The post Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery For An Agribusiness: <br>Securing The Harvest appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Key Highlights Include:

👉🏻Proactive Planning: Strategic approaches for long-term project success.

👉🏻Stakeholder Engagement: Effective methods to align development goals with business objectives.

👉🏻API Design Excellence: Uncover the power of an API-first approach – enhancing flexibility, accelerating innovation, and ensuring scalability.

👉🏻The Power of Documentation: How clear documentation minimizes project risks and enhances team productivity.

To view the full recording click here:

Our Webinar Panelists:

The post Innovate Together: Seamless Integration Strategies For Bridging Development & Business appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

According to a recent report, organizations with a sound Finops culture stand to save 30% on their cloud spending. In this masterclass webinar, Aubrey Bent, Cloud Kinetics FinOps Practice Lead, with 20+ years of IT experience & 8+ years focussed on Cloud Financial Management, shared practical insights & best practices on managing your cloud spend while optimizing time and resources.

Session highlights included:

• Finops 101: Why your organization needs FinOps
• The FinOps framework
• Use cases & user stories
• Discovery steps to get started

The session was followed by Q&A and opportunities to connect one on one.

The post Master The Art Of Cloud Financial Management appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

With more businesses starting their digitalisation journey by moving to the cloud, cloud-powered digital data protection solutions, such as Druva, are gaining traction for their specialised features in streamlining data protection processes for enterprises and their ability to safeguard digital assets in the cloud.

The Druva Platform

Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most widely adopted cloud platform in the world, Druva is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that provides data protection solutions across data centres, cloud applications and endpoints through swift recovery and backup.

Druva’s patented cloud architecture harnesses the power of AWS’s public cloud to form a streamlined system that reduces the complexity and costs of data protection services for businesses, ensures compliance for borderless businesses and improves cyber resiliency while providing critical insights that can better enable business continuity. These features are essential to tackle today’s common, yet impactful, cyber issues.

Today’s top cyber issues

Major cyber concerns in this digital age include threats of malware (malicious software), data losses from natural disasters and potential data compliance breaches. These concerns significantly affect the security levels of data, eventually impacting the effectiveness of business continuity itself.

Data loss typically arises from both malware attacks and natural disasters. By using malware, cyber-criminals can hack into an operation’s systems, encrypt the files and then demand a ransom in exchange for a decryption key. From notable examples such as the US$50 million Acer ransomware attack and the Microsoft Exchange server hack that affected 30,000 organisations, it is apparent that the threat of malware is highly dangerous.

With natural disasters, the associated risks of power outages and hardware failures are leading causes of data loss, especially for businesses that choose to maintain on-premises servers for the majority of their data. From these ‘acts of God’, the costs of such risks were exemplified when a tornado destroyed the headquarters of Western Express in 2020, wiping out the company’s crucial data centre hosting systems. Even though data systems were backed up the night before, the company still lost 30 minutes’ worth of data – which could not only be detrimental but disastrous, depending on the classified level of the lost data.

While the events above are unexpected in nature, data compliance issues are dependent on established regulations already in place. As businesses migrate to the cloud and become borderless, they often face challenges to ensure that their data and operations remain locally compliant, which can then incur legal liabilities.

If these compliance regulations are not adhered to, it may result in costly fines for businesses, such as the €35.3 million fine incurred imposed on H&M for breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules in 2020. Therefore, from the heavy costs illustrated, it is crucial for businesses to ensure their data’s protection and backup through tools like Druva.

How Druva addresses today’s cyber issues

Druva, a compliance-certified platform, is built with centralised and automated features that provide a streamlined process for data extraction during backup and recovery procedures. The platform’s key features include hybrid cloud solutions, disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) and data compliance adherence.

The platform ensures data protection as its direct-to-cloud backup feature does not require the implementation of additional hardware infrastructure. During unexpected crises such as natural disasters, businesses having most of their infrastructure on-site can use Druva as a “turnkey” solution to safeguard their data and mitigate disruptions caused by hardware damage and power outages.

