Continuity Archives - Page 4 of 12

What happens when your employees can't get to work?

February 25, 2016/in Blog, Communications, Compute, Continuity /by ISG Technology

There was a time when waking up after a massive snowstorm was a joyous occasion. You’d sit down to watch TV or listen to the radio, hoping to hear your school’s name on a list of those closed for the day. There really wasn’t anything better in the winter than a snow day.

Sadly, however, those days are long gone. There are a lot of perks to being an adult, but one of the drawbacks is that having an entire office stay home for a few days when the weather gets rough simply isn’t an option.

That being said, working from home poses a lot of challenges too. Aside from having to deal with kids loudly enjoying their snow day, remotely accessing business applications can be difficult.

Forcing employees to come in during a blizzard is reckless

Many more thoughtless employers believe the answer to this problem to be simply requiring employees to get to work regardless of the weather conditions. While maintaining business continuity is incredibly important to profits, at the end of the day your employees are really the only irreplaceable part of your operation. With the U.S. Department of Transportation having found that more than 31 percent of fatal weather-related car crashes happened due to snow and ice between 2004 and 2013, requiring people to come into work under such conditions could prove to be deadly.

Don't force your workers to come in on a snowy day.

What’s more, getting to the office in a blizzard can actually be illegal. During winter storm Jonas in January 2016, New York City and Long Island were forced to ban traveling. This included trains and city mass transit, and also driving in the tunnels and onto bridges. So not only is forcing employees to come in during a massive snow storm incredibly heartless, it could be illegal.

Working from home is a start, but there’s a catch

All this being said, your business likely can’t just stop operations for a few days while a storm blows over. Your clients and partners demand continuity, which means employees will have to work from home when the snow falls heavily. Certain business applications are absolutely vital to your company’s work, and yet quite a few of these systems may not be able to be accessed while at home. They require employees to be in the office when utilizing them, severely cutting down on what your employees can do while at home.

While this is clearly a major problem for employees that rely on mission-critical applications to get their work done, there are other logistics to be considered when implementing a work-from-home initiative in the wake of a disaster. According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of Americans have a broadband connection at home. While that’s still a majority, it shows a massive hurdle many companies will have to overcome when trying to maintain business continuity after a disaster. A proportion of your employees may not have high-speed Internet at home, which means their ability to stay productive is going to severely drop.

“Employers need to have a plan in place.”

Proper planning is vital

What all this means is that employers need to have a plan in place for the eventuality of workers being snowed in. This includes having a lengthy discussion with employees about their home situations, including their ability to connect to the Internet if the need for them to work from home should arise.

It also means that cloud-based disaster recovery is an absolute must for those businesses operating in colder climates. Blizzards are a very real threat to business continuity, and not being able to access your applications in the event of such a disaster could be costly to your operations.

Consult with an ISG Technology disaster recovery professional today and save yourself the headache of an adult snow day.

Server virtualization: What can it do for your company?

February 24, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity /by ISG Technology

When it comes to making sure business is running smoothly, it often falls on the shoulders of the IT department to ensure that everything is aligned and working toward the end goal of more growth, higher revenue and better reputation among clients. To this end, server virtualization can be one of the better ways to ensure optimized resource use and preserve functionality within the IT department.

According to a 2015 study conducted by Techaisle, 54 percent of small to medium-sized businesses in the U.S. currently leverage server virtualization, a hefty increase from the 41 percent of 2013. For midmarket companies, penetration is at 88 percent. Clearly, organizations are jumping on the bandwagon of server virtualization. Let’s take a look at this technology and see how it can impact your company for the better:

“IT admins don’t have to worry as much about processing capacity.”

What is it?

Server virtualization is the act of taking one physical server and splitting it into multiple – and, compute resources permitting, sometimes infinite – virtual environments. Virtual machines run on a guest/host paradigm, according to TechTarget. This means that a single administrator (the host) can create virtual machines (guests) that use different operating systems. Guests sit on top of something called a hypervisor, or virtual machine monitor, which allocates resources and validates all of the guest-validated CPU information.

