cost of a traditional in-house DR solution. HCI appliances come preconfigured with compute, storage, and networking capabilities, along with the appropriate software stack. HCI products provide a simple building block for creating DR environments that in-house IT staff can deploy and manage on their own. Many HCI vendors provide HCI appliances tailored for DR, making it even easier to create an in-house or collocated DR infrastructure. The environment can be scaled up by adding more HCI units.  

• The Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Disaster Recovery 
• TierPoint’s DRaaS and Backup Predictions for 2020 
• Today & Tomorrow in Disaster Recovery and Backup 

Managed DRaaS and disaster recovery services

Customers have much a wide range of services available for implementing and managing their DR environments.  

Managed DRaaS is a category of DRaaS that includes services for planning and deployment, managing the server image, replicating production data to the cloud, and creating and executing the many detailed policies and procedures required by the customer’s DR environment. Managed DRaaS is especially popular with companies that lack the expertise or time to manage their own DR system. 

Disaster recovery management and consulting services are increasingly common. For example, TierPoint offers a wide range of services, from strategic DR planning and implementation to testing and management services. Testing is one of the most critical services, as it ensures there are no bugs or missing elements in your DR environment before a disaster happens.  

As the IT environments become more complex, the need for outside expertise will continue to grow. Fortunately, DRaaS and managed DRaaS providers can take on much of the burden of DR planning and management, and help ensure you’ll have a reliable, and rapid backup and recovery solution.  

Also read: Why You Should Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan 

More coming on Disaster Recovery and DRaaS in 2021

A managed service provider, like TierPoint, can help you develop your disaster recovery plan, test your plan, and help you meet your recovery goals. Learn more by contacting us today. 

Stay tuned for more disaster recovery and business continuity content to come in 2021 by reading the TierPoint blog.  

• cost containment and cost optimization
• business growth and profitability
• digital transformation initiatives
• cybersecurity

While diverse, these strategic goals share a common (and critical) factor: a reliance on high-quality data for success. As the report noted, businesses can’t hope to achieve their goals without access to credible, trustworthy information. Organizations require data to understand how to achieve greater cost efficiencies, to identify new market opportunities and areas of profitability. Without reliable data, businesses can’t analyze past mistakes, forecast future outcomes, understand customer behaviors, or provide strong cybersecurity.

To ensure the availability of critical data, IT departments are adopting cloud-based backup and recovery services. Cloud backup and recovery can help guarantee data availability and security. The Veeam survey found that organizations are using cloud backup services for about half of their backups. By 2023, organizations anticipate using cloud-based services for more than three-fourths (77%) of their backups.

Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) support business goals such as cost savings, business development and digital transformation, and cybersecurity. In this post, we examine how BaaS and DRaaS can impact those strategic goals we mentioned earlier.

How BaaS and DRaaS support strategic goals

Cost efficiency

Both BaaS and DRaaS support cost containment and optimization, for example, by substituting expensive capital investments in data center infrastructure with cost-efficient cloud services. With BaaS and DRaaS, an IT department saves on hardware, software, maintenance costs, staff, and facility expenses. Instead, the cloud provider supplies the infrastructure and labor, with the costs shared by the customers. Many providers also offer managed backup and DR services, a useful add-on service for the 44% of the organizations surveyed by Veeam that said they suffered a lack of IT staff skills and expertise.

Transformation and growth

Backup and DR services also support digital transformation and business growth. Because DRaaS and BaaS environments are rarely used except in an emergency, they can also serve as alternative environments for activities such as application development, testing, and data analysis. As a copy of the production environment, a DR environment is useful for many types of development and testing, as well as analysis of large volumes of data, without disturbing the production systems or impacting end-users. That gives the organization an enormous advantage in researching and testing new applications and technologies and in analyzing new business models.

Cybersecurity

Nearly a third of the surveyed organizations listed cybersecurity as their top challenge. One of the biggest cybersecurity threats today is ransomware, which encrypts the victim’s data, in some cases locking out the entire network, and holds it for ransom. Often, even with a ransom payment, the victim never gets its data back. While IT security solutions such as anti-malware, firewalls, intrusion detection, and encryption all help protect enterprise data, the most effective way to recover from a ransomware or other data-destroying attack is by having an up-to-date copy of the data. BaaS and DRaaS can enable a company to quickly shift operations to the cloud backup, which is protected from any malware that infects the on-premises systems.

Cloud data management and strategic goals

Backup and recovery are a subset of a larger category of solutions called cloud data management (CDM). Cloud data management providers typically offers data storage, automated backup, backup and recovery planning, migration planning, support services, data security, and remote access from any location. The provider may also offer disaster recovery (DR) services, data governance, data synchronization between applications, data conversion and cleansing, data compression, and other data management and migration services. Cloud data management makes it easier to manage and share data across multiple cloud solutions and providers. With half of the world’s data residing in the cloud by 2025, cloud data management is poised to grow even more.

An example of cloud data management is Veeam’s Cloud Data Management Platform. Along with backup, replication, and archival services, the Veeam platform also provides governance and compliance services, orchestration and automation, and data monitoring and analytics. Cloud data management with cloud backup and recovery services provide substantial support for business development, digital transformation, cybersecurity, cost optimization, and many other business and IT priorities.

Join us at BraveIT 2020

To learn more about the importance of data in achieving business goals , read our blog post: The 2020 CIO Cloud Data Management Initiatives. We’re also a sponsor of TierPoint’s BraveIT conference, where guest speakers and experts will discuss cloud data management, cybersecurity trends, disaster recovery trends, how businesses will pivot post-Covid and more.

