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Sapphire is an established private cloud service provider with emphases on Business Continuity, Virtualization Services, and Regulatory Compliant Data Storage. To become a reseller click here. For information about finding a reseller or how your existing IT Service Provider can become one, click here.

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Sapphire Cloud Solutions is a full service cloud hosting provider for resellers. To become a reseller click here. For information about finding a reseller or how your existing IT Service Provider can become one, click here.

For more than ten years now, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has cemented its place as the business service delivery model of choice – whether the call to action be collaboration or analytics.  Historically, companies were required to buy, build, and maintain their IT infrastructures despite exponential costs. SaaS gives companies an alternative. Now, they can plug in and subscribe to services built on shared infrastructure via the Internet.

The SaaS model has flourished because of the many benefits it offers to businesses of all sizes and types. For small and medium size organizations in particular, web-based applications delivered via SaaS can provide a great cost effective alternative to delivering effective IT to your business.

Below is a list of 10 Software as a Service (SaaS) benefits to help organizations understand why they should choose SaaS solutions over traditional software:

• Affordable

Unlike traditional software, SaaS is usually sold on a subscription basis that includes upgrades, maintenance and a degree of customer support. SaaS subscription models usually operate on a monthly subscription basis,  hence there are no large up-front costs.

• Quick to Deploy

With SaaS solutions, all you need is a web browser and internet access, and you’re ready to go. Whereas traditional software can take weeks or even months to deploy, SaaS solutions don’t require any software to be installed and so you are able to access your new software immediately.

• Zero Infrastructure

When delivering business applications via SaaS, the complexity of the underlying IT infrastructure is all handled by your SaaS vendor. Users do not need to worry about the maintenance of hardware, or which operating system version supports which database – SaaS vendor will take care of all of this for you, so you don’t have to.

• Seamless Upgrades

SaaS provider will manage software updates and upgrades for you, eliminating the need to install or download patches. At any one time, you can be assured that you will always have the most up to date software.

• Guaranteed Levels of Service

With most traditional software, you are not given a guarantee on how well it will perform, with SaaS you are. At Sapphire Cloud Solutions, we guarantee your applications will be available 99 % of the time.

• Backups and Data Recovery all done for you

If you are familiar with traditional software, you will know that unless a costly automated solution has been implemented, the process of backing up your data on a weekly basis can be laborious at the best of times. SaaS solutions eradicate this painstaking task, instigating automatic backups without user intervention and thus ensuring the integrity of your data.

• Work Anywhere

Providing there is an internet connection, SaaS solutions can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Users are able to access their data and work more efficiently from anywhere, making life easier for home-workers or for those people that work across multiple sites.

• Security

In many instances, an organizations’ business information is more secure in a SaaS solution, than in traditional software. At Sapphire Cloud Solutions, we run a much more secure, separate datacenter which contacts the IT infrastructure to deliver our applications.

• High Adoption Rates

As SaaS solutions are delivered over the internet, there is virtually no learning curve involved with adopting a new solution as employees tend to already be used to working on the internet.

• Long Term Customer Relationship

We believe  this last point to be the most significant. At Sapphire Cloud Solutions we charge you an annual fee for the service, not monthly. So it’s important to us that you are happy with the service and stay with us for several years. We are very focused on ensuring you remain happy customers long term. You can contrast this with traditional software vendors who make the majority of their profit on the initial software license sales and have a relatively small ongoing support fee. Their focus is on getting you to buy the license and not necessarily the longer term view.

Sapphire is an established private cloud service provider with emphases on Business Continuity, Virtualization Services, and Regulatory Compliant Data Storage. To become a reseller click here. For information about finding a reseller or how your existing IT Service Provider can become one, click here.

As we reach the halfway point of 2016, it is interesting to take a look at the year’s predictions vs. the year to date actual results. An article from CIO’s digital magazine (http://www.cio.com/) boldly predicted the “Death of the Enterprise Public Cloud” and because of this death, there will be “a shift in the focus for IT groups to deliver applications”, rather than spending time agonizing over what or whose cloud infrastructure to use.

At Sapphire Cloud, we see the future and the future is now. Built around “Best in Class” products, our future ready private cloud delivers today and is ready for tomorrow.

Sapphire is an established private cloud service provider with emphases on Business Continuity, Virtualization Services, and Regulatory Compliant Data Storage. For more information about becoming a Sapphire Cloud Reseller or End User, go to www.sapphirecloudsolutions.com.

Backed by over 25 years of experience, Sapphire Cloud provides Small and Medium Businesses with outstanding business continuity and disaster recovery solutions on our private commercial cloud. Our team of experts will evaluate your IT systems to devise a DR strategy that works for you and your budget, including both physical and virtual servers and infrastructure. If your IT Service Provider is not a Sapphire Cloud Partner, ask them to sign up so you can have access to one of the fastest growing private commercial cloud services. If you do not have an IT Service Provider, we will work with you to find a reseller who meets your needs.
When creating a DR plan it is important to take into account your every IT need so you can get your most important applications back up and running as soon as possible. We can seamlessly synchronize our cloud systems with your on-site tools ensuring that your data is always protected based on the following industry standard metrics:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) or how long you have before you need access to your applications and data after an emergency.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) or how much data loss you can tolerate.
• Service-Level Objective (SLO) or how much data recovery you need and when you need it.

SLO’s help you devise your DR plan on an application basis. For example, you can go a lot longer without your credit card processing system than you can go without your reporting applications. SLO’s also let you know which systems you can and cannot move to a cloud-based system due to their latency restrictions.