These guest machines, while not running from a physical location, still use up real resources. However, since it’s all managed via one physical server, resource use is curbed significantly, so IT admins don’t have to worry as much about processing capacity or resource management.

Creating virtualized servers can lead to significant OPEX and CAPEX savings.

Worth it in the long run

Virtualization doesn’t just save up space in the server room. By getting rid of physical infrastructure and deploying VMs within minimal real servers, companies can save money as well. Significant reductions in capital and operational expenditures are possible by transforming IT infrastructure in this manner. In fact, according to TechTarget contributor Rick Vanover, the more effective use of resources and greater computing capacity can lead to savings due to less space and power used within the data center.

ISG Technology is a certified partner of VMware, one of the tech giants in the world of virtualization. In fact, VMware was listed as the number-one virtualization company by ServerWatch, and Gartner named the company one of the leaders in the field in 2015. At ISG, we can help you choose and manage your VMware solution so you don’t have to worry about your IT resources or CAPEX/OPEX.

Contact ISG Technology today for more information!

Winter storm in the Midwest highlights need for disaster recovery planning

January 28, 2016/in Blog, Continuity /by ISG Technology

Although it came a little later than usual, winter is finally here for much of the United States. Many parts of the U.S. have been blanketed in snow recently, but it would appear the Midwest has received an extra helping. Winter storm Ilias has made its presence known, with its icy fingers reaching from Kansas all the way to Tennessee and beyond.

Thankfully, no deaths have been reported yet as a result of Ilias. That being said, the occurrence of yet another cold and icy winter certainly isn’t welcome, especially for companies trying to maintain business continuity. Heavy storms like Ilias are incredibly threatening toward the livelihood of a business, and organizations should take steps to prepare a disaster recovery plan for them.

“Snow can very easily cause a roof collapse.”

What happens when your facility is damaged?

Although winter storms may not be as flashy or as obviously disruptive as other natural events like tornados, they can still cause some heavy damage to your company’s building. Snow may not seem heavy to you, but that’s only because you’ve only ever picked up enough to make a snowball. When it begins to pile high on your facility, snow can very easily cause a roof collapse if left unchecked.

What’s more, extremely heavy winter storms have been known to cause power outages. Nemo, a massive blizzard that ravaged the Northeast in 2013, caused the outage of more than 650,000 businesses and homes in the area, according to USA Today. The massive power of this particular blizzard shows that your business is completely open to the elements. The building housing your company simply cannot be 100 percent protected against the weather, and as such you’ll need a disaster recovery plan for when things go wrong.

What about when people can’t get to the office?

While damage to your office building would be terrible, everything contained there is just stuff. The part of your organization that really matters is the people working every day to further your business. Your employees should be your first concern when thinking of a disaster recovery solution for winter storms, as commuting to work in snowy conditions is incredibly dangerous.

Ilias emphasized this point recently when the roads near Kansas City froze over, causing multiple car accidents in the metropolitan area, according to KMBC. When storms get this bad and having your people come into the office becomes a liability, will your business be able to function? You obviously don’t want your employees to be in harm’s way, but how can you keep up business continuity if none of your employees have access to work-related resources?

You need a disaster recovery plan now

Waiting until tragedy strikes your business to make a disaster recovery plan is like putting your seatbelt on after a car accident: The damage has already been done. Anyone who doesn’t have protection against events like winter storms should absolutely be looking into disaster recovery solutions. Thankfully, ISG Technology can help you on your journey toward a more prepared workplace.

Check out ISG Technology’s page on disaster recovery planning and contact a DR expert today!

ISG Technology: Who we are

January 27, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Communications, Compute, Continuity, Networking, Professional Services, Security, Storage /by ISG Technology

We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing what ISG’s services can do for you, as well as what kinds of specific problems we can fix. We’ve even done an opinion piece here and there about current trends within IT. What we haven’t done so far is explain what kind of a company we are on a more personal level.

As a modern company, it’s really important to us that you not only understand what we do, but who we are. In an effort to fully introduce ourselves to you, we’d like to explain the three guiding principles that drive our company’s innovation each and every day: people, technology and service.

“People come first.”

People

When it comes to business, even the business of technology and machines, people come first. When we’re considering initiating a business relationship with a company, the first thing we do is try to fully understand the people who work there.

