June 5th, 2020
With the events of the coronavirus shuttering businesses and non-profits, the idea of cloud-based infrastructure is once again in full view of leaders everywhere.
Clearly, businesses need a DR plan for desktops and servers. Maintaining a separate facility — which is a common approach — is expensive. The cost of creating and maintaining a second facility and duplicate infrastructure is prohibitive for most organizations. The costs of traditional recovery testing and exercising often constitute a significant portion of the annual DRBC budget (Gartner estimates this is $100,000 or more per exercise).
Perhaps it is time to change our perspective from disaster recovery to business continuity. Companies are increasingly turning to Technology Source as the smart way to implement a DRBC strategy. To understand why, let’s look at the basics of a cloud-based desktop: This is a computing solution in which virtual desktop infrastructure is outsourced to one of many USA-based teams vetted and deployed by Technology Source. An organization’s data is stored in a highly secure and private (as opposed to public clouds like AWS and Azure) cloud environment. The functionality of the environment relies on the virtual desktop, which is a dedicated resource for each user that transforms on-demand cloud services for organizations around the world.
This is an efficient model in which the selected firm manages the responsibilities that would typically be shouldered by a company’s IT department and stored on-site or in public clouds. This is also called “desktop as a service” (DaaS), a virtual desktop, or hosted desktop, and we call them “securely managed workspaces”.
The Technology Source team only works with providers who deliver each user’s securely managed workspace. We ensure they start with the login. The advisors at Technology Source strongly recommend multifactor authentication for security. Upon login, the user is brought into their operating system in the cloud, complete with security settings, approved browsers, browser history and webpages, and all the user’s applications – all open right where they left them. This is all accessed on any company-approved device — including tablets, smartphones, laptops, Macs, PCs, and zero clients — anywhere there is an internet connection.
All the infrastructure, or a hybrid combination, is hosted by the winning vendor. This is including servers, applications, security, network, storage, and backups. This architecture is housed in the vendor’s ultra- secure (Tier-5), HIPAA and SOC compliant data centers, fully supported by our 24-hour engineering teams, and many vendors boasts 100% uptime.
With virtual workspaces, not only do you benefit from having desktops in a secure, high-availability (HA) data centers that are not affected by disasters, you gain peace of mind knowing that you have complete redundancy — your business data and applications are hosted in several data centers. So, even if one of your HA data centers goes down, your employees will always have access to their virtual environment.
This ensures your company is always running, always up, always.
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