BraveIT 2020 is an interactive, thought leadership and networking event designed for the modern IT professional. The 2020 BraveIT virtual conference will take place September 16-17 with multiple guest speakers and panels. See the full agenda and register today.

BraveIT Spotlights are guest blog posts from our 2020 BraveIT sponsors. Dave Russell is the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam.

Putting Power Systems infrastructure and applications into the cloud adds many advantages: rapid scalability, ease of management, reduced IT staff, access to new technologies, and distributed access for remote workers. Power Systems plus the cloud is really the best of both worlds. 

What you need to migrate IBM Power Systems to the cloud

Careful planning is needed before a legacy application is moved to the cloud. If you’re considering migrating some or all of your Power Systems AIX or IBM i applications, here’s a guide to help you plan your cloud migration strategy.   

Development, disaster recovery or production

Cloud-based environments can serve three basic purposes: 

• Development – The cloud can provide a development “sandbox” for writing and testing new code 
• Disaster recovery – Cloud environments are often used for disaster recovery solutions. Replicating applications and data to the cloud can give you a ready-to-use backup in case of an outage or cyber-attack on the main production system.
• Production – Re-hosting all or part of your production IBM systems to the cloud can also give you access to the latest hardware improvements and operating system updates, without your IT staff having to do a thing. The cloud also provides a convenient and cost-effective way to meet seasonal demand for IT resources without having to buy additional hardware. 

IaaS or DRaaS

There are two options for moving Power Systems applications to the cloud: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). 

IaaS is an infrastructure-only option which includes storage capacity, network functionality, CPU, and memory. IaaS can help extend an on-premises system by providing additional storage or virtual servers as needed, sparing the customer the cost of buying new hardware to meet occasional surges in demand. The customer can implement whatever platform it wants, which is convenient for organizations with older versions of the IBM i or AIX platforms. 

DRaaS is good for ensuring that on-premises servers can failover to an alternate system in the cloud in case of a natural or man-made disaster. The on-site applications and data are replicated to a cloud virtual server which acts as a “cold” or “hot” spare in case of disaster. By using DRaaS rather than a simple data backup to the cloud, you can significantly reduce downtime and data loss.  

TierPoint’s IBM Systems disaster recovery service is an example of a DRaaS solution. Examples of IaaS offerings include: Data Storage Corp.’s (DSC’s) eHost, the IBM Cloud with Power Systems Virtual Servers. IBM Power Systems platform for Google Cloud, and .Skytap’s cloud for AIX and IBM i on IBM Power. 

Migration help

Many cloud computing providers offer cloud migration tools and services to help you transition to their cloud environment. Alternatively, you can contract with a cloud managed services provider who can both conduct an application and data migration, and manage your environment.  

A migration isn’t always as easy as a lift and shift. Migration planning providers may need to conduct a pre-migration assessment, create a roadmap and timeline for the migration, and help carrying out the migration. Management services cover the day-to-day administration of a cloud environment—such as updates, application performance and security monitoring, and tech support. 

Pre-migration audit

You’ll need an inventory of your Power Systems portfolio including servers, applications and licenses, application interfaces, and the various categories of data (e.g., financial data, public data, personally identifiable information covered by privacy laws, etc.) Also take stock of your in-house resources. What types of Power Systems and cloud services expertise exists among your employees, and what training opportunities can the managed services provider or consultant offer? Educating your staff enables them to liaise with IBM and cloud solutions vendors, as well as troubleshoot problems in an emergency. 

Workload sizing

Before you can move application workloads to the cloud, you need to size them. Knowing the performance data on your workloads will help you cost effectively plan your cloud requirements. Otherwise, you may have to spend more to add virtual machines, memory, and storage capacity post migration. There are tools for analyzing the performance of IBM i and AIX applications, such as the IBM Workload Estimator or Systems Workload Estimator. 

Data backup

Perhaps the most critical element of any migration is a good copy of your data. No one wants to lose half their business data to an untested backup. In the past, data was copied to tape and the tapes were sent to the cloud provider for upload. However, tape backups are more time consuming and more vulnerable to loss or theft.  

Lately, transferring data directly to the cloud has become more popular. For direct transfer, you can use an ETL (extract, transfer, and load) tool or replication service from a third-party provider, such as Google, TierPoint or Data Storage Corp.   

Schedule the migration

Because migrations can go awry, it’s best to choose a date and time when few end users will need the system. Typically, migrations and backups are scheduled on the weekend or late at night. Some migration services, such as TierPoint’s DRaaS, can replicate data in the background, without impacting the end user experience.  

When you finally do migrate your systems, whether it’s in phases or all at once, make sure to build in extra time for tweaking and testing. Ultimately, a cloud migration should provide you with the flexibility and scalability you need to meet the needs of your business while retaining the Power Systems infrastructure that you’ve come to depend upon. 

Migrate and protect your IBM Power Systems environment

Managed services providers (MSPs) can help you manage all of the considerations outlined in this post and more. When working with a managed services provider, you also gain the expertise needed to manage these large and complex migration projects without adding a burden to your IT team. Along with our partner, Data Storage Corporation (DSC), we provide migration, disaster recovery, and other managed services for cloud and hybrid cloud environments (private and public cloud with other workloads). 

Data Storage Corporation (DSC) is a provider specializing in IBM iSeries disaster recovery and helps organizations protect their data, minimize downtime and recover and restore data within their objectives. TierPoint is a leading provider of secure, connected data center and cloud solutions. Together, they provide a comprehensive solution for managing IBM iSeries migration, hosting and disaster recovery. Learn more about how you can protect your IBM iSeries environment and migrate to the cloud. 

To learn more about migrating legacy systems to the cloud or protecting it with a disaster recovery solution, contact us today.