The reason we do this is simple: We can’t figure out how to fix your problem if we don’t know anything about who you are and what you need from us.

For the average managed services provider, solving an issue starts with what the MSP can do to fix the problem, followed by how the company is specifically going to solve it and finally finishing with why that particular situation was a problem in the first place. While this gets the job done most of the time, we at ISG think these companies have it backwards.

We begin our problem analysis by first figuring out why this obstacle is in your way. Starting here works better because it allows us to fully understand all aspects of your particular situation, without coming in with any preconceived notions. After this, we begin to work on how we’re going to fix the problem, followed by a full and detailed investigation into what the actual problem is.

What this means is that you can rest assured ISG will solve the problem you’re actually having, and not the one you think you’re experiencing. While you may think you need simple malware removal – something ISG could easily provide for you – it may turn out that you actually need comprehensive firewall protection services. By figuring out why a situation is a problem for you first, we can diagnose the root cause of your dilemma and provide a solution based on your company’s specific needs.

Technology

Technology is evolving at a truly remarkable rate. The Pew Research Center found that in 2015, about 68 percent of American adults owned a smartphone. In 2011, that number was closer to 35 percent. In four short years, smartphone usage had almost doubled, showing how fully technology has been integrated into our everyday lives.

Technology is everywhere, and with around 84 percent of your American clients identifying as Internet users, being on the forefront of this revolution is absolutely vital to stay profitable. That being said, keeping up with the latest and greatest in technological innovation is extremely hard when you’re trying to run a business.

To anyone working outside of IT, something like server virtualization can sound like magic. Just wrapping your head around the concept of fitting multiple, virtual machines on a single server can be impossible if you don’t understand the finely tuned technology behind it.

Thankfully, our team of highly trained tech wizards can make this magically complex technology simple and easy to comprehend. With ISG, you can rest assured that you’re getting the technology your business needs, from experts who truly understand it.

ISG tech experts are extremely knowledgeable.

Service

Although you obviously want a cursory understanding of the technology you’re investing in, we know that you want IT solutions to just work. You don’t want your business goals to be hampered by constantly having to figure out what’s going wrong with the services provided to you, and as such, ISG has always been focused on providing a quality service to all of our clients.

Whether it’s disaster recovery services, or even online backup of your mission-critical data, we value giving the businesses we work with the best product we can. Investing in ISG is investing in consistency, and nothing is more important to us than making sure your IT problems get solved as efficiently and as effectively as possible.

If you’d like to learn how ISG can help bring your business to the next level, make sure to check out the list of managed services we offer on our homepage.

Is your company ready for a power outage?

January 26, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity /by ISG Technology

When the word “disaster” comes up in a conversation concerning your company, you probably think of tremendously damaging events caused by nature. Most people jump to thoughts of raging fires or blistering winds from a tornado. These are obviously incidents to be concerned with, but what about the less-flashy disasters that may befall your business?

You’ve probably got a fire extinguisher somewhere on your premises, and you also most likely have a procedure in place for a strong tornado, but do you have a disaster recovery plan for when the power goes out?

Power is about more than keeping the lights on

Keeping the electricity flowing is an absolute necessity for business continuity. So much technology goes into the daily operations of organizations these days that having the power go off unexpectedly can have serious effects.

According to Gartner, the average cost of downtime has been calculated to be roughly $5,600 per minute. That means that a power outage lasting only an hour could cost your business up to $300,000. That’s a huge expenditure for a single point of failure within your organization, and points to the highly important role electricity plays in the enterprise today.

Think of all the actions your business conducts that require power. Everything from using a VoIP phone system to talk with clients to simply sending out companywide emails all require your organization’s office to have power. Once this connection to the grid is severed, your ability to continue business is completely destroyed. Electricity is at the center of just about everything you do at work, and the loss of it can be devastating.

Power outages more common than you’d think

While the statistics about network downtime in and of itself should be enough to convince you of the importance of disaster recovery planning, the truly frightening aspect of losing power is how common it is. In fact, Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty has discovered that these kinds of incidents happen a lot more than the average person would suspect.

