An airtight DRaaS and VMware Cloud solution

With 39% of UK businesses identifying a cyber-attack in the last 12 months and around one in five (21%) of these reporting a sophisticated attack such as a denial of service, malware, or ransomware¹, most of us know just how essential Disaster Recovery (DR) is.

Being proactive in protecting digital data and customer assets is no luxury when you also consider these cybercrime risks in the context of increased remote working and assets that are dispersed across locations.

Cloud-based DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is a cost-effective, fast and airtight route to this protection.

We are now VMware Cloud and DRaaS verified

QuoStar has VMware Cloud and DRaaS verification across our next generation private cloud platforms. This can help you to safeguard valuable assets quickly and effectively against the disasters that carry a real risk to your applications and infrastructure.

Tailored to your VMware environment

By designing a DRaaS solution specifically for your VMware environment, we can give you peace of mind that your data is protected, without the need for capital investment or upskilling within your IT team.

This fast, efficient and secure disaster recovery solution, which can be from on-premises to cloud as well as cloud to cloud, gives you the benefit of:

  • Automated recovery and fallback
  • An RPO (recovery point objective) as low as five minutes
  • Reduced operating costs
  • In-house IT team freed up to focus on high-value projects

Fast, non-disruptive DR testing

Backups and disaster recovery need regular validation to ensure they will work when needed. Our cloud-based DRaaS solution reduces this risk with fast, clean simulated DR testing in minutes. This regularly scheduled testing, which is required for proper DR planning and validation, does not impact on your ongoing DR activity or IT team.

Protect collection of VMs (vApps)

The enhanced grouping and protection workflows within our service help to preserve recovery priorities and network configurations for virtual apps (vApps), eliminating the need for manual scripting and shortening RTOs.

Bandwidth monitoring

Our DRaaS solution gives you visibility into what DR is adding to bandwidth, which helps to troubleshoot latency issues. It also offers capacity reporting, identifying what DR is consuming in storage on the target environment.

Remove complexity and overhead

Working in partnership with QuoStar on a DRaaS and VMware Cloud solution gives you peace of mind that core DR operational work is managed and continually updated in line with regulatory and compliance mandates. It removes complexity and overhead from your organisation.

Neil Clark, Director of Cloud Services at QuoStar: “QuoStar obtaining both VMware Certifications (Cloud and DRaaS Verified) rubber stamps our commitment to building the best-in-class Private Cloud Platforms.

“QuoStar understands that cutting corners at this level can be catastrophic and, a lot of the time, holds businesses back from moving to the right cloud solution. By using an industry leading solution like VMware, we can provide the most reliable, highly performance and cost-effective solution to our customers.

“QuoStar’s private cloud is just one part of QuoStar’s multi-cloud solution, allowing our customers to benefit from the advantages of each cloud platform.”

Contact one of our Cloud specialists to find out more about QuoStar’s DRaaS and VMware solution.

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Statistics: ¹ Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2022

Why you need an Azure Landing Zone

If your business uses Microsoft Azure, you also need a well-designed and structured Landing Zone. A Landing Zone is a key component of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, helping organisations to better manage and scale their public cloud environments.

What makes up a Landing Zone?

In terms of Microsoft Azure, a landing zone is a combination of multiple subscriptions within an Azure Environment. These subscriptions are already set up for all areas of the platform that may be required to support the environment, whether that’s Infrastructure as a service or Platform as a service.

You could view a Landing Zone as foundations, built on solid practice and design considerations, which you can build on, expand and scale as required. The design of these foundations will differ, and the basics can be laid out differently from one Landing Zone to the other, as there is not one single design for all types of infrastructure.

While Landing Zones can vary due to their modular design and business requirements, they usually cover certain design areas, as below:

alz-design-areas

Landing Zone Design Areas

No matter what type of deployment you are designing, be it enterprise, hybrid-cloud, or a simple, small POC (proof of concept) environment, each design area listed should be considered within a Landing Zone.

