Disaster recovery is usually a subset of activities around a larger business continuity initiative in an organization. For this article, we will describe disaster recovery, or DR, as the activities required to restore availability of the computing environment to the organization. IT teams inside organizations have been practicing DR for years, often by implementing do-it-yourself (DIY) DR in the form...
Disaster RecoveryIn a recent Gartner survey of risk, audit, and compliance executives, cloud computing ranked as the top risk concern. More specifically, these executives emphasized the potential of unauthorized access to sensitive or restricted information stored in the cloud, and the possibility that cloud-hosted data could be rendered inaccessible due to a service disruption on the cloud provider’s end. While...
cloud computing Data Centers cloud security hybrid cloud Data Security IaaS compliance multi cloud data securityDesigning Expedient Enterprise Cloud September 2018 marks a milestone for Expedient. The release of Expedient Enterprise Cloud is the culmination of thousands of hours in evaluations, education, training, beta testing, product roadmap shaping, advisory boards, design sessions, and acceptance testing from Expedient Support and Delivery engineers. As I reflect on the past several years of work, I want...
cloud computing IaaS public cloud VMwareIn 2013, Pat Gelsinger walked on stage at a capacity VMworld general session and introduced a vision for the next evolution of virtualization: the Software-Defined Data Center. A model where infrastructure provisioning would be disaggregated from the underlying hardware and defined simply by code. At the time, most people in the packed Moscone Center had very little concept of...
Cloud Computing IaaS public cloud hyperscale cloud multi cloud VMwareWe all know that recovery planning for disasters is an important task for organizations of all sizes and industries. This can be a time-consuming and complicated process, but many organizations do eventually create a plan that meets their recovery objectives. “Ahh, now we can sleep better at night!” these IT and business leaders tell themselves. The DR plan is...
Disaster Recovery managed services disaster recovery planningMany IT strategists today are promoting the simplification of IT as a path to better business outcomes. The consensus among them is that complexity can hurt business. Siegel + Gale’s Global Simplicity Index says the world’s top 200 companies lose about 10% of their profits every year due to excess complexity. The SAP whitepaper “Leading Your Organization out of...
Cloud ComputingThe European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective May 25, 2018, and with it came a flurry of privacy policy notification updates from websites, other digital publishers, and more, all of whom are tasked with ensuring that any sensitive user data collected on EU residents – even as a sub-processor – is handled and processed according to...
Security and Compliance Cloud Computing Data Security managed servicesIT strategy is more complex than ever, thanks to all the software as a service (SaaS), cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and multiple platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings available today. In the past few years, cloud-first strategies proliferated resulting in hybrid IT environments in which some computing workloads were outsourced and others were not. Reasons for a cloud-first strategy often included...
Cloud Computing Multi-cloudWith a success strategy focused on organic growth, Expedient has expanded from two dozen employees and one data center in 2003 to now comprise nearly 300 employees and 11 data centers in seven cities, all of which offer award-winning infrastructure as a service and managed services. Our President & COO Shawn McGorry talked with the Pittsburgh Business Times about...
Disaster Recovery Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a serviceOff-balance-sheet operating lease financing is used by many companies to manage spend on IT infrastructure. Many companies use this vehicle, also known as an operating lease, to flatten IT infrastructure spend and minimize risk of asset ownership. But the leasing rules are changing. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board are eliminating off-balance sheet leases for...
Cloud Computing IaaSThe Healthcare Industry’s Requirements for a Cloud Service Provider While data security and availability is imperative for any organization, it is especially true for those in the healthcare industry, whose access to personally identifiable information (PII) such as birth dates and social security numbers requires strong data security measures – and can present security concerns and complexities as these...
Healthcare Security and Compliance Cloud Computing managed services