Posts by UpsideAdmin

The Dirty Little Secret About Online Backup

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How do you know your business data is protected? If your server fails or a hurricane hits or some other digital disaster strikes, what would you lose? Your email? Your customer database? Your business contacts? Your business?

Perhaps you’re one of the many companies taking advantage of online backup services to protect your data. Online backup is a great way to ensure that critical digital assets, from databases to documents, can be safely restored if there’s ever a problem. But if you’re using online backup, there’s something you need to be aware of. It’s the one consideration that your online backup provider might not have mentioned to you.

It’s the dirty little secret about online backup.

The secret is that it might take a lot longer to restore that data than you expect. What most providers don’t mention is that, after a disaster or server problem, it might take days to restore critical business data. In fact, the time it takes to restore data, even with a high-speed Internet connection, can mean potential downtime that can be detrimental to your business – even to the point of causing business failure. In fact, some industry sources estimate that approximately half of computer users will experience a loss of data at some point, and businesses that experience a major loss of data may not be able to recover and could end up going out of business within two years.

Luckily, online backup solutions have been around long enough that now there are reliable options that address these issues. For example, one popular option is a hybrid online/local service that allows organizations to maintain up to date local copies of critical business data that are available to speed the recovery process in the event of a data loss. Using a hybrid model can significantly reduce recovery and restore times for small and mid-sized businesses.

In this Upside Research White Paper on The Dirty Little Secret About Online Backup, we’ll take a closer look at the dirty little secret of online backup, explore what to look for in online backup solutions, and learn how companies are solving the problem of slow recovery times through hybrid disaster recovery solutions.

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HTML5 and Document Sharing

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Recently, Crocodocs announced its new embeddable HTML5 document viewer and annotator, a self-proclaimed first of its kind. The news came with an announcement of a partnership with Yammer, one of the enterprise pure play social media platforms. The Crocodocs tools give Yammer a full-fledged document sharing and collaboration platform, enabling users to embed any type of document into the micro-blogging platform for viewing and collaboration. With HTML5, this also makes the embedded documents viewable on mobile platforms. The question is, what impact will it have on the grip that Microsoft and Adobe have on the document viewing and collaboration market?

Read our complete analysis of HTML5 and the collaboration market at IT Briefcase.

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Collaborative Business Analytics

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The business analytics market is not immune to the rise in popularity of social networking for the enterprise. In fact, many proponents of business intelligence and decision management solutions see social networking as a way to extend business analytics to the masses. Enterprises have struggled with extending BI functionality beyond the dashboards that power users inhabit. New social networking and collaboration capabilities foster advanced analyses and better brainstorming among BI users, which may be just the antidote this segment needs.

Among the BI vendors, several have made recent announcements around their solutions’ new collaboration and social networking capabilities. IBM recently announced its Cognos 10 release, which embeds the collaboration capabilities from Lotus Connections right into Cognos 10. Users familiar with the Cognos interfaces can post messages, participate in discussions, add comments on data points, and access decision networks. The goal of Cognos 10 is to establish information hubs that span the enterprise, pulling in users around threaded discussions associated with BI content.

Read the full post on collaborative and social business analytics at ITBriefcase.com.

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Open Source Databases Flocking to the Cloud

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The widespread presence of open source databases in web and enterprise applications is not new. But recently, a few upgrades to some of the leaders in the space as well as a much-anticipated new entrant have cast new light on their emerging and important role in powering many critical cloud-based applications. From an enterprise perspective, we feel the key take away is that when it comes to databases and new cloud-based deployments, one size doesn’t necessarily fit all. As organizations expand their Web and cloud deployments it may make sense to consider other types of databases, including some of the ones below.

Last week, 10Gen released the latest version of its high-performance, document-centric database, MongoDB v.1.8.0. The newest version includes journaling, which will help for faster recovery in the event of a crash and the need to restore the database. It also includes improved replication and sharding functions. According to 10Gen, more than 100,000 copies are downloaded monthly of MongoDB. The product itself is relatively young, with its entry into the market in 2009, but it has been…

Read the entire post on Open Source Databases Flocking to the Cloud at IT Briefcase.

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Backup and Remote Access with KineticD KineticExtend and KineticSecure

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Online backup and recovery is an important market offering for small businesses that often have limited or nonexistent on site IT staff to assist when systems go down. These companies need the same industry-strength storage and backup solutions as enterprises, but without the hefty price tag or labor overhead. That’s where KineticD comes in.

KineticD

KineticD (formerly Data Deposit Box) is a Toronto-based company that provides continuous backup, restore, sharing, and access services for SMBs. Back in 2002, Data Deposit Box came to market to address a growing market for online data protection with a patented continuous recovery system for the data held on business-critical PCs and servers. Over the next eight years, the company paid attention to the way its customers, mainly small and midsize businesses, were using the service. The results led to the launch of a new set of solutions targeted at not only insuring protection of key business data but also providing remote access to that data and the applications that powered them.

Today, KineticD provides backup and remote access to more than 40,000 users in over 15,000 businesses. The secure online backup and remote access solutions can be used by businesses of any size, but resonate particularly well in the small business market. With its software-as-a-service model, KineticD provides added flexibility and ease of use and management for small businesses. New applications for the iPhone and iPad extend the functionality of secure remote backup and access to two of the newest productivity devices for the mobile business user.

