CoreSite welcomes Sabur Mian, CEO at STN Inc., as a guest blogger on Connect[ed]. STN is an IT managed services provider offering consultation and solutions ranging from data backup and disaster recovery to security and data center management.
You’ve heard it before: “Don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff.” It’s a nice idea but might invoke an eye roll or two from CTOs and IT teams. That’s because what once was considered “small stuff” – a few minutes of lost data, data corruption or brief disruption in business continuity – is anything but that. In fact, many businesses can’t accept losing the data from a single transaction, and for critical services providers such as hospitals, police and fire departments or 911 call centers, breaks in availability could be tragic.
Five or 10 years ago, business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies were devised with floods or earthquakes in mind, events that lead to power failures. Today, anything that puts the business out of operation is a disaster.
The traditional approach to BCDR has changed as a result. Resilience, the ability to quickly achieve baseline operational capabilities as you return to normal operations, better represents what modern BCDR looks like.
Resilience includes operating the business while fighting the threat. That effort puts more strain on IT engineers and admins, who often are fully occupied by “keeping the lights on,” making sure critical data is available while simultaneously solving problems with cloud services, while also working on projects to boost efficiencies and productivity. CTOs need to manage resources so that all those activities occur, even in light of shrinking staff sizes and increases in ransomware or other cyberattacks.
The partnership between CoreSite and STN gives clients access to data management experts, services and software defined network (SDN) appliances in reliable, highly interconnected, compliant data centers. CoreSite provides very complex and very fast network connectivity to almost everything that our clients might need, including an ecosystem of IT services providers through the Open Cloud Exchange®.
Sabur Mian, STN
With a plethora of tasks at hand, data backups and BCDR/resilience enhancements often don’t get the level of attention they require. Naturally, the organization looks to software solutions to automate backups and DR, but often find them to be expensive and difficult to implement.
Before I move on to how STN and CoreSite work together to address those challenges, let’s turn attention to how hybrid IT evolution is also driving the need for data management services. Enterprises of all sizes are rethinking their cloud deployments. They are repatriating applications from public cloud into colocation data centers and back on-premises. Production can continue to operate in public cloud. However, your backup and your DR doesn’t need to be running in the public cloud. It still needs to happen but at lower cost. That said, keep in mind that repatriation doesn’t only bring the workloads closer to home, it also brings the burden of executing data and workload management in-house.
We Sweat the Small Stuff, So You Don’t Have To
STN was founded in anticipation of the changes I’ve been talking about – while helping reduce risk to assets and business continuity as well as control the costs for data transfer and storage costs. STN takes on tasks that in the past were distributed across a larger IT staff, so our clients can focus on their business. If you are reading this as part of a search for an end-to-end backup and business continuity solution, you know that what I just said is not cliché.
The partnership between CoreSite and STN gives clients access to data management experts, services and software defined network (SDN) appliances in reliable, highly interconnected, compliant data centers. CoreSite provides very complex and very fast network connectivity to almost everything that our clients might need, including an ecosystem of IT services providers through the Open Cloud Exchange®.
There is redundancy as well, a key to DR and business continuity. You can store data in a facility that STN has access to and have it replicated in a CoreSite data center. CoreSite also offers a 100% uptime SLA and has a 20+ year track record of operational excellence. Furthermore, they are open to providing services to clients of all sizes and customizing deployments.
When I was discussing this blog with the CoreSite team before writing, they asked why STN chose them as a partner. I’ve given you some of the technical reasons and alluded to their credibility as a top-tier provider. There’s another, very important reason: we enjoy working with the people, who are committed to building a holistic solution and trust us to do what we do best.
How do you get started with STN? You might be surprised to learn that we will assess your production environment for free. We will focus on business requirements around specific recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO), which really translates into the impact of downtime on productivity and revenue.
When you are ready to discuss your specific data management requirements, get in touch with CoreSite here or schedule a consultation with STN here.