Equipped with DRaaS capabilities, Druva minimises the impact of data loss because the centralised data protection platform is securely managed in AWS, whether the data is at rest or in transit. As a certified AWS Solution Architect, Cloud Kinetics has employed Druva as part of a larger solution to help our client, Enersys, orchestrate and generate a disaster recovery and effective business continuity plan (BCP) for their on-premises data across its multiple data centres.

With this solution, Druva can recover applications for the business within 15 minutes to an hour with a single click in the event of a disaster or cyber-attack, greatly minimising disruption and downtime. The platform also instils proactive support through consistent data verification and feedback cycles that ensure data backup and restoration. If corporate data is ever encrypted and held ransom by a malicious party, the business can quickly retrieve an up-to-date backup of their data instead of being forced to pay the ransom (often without any real guarantees) and experiencing service disruptions.

Druva also has a compliance monitoring solution that features a single, fully automated dashboard that constantly monitors company data with prebuilt or customised compliance templates. It can proactively alert users to key regulations or report violations on a 24/7 basis, defensibly delete sensitive data in the cloud backup or source files in response to potential violations of key compliance standards. It can even simplify endpoint protection governance for the remote workforce. Altogether, this dashboard feature significantly streamlines the compliance process, giving both businesses and their users greater peace of mind.

Moving forward with Druva

Cloud migration does not make data entirely immune to external threats and nor will it completely address all compliance matters. Hence, businesses should leave nothing to chance. Every point of vulnerability runs the risk of exploitation, making data protection and backup solutions like Druva the new business necessity.

As a trusted AWS partner and with our experience with Druva, we can ensure that businesses are well-prepared to handle modern digital threats and emerge more resilient – both today and in the future.

The post Securing Your Business With Druva, Powered By Amazon Web Services appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

6 compelling benefits of cloud solutions

Businesses that have been using cloud services long enough report higher efficiency, better customer service and increased profit margins. Other advantages of adopting cloud services include:

1. Improved access to data under all work conditions

With hybrid and remote work part of the long-term business vocabulary now, the cloud has become integral to the business framework since it can securely store data and systems, and enable remote access to them from anywhere at any time.

For example, consider cloud services for organizational call centres. Earlier, 90 percent of businesses used on-premise solutions. However, as call volumes rose because of the changed circumstances, making contact centres cloud-based enabled businesses to re-route calls to home-based agents, who assisted customers by accessing their data in the centralized data pool hosted on the cloud. This ensured that customers experienced the same quality of service while agents remained safe at home or at any other remote location.

2. Better collaboration between work groups

Cloud-based productivity applications enable better real-time digital collaboration between employees, and with clients. While working on a document, changes can be made on-the-go. This increases productivity, improves communication and eliminates unnecessary back-and-forth processes. This is especially useful for businesses working on cross-border projects, or businesses partnering for an event or announcement.

3. Increased cost savings for both small and large enterprises

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) cloud services enable businesses to tailor their usage and be charged accordingly. This is especially valuable for small businesses and start-ups with smaller IT budgets and fluctuating sales volumes. Using cloud services on contract also helps reduce capital expenditure and overhead costs, and allows businesses to use their human and financial resources for other critical and strategic purposes.

4. Better security during all operating conditions

Cyber threats are an undeniable reality of the modern business world. Cloud service providers usually include data security services that cater to both single and multi-cloud environments.

For instance, cloud services allow healthcare businesses to store files and reports in a secure centralized location but providers access them from different networks when required. This allows providers to deliver quality healthcare without running the risk of leaking sensitive personal information.

5. Assurance of business-as-usual under all situations

During mergers and acquisitions, businesses earlier had to undergo an extensive IT system integration process, which could disrupt productivity and incur high costs. However, having cloud-based systems significantly improves and simplifies integration. It minimizes disruption during the transition period and saves both time and money. Any necessary software updates automatically download onto the cloud so that businesses always have the most up-to-date systems at the best possible rates, and without interruption.