The company’s research found that from 2010 to 2014, power outages were the 10th most likely cause of disruption to business continuity. Although other, more natural forms of disaster beat out loss of electricity, this study still shows just how vital power is to the average business’s continued profitability.

“Take the time to make sure your company is safe.”

Disaster recovery planning is a must

With the knowledge in hand that your company’s power is absolutely vital to business continuity, it’s time to take action. The only way to truly be ready for a trying event such as this is to have a plan that comes in the form of a disaster recovery solution. Not only will a solid disaster recovery plan allow you to mitigate the risk of a power outage, but it will also make sure your business doesn’t fall victim to other disruptive events.

However, it’s important to note that there is a certain level of expertise necessary in the creation of a plan. Your IT team is undoubtedly talented at what they do, but they probably don’t have the experience required to make a disaster recovery procedure.

Many people like to think that doing something in-house will end up being cheaper. This may be true of other functions, but not so for disaster recovery. In fact, a study conducted by Computer Economics found quite the opposite.

Of the organizations surveyed in the report, 92 percent stated that their expenditures in the creation of a disaster recovery plan were the same or even lower than when they attempted to do so with internal staff. There are obviously many reasons behind this, but chief among them is the fact that tasking your internal IT team to create a plan pulls their attention away from internal goals.

This not only wastes the time of these employees, it also wastes your company’s money. Allowing an outside firm that actually knows how to set up a disaster recovery procedure lets your workers get back to keeping your business up and running, thereby increasing efficiency.

If you’ve ever thought about creating a disaster recovery plan, there’s been no better time than now. Waiting until an unfortunate event actually hits your company could result in major downtime for your services, which is going to cost quite a lot of money. Take the time to make sure your company is safe and contact an ISG Technology disaster recovery specialist today.

What to know before deploying: Cloud capabilities

January 26, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity, Storage /by ISG Technology

Cloud environments are being used for more things within every industry. Its advantages come in many flavors: IT executives polled by the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services named business agility, collaboration and cost savings as the biggest drivers for cloud adoption. In fact, a full 72 percent of those surveyed reported that collaboration was the best business benefit of deploying virtual environments. After all, with the cloud, business partners can more easily communicate and share documents from remote locations.

This is only the top of the list of cloud benefits. Let’s take a look at how the cloud was used in 2015 and how it’s likely to be used as this year progresses:

“The cloud presents itself as the ready answer to DR problems.”

Disaster recovery and business continuity

Keeping companies afloat was right up the cloud’s alley in 2015. Cloud Tech contributor Monica Brink noted that one of the biggest trends seen throughout 2015 was the use of the cloud as a disaster recovery tool. As IT budgets diminish and cloud adoption grows, these kinds of virtual environments present themselves as the ready answer to DR problems. The market for Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service, as a result, continues to grow. Projections in a report published by MarketsandMarkets indicate the DRaaS market will be worth $11.92 billion by 2020.

IT management

As mobile devices continue their entrance into the workplace and new computers are constantly added, network administrators have their work cut out for them to try and manage the growing number of endpoints any one organization has to deal with. A poll conducted by IT management provider Autotask found that the increase in endpoints is more easily managed with the cloud. Around 55 percent of the IT service providers surveyed said they had seen significant or steady growth in the number of endpoints they have to manage.

The majority of these respondents noted that they used the cloud to manage all of these endpoints. With network virtualization and cloud computing, it’s easier to view, manage and define all the devices on any one network, and that in turn enhances security.

Cloud storage

The market is looking good from the cloud storage end, as well, and related verticals are beginning to show the impact of the cloud. For instance, the video surveillance market is on the incline, according to MarketsandMarkets. This vertical is expected to be worth a total of $18.28 billion by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate of 22.41 percent. As a result, the cloud storage market will also exhibit some growth, because where else are companies going to store those surveillance videos if not in the cloud? The value of this market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 40.55 percent from 2015 to 2020, according to Research and Markets.

The cloud is used to enhance business agility and decrease complexity within an organization.

