What if performing your DR was as simple as cooking spaghetti?

1. What if Performing Your Disaster Recovery Plan Was as Simple
as Cooking Spaghetti ?
The Cloud DR
Cookbook
Are you ready
to innovate?
By Alexandre Lanoue

2. Introduction........................................1
Chapter 1 : An overview of the Digital
Enterprise............................................2
● Cloud
● Analytic
● Mobile
● Social
● Internet of things
Chapter 2 : Business resiliency in a
box.......................................................4
Chapter 3 : The branch in a box as a use
case......................................................5
Chapter 4 : How do you get
started?...............................................6
Conclusion..........................................7
Table of contents
Cloud
RPO
RTO
Workload
Stategy
Management

3. Introduction
The emergence of the third platform is
fundamentally changing how we live, work
and interact. These digital forces have altered
user expectations and require enterprises to
rethink client employee experiences.
However, how do enterprises leverage this
new digital technologies when it's already
difficult for IT team to complete existing
workloads while keeping infrastructure and
skillsets up to date.
This struggle is magnified when the time
comes to plan a proper business resiliency
plan. Where traditional backup and disaster
recovery methods may have been valid for the
last few decades, explosion data growth and
the increasing complexity of business
applications are now challenges that every
CIOs in the world is facing. Although every
business strives to achieve agility and
scalability, these goals are not always easy to
obtain, but digital enterprise technologies
may hold the key to success.
The purpose of this ebook is to introduce
how Digital Enterprise concepts could be
leveraged to overcome these challenges and
prepare enterprises for tomorrow's business
resiliency requirements.
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4. The Digital Enterprise is a fairly new concept. IBM, HP and many other tech-companies describe it a
transformation of the business model. The digital enterprise accelerates growth by reinventing the way
people interact with and within organizations. According to IBM, the Digital Enterprise should leverage
five technologies : Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Internet of Things.
The Five Technology Components that Support a Digital Enterprise
An overview of
The Digital Enterprise
2
Cloud
The Cloud is not simply about hosting an
infrastructure; it’s about getting the
technology businesses need on demand. By
adopting a scalable, hybrid cloud strategy,
organizations are able to speed the
deployment of very complex software and
hardware implementations. With the cloud,
companies can cut projects timelines that
used to take months down to a matter of days.
The cloud also brings a dimension of cost-
savings to businesses. For the first time ever,
organizations have the ability to transform
project capitalization requirements into
operational financial models. By eliminating
the initial capital investments originally
needed to deploy new technologies, for
instance, companies gain fast and positive
ROIs on projects. With a “pay per use” pricing
model, companies can also more easily scale
their cloud infrastructures to match growing
or shrinking IT needs.
Analytic
For most people, analytics are defined as data
warehousing, big data and business
intelligence. This is only a piece of the puzzle,
however. Analytics is not solely about
processing a large amount of data in a very
short period of time, or applying business
rules based on algorithms. Rather, the greatest
value in analytics comes down to the ability to
extract insights from data so that businesses
can better understand the current and past
performance of their organization.
All of this is achieved by using descriptive or
diagnostic analytical processing. Predictive
and prescriptive analytics also allow companies
to accurately estimate what will happen in the
future. Using predictive analytics, a business
leader could glimpse possible future scenarios,
which would allow them to make the best,
most-informed decisions possible for their
organization. Companies can also harness the
power of analytics in a business context by
empowering all employees to make insight-
based decisions rather than relying on instinct
and past actions.

5. Mobile
Mobile access from tablets or smart phones
has put the latest information at the
fingertips of the user. For the first time in
human history, employees have access to
the data they need at the moment they need
it. This is extremely valuable to employees
who travel.
An executive that travels to a new country,
for instance, has the power to make a
decision or approve a contract while they
are out of the country on a business trip.
Overall, mobile brings convenience and
flexibility to business processes and , we
should not forget that the true value of
mobile technology is to improves
productivity.
Social
Social media platforms have become a part
of everyday life. In the business world,
social is about connecting people together
to unleash the power of the collective
intelligence. By amplifying the value of
human connections, organizations are able
to uncover creative ways to solve issues, find
experts, share information faster and
develop engaging dialogues to strengthen
relationships.
By making people the centre of its
operations, an organization can not only
create personalized digital experience, but
they can also engage in a conversation with
employees. As a result, organizations can
cultivate a culture of trust and innovation.
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things refers to the devices and software that connect our world. The idea of
security is central to the Internet of Things. By opening an organization to the outside world
through new applications and other widely accessed technologies, it becomes exposed to threats.
As a result, organizations must be prepared to “seek and destroy” these threats before they suffer
the consequences.
And as devastating as the threat of a virus or security breach can be to an organization’s overall
ability to perform, the damage can also be detrimental to an organization’s reputation.
To be a digital enterprise, a company needs to do more than simply deploy these five
bundled technologies across their organization. Becoming a digital enterprise comes
down to strategy. It's about designing and building business processes that take advantage
of these five technologies in unison – all for the sake of ensuring the successful longevity
and operational efficiency of a business.