For a full review of KineticD’s solution, please download the Upside Research KineticD Product Brief.

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Having it Both Ways: Finding the Right BPM Tools for Workflow and Project-Based Processes

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When it comes to business processes, change is what it’s all about. That holds true even when it comes to business process management. By now we’ve probably all learned that business process management (BPM) is a great approach for automating business processes. And over the past few years we’ve found that BPM solutions have proven they are good for automating well-defined workflows and enabling organizations to streamline a wide range of business processes.

To help organizations better define their processes and process management needs, this Upside Research white paper on BPM and workflow tools takes a closer look at the distinction between activity-based processes and traditional flow-based processes, and how organizations can optimize their processes in the most effective way.

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BPM Implementation Study – ActiveVOS

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Not only are today’s IT environments more complex than ever before, but the current economic climate is making it more difficult for IT organizations to easily and cost-effectively meet changing business requirements. What’s needed is a way for organizations to streamline business processes, increase efficiency, and empower business users, rather than IT, to be at the forefront of business process change. In many cases, this is where a good business process management (BPM) solution comes in.

Upside Research, Inc. recently interviewed a national government security organization that had a critical need to manage the security of files exchanged among users, screening out malware, malicious code, and viruses. In this ActiveVOS-BPM-Implementation-Study-Upside-Research, we’ll take a closer look at the organization, its challenges, and the solution, and the business impact from its BPM deployment.

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Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS BPMS – ENABLING DYNAMIC GROWTH

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Click here to download the full Upside Research Report on Western Governors University BPM implementation.

Technology doesn’t exist for its own sake—it ultimately serves the needs of the business. But when business needs change rapidly and dynamically, it can be extremely difficult for a company’s IT infrastructure to keep up.

Yet when designed correctly, a good IT infrastructure not only keeps up with business change, but it enables greater, faster, and broader innovation.  That’s especially true when it comes to business process management (BPM). BPM solutions are one of the ways to automate, manage, and optimize business processes, enabling organizations to meet dynamic business needs effectively and efficiently.

Upside Research recently came across a good example of a company that has successfully adapted its traditional, statically-oriented IT infrastructure to meet more dynamic business needs through the use of SOA and BPM.

Western Governors University is an online university that was facing student management challenges as it continued to grow at a significant pace. Of particular urgency was finding a way to create a student change management system that could orchestrate the flow between legacy applications and new applications, and provide an online student interface where the students could enter their data via a web page. That data would then trigger different process-driven requirements for the university.

The university is in a rapid growth state, and was looking for a BPM solution, one that would be based on standards and could incorporate human tasks with automated processes. While many of the processes were student-management related, they reflect the types of problems that most organizations face as they continue rapid growth and have legacy and new systems that need to communicate. The broader issues this academic institution faced were: the need to convert manual processes, eliminate costly errors, reduce inefficiencies, and create flexible processes that reflected the changing nature of the online academic calendar, as well as reduce the manual resources and headcount required to manage the process.

The IT organization at WGU launched a search for a BPM system that was standards-based and supported a services-oriented architecture. WGU investigated multiple different tools but ultimately and quickly found ActiveVOS to be the only solution that came with the full set of functionality required out of the box. After considering several of the other solutions (including JBoss jBPM and coding a solution themselves), WGU selected the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS) from Active Endpoints. In this Upside Research Implementation Brief, we’ll take a closer look at the university, its challenges, and its decision to select a model-driven BPMS over a set of non-integrated tools as the foundation for its SOA architecture. We’ll also examine the business impact of its BPM deployment.

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Software. Hardware. Complete.

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Software. Hardware. Complete. by David A. Kelly
May 2010 : Oracle Magazine

The completion of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in January 2010 was big news for Sun customers, but it’s also big news for Oracle customers and enterprises in general. The combined assets of the two companies offer organizations an unsurpassed breadth of products from disk and storage systems to servers, database, middleware, applications, and management tools. The combination of Oracle’s enterprise software with Sun’s software, hardware, and storage systems provides a complete stack that can be integrated into solutions that are optimized for higher performance, improved reliability, and enhanced security. (See the “Delivering a Complete Technology Stack” sidebar for more information.)

“Having a complete stack is something that we’ve wanted for years,” says David Maitland, CIO and director of corporate services at Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). “The combination of Oracle and Sun products now provides us a top-to-bottom, integrated, open-infrastructure stack.”

Based in the U.K., AWE is a government-owned, contractor-operated establishment charged with providing and maintaining warheads for the country’s nuclear deterrent. AWE’s employees conduct advanced scientific research and manage advanced design and production facilities.

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The Virtual Enterprise

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The Virtual Enterprise by David A. Kelly
July 2010 : Oracle Magazine

When JP Morgan Chase acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual over a 12-month period, it had to work hard and fast to integrate those large companies.

“Acquisitions impact the infrastructure layer in a big way, so you have to be constantly prepared to accommodate those customers and the new databases, especially when we’re talking huge mergers like Washington Mutual,” says Thiru Vadivelu, lead database architect at JP Morgan Chase. Vadivelu is part of the corporate systems infrastructure group within the company, which gathers requirements from the business units and designs infrastructure solutions to implement and support those requirements. Vadivelu himself manages the database architecture, performance, and capacity planning functions in corporate technology.

For Vadivelu and his corporate technology group, grid and virtualization technologies were a key part of the strategy for handling those challenges.

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