Unified communications in the cloud

The CIOs polled by the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reported that collaboration tops the list of priorities in terms of cloud adoption – and it’s for good reason. When the cloud is paired with powerful communications technologies that bring all methods of contact into one suite, it becomes monumentally easier to exchange ideas and get business done. According to MicroScope editor Simon Quicke, small to medium-sized enterprises are adopting cloud-based UC at a faster rate than ever before. These communication tools are flexible, cost-effective and reduce complexity within an organization.

All of these capabilities are going to be crucial for IT managers to take advantage of in 2016. By streamlining business processes and investing in managed cloud environments, your company can make sense of complicated IT processes and increase agility where it counts. Contact ISG Technology today for more information about how the cloud can go to work for your business!

Deploying hybrid cloud in 2016: Tips, tricks and stats

January 26, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity, Storage /by ISG Technology

The cloud is everywhere. No matter where you look, it seems nearly every company is using cloud technologies or talking about the cloud in some form. Verizon’s recent “2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud” report indicated that 87 percent of organizations are now using cloud-based tools to run mission-critical workloads, with 69 percent of enterprises touting the cloud’s usefulness in helping them revolutionize business processes. While adoption of private cloud is on the incline, hybrid architectures are also set to enjoy an increase in the coming months.

Why are enterprises across the board and within nearly every industry adopting cloud technologies? The advantages speak for themselves. Cost effectiveness, increased ability for collaboration and better flexibility are only a few of the benefits that companies can glean from deploying applications in these virtual environments. Private and public cloud environments are useful in their own rights, and hybrid cloud allows companies to choose the best of each kind of deployment – mix and match cloud, so to speak.

The ability to combine private and public deployments into one solution is enticing for many businesses, and as such, the outlook for hybrid cloud is good.

Cloud adoption: Past and future predictions

In 2011, Gartner projected the rise of hybrid cloud by saying that 90 percent of organizations had plans to hybridize their IT strategies in the near future. The subsequent years have shown that, yes, hybrid deployments have practically skyrocketed since those Gartner predictions were made. Research published by MarketsandMarkets in March 2015 projected that the total market value of the hybrid cloud space would reach $84.67 billion in 2019, growing at a compound annual rate of 27.3 percent beginning in 2014. This is a huge portion of the market share allotted to the overall cloud industry.

The new year is already beginning to see important changes when it comes to hybrid architectures. Cloud Cruiser contributor Dave Zabrowski predicted that in 2016, the hybrid cloud would become the standard for operation among enterprises and small businesses alike. Zabrowski cautioned that deploying hybrid cloud environments can add complexity to IT infrastructure, but drawbacks like these aren’t slowing the adoption rate any. Network World contributor Brian Butte noted that because enterprises are learning the real benefits and disadvantages of each kind of cloud deployment – public and private – they are more likely to turn to hybrid environments to serve them for different purposes.

“Hybrid cloud is being utilized for more than simply storing and running applications.”

Cloud containers: Good news for everyone

Hybrid cloud deployments offer a bevy of advantages to those enterprises that make the decision to hybridize their IT infrastructure. Enhanced flexibility, better business agility and customizable pricing are all important incentives for cloud adoption. However, these are only surface-level benefits.

One of the biggest advantages of the hybrid cloud lies in the ability to develop and deploy containerized instances that run applications and store data. Containers work in a similar manner to virtual machines, except that VMs run complete instances of servers and thus take up a lot of space. Containers, on the other hand, are extremely small. Essentially, they represent building blocks that can form complete instances, instead of coming as a complete package. According to WindowsITPro contributor Orin Thomas, this facilitates the movement of containers between hosts, because all you have to do is shift the container files themselves.

This enhanced ability for movement and application support is advantageous for numerous reasons. In a hybrid cloud environment, this allows developers to streamline app development and delivery.

“[D]evelopers creating applications can build a container on their development machine, push it into their organization’s private cloud deployment for wider testing, and then push that same container up into Azure when the application is ready to be deployed into production,” Thomas wrote.

Hybrid cloud is helping enterprises make the most out of their IT infrastructure.

Considering hybrid? ISG can help

Hybrid cloud is being utilized for more than simply storing and running applications. Development and delivery are two other important aspects of IT infrastructure that should be considered when making the move to the cloud – additional benefits that may not be at the top of administrators’ minds when considering options in the new year.