  • Enterprise enrolment – have we set up a tenant that will support growth and scale? How will we license it?? CSP, EA etc?
  • Identity – How are we going to control identity and access? Serious consideration should be given to how this is managed.
  • Network topology and connectivity – What will our network look like now and how will this scale and grow? What design considerations, such as segregation, do we need to consider?
  • Resource organization – How will we organise our resources to allow for growth without red tape? What are our needs around business areas, different teams, subscriptions? And how we implement this within management groups?
  • Governance disciplines – How do we stay compliant? How do we enforce security requirements? How do we ensure our data sovereignty?
  • Operations baseline – How will we manage, monitor and optimise our environment? How will we maintain visibility within our environment and ensure it operates as required?
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) – How will we plan and design for continuity and protect our data? Have we considered the need to replicate data or provide a method of restoration? Do our proposed methods meet the RPO and RTO objectives of our organization?
  • Deployment options – How will we deploy our Landing Zone and resources moving forward? Will this be a manual process? Will we consider Infrastructure as Code? What methodologies for deployment could we use? 

We’ve helped several customers get their landing zone to good by deploying QuoStar’s best practise landing zone framework, which implements current governance best practises, cost management protection and parameter security. This has helped them to get to a position where they have the correct foundations build upon, future proof expansion and allow adoption and implementation of a continuously evolving best practise frameworks.

As a leading Microsoft partner, contact one of our Cloud specialists today to find out more about our services.

Cloud computing – How can companies maximise their investment?

Cloud computing investment

 

Many organisations have seen their cloud computing bills rise and rise – when many costs have gone down over the last 12 months, in both public and private platforms.

 

So, how should organisations be reviewing their cloud computing to ensure that they are paying the right price for the right cloud infrastructure?

 

Review licensing of your cloud computing regularly

It’s worth regularly reviewing licensing, particularly around the Microsoft stack. Microsoft makes regular changes to licensing, particularly around cloud-based services; some small adjustments can deliver significant savings within an estate. It’s worth noting that many organisations are doubling-up on licensing, particularly when using Azure and Microsoft licensing, i.e. Not using the Azure Hybrid Benefit program. If you bundle this program with reserved instances, then savings of up to 80% can be made.

 

Reserved Instances

Ensure that you are using reserved instances where appropriate. Many organisations are still using pay as you go billing and ultimately losing out versus locking in pricing for a year or more. In some scenarios you can save more than 70% with reserved instances.

 

Price matching between cloud computing providers

Most public and private cloud providers will match their direct competitors on price. If you are up for renewal on your cloud platform or not in contract it’s important to take this into account. Also, even if you are in contract it may be worth speaking to your provider about extending your contract term for a reduced monthly fee.

 

Look at containers

Cloud containers are lighter weight than virtual machines and thus cost less. Look at your applications. See which you can repackage into containers to reduce the VM footprint and also costs.

 

Testing environments

Many organisations are paying to host their development and testing environments. This is typically unnecessary, and most cloud providers will allow you to run these workloads and licenses at a significantly reduced cost.

 

Move from database virtual machines

Often, due to technical and operational familiarity, a lot of databases sit on VMs when they could sit in an elastic database. You can gain significant cost-savings, resiliency and often security, without a huge amount of work.

 

Look for redundant disks

So many cloud estates have idle disks lurking around with them. It’s important to identify where these are as they will be costing you every month. Most cloud providers, particularly within the public cloud arena make this easy, i.e. Look at the disk owner (or lack of) within the Azure portal’s disk screen.

 

Look at storage tiering

It’s easy overtime for data usage on disks to change. It’s important to ensure that the right data is stored on the right type of disk. That will ensure you are paying the right amount to store or process that data. Storage tiering, particularly automatic storage tiering, if not in use already should be evaluated to get the right balance for spend vs performance.

 

If you’d like an audit of your cloud platforms to validate that you have the right cloud infrastructure at the right price get in touch now.