The advent of cloud services and hybrid cloud infrastructure has fuelled the roll-out of enterprise-ready DRaaS (disaster recovery-as-a-service) offerings. The view of technology experts is that these offerings will continue to enter the mainstream and favourably impact the incremental cost to implement sound business continuity. The cloud, it would seem, has laid the foundation for a fresh era in disaster recovery strategy development, enforcement and management.
Desmond Pillay, Africa Sales Country Manager, KEMP Technologies, supports the idea that the growth of the cloud means that any size organisation has access to business continuity services. These services encompass everything that is required to ensure an organisation's critical business functions in the event of a disaster.
KEMP Technologies is the application-centric load balancer company currently leading the industry with price-to-performance advantages.
Additionally, international industry analysts claim that more businesses are seeing load balancing technology in a new light, as an effective way to address disaster recovery, scalability, security, failover and application virtualisation requirements.
John Moore from CIO.com points out an internationally recognised feature of load balancing technology being its ability to rapidly give people access to corporate and external communications like instant messaging and e-mail during an emergency.
There are various instances where load-balancing infrastructure provides critical service delivery in the event of disaster recovery.
As an example of the level of technology being made available to capitalise on the cloud to enhance disaster recovery operation, KEMP has launched Multi-Site Geo Load Balancers (GLM) - designed to optimise and increase availability and continuity for multi-site application deployments.
GLM ensures that even when a primary site is down, traffic is diverted to the disaster recovery site. GLM load balances using domain name services (DNS) technology, taking advantage of DNS to direct traffic allows the user to load balance business critical applications to any Internet address and ignore protocol level configuration on load balancing devices.
The GEO LoadMaster assures seamless failover and failback to the best performing and geographically closest data centre for optimal use of web-based applications, including Microsoft Exchange. In the event of a service disruption, traffic is automatically controlled based on set policy in order to minimize impact and the need for manual intervention.
Pillay says that the development of load balancing infrastructure has kept pace with the demand for disaster recovery strategy, particularly that which oversee the protection of data and datacentres.
"Data centre strategy, positioning and equipment has emerged as a key area of influence within e-commerce today ... we know that load balancing virtualised infrastructure will continue to make inroads into the further establishing of resilient data centres and their leverage to improve application performance and high availability," he said.
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