6. Quicker data recovery during emergencies

Cloud backups improve business resilience. For businesses that need to be always-on, such as financial services, any prolonged downtime can be catastrophic for all concerned parties. To mitigate the impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, natural disasters, even power outages or any other disruptions, cloud backups for critical services can be created in multiple data centres so that data services can bounce back quickly and ensure end users always have access to their funds. In a recent VMware survey, 88 percent of IT executives utilizing cloud services said that they have been expanding their disaster recovery and risk mitigation policies.

Cloud is the future of digitalization

It is impossible to discuss digitalization without including cloud services. They are a natural addition to most businesses’ digital transformation strategies and will only become more robust and versatile to adapt to the changing needs of the business world.

Businesses today need to evolve and adapt quickly to face new demands and challenges. With the cloud as a cornerstone of digital transformation, cloud services have almost become a necessity to do business in the digital future. It is no longer a question of why, but how soon can a business begin using cloud services.

Follow us on Linkedin for more updates.

The post 6 Reasons Why Cloud Computing Is Important For Digital Transformation appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

What is disaster recovery?

Any type of unforeseen event that disrupts your business is a disaster. This could be caused by natural disasters, cyber-attacks or human error. Whatever the nature of the disaster, having a clear disaster recovery (DR) plan helps to restore operations to normal quickly. DR involves advance planning and it allows organizations to maintain or quickly restore mission-critical functions following a disaster.

Although both DR and BCP go hand-in-hand, they cannot be considered the same. Disaster recovery focuses on how to quickly get the organization back on its feet after disaster while business continuity deals with how to continue operations smoothly during such events. However, implementing DR plans is a critical part of Business Continuity Planning.

Cloud disaster recovery

A cloud-based disaster recovery plan makes use of a public cloud — such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform — to back up data, applications and other resources. When disaster strikes, those resources can be restored from the cloud back to their original locations – on premise (on own data centres / co-located data centres) or on cloud, where the backup was stored.

Cloud disaster recovery offers the greatest flexibility and recovery speed compared to other disaster recovery models. An important point to note is that a cloud-based DR plan can be used to back up and restore workloads that run on premise as well as those hosted in the cloud. Organizations do not have to run their production systems in the cloud in order to take advantage of a cloud-based disaster recovery.

Benefits of cloud disaster recovery

Hosting your DR in the cloud has many benefits:

Reduces physical storage needs: DR on the cloud allows you to store your data directly on the cloud, in real time. There is no need to use physical items like disks, tapes, or any other storage devices, which themselves could be compromised in the event of a disaster.
Stores mission-critical data off-site: A cloud DR plan automatically gives you the advantage of keeping your mission-critical data off-site in a remote location, away from your on premise infrastructure. In case of a natural disaster, even if your production centre is fully destroyed, your data will remain safe in a separate location.
Reduces costs: A cloud DR plan is cost-effective. You can pay-as-you-go. In other words, you need to pay for cloud DR infrastructure as and when you use it; there is no need to invest upfront in hardware or to pay for more infrastructure than you actually use at a given time.
Easy to implement and reliable: Implementing your DR site on cloud is easier than other DR models and offers high reliability, more than 99%. This makes DR on cloud a clear winner.
Scalable and efficient: It goes without saying that scaling your infrastructure up and down on cloud is easy and efficient. The entire IT infrastructure of the business can also be lean while fully ready to fight any emergency or disaster.

What about data security?

Security is always a primary concern when it comes to the cloud. Is it really safe to store sensitive personal data on the cloud? While we know that public cloud providers have stringent security protocols in place, some data might still be too sensitive to deploy directly on public clouds – like financial or medical information. Virtual desktops are useful in such cases. Virtual desktops or Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a solution that helps users get a fast, responsive desktop of their choice accessible anywhere, anytime, from any supported device.

AWS Workspaces and Windows Virtual Desktops are such DaaS services provided by AWS and Microsoft Azure respectively. Virtual Desktops help to eliminate the complexity of managing hardware inventory, OS versions and patches, therefore simplifying your desktop delivery strategy. These Virtual Desktops are deployed within a Virtual Private Network (VPN), providing each user with access to persistent, encrypted storage volumes. No data is stored on the local device but still immediately accessible in case of any eventuality.