Finally, you need to know how long you need your DR system in place. Not all disasters result in total loss of on-site capability, and you need to know how much backup you will need based on your server, multisystem or shared system, and data center loss risks. You may only need a few hours or days of DR service in most situations, but a total loss may require weeks or months of backups before you can rebuild your facilities.

Regardless of the DR system you get, your plan must take into account your infrastructure needs and risks and the duration of your recovery.

If you have any questions or would like guidance with your business continuity planning contact me (naum.lavnevich@sapphirecloudsolutions.com) or go to the Sapphire Cloud’s website at www.sapphirecloudsolutions.com for more information.

Sapphire Cloud Solutions stays ahead of the trends to provide you with the resources needed to build and maintain strong business continuity plans. This blog provides you with new insights on DR processes and procedures. If you need any assistance with them, let us help you!

SMB disaster recovery isn’t always easy, but following some key disaster recovery best practices is a good start. SMB IT managers may feel they can easily recover from outages because they have smaller IT environments and excellent IT teams. However, even the best IT managers can under estimate the complexity of building successful disaster recovery strategies. Sometimes this mindset leads to either an incomplete DR plan or no plan at all. If you intend to build a DR plan, you need to follow the essentials for disaster recovery planning.

1. Determine Impact

The most important and difficult step in disaster recovery planning is understanding how an unplanned outage affects your organization. Unplanned outages are any unforeseen events that interrupt normal business operations such as an IT systems failure, fire, power loss, or a natural disaster. Performing a thorough Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is the first step towards a successful DR plan. Without a BIA, it becomes very difficult to know what type of disaster recovery strategy you need. Depending on the interruption, your organization can lose revenue and sales opportunities, suffer reputational harm, or in the worst case, go out of business.

A thorough BIA is performed by identifying your organizations most critical business activities and applications and predicting what would happen if they were interrupted. This analysis is where many inexperienced planners make a mistake: Often they will take analysis shortcuts and go directly to developing a solution. DR planners should not assume there is a workaround or contingency available when a critical application is interrupted. A good rule of thumb is to plan for the worst and hope for the best.

A primary DR goal is to set a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) or how long a critical process can be down, and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO), or how much data you can safely lose. Often, the age of your data defines its RPO, not its size. For example, an accounting firm must be able to recover immediately up to the time of the crash while an auto repair shop may be able to lose 12 hours’ worth of data.

When performing a BIA, the planner must determine and rate on a scale from 1 – 5, with 5 being most critical:

– The financial value of the organizations functions and applications and how much revenue will be lost if this function is interrupted. The organization’s financial team must play a vital role in this step of the BIA.

– The operational value of the organizations functions and applications and how much productivity will be lost if the function is interrupted.

– The reputational value of each application and how it will affect customer satisfaction and future business growth.

– Last but not least, it is critical to identify the IT infrastructure required to the implement the DR plan.

2. Understanding Risk

Once the BIA has been completed, a thorough Risk Assessment (RA) of your organization must be performed. Typically, the RA is tightly bound to the results of the BIA. Functions and applications with a critical rating of 4 and 5 should be assessed first. Non-critical applications can typically be brought online as needed and do not need the same level of understanding and planning as critical applications.

Risk is complicated and its underlining factors make it easy to get bogged down while performing an RA. Therefore, keep your assessment criteria simple and be realistic about the risks your organization could face including specific threats tied to your organization’s geographic location, weather patterns, power and communications, and the transportation infrastructure.

3. Developing a Recovery Strategy

Once the DR planner has identified critical applications and assessed how outages will impact their business, it is time to develop a recovery strategy that will get their organization online quickly and mitigate its losses.

While developing a recovery strategy, be sure to consider existing contingencies or redundancies already in place. For example, if a critical application is hosted offsite or is managed by a provider, be sure to include them in your planning. Including all internal and external parties in your recovery strategy could greatly increase the resources on hand to assist in your DR activities.

As previously discussed, the key factor behind an effective DR strategy is determined by the critical nature of the application, how long critical applications can be down, and the acceptable amount of data loss for each application. Defining a clear path to procuring replacement equipment, retrieving your backup data, and establishing a recovery location is the foundation of executing your recovery plan.

Quite often improvements to an organization’s operating environment are discovered during the business and risk analysis activities. Any changes to operating environments should be defined and implemented as part of the recovery strategy process. Testing your DR plan on an annual basis will ensure it works and will also highlight areas in need of improvement.

By nature, all disasters are unforeseen, unpredictable, and unique, thus making it impossible to write a perfect plan. Testing your plan is the best way to make it as effective as possible.

4. Documenting the Recovery Plan

The final, and perhaps most important, part of your recovery plan is documenting it. Keep it simple: Smaller businesses should not attempt to develop an enterprise class DR plan. Very detailed disaster recovery plans take time to develop and are hard to maintain. At a high level, the disaster recovery plan should outline the priorities for system recovery, the recovery time objective, recovery procedures, as well as the location of data backups and the contact information for key recovery personnel. Testing the plan frequently will help identify weaknesses which is much better than discovering them during a DR event. Every time you test a recovery procedure, you will discover where the gaps are and what improvements you can make to ensure you achieve a mature and comprehensive DR plan.
We hope you found this information useful. If you have any questions or would like guidance with your business continuity plan contact me (naum.lavnevich@sapphirecloudsolutions.com). If you would like more information about Sapphire Cloud, check out our offerings page at www.sapphirecloudsolutions.com