Author: Josh Achtemeier

Containerization in production. The technology of our dreams, promising to unlock unparalleled agility. Today, containers have become even more than that. They have evolved into a vital tool for IT pros to modernize their SQL Server environments. Gartner predicts that 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2026, so this technology is well on its way to establishing itself as the new industry precedent.

Unsurprisingly, modernizing your SQL Server environment(s) with containers is accompanied by an initial expense. However, SQL Server containers unlock powerful benefits that ultimately enable your organization to reduce overall costs, enhance performance and agility, and push total downtime to zero.

Reduce Overall Costs

Inherently, containers are lightweight, agile, and flexible. Organizations can use them to help deploy business-critical workloads more swiftly and consistently across any mix of physical, virtual, and cloud servers. This “consistency” is the critical factor that helps organizations reduce overall costs. Containers help unify differing orchestration tools and management systems to increase time to market for applications, and significantly reduce the recurring management expense. They can allow you to create the perfect pay-as-you-go multi-cloud or hybrid environment to maximize cost-efficiency. And because multiple containers can be run on any given server, big savings can be achieved through consolidation of your SQL Server environment as well.

Bridge Your Organization to Easy Cloud Adoption

The allure of the cloud is clear for organizations. Unparalleled agility and the ability to easily scale your organization’s environment to match operational needs. Containerizing your SQL Server can absolutely enhance application portability within your existing cloud deployments, or help pave the way to a new hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure for your company. Containers ensure that applications run consistently, regardless of the infrastructure they are hosted on.

Achieve a Virtually Zero Downtime SQL Server

Containerizing your organization’s SQL Server environment—the home of some of your most valuable data assets—has obviously not always been straightforward. Downtime mitigation is a significant concern, and appropriately so. Relying on pod-level high availability alone is a grossly inadequate level of protection for many global organizations whose cost-of-downtime can reach 7-figure sums every hour.

DH2i’s DxEnterprise (DxE) can completely resolve this concern as the only clustering solution on the market capable of facilitating fully automatic database-level failover of SQL Server Availability Groups in Kubernetes. This capability unlocks failover automation at the database level and ultimately shrinks failover windows from minutes to seconds for containerized SQL Server.

SQL Server Modernization is Easier Than Ever with Containers

Aging infrastructure in the context of SQL Server can be a dangerous vulnerability and a slippery slope the longer you ignore it. Leveraging the power of containers to modernize is the easiest path to the future for any organization though. While the initial cost can be a hurdle, the integration of production containers in your environment ensures an eventual and significant reduction in management and infrastructure costs your organization faces. It also enables a scalable and optimized existence for your SQL Server assets in the cloud. Most importantly however, containerizing your SQL Server environment unlocks absolute minimum downtime, but only if you are leveraging appropriate HA clustering technology.

If you’re curious about learning more about how DH2i’s DxEnterprise unlocks a containerized SQL Server ecosystem with virtually zero downtime, reach out and schedule a personalized demo with our team.

The Virtual Private Network (VPN). What a marvelously impenetrable fortress of IT security brilliance! VPNs were virtually—pun intended—uncrackable at the time of their creation in… 1996. Yes, you read that year right. VPN technology is in its late 20s, and unfortunately, its best days are undoubtedly behind it.

Though the tide had already turned in favor of newer approaches, COVID-19 was a significant breaking point for VPN technologies. The pandemic demanded a massive shift to remote work for countless organizations around the world. Unfortunately, this shift also represented a proverbial gold mine to hackers, and 44% of organizations surveyed by the 2022 Cybersecurity Insiders VPN Risk Report said they observed a tangible increase in exploits targeting their VPNs.

So, why is the thought of thousands of organizations leveraging VPN technology a mouth-watering prospect to cybercriminals, and why have many organizations already phased (or are working on it) this technology out? To start, you have to think about the world that VPN was conceptualized and created within. VPN technology was never designed to protect organizations existing in the hybrid and multi-cloud world we know today, and it certainly was not designed to support the infinitely expanding Internet of Things. Thereby, the continued use of VPNs in these complex, heterogenous environments has culminated in some acute vulnerabilities to network security and uptime.

Every Single VPN Connection is a Key to the Network

Perhaps the single most critical vulnerability of VPN is how network access is regulated (or the lack thereof) for its users. Any single VPN connection represents access to a full slice of an organization’s network. In other words, a single entry point can be exploited to the tune of limitless lateral attack surface.

