As big data is becoming a mainstream business, organizations today are exploring this avenue to transform their business and provide their clients with insightful business intelligence. They have learned that the big data is not just a single technology, technique or an initiative. Instead, it is a trend that’s across many areas of business and technology. Using this technology they have started defining new initiatives and are in the process of reevaluating existing strategies.

 

The sudden growth in the data has made companies change the way they access mission-critical information, deploy applications, and approach data protection in general. So now the concern is whether these companies have a disaster recovery plan in place to recover from a catastrophic outage. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) can help get systems back online quickly and efficiently. This plan documents the procedures required to recover critical data and IT infrastructure after an outage. Here are some key points to consider while deciding the strategies for disaster recovery:

• Setup & finalized RPO(Recovery Point Objective)

The recovery point objective (RPO) is the interval that equates to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss after an unplanned outage occurs. The RPO is so crucial because it determines the frequency at which you need to back up your data. We need to ask yourself how many hours of data loss as a result of systems going down can you manage or afford to lose. If your RPO is two hours of data, then we need to perform backups every two hours. All the management executives and the entire team needs to agree upon the RPO.

• Offsite backups

The most obvious disaster recovery step is to keep the data stored in a remote location. Off-site backups ensure that data will remain unharmed during unforeseen situations like a natural calamity, fire etc. For Big Data, cloud-based backup is probably the best option because it is cheap and easy to backup your data to the cloud, particularly batch data, which is large and static.  

• Conduct recovery tests regularly

In order to be confident about a disaster recovery plan, testing the plan is of utmost importance.  Best and safest approach is to test at least semi-annually for newly implemented disaster recovery plans and then yearly in future. The tests you conduct should verify that your disaster recovery procedures can restore Big Data workloads to meet the predefined RPO.

• Use data recovery tools

It is important to ensure that you have good data recovery tools at your disposal during disaster recovery. This may require having backup instances of the tools available in case your production environments are destroyed.

• Have continuity in data gathering

Disaster once occurred will not stop the data flow. During disaster recovery, you need to make sure that the data is captured continuously although your operations are not working. Make sure that your backup storage locations have enough spare capacity to manage new data which is generated at the time of restore operations.

In the rapidly changing environment, where organizations are prone to threats, it is vital that you have a robust and well-tested disaster recovery plan in place. We say that “Prevention is better than cure” and hence securing & backing up data using new technologies should be of utmost importance for the organizations.

 

 

Virtual Reality (VR) in this information age is a buzzword, however soon the situation will change as many companies are understanding its application. As the technology is rapidly becoming more widespread and awareness of its potential is growing day by day, VR will go mainstream. However, like any new and revolutionary technology, with all the benefits it offers, it also offers a number of significant challenges. Virtual Reality comes with the challenge of how to deliver massive files over the internet.

 

The possibilities with VR are endless, however, the challenges need to be taken care of. Some of them are listed below:

• Data Storage

File sizes generated by VR are significant and depending on the camera, can produce up to 1TB of data per hour. A sports organization streaming 60 games per year at three hours per game must be prepared to store more than 180 TB. Looking at such sizes, storing this data is the biggest barrier to companies who are planning to invest in VR. The ideal scenario for storing VR data must be one that enables organizations to access and edit their VR files as necessary, while also allowing them to economically archive them, thereby protecting and preserving data for as long as it’s needed.

• Content Distribution

Technological development in the media sector will cause an enormous increase in data production and consumption. Content providers will need platforms that support VR content and a robust infrastructure with the capacity to support large amounts of data. Distributing these data will be a headache as VR content requires bandwidth multiple times higher than the normal data transfer. Traditional methods such as FTP and HTTP can’t transfer large volumes of data at different distances. We need to make sure we use faster file transfer methods. eSecureSend our SaaS solution moves data 20X faster than regular FTP. It is necessary for an organization to use a secure, reliable, easy to use and faster method for transferring the enormous VR files, anywhere at any point in time.

• Device challenges

The VR devices are bulky and uncomfortable to wear as the field of view (FOV) is the biggest limitation. These devices have a FOV of up to 90 degrees, as compared to the 190 degrees horizontal and 120 degrees vertical which is necessary for a normal human vision. For these devices to create impressive experiences, they must capture as much of the FOV as possible. For the normal human eye to see, the projected image needs to be in a large FOV.

• Higher cost & streaming

VR technology is very expensive. Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive cost upwards of $500 for the combo of headset and controllers. To solve one component of the latency problem, the driver for the content has to be powerful enough to maintain a recommended frame rate of more than 90 fps. This is the reason that VR content only works well on powerful machines. Streaming is also a challenge. Because the content needs to be in high resolution and needs to render at a much higher refresh rate and the bandwidth required for streaming grows a lot.

Virtual Reality is changing the internet and more VR content is being developed every day, but mass-market adoption and success are impossible without an effective, reliable and scalable content delivery strategy. If virtual reality is expected to be a future staple, there is plenty of work to be done around the technologies and the overall user experience.