PARALLELS RAS USE CASES

Business Continuity &
Disaster Recovery

Make Parallels®️ Remote Application Server (RAS) part of your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan to help your organization deliver full virtual workspaces and remain operational during adverse events.

What Is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Planning?

BCDR is a set of processes and techniques that enables organizations to quickly resume operations during and after a disaster. BCDR has become a watchword in organizations, and for good reason. An increasingly always-on, 24x7x365 world means that any enterprise, at some point, can become vulnerable to risks beyond its control.

The primary goal of BCDR is to reduce risks associated with an unexpected interruption, helping organizations to run as ‘close to normal’ as possible. When appropriately executed, BCDR planning can enable an organization to increase revenue and improve its reputation. It also helps an organization to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.

The Differences Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity and disaster recovery combine two terms: business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) into a single term, BCDR. This is due to a growing recognition that business and technology executives must work closely, rather than in isolation, while planning incident responses.

Business continuity processes ensure that mission-critical functions continue with minimal downtime during, and after, an interruption. A business continuity plan (BCP) usually starts with a business impact analysis (BIA), which determines the BCP’s scope and other requirements, such as legal, regulatory and contractual obligations.

Disaster recovery is more reactive and defines how an IT department can recover from a specific incident or disaster. While business continuity focuses on the entire organization, disaster recovery zeroes in on IT, covering processes such as server and network restoration, provisioning backup systems and copying back up data.

Why is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Important?

There are plenty of reasons why organizations should have a BCDR plan. Here are a few of them.

Common Continuity and Disaster Recovery Mistakes

When a disaster strikes, an effective BCDR plan is undoubtedly the difference between an organization’s survival and decline. Unfortunately, most companies stumble when it comes to designing and executing BCDR plans. Here are a few common mistakes.

Enabling Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with Parallels RAS

When it comes to safeguarding data and minimizing downtime, there’s no room for guesswork. Without a solid, strategic BCDR plan, even the most mundane outages can cause far-reaching consequences, potentially impacting long-term revenue growth, brand value and reputation.

Parallels RAS delivers an all-inclusive portfolio of BCDR solutions.

Parallels RAS Use Cases

Parallels RAS is a comprehensive virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. Organizations can leverage it to publish Windows applications and desktops, which in turn can be hosted either on-premises, on public clouds, or both. If disaster strikes, employees can access published resources from any location on any device and platform—including HTML5-compliant browsers.

While using Parallels RAS, users enjoy a native-like experience irrespective of the device they’re using to access published resources. It’s simple to drag, swipe, zoom in, and tap to click while using Windows applications and desktop on mobile endpoints just as one would on a PC. This makes it easier to complete tasks while working remotely.

Parallels RAS supports both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Organizations can easily segregate their resources and migrate them between on-premises and public cloud infrastructures with Parallels RAS. This flexibility enables organizations to seamlessly distribute workloads when computing requirements and costs change.

Moreover, load balancing is enhanced via High Availability Load Balancing (HALB) in Parallels RAS. This extra layer of redundancy evenly distributes traffic between the gateways ensuring that users never experience downtime.

Parallels RAS enables IT administrators to secure corporate applications and data by enforcing client policies based on endpoints or Active Directory (AD) groups. Parallels RAS Client Group Policy minimizes IT administrators’ efforts to support multiple configurations, even for new users.

For example, you can quickly add a new employee who joins the organization to a particular AD group. This employee automatically receives all pre-configured policies for the group. Besides the Client Group Policy, Parallels RAS also secures corporate data and applications via cutting-edge technologies, including smart card authentication and multi-factor authentication (MFA). It also supports Duo, Google Authenticator and SafeNet, among others.

Proactive monitoring and reporting is a crucial component of BCDR. During a crisis, it enables IT managers to identify and prioritize business processes and services and establish appropriate responses. Parallels RAS has an enterprise-grade monitoring and reporting engine that converts raw data into intuitive and visual reports.

IT administrators have a complete view of the entire organization’s IT infrastructure, enabling them to obtain detailed statistics, including groups, users, applications, server usage and devices.