Physical Infrastructure is An Expense and Point of Failure

Hardware VPNs require a physical processor to support VPN tunnel creation, and as the need for additional VPN tunnels grows, so does the hardware footprint. Setting up and configuring this physical infrastructure is a complex and costly process to begin with. Not to mention, these physical appliances also must be diligently maintained, because ultimately, they represent a potential point of failure within any IT environment. This leads to VPN appliances being accompanied by significant recurring expense in order to remain reliable.

VPN Security Can Be at the Mercy of Password Strength

Best practices for password security have certainly evolved over the years. There are mandated bi-annual or quarterly updates, prohibited repeating of passwords, and growing minimum character limits. However, many organizations don’t have the resources to enforce policies like this, and humans are, well… Human. Convenience often outweighs optimal security for those who haven’t experienced a data breach personally, and in the context of VPN, one set of compromised credentials can unlock an entire network to bad actors.

External AND Internal Bad Actors

When people consider the cybersecurity threats facing today’s corporations, it’s natural to think about external bad actors hacking into your network for the first time and compromising your organization’s data immediately. However, there are thousands of recorded instances where bad actors have quietly and covertly breached a network perimeter, and then remained dormant for an amount of time before actually executing an attack.

SDP: The Answer to VPN Vulnerabilities

Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) and Zero Trust technology is where the information technology industry must continue heading to have the best chance of defending against today’s cyber threats. Not only do these solutions avoid the significant expense and vulnerability accompanied by physical VPN appliances, they also include critical functionality such as the following.

Application-Level Access – SDP solutions regulate access much more granularly—limiting user access to specific authorized applications. This is a huge distinction from the excessive permissions and full slice-of-the-network access enabled by VPN. If a user were to be compromised, this capability eliminates lateral attack vectors and isolates the adverse effects of a breach to the authorized application(s).

Cloud-Ready – Software-defined perimeter technology was purpose-built for today’s heterogenous multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. It gives you the power to interconnect disparate infrastructure safely with Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) connections.

Trust Nothing, Verify Everything – This has become the mantra of Zero Trust Security, and a call-to-action that software-defined perimeter technology delivers on. Whether internal or external to the network, users are asked to complete continuous verification and authorization throughout their interactions with a network.

With more VPNs being exploited every day, the future of information technology security is relying on organizations to get proactive when securing their network perimeter. VPN technology is over 25 years old, and a changing of the guard to SDP technology is critical to protect organizations in our hybrid and multi-cloud world.

DH2i’s Take on Software-Defined Perimeter

 DH2i’s DxOdyssey SDP software integrates all the standard functionality of other Zero Trust solutions in the industry, but it also contains some powerful differentiations such as:

• No “middleman” data path intrusions (we never see your data ourselves)
• Up to a 40% increase in network throughput with patented hybrid TCP/UDP technology
• Ensuring uninterrupted access with highly available tunnel groups

Let us know if you’d like to check out a free personalized demo.

Introducing new information technology into your organization is a massive endeavor—especially when it will have a direct impact on business-critical SQL Server workloads. Somehow you need to find time to undertake a labor-intensive solution identification process, complete a thorough proof of concept (POC), and write a formal proposal—all while simultaneously maintaining the standard day-to-day requirements of your job as an IT professional.

No IT team wants to be in a position where they just spent months testing and advocating for a software solution they are excited about, only to be shut down by executive decision-makers who are not willing to prioritize the project. A successful POC that doesn’t end in technology adoption is draining and discouraging. Unsurprisingly, it can ultimately result in an IT team that is reluctant to pursue business-enhancing innovation at all. And if there’s anything that organizations can’t afford in the age of digital transformation, it’s complacency within their IT department.

So, if you’ve identified an impactful solution that could benefit your organization, what are some best practices you can employ to have the best shot at getting the support of the decision-making hierarchy?

Capitalize on the Power of the POC

Depending on the size of your organization—and especially within the scope of SQL Server high availability—new software acquisitions will typically impact the day-to-day lives of multiple people on your IT team. Invite as many users as possible to share in the POC process and let them take the new solution on a test drive with you. Truly powerful software solutions will speak for themselves when new users get in the driver’s seat for the first time, and the more advocates you have for technology adoption, the stronger and more compelling your proposal becomes.

At the very least, inviting multiple users to join the POC process opens a forum for a greater diversity of perspectives and opinions of the solution being evaluated. This helps avoid fixation or tunnel vision, and can help you more accurately gauge the total impact of technology adoption.

