3 Ways for CIOs to Ensure Business Continuity

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic brought a new buzz phrase to our consciousness: business continuity. Along with it came related terms such as business continuity management – a big part of which includes having a business continuity plan. And, of course, a best practice of business continuity planning includes also planning for disaster recovery.

In terms of disaster recovery, our customers report to us that they no longer have disasters from which to recover after they start using Runecast Analyzer, as it enables them a proactive approach to managing their infrastructures. We hear regularly that it is the perfect business continuity software for IT teams looking for  IT service continuity management of VMware, AWS, and Kubernetes environments.

The following areas are how your IT team – and company – will get and stay ahead of the rapidly evolving business landscape.

Operational Transparency

Your business continuity requires operational transparency. Having only a reactive, business-as-usual, incomplete view of what is happening is no longer enough.

Your team needs to reveal any potential issues and security noncompliances proactively, not only for internal reasons but also for external security audits.

How Runecast Analyzer specifically helps you with this

Runecast scans the IT environment and provides real-time dashboards showing the status of configuration issues and security compliance, providing proactive insights to IT teams.

Logs analysis provides actionable insights with clear remediation steps, to remove delays in resolving issues. Management and auditors can be provided customizable reports on compliance and risk management that goes back a whole year. Log entries can be filtered based on important predicates: FailedTo, SCSI_command, NMP, Unableto, Error, and shell.

Proactive checks align your hybrid-cloud SDDC to best practices for VMware, AWS, and SAP HANA, as well as security hardening for VMware and AWS – with real-time, actionable insights from your logs.

For upgrade planning, your team can also simulate ESXi upgrades against VMware’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) before you ‘flip the switch’. 

• Transparency/Visibility of critical IT infrastructure
• Issue prevention for better availability/uptime and performance
• Actionable insights, prioritized by Critical/Medium/Low
• Automation of scans and compliance reporting
• Fast, customizable reports that show a year of historical data
  

Risk Mitigation & Compliance

Your IT team – and company – needs to get and stay ‘audit-ready’ for various complex security compliance standards that are continuously being updated.

One misconfiguration can result in a Purple Screen of Death (PSOD), security breaches, or downtime – the latter, at an average industry cost of $5,600 per minute already in 2014, according to a Gartner study that year.

The increasing complexity of virtualized data centers requires an efficient and proactive approach to mitigating critical issues if you want to ensure uptime and business continuity.

How Runecast Analyzer specifically helps you with this

Runecast Analyzer automates compliance checks against best practices and a growing list of security standards (with more standards added regularly to the analyzer’s capabilities).

For companies that do not have any specific security compliance standards to adhere to, Runecast’s custom profiles enable IT teams to choose from established standards to create a profile that conforms to internal security frameworks. This ensures that System Admins can easily apply and report on in-house frameworks within their environment.

• Automated audits for compliance with VMware and AWS security configuration guidelines and leading security standards – CIS, NIST, PCI DSS, DISA STIG, HIPAA, BSI, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.
• Best Practices alignment for VMware, AWS, and SAP HANA on vSphere
• Secure, on-premises solution that works offline, with no sensitive data sent offsite
• Remediation steps included, with no need to involve an offsite 3rd party and the time it takes for them to respond
  

Reduced Operational Costs

To give your company a marketplace edge, your IT team needs to manage increasingly more infrastructure on a per-person basis, reducing what many (unfortunately) consider to be ‘standard’ data center costs – and free up budget for growth.

Imagine a team that can repurpose more hours away from reactive troubleshooting toward proactive projects that help to bring your organization more readily into the future. Digital transformation suddenly has real meaning and measurable benefits.

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How Runecast Analyzer specifically helps you with this

Automated issue prevention and security compliance checks do what is not humanly possible, thus enabling IT teams to focus on resolving revealed issues proactively.

Automation via natural-language processing (NLP) enables being able to continuously scan publicly available knowledge bases, best practices, forums, and other sources, interpreting the information into machine-readable rules, and checking those proactively against your IT environment.

• Save time (issue prevention, better availability)
• Simulate upgrades for HCL checks
• Reduce human error when upgrading (using the simulation tool)
• Free up the budget for team innovations and business growth
• Runecast customers report 80-90% of troubleshooting time saved.
  

MSPs and technology integrators that partner with Runecast also report:

Happier Customers

Some of the many forward-focused organizations already benefiting from Runecast Analyzer include: Chevron, Erste Bank, Raiffeisen Bank, de Volksbank, Fujisoft, Scania, Avast Software, and the NHS.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) uses Runecast to ensure its space missions are fully operational (Case Study and Video).

Our customer and partner ONI reports 70-80% time savings and has maintained 100% uptime using Runecast (Case Study and Webinar).

The Enterprise Console for Runecast Analyzer provides a single-dashboard view of global  environments, enabling enterprises and MSPs to separate data centers or customers into easily manageable assets. (Read more about our Enterprise Console)

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How Runecast Analyzer specifically helps you with this

• Very short/quick time to value and ROI
• Reference relevant customer cases (case studies show %s)
• Enterprise Console, for a single-dashboard view of larger environments
• Lightweight, smart design, easy to use
• Made by Admins, specifically for the most security-conscious Admins
• R&D team listens, and they are super-fast innovators