The Cloud Kinetics approach

At Cloud Kinetics, we have worked with many clients to design their Cloud Disaster Recovery strategy. We work with key stakeholders during the initial phases to identify and agree on the approach, and follow two basic approaches for Cloud Disaster Recovery:

Approach 1:

• Identify the list of customer stakeholders who can:
  • initiate a disaster notification
  • approve the need for bringing up the DR region
  • approve the need for a DR drill
• Identify and agree on the list of applications, database and other instances that need to be launched
• from the latest snapshot available in the DR region
• Identify and agree on the configuration needed for the listed instances
• Identify and agree on the schedule for copying snapshots of all other instances from the primary region to the DR region
• Setup and perform a DR drill based on the pre-defined schedule.

Approach 2:

• Identify the list of customer stakeholders who can
  • initiate a disaster notification
  • approve the need for bringing up the DR region
  • approve the need for a DR drill
• Identify and agree on the list of applications, database and other instances that need to be running 24×7 in the DR region
• Identify and agree on the configuration needed for the listed instances
• Data replication for DB instances between the primary and DR region
• Identify and agree on the schedule for copying snapshots of all other instances from the primary region to the DR region
• Setup and perform a DR drill based on the pre-defined schedule.

As the world faces unknown threats, having a clear Disaster Recovery Plan in place has become crucial for businesses. Technology has, time and again, offered a solution for most business hurdles. Consequently, a DR plan based on the cloud makes it an ideal cloud disaster recovery solution. Cloud native platforms offer the fast recovery, flexibility, agility, scalability and functionality that an effective DR plan requires.

The post Cloud Disaster Recovery: A Crucial Part Of Your Business Continuity Planning appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Commvault® software can help you move your workloads across platforms in just a few clicks — accelerating your time-to-value when migrating to AWS. It provides the bridge from legacy to transitional hybrid to true exploitation of the public cloud.

By leveraging your backup copies, it reduces the risk and simplifies native moves to and from the cloud to fully migrate business critical workloads (including compliance, data governance, backup and more) into the cloud while assuring data security to, from, and in the cloud through advanced authentication and encryption protocols.

Get more value from your cloud investment – increase productivity, accelerate delivery and realize the true economics of the cloud with advanced orchestration, provisioning and management capabilities

The post Moving Workloads To The Cloud appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Founded in 2008, Druva is a fast-growing provider of data protection solutions for the enterprise. The company offers a full suite of data protection and management solutions for enterprise laptops, PCs, smartphones, and tablets. Its flagship product, inSync, is a highly scalable solution designed for backup, secure file sharing, and analytics for the enterprise mobile workforce. Druva has over 1,500 customers and estimates that it protects a million data endpoints across 46 countries. The company is privately held and has offices in the United States, India and the United Kingdom.

The Challenge

To expand its business and appeal to customers who want a cloud-based solution, Druva decided to offer a cloud version of the inSync platform. The company needed a cloud service provider able to meet its business requirements while allowing Druva to stay focused on its core business. As Milind Borate, CTO and co-founder of Druva explains, “Druva is a global enterprise and we needed a service provider with servers in multiple geographic locations. We wanted a platform that would support us as we grew while meeting our stringent requirements for enterprise-level security.”

Why Amazon Web Services

“We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because we were impressed by its technology leadership and reputation as a continuous innovator,” says Borate. Druva runs inSync Cloud on AWS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage volume, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for configuration management, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage.

The inSync Cloud platform provides customers with instant anytime, anywhere access to data using a web browser or mobile device. inSync Cloud runs across multiple Availability Zones in two AWS regions. Figure 1 demonstrates the inSync Cloud on AWS.

After the initial migration, Druva moved away from the Cassandra database that it was using and expanded its cloud stack to include Amazon DynamoDB. “Using Amazon DynamoDB solved the problem that we were having with linear scalability without resorting to designing and building systems ourselves to get desired throughput,” says Borate. “Amazon DynamoDB allows us to focus on application development rather than database maintenance.” Shifting from Cassandra running on Amazon EC2 ephemeral storage to Amazon DynamoDB allowed Druva to decrease Amazon EC2 instances by 75 percent and reduce costs by 30 percent.