Partnering with a managed services provider like ISG Technology can help take out some of the complexity of deploying a hybrid cloud solution. Our cloud experts can successfully guide you down your path to hybrid IT deployment – call us today for more information!

What is the future of the hybrid cloud?

January 26, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity, Storage /by ISG Technology

With 2015 in the rearview mirror, people are starting to look ahead toward 2016. Although most people are looking forward to a New Year’s resolution they probably won’t be following, many in the tech industry are eager to see what 2016 holds in terms of cloud computing development.

The cloud has completely changed how modern business is conducted, but it hasn’t stopped revolutionizing yet. Improvements in the technology have brought about something called the hybrid cloud, an incredible combination of the private cloud’s security and the public cloud’s affordability.

This advancement is working so well that MarketsandMarkets predicted that the hybrid cloud market would be worth a staggering $84.67 billion in 2019. That’s a huge improvement over 2014’s worth of $25.28 billion and simply points out how fast this technology is catching on.

Hybrid cloud is the ‘next step’

The hybrid cloud really is a breakthrough and has quite a lot of fans all over the tech industry. One of these fans is Brian Butte, a contributor for Network World. Butte states that the hybrid cloud is the next big thing for IT due to the rapidly changing landscape of modern technological innovation.

He states that advancements like the Internet of Things and real-time analytics are “cloud-dependent technologies” that work very closely with the end user, thereby requiring a public cloud option. However, the public cloud isn’t a perfect solution.

A hybrid cloud solution solves a lot of problems.

Cybersecurity is always a huge concern for businesses these days, and the public cloud simply isn’t safe enough for all company data. Some information is simply too sensitive and therefore needs the security of a private cloud. That being said, the private cloud isn’t very cost-effective for housing all the data a business might produce.

This is why the hybrid cloud is so incredible, and it’s why this technological leap is becoming so popular. By combining the best attributes of both cloud types, the hybrid cloud is making quite a name for itself in the IT world.

As Butte puts it: “Deploying hybrid clouds is the next step beyond private clouds in the evolution of cloud computing.”

“The hybrid cloud is only getting bigger and better.”

Implement your hybrid cloud solution now

The hybrid cloud is only getting bigger, and there has been no better time than now to invest in it. If your company has needs that can be met by public cloud managed services, but you need a more secure option for other data, the hybrid cloud is right for you.

Make sure to check out ISG Technology’s cloud services page today and see what the hybrid cloud can do for you!

Is your business ready for a winter storm?

January 26, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity /by ISG Technology

With snow finally falling in many parts of the country, winter has finally made its presence known. The first snowfall of the year is truly a wonderful event, and yet it poses a serious risk to businesses. Heavy snowstorms can cause damage to a company, both to physical infrastructure and the ability to conduct business.

In fact, AccuWeather found that winter storms cost the American economy $3.7 billion in 2014 alone. This number only accounts for the physical damage to buildings, leaving out the devastating cost snowstorms can cause in terms of downtime.

“Winter storms cost the American economy $3.7 billion in 2014.”

Although that number is frighteningly high, heavy snowfall doesn’t have to completely disrupt your revenue stream. With the right tools, and the right help from an experienced disaster recovery provider like ISG Technology, any business can weather the storm.

You’ll need to prepare the office

Just because you’re not able to control the severity of a snowstorm doesn’t mean you have to be at its mercy. Like many parts of life, failing to prepare for heavy snow is preparing to fail. There really isn’t anything big you can do to get ready for one of these storms. Rather, there are a lot of little ways you can prepare your company for massive snowfall.

Ready, a public service campaign created by the American government, has a large list of ways people can prepare for heavy snow. The list is targeted mostly at the average citizen, but it works just as well for a company preparing a disaster recovery plan for the winter.

Everyone should have rock salt and sand ready in the event of icy roads. This is great advice for companies with their own parking lots, as having clients and employees getting stuck in the ice every 10 minutes simply isn’t good for business.

Pushing cars in the snow is no fun, invest in salt and sand now.