The POC process also needs to be accompanied by strategic, measurable goals, because this is how you are going to show your decision-makers how this solution quantitatively and objectively can make a difference at your organization. When evaluating SQL Server high availability solutions, this might look like measuring:

• Relative failover speeds
• The impact on total licensing expense
• The number of workloads that can be safely stacked on a single server

New solutions are not adopted on a positive gut feeling after reading marketing materials. POCs give you the power to show the potential benefits in black and white, so approach them intentionally with specific demonstrations of value in mind. 

The Solution Provider is Eager to Help – Use Them as a Resource

You are in the driver seat when it comes to evaluating new software. The solution provider is generally ready to assist in whatever way they can to help facilitate your understanding of the software solution, because they want to make a sale. So, don’t be afraid to ask for help along the way. Learning your way around new software can be a time-consuming task, and it’s worth taking advantage of the resources at hand to help make it as efficient a process as possible.

Obviously, technology vendors have strong technical knowledge and competency to help you along the way through product evaluations. However, their usefulness does not stop there…

Most technology companies have experienced their fair share of deals that got away. Sometimes these disappointments are just due to budget constraints, champion turnover, or other logistical shortcomings. The failed adoptions that sting the most though are the ones where organizational decision-makers failed to see the value in our solution. These are nothing if not learning experiences though, and they have equipped solution providers with a multitude of valuable insights that they would love the opportunity to share with you.

As the technology evaluator/product champion(s) for an organization, it can be an invaluable exercise to tap into these insights prior to your final proposal. While your perceived value of a solution can be fixated around a particular benefit or feature, these conversations can unlock a more holistic value story to help sway your organization’s key stakeholders and decision-makers.

Integrate Technology Proposal with Existing Goals

It’s not rocket science. Technology proposals have a much higher chance of being successful if they help achieve existing goals at your organization. Whether continuous improvement or other business initiatives, these goals are crafted with the needs and priorities of all business units and stakeholders in mind. In-turn, methodically introducing new solutions in the scope of these objectives is a critical advantage in enticing key stakeholders.

Even if a new solution is identified that could have an unambiguously positive impact on your organization, it can be a tough sell if the impact falls outside the scope of these existing goals. Because previously established goals and initiatives are accompanied by previously determined budget allocations. Re-allocating resources is usually only a realistic expectation when reacting to a serious negative event like a security breach or extended downtime incident.

Making the Final Technology Adoption Proposal

Your POC is complete, your team of evaluators have become enthusiastic advocates, and you’ve formulated an amazing proposal that fits like a glove in the scope of your organizational budget and goals. This is by no means a secret formula for 100% success, but based on our interactions with customers and prospects these tips will give you the greatest probability of having your proposal approved, and your hard work rewarded.

Just don’t forget to talk to decision-makers as humans too. Call us a “glass-half-full” company at DH2i, but we believe appealing to emotions and the human experience can be impactful even within the corporate machine. Modern software solutions don’t always just bring new technical capability to organizations. New technology can also simplify management and genuinely improve the quality of life for the IT pros who use it. In other words, certain technology can be accompanied by sensational ROI, and also positively impact the people at your organization. Reducing turnover and improving quality of life can contribute to overall success in the very same manner that technical capability can.

At DH2i, we make ourselves available to help every step of the way through the evaluation process. We typically start with a personalized demo to help you determine how our solutions could benefit your organization’s SQL Server environment. Then we offer free, fully-featured trial licenses for a flexible duration to allow your organization to complete a thorough evaluation. We provide free email-based support with on-boarding and throughout the duration of your POC of DxEnterprise Smart HA Clustering, or DxOdyssey SDP technology. Our dedicated support team has even been known to provide after-hours assistance to ensure success for prospective customers.

Customers have chosen our solutions after being able to clearly demonstrate industry-leading failover speeds, as well as other capabilities in the POC stage that unlock the following benefits in their SQL Server environments:

• An 8-15x reduction in OSes under management by safely stacking instances
• A 30-60% reduction in overall cost licensing costs
• Up to a 40% increase in replication throughput when using the highly performant network transmission technology of DxOdyssey

Lastly, with lightning-fast failover speed and advanced modernization capability, DH2i can enable patching and updating during regular business hours. This is a truly powerful value proposition for DBAs and other frontline IT pros—getting their nights and weekends back while simultaneously reducing total downtime.