6. Business resiliency
in a box
4
For an organization to compete in today’s competitive markets, it needs to be able to stand up against
ever-evolving threats and operational inefficiencies. Developing a good business resiliency plan that is
supported by the five digital enterprise technologies is a part of that.
Cloud solutions are one of the simplest ways to build business resiliency today. Cloud solutions range
from private on-premise clouds to public clouds or even hybrid (or mixed) clouds that contain elements
of both public and on-premise cloud environments. After deciding which method is best for a business,
companies need to decide how to store applications and application data. They also have to decide their
ideal level of vault resiliency and estimate a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), or the time it takes to
recover information and systems once they go offline.
Regarding backup, it is important that companies utilize the latest technologies, such as block level
backup instead of file level backup. It is also important that the chosen technology supports frequent
incremental backups. This will allow considerable reduction in the amount of backup data being stored
to the vault over time, which will reduce storage needs.
For those concerned with an incremental, forever backup strategy, the latest technology, such as IBM
Spectrum Protect or IBM Cloud Managed Backup, allows companies to virtually “re-create” a full
backup of data and systems at any point in time. This allows businesses to comply with the most
complicated retention policies.
The vault resiliency is also another critical aspect. An organization could implement the best backup
solution, but if the vault itself is not protected, the overall business resiliency plan will be affected. The
level of protection that a business chooses to implement will have a major impact on their restore time
objective. What people often forget is that it may take a lot of time and effort to make the vault ready for
the restore process.
Traditional off-site tape may still be a supported solution by many technology brands, but companies
should explore the affordability of cloud infrastructures. Cloud object storage, for instance, hosts a copy
of an organization’s backup vault. Another affordable cloud solution utilizes Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS) to host a backup server replica. IaaS, such as SoftLayer IaaS, could also be considered as a low-
cost disaster recovery solution.
4

7. The Office Branch
in a box as a use case
Cloud technologies can also be used to connect multiple office locations. For instance, consider an
organization with several branch offices that all require backups for their critical applications. In most
cases, a disaster recovery system is needed to protect the data and servers of every branch. To ensure all
business branches are protected and resilient against data loss, a central office or data center may need
to function as the universal manager.
Fortunately, digital enterprise technologies equip companies with the right tools to manage multiple
office branches. Scalable models, for instance, provide companies with the ability to get fast, dedicated
links to a central data centre. When it comes to the link between the branch office and the central office,
it may be a very costly and complex scenario depending on the locations and the distance between them.
By leveraging the network of an Infrastructure as a Service provider, such as SoftLayer, however,
companies can reduce the cost of their network expenses. By creating a VPN or dedicated link from each
location to the closest POP, organizations can then leverage the high bandwidth, high availability
network of an IaaS provider to relay data. Also, as described in the previous chapter, companies can also
leverage cloud object storage or public/dedicated IaaS servers to host a replica of data backups.
5

8. 6
How do you get Started?
The first step towards becoming a digital enterprise is to properly plan and prepare a solid business
case. It may be easy to see the possibility of value, but to gain quantifiable, value-driven results,
companies must choose their investments wisely. Here are some of the top business resiliency
solutions – fuelled by digital enterprise technologies – that finance departments should consider:
DR Planning and Prioritization
● Depending on the nature of a business, recovering all applications in a
timely manner may not be feasible, so it becomes necessary to prioritize,
plan and test backup recovery strategies. This ensures the most important
aspects of a business are back up and running first, which in turn reduces
the lost costs associated with outages.
● The Ability to Streamline Acquisitions. A scalable backup and restore
solution combined with a cloud disaster recovery solution can facilitate
the tasks involved in the undertaking of a company fusion or acquisition.
● Low TCO. Have you considered that a cloud business resiliency plan may
be “cheaper” than a traditional solution while being more efficient. Don't
forget that a Cloud solutions are typically driven by an OPEX model as
opposed to a CAPEX model. In many cases, the annuity cloud model will
propose a lower TCO.

9. Conclusion
7
The emergence of digital enterprise technology has tremendously changed the
resiliency of businesses in almost every industry by making enterprise-grade I.T.
resources accessible for organizations of every size. As a result, organizations should
consider leveraging the cloud for their business resiliency plan to reduce
implementation cost while improving the business recovery times.
Ready to explore how digital enterprise technology has the power to transform the
efficiency and costs of your business? Reach out to an SIA Innovations expert today!