On top of that, businesses should invest in shovels for days when snow falls during work hours. Note here that the word used was shovels not shovel. Nobody wants to scrape ice and snow off of pavement alone, and your employees will thank you for spending the extra money.

Get help from the experts

Although all of this is all great advice for those wishing to ready themselves for the winter, there are a whole host of other aspects to consider when making a winterized disaster recovery plan.

Do you know how long your IT systems will last without maintenance in the event of a major snowstorm? How about what to do when the snowfall gets too heavy and crashes through your facility’s roof?

These questions and many more all require a disaster recovery expert to answer them, and attempting to make a plan without experienced personnel simply isn’t feasible. Thankfully, ISG Technology is here to make the process simple, easy and affordable.

If you’d like to make sure your business is ready for winter, or any disaster that might come your way, make sure to check out ISG Technology’s disaster recovery page today.

3 reasons why your business should consider colocation

January 25, 2016/in Blog, Cloud Hosting, Continuity /by ISG Technology

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. It seems like new innovations are coming out every day, each with more benefits than the last. One of these incredible jumps forward has been colocation. Basically, this is where companies bring their own servers to an outside data center and share space – or colocate – with other companies.

Colocation has revolutionized enterprise IT, as many organizations have jumped into this innovation with both feet. In fact, the market surrounding this feat of modern technology is expected to absolutely explode in the years to come. According to 451 Research, the global data center colocation market is projected to be worth around $36 billion by 2017. That’s a huge amount of money for a single service, and simply goes to show how popular this innovation has become in recent years.

So, to bring more exposure to this incredible advancement, we’d like to take some time and discuss the top three reasons why your business should consider colocation.

Colocation is an interesting innovation with many benefits.

1. Affordability

The first – and perhaps most important – benefit of colocation is the cost savings that it can provide to organizations. Servers are absolutely necessary for modern business operations, but their care is incredibly expensive. The electricity used to power them alone is a huge expenditure, not to mention the fact that you need to hire employees to make sure the machines are safe and well maintained.

This is probably the biggest reason why so many companies are opting to switch to colocation services for their computing needs. Although you’ll still have to provide your own servers, sharing space in a single data center means sharing electricity costs. That’s good news for the environment, and it’s also a great way to slim down that budget.

What’s more, colocation providers have highly trained staff on duty 24/7 making sure your machines are kept safe and sound. This frees up your own IT team to work on internal goals and projects, rather than simply paying them to maintain the servers. In a way, you’re paying less money to get more done.

“Average network downtime costs around $5,600 every minute.”

2. Reliability

While saving money is always a good thing, businesses need more than that. Companies need to know that their services will be provided at all times, as the loss of these capabilities can be extremely expensive.

According to Gartner, the average network downtime costs around $5,600 every minute. This makes a lot of sense, considering the importance of connectivity in the Internet age, although that amount of money being lost every minute should be extremely frightening to the average business owner.

This fear of downtime is driving a lot of company leaders into colocation services, and for good reason. Colocation service providers often also offer disaster recovery planning. This means that these companies will be much more prepared than your organization at dealing with a disastrous situation, therefore ensuring the uptime of your mission-critical services better than your company ever could on its own in its own facility.

3. Scalability

Sure, your company may only need a single server right now, but don’t you think that will change as your business grows? The whole point of the American Dream is to start small and eventually work your way up to massive success, but is your company prepared for that?

Scaling up on your own can be incredibly frustrating, as finding the space for new servers is not easy. Your company’s office probably has a finite amount of space, and while growth means more computing needs, it also means more employees. How will you find space for your servers if you have more workers than ever? Once again, this is is where colocation comes in to help save the day.

One of the best parts of colocation services is the fact that you can scale your company’s operations up or down to your heart’s content. Taken on a lot of new business and can’t handle the workload? Just rent more space. Had a bad year and don’t need as much server space? Scale down. Colocation services are almost entirely customizable, allowing your computing operations to grow or shrink with your business.

Colocation really is an incredible innovation. It allows your company to receive the server power it needs, without forcing you to buy space you don’t. If you would like to see what colocation can do for you and your business, contact ISG Technology today. Our years of experience in the field will allow you to leverage this amazing technology to benefit your company.