The Benefits

“AWS provides services that make our life much easier,” says Borate. “The transition was extremely smooth, everything was automatic, and the experience validated our decision to go with AWS. AWS builds its services with industry best practices, and the architecture is in place to help us design an appropriately secure application environment.”

Druva uses the AWS platform to automated most of its tasks, allowing more time for product planning and development. Using AWS, Druva can perform a weekly code update on the cloud and give its customers immediate access to new features. “Our cloud implementation benefits from the scalability, durability, and flexibility of AWS,” says Borate. “Building inSync Cloud on AWS has meant a faster time to market.”

The post The Story Of Druva appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

A few recent updates to the File Gateway configuration of the Storage Gateway, and how they come together to enable some new processing models. First, the most recent updates:

SMB Support – The File Gateway already supports access from clients that speak NFS (versions 3 and 4.1 are supported). Last month we added support for the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. This allows Windows applications that communicate using v2 or v3 of SMB to store files as objects in S3 through the gateway, enabling hybrid cloud use cases such as backup, content distribution, and processing of machine learning and big data workloads. You can control access to the gateway using your existing on-premises Active Directory (AD) domain or a cloud-based domain hosted in AWS Directory Service, or you can use authenticated guest access. To learn more about this update, read AWS Storage Gateway Adds SMB Support to Store and Access Objects in Amazon S3 Buckets.

Cross-Account Permissions – Some of our customers run their gateways in one AWS account and configure them to upload to an S3 bucket owned by another account. This allows them to track departmental storage and retrieval costs using chargeback and showback models. In order to simplify this important use case, you can configure the gateway to provide the bucket owner with full permissions. This avoids a pain point which could arise if the bucket owner was unable to see the objects. To learn how to set this up, read Using a File Share for Cross-Account Access.

Requester Pays – Bucket owners are responsible for storage costs. Owners pay for data transfer costs by default, but also have the option to have the requester pay. To support this use case, the File Gateway now supports S3’s Requester Pays Buckets. Data collectors and aggregators can use this feature to share data with research organizations such as universities and labs without incurring the costs of access themselves. File Gateway provides file based access to the S3 objects, caches recently accessed data locally, helping requesters reduce latency and costs. To learn more, read about Creating an NFS File Share and Creating an SMB File Share.

File Upload Notification – The gateway caches files locally, and uploads them to a designated S3 bucket in the background. Late last year we gave you the ability to request notification (in the form of a CloudWatch Event) when new files have been uploaded. You can use this to initiate cloud-based processing or to implement advanced logging. To learn more, read Getting File Upload Notification and study the NotifyWhenUploaded function.

Cache Refresh Event – You have long had the ability to use the RefreshCache function to make sure that the gateway is aware of objects that have been added, removed, or replaced in the bucket. The new Storage Gateway Cache Refresh Event lets you know that the cache is now in sync with S3, and can be used as a signal to initiate local processing. To learn more, read Getting Refresh Cache Notification.

Hybrid Processing Using File Gateway

You can use the File Upload Notification and Cache Refresh to automate some of your routine hybrid process tasks!

Let’s say that you run a geographically distributed office or retail business, with locations all over the world. Raw data (metrics, cash register receipts, or time sheets) is collected at each location, and then uploaded to S3 using a File Gateway hosted at each location. As the data arrives, you use the File Upload Notifications to process each S3 object, perhaps using an AWS Lambda function that invokes Amazon Athena to run a stock set of queries against each one. The data arrives over the course of a couple of hours, and results accumulate in another bucket. At the end of the reporting period, the intermediate results are processed, custom reports are generated for each branch location, and then stored in another bucket (this bucket, as it turns out, is also associated with a gateway, and each gateway will have cached copies of the prior versions of the reports). After you generate your reports, you can refresh each of the gateway caches, wait for the corresponding notifications, and then send an email to the branch managers to tell them that their new report is available.

Here’s a video (and presentation) with more information about AWS Storage Gateway :

At Cloud Kinetics, our experience and expertise in providing cloud-managed services across industries ensure that we are well-positioned to support businesses in fully leveraging the cloud’s immense potential.

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