Earthquake in Virginia: Is Your Business Ready for a Disaster?

By Michael Miller

This week we recently experienced an earthquake on the east coast in Virginia. We haven’t had an earthquake of this magnitude in nearly 100 years on the east coast. As I sat outside for lunch watching traffic lights sway, bricks falling, buildings being evacuated and fire alarms ringing throughout Alexandria, I couldn't help but wonder how many of these businesses actually had a full disaster recovery plan in effect. And better yet if they had a plan, have they ever exercised it with their IT department heads or leadership teams?
I’m surprised at how many businesses take disaster recovery for granted these days. If you lost your accounting software and all of your customer contacts, account numbers, service history or anything of importance, how would you rebuild your business? Would you start from scratch? Would it cause your business to close its doors for a period of time until you rebuilt, losing revenue and profits? This is a topic that we think is a very serious and mission critical topic yet so many businesses let their disaster recovery plan fall by the way side.

If you’re one of those companies that think that your managed IT services company does your backups for you and that you are safe, guess again. If your managed services IT company has never had a conversation with you about your backup strategy, document retention or offsite backups do not assume that they have you completely covered in the event of an outage. Engage them and have them put your DR plan in place and then test it. Test it quarterly to make that not only your staff knows what to do but your managed IT services company knows what to do and how to restore your network and servers quickly in the event of an outage.

Disaster can strike at any time. While you’re sitting at lunch on perfectly beautiful day as was the case several days again here in Virginia, or with more advanced warning like Hurricane Irene which is barreling towards the east coast as I write this blog post. Don’t wait until after the disaster happens to decide on how to protect your data. Be proactive and have a system in place. I’ve always liked the saying of “Failure to plan is planning to fail…”

Contact Alexandria Networks at http://www.alexandrianetworks.com today for more information on how to build a solid DR plan for your association or business.  As your local Barracuda Networks partner, we can help build a strategy that covers both onsite and offsite backups to help your business to continue in the event of a disaster.

To Virtualize Or To The Cloud?

By Michael Miller

It's a question that's often asked in the association world. Should we virtualize our servers or take everything to the cloud? Really there is no correct answer to this long standing debate over which is better for an association or non-profit organization. The answer is usually defined by the culture of the organization in most cases.

I have found that some associations like to have their infrastructure fully built out and not relying on third parties other than an ISP to keep them self sufficient. Then you have the other type of organization that fears the worst and wants to offload every technology component and run a variety of SaaS applications which to them, is an insurance policy against a disaster.  Sure your data is offsite, sure your end users can access it from anywhere but what happens when your service provider or your SaaS application goes down? Uh oh!

We here at Alexandria Networks have been using a hybrid approach to this debate for some time now. While we still like to have our data local, we do have a mixed bag of tricks that we use daily for our network infrastructure.  For e-mail and messaging, we are 100% in the cloud with Microsoft's BPOS Hosted Exchange. It was an easy migration for us to make and we were able to take advantage of this complimentary solution from Microsoft since we're a partner of their services. It just made sense.

We still have our local VMware 4.1 infrastructure with our 4 TB SAN running Windows 2008 R2 64 bit Terminal Server, Windows 2008 R2 as a domain controller or two and our help-desk ticketing and our AnyWare remote monitoring and management servers in our data center in Alexandria. We host our own accounting package on our local servers and back that up to the cloud by way of a Barracuda 190 Backup Appliance and their Cloud Storage service. This setup for us has proved to work very well for us as e-mail seems to never go down, we can have full use of Outlook using RPC over HTTPS whether we are in the office, away from the office or traveling.  Access to the accounting software can still be accomplished by Terminal Services as well as other local data on our network but we're able to sleep safe at night, knowing that our data is backed up both locally and then de-duped then sent to Barracuda's Cloud Storage.

We like the hybrid approach for now. It's safe, bullet-proof and works for us. A lot of our clients are adapting similar approaches when it comes to virtualizing or taking their data to the cloud.

Our recommendation for clients with 5 to 10 servers in house would be talk to you staff to find out how resistant to change they really are. If they seem to not adapt to change well, virtualize your large and aging environment while slowing making some services accessible via the cloud. If your staff looks forward to change and wants a highly scalable solution that can grow with the association, maybe it's time to look more seriously at cloud services.

Contact us for more information on either virtualization or cloud services at http://www.alexandrianetworks.com/ or call us at 703-772-4243.

Alexandria Networks Plans to Attend 2011 ASAE Technology Conference

Alexandria Networks is planning on attending the 2011 ASAE Technology Conference & Expo in Washington D.C. at the Walter E Washington Convention Center this coming December.  As one Washington D.C.'s top IT consulting firms for associations and non-profits, Alexandria Networks plans on sharing some of the new technology recently implemented for our client base that helps streamline IT support for our association client base.

Some of the new technology we use includes our AnyWare Managed Services platform and toolset and updated help-desk ticketing system which allows our engineers to proactively monitor and maintain client computers and servers on a daily basis. With the AnyWare Managed Services toolset, Alexandria Networks can provide superior, high-end, IT consulting services for associations by managing IT related tasks from start to finish. We can keep association IT costs down to a minimum by performing more with less, allowing clients to focus on their bottom line while still remaining conscience of IT budgets and spending.  With our proactive approach to remote monitoring and maintenance (RMM) our staff members can track down IT problems before they become a problem for association staff members allowing our engineers to take the stepped needed to resolve a problem before it escalates into a larger outage or issue.

Alexandria Networks will be on hand to talk about the advantages over break-fix type of support vs. managed services and how managed services can allow an association to run smoother even during peak demands such as around annual conventions and conferences. Also as an added bonus to visitors to our booth at the 2011 ASAE Technology Conference & Expo, we will be giving away a pretty significant prize during the event so stay tuned for our announcement regarding our contest and give-away!