In the modern world, data has become a commodity.
There are many things that mobile devices and other machines can tell their users. From personal information to actual hardware status, businesses are required to keep tabs on a lot of different aspects pertaining their operations. This means that data centers and the servers that inhabit them are the subject of an increasing pressure to perform – one that shows no signs of slowing down.
Not only does this mean that companies will need to investigate data center expansion if they have not already, but there are going to have to be major provisions made in the way of business continuity. Because of the growing workload that is being placed on the shoulders of the technology, there is a corresponding demand to keep these servers running at all times.
When systems go down, it can be catastrophic for any given organization. Depending on the severity of the situation, some businesses stand the risk of closing their doors for good. This is why there has to be a thorough examination of every possible weakness that might inhibit proper disaster recovery from occurring. While swift access to backups and redundancies of networks, power and files are critical to the survival of all companies big and small, there is another bump in the road that could potentially derail prompt restorations – system settings.
Critical system settings key to facing adversity
It should be noted that business continuity is different than disaster recovery. While DR strategies are developed with the intention of restoring everything to its former glory after an outage or disruption, BC is about getting systems running again for the interim, at the very least. Some of the resulting solutions can be temporary in nature so long as they kickstart the process of getting back to normal.
The cloud has become quite instrumental in both disaster recovery and business continuity plans over the last few years. With its constant availability, the cloud is capable of bringing back many essential aspects of the data center in no time, even if the original hardware were to be destroyed in, say, a fire. Offsite redundancies have earned a prominent place in the survival planning of everyone from private users to government institutions.
But there is more that can be stored and recovered from the cloud than just essential documents and communication lines. Settings for enterprise hardware are often amassed over time, be they put in place by the user to customize functionality or by the company to protect sensitive files. Many times, it will be a laborious effort to optimize every machine individually. Even then, human error still has a significant chance of affecting the final outcome – rush jobs done for the sake of time are incredibly susceptible to containing inaccuracies and mistakes. This means that even the slightest of wrong keystrokes could jeopardize the entire business.
But software and services do exist that can prevent a multitude of these issues from cropping up. System restore programs, like Deep Freeze from Faronics, can allow even the most complex of settings to be preserved when a system wipe is required or a critical error occurs. Because Faronics understands how unexpectedly system issues can occur. Deep Freeze protection can also be leveraged through the cloud. This means that, no matter when a system runs into trouble, getting it up and running is merely a matter of logging in and managing your computer network from another workstation.
