Sponsor: Rackspace, Ltd.

No matter where a business is on the road to digital transformation, IT and LOB execs must not overlook the importance of having a solid business continuity strategy that doesn’t break the bank. And, the more ‘digital’ a business becomes, the more important it is for 24/7/365 access for customers, whether next door or around the world.

This BattleCard looks at the factors driving business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, and how to structure your BC/DR plan to minimize three critical factors: Recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and total cost of ownership (TCO) for your BC/DR solution.

In our “there’s an app for that” environment, businesses need to offer their customers anywhere, anytime, any device access to engage with customers, suppliers, and employees. However, critical business logic in legacy applications is often trapped in on-premises datacenters, limiting access in today’s multi-cloud, multi-vendor world.

This BattleCard looks at ways business-critical legacy applications can be freed from their data center roots, and how to develop a plan for re-factoring or re-platforming tried-and-true code to embrace a business’ digital transformation and become more cloud-savvy

Businesses face a myriad of decisions when embarking on their digital transformation journey. Young companies are often ‘born in the cloud’, while established businesses often are burdened with legacy applications and infrastructure that can siphon IT attention from adding business value to chasing after OS upgrades and hardware failures.

This battlecard looks at the challenges enterprises are facing at the outset of their digital transformation and provides guidance on how to utilize off-site hosting capabilities as an important first step to both modernization and the cloud.

Experts Share Tactics to Help Financial Services Organizations

According to PWC, attacks on financial institutions grew 130% last year. And in a recent outage at a regional bank, equipment failure led to $15 million in lost revenue and another $5 million in fee waivers and associated costs. In addition to the raw cost of an incident, financial organizations also face the risk of exposed customer information, regulatory fines, loss of trust and impact to stock prices.

In the webinar, Minimizing Data Disruptions Through Business Continuity Planning, our experts will:

• Define the scope of data continuity, including disaster recovery and mitigation.
• Discuss common causes of service interruptions.
• Show you how to identify the right data continuity solution for your organization.
• Define tiers of disaster recovery, including multi-tenant DR and full-featured solutions.
• Share strategies for handling complexity and other DR issues.

An effective business continuity strategy can provide immense value for your organization — better planning would have saved that regional bank $20 million and a lot of dissatisfied customers.

Experts Share Tactics to Help Financial Services Organizations

According to PWC, attacks on financial institutions grew 130% last year. And in a recent outage at a regional bank, equipment failure led to $15 million in lost revenue and another $5 million in fee waivers and associated costs. In addition to the raw cost of an incident, financial organizations also face the risk of exposed customer information, regulatory fines, loss of trust and impact to stock prices.

In the webinar, Minimizing Data Disruptions Through Business Continuity Planning, our experts will:

• Define the scope of data continuity, including disaster recovery and mitigation.
• Discuss common causes of service interruptions.
• Show you how to identify the right data continuity solution for your organization.
• Define tiers of disaster recovery, including multi-tenant DR and full-featured solutions.
• Share strategies for handling complexity and other DR issues.

An effective business continuity strategy can provide immense value for your organization — better planning would have saved that regional bank $20 million and a lot of dissatisfied customers.

Both the number of companies using multiple clouds, and the number of clouds they’re using, are growing. And, according to our recent Cost of Expertise Report, 44% of IT workers say they spend more time maintaining cloud services than initially expected.

In our new webinar, Navigating Multi-Cloud Complexity and Integration, our experts will:

• Examine the financial and business costs associated with management and maintenance of multiple clouds.
• Explore ways to integrate monitoring, maintenance and management of your clouds.
• Share how TotalTrax, a Rackspace customer, found greater efficiency in its multi-cloud environment.

Stepping out of legacy databases and applications is complicated and one of the biggest challenges IT organizations face. You can’t afford to maintain the status quo, and yet you cannot afford a costly misstep in the process of modernization.

• How do you know where to start?
• What’s a cost-effective replacement for a legacy database?
• How much can you reasonably expect to save with a modernized application stack?

In our new webinar, Modernizing Legacy Databases & Applications, Rackspace experts will share their modernization experiences and how we helped TotalTrax, a telematics firm, move its applications from an on-premises customer environment to a cloud model.

Migrating your application portfolio is a critical first step for success in the cloud. But the process, if performed correctly, requires painstaking discovery, planning, testing and data configuration. This webinar provides a closer look at some of the more common hiccups companies face during migration. We’ll also discuss how Aeroméxico, the largest airline in Mexico, partnered with Rackspace to build a high-volume digital environment capable of supporting customer transactions for each if its 600 daily flights.

Selecting the right cloud platform for your workload, architecting a solution and modernizing operations is a complex process. There are many variables to consider, including the level of scalability you require, the level of security your data needs, and your business continuity and governance requirements. This webinar takes a look at cloud selection through the lens of British Medical Journal’s need to run multiple workloads with very distinct requirements.

• What are some of the big differences between clouds?
• What are some commonalities?
• What are some common needs that dictate one cloud over the other?
• How can you be sure you’re making the right choice?

Managed hosting is an IT service model that provides companies with dedicated, single-tenant, leased infrastructure from a managed services provider . The solution includes servers, software, storage and networking and can also include specialized services like managed security1 . Companies choose their OS, and the service provider handles the administration, management, support and security . Resources are not shared, so companies receive the full performance capabilities of the infrastructure they lease . Managed hosting offers the strategic benefits of IaaS2, cost reduction and of moving on-premises IT infrastructure, systems and applications to the cloud3 . Its enhanced security and protected environment make managed hosting a logical choice for companies regulated by PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA and FISMA . As proof, over half of all companies recently surveyed by Tech Pro Research reported a risk decrease following an IaaS implementation2 in the cloud.

The Cost of Cloud Expertise report was developed by Rackspace to explore the importance of expertise to an organization’s cloud evolution and the impact the current technical skills gap is having on businesses. In collaboration with LSE academics and Vanson Bourne, we surveyed more than 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros from across the globe to better understand the barriers to increasing cloud usage, the impact this has on innovation and business growth, and the skills organizations require to compete in our technologically driven world.

According to EY, 85% of banks cite digital transformation as a priority this year. One of the main barriers to change is the ability to demonstrate the business case and the cost benefits of transforming your IT. This white paper helps you gather and evaluate the hard data that you need to get buy-in. Combining actual numbers and expert insights with the nuts and bolts of assessing the economics, this white paper helps you compare both the hard and soft costs of managed cloud against an on-premises environment.

Financial services organizations around the world are modernizing IT to drive top-line growth and streamline compliance burdens. From multinational brokerage houses to local branch banks, digital transformation initiatives are moving financial institutions toward more secure, agile, and cost-effective infrastructure and applications, empowering workers and improving customer experiences.

The investment in and power of a private cloud requires deep thought and planning before making the move; so, before you decide what to move to a private cloud, watch our new debate-style webinar to get advice from Rackspace experts.

Poor planning is the top mistake organizations make when approaching public cloud adoption. With the pressure to transform while maintaining IT operations, public cloud projects often suffer from rushed implementations, lack of expertise and inadequate organizational support. Before the first chunk of data ever moves to the cloud, there are a myriad of decisions to be made.

Our white paper, 10 Steps to Success in the Public Cloud, boils those decisions down to ten milestones to guide your strategy and planning activities.

Whether you’re starting out or stalled out, review these important considerations to get on track. The white paper covers:

• Planning frameworks and best practices
• Ways to foster education and communication
• Tips on building your business case and selecting pilot workloads
• Strategies to address security and governance
• Automation and migration methodologies