In simpler times, businesses kept their data in one place. That made the data easy to access and control. Today, many large enterprises have a global component to daily business transactions, with customers, partners and employees located around the world. Given the distributed nature of an organization's users and increasing data location regulations, the traditional method of storing data on a central server to support worldwide stakeholders no longer meets business needs.
Posted September 16, 2014
North American businesses are collectively losing $26.5 billion in revenue each year as a result of slow recovery from IT system downtime, according to a recent study. To protect against unexpected outages, IT organizations attempt to prepare by creating redundant backup systems, duplicating every layer in their existing infrastructure and preparing elaborate disaster recovery processes. This approach is expensive and only partly effective, as demonstrated by the string of notable outages, and can be seen, at best, as a way to minimize downtime. Major social networking companies, such as Google and Facebook, have figured out how to scale ut application stacks rather than scale up vertically.
Posted May 12, 2011