Looking Forward: Data Center Redundancy, Better Security and Much More

As we enter the second quarter of 2023, it’s an opportune time to look ahead to see how TECA is changing and expanding to provide customers with even greater service in the months ahead. Tom Fischer, co-founder and CEO/President, along with Steven Shirley, Technical Sales Representative, offer insight into what’s new at TECA and what customers can look forward to.

• What can your customers expect to see from TECA in 2023?
• We’re really expanding our services and infrastructure, fleshing out what we currently provide while adding more data center redundancy and better data security. We’re also expanding our staff to meet additional customer demands and continue to provide top-tier service.
  Our mission remains the same now as it was when we launched in 2005 … to continue to make our existing offerings better, more secure, and more refined and to expand our service offerings to meet our customers’ needs.
• It seems like ransomware is in the news on an almost daily basis. What is TECA doing in response to that?
• We’re continuing to strengthen and fortify security. In fact, data protection is at the very core of what we do. John McGee, TECA’s Senior Director of Technology, did an excellent job covering this topic in our last two e-news, Security Blanket — How TECA’s Got You Covered and The Ultimate Guide to TECA’s Enhanced Data Security.
  As the threat of ransomware continues to grow, organizations are deeply concerned about having immutable copies of their backups. Our Rapid Rebound VTL Solution offers exactly that.
  What’s interesting is that up until recently, using tape as a backup had lost favor with many organizations. However, now tape — especially virtualized tape — is reemerging and gaining in popularity. That’s because, once you’ve backed up to tape — presuming it’s not contaminated with ransomware — it’s permanent and invulnerable. And because some of these ransomwares are corrupting people’s backups, the desire to back up to tape (or virtual tape) turns out to be the smartest solution. It’s also the solution we’ve been promoting for years.
  Additionally, we’re continuing to build on our infrastructure at all our locations, building deeper redundancies within our environment both geographically and locally.
• What’s new in hosting solutions?
• The new Power server offering (Power10 Servers) from IBM has put many customers with on-prem system at a crossroads. Do they continue to invest in on-prem infrastructure or is it time to move workloads to TECA’s cloud?
  Many are making the move to TECA’s cloud offering because of TECA’s higher level of expertise in networking, immutability, security and redundancy.
• What’s new in DR? What are you seeing in DRaaS and what is TECA doing?
• People are more focused on recovery time. That’s not necessarily shocking, because system recovery time can be lengthy, but for the most part the discussions we’ve had in the past with people interested in off-site backups focused on securing an additional layer of protection. Whereas now, it seems like a lot of the conversations are focused on Disaster Recovery, in addition to backup archival. They’re interested in fast recovery time and how quickly we can make their system available for them to continue operations. It’s just a higher priority.
• Are there any solutions that appear to be gaining popularity?
• Our storage-to-storage replication solution has really taken off. It provides a sub one-hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a sub one-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Previously, these organizations would buy High Availability (HA) software which requires annual maintenance as well as daily operations support to verify synchronization between production and target HA systems.
  TECA’s storage replication service does not require that level of ongoing maintenance and monitoring. We’re certain that it’s going to continue to grow in popularity as the year goes on.
• What trends do you see for the future?
• There’s definitely a trend toward cloud hosting. People are starting to understand that they still need additional redundancy. TECA’s original offering, Rapid Rebound, provided customers with on-prem systems and a target cloud recovery service so they could continue operations even if there were a catastrophic event at their data center. Today, even if your workloads are running in a highly resilient cloud environment, you’ll still need off-site/geographically separate redundancy.
  With TECA’s multiple data centers, we’re able to provide a higher level of service redundancies between data centers than ever before. When speaking with long-term customers as well as prospective customers, the need for a second tier of redundancy with the hosting offering is common. Two years ago, I think that conversation was relatively rare.

Questions about the services TECA provides? The expert TECA technology team are happy to help. Contact us today.

Disaster recovery is critical to business success. If you don’t have a DR plan or haven’t reviewed your plan in a while, you could be flirting with disaster.

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