Are you Prepared?

Swimage Monthly Newsletter

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity planning (which includes a well-designed disaster recovery plan) is a vital part of any business. Failure to develop a good business continuity plan puts your company and your customers at high risk. This is especially true in today’s highly connected landscape. The risk of malware, ransomware, hacking, or other nefarious activity has never been higher.

In an effort to combat the many external risks to the business, organizations have shifted to disaster recovery (DR) alternatives, including virtualization, cloud services, etc. These alternatives fill gaps and reduce overall risk for certain types of business, network, or system catastrophes. However, they do not come without costs, including failover latency, limited business functionality, and unpredictable cost structures.

In all fairness, traditional DR alternatives are also considered very costly and can have even more
challenges. Traditional disaster recovery plans include failover hardware, PC inventory, and expensive backup storage. They also require and heavy labor to implement, test, and when needed, recover (failover). Often traditional DR plans do not maintain true business continuity.

Swimage directly combats the challenges of traditional and newer DR alternatives.

Whether it’s an on-premise DR solution or virtualized, Swimage is designed to rebuild a single system, a large group, or an entire company in a matter of minutes. Swimage handles this completely zero touch, even if the device is remote. When complete, all functionality is restored. This includes all applications, settings, data, and established security compliance .Once a rebuild is completed, the employee simply continues working as if nothing changed.

This may sound impossible, but with 25 years of innovation, Swimage has a fully automated intelligent configuration engine that rebuilds a device with no touches and no technical expertise required.

Swimage ensures that all PCs can be rebuilt simultaneously with little latency in execution and no labor. To achieve this feat, Swimage:

  • Continually scans the PC to discover its configuration
  • Collects this information and stores it into a configuration database
  • Creates a localized recovery space and populates it with all “known good sources”
  • Continually validates the integrity of the recovery space and ensures sit ’all current
  • Uses compliance rules to continually enforce security
  • Enables a remote technician, the end user, or an automated rule to rebuild the entire device on demand

Swimage ensures business continuity and provides what is lacking in other solutions, including the
ability to:

  • Trigger a failover quickly
  • Rebuild mass systems in minutes
  • Ensure that the DR process is reliable and always ready
  • Utilize the same process for both office devices and remote devices
  • Immediately enable all business functionality on failover
  • Automate the entire process with minimal labor

Swimage is a comprehensive PC recovery solution which completely rebuilds an entire organization’s PCs in minutes. Swimage can ensure your business continuity and be a critical piece of your disaster recovery plan. With Swimage, you can minimize downtime and recover your entire organization without adding additional IT staff.

To learn more, please visit www.Swimage.com/benefits/business-continuity/ or email info@Swimage.com.


Filling Autopilot Gaps

Microsoft is encouraging businesses to adopt Autopilot as part of the Modern Desktop Experience. However, Autopilot has many gaps which are frustrating IT departments. Fortunately, Swimage integrates with Autopilot and fills those gaps.

Swimage improves Modern Desktop functionality with the following:

  • Remote device management
    • Monitor and manage remote devices – even those with little or no Internet
    • Provision, repair, recover, replace, upgrade, or migrate
    • Utilize tech portal or self-service
  • Fully functional and secure PCs at first login
    • Use devices immediately after first login – no need to wait for apps to be downloaded or security to be applied post-login
  • Resilient deployment
    • Automatically restart interrupted deployments where they left off
    • Utilize Swimage’s snapshot and/or rollback, if desired
  • Low bandwidth deployments
    • Drastically reduce your Internet/network bandwidth demands for your deployments
    • Run completely offline, if needed
  • Security
    • Lock system during the entire deployment and application installation process
    • Maintain encryption regardless of encryption vendor
    • Apply full security to devices before first login
  • Compliance enforcement
    • Enforce any policy and take actions based on defined rules (lock, reimage, recover, repair, patch, etc.)
    • Enable Zero Trust Security
  • Domain join flexibility
    • Join an on-premise domain (even if remote)
    • Join a hybrid domain
    • Join an Azure domain
  • Data flexibility
    • Capture and restore all settings and data, no matter the location
    • Store settings and data according to company policy (OneDrive not required)
  • Application flexibility
    • Utilize application matching rules to automatically install desired apps
    • Access apps from any desired location (Microsoft Store not required)
  • Disaster recovery for all PCs (onsite & remote)
    • Recover an entire organization’s devices simultaneously by zero-touch, Tier-0, or Tier-1 support
    • Rebuild and recover from all known-good sources in minutes, completely remote
    • Reinstall approved apps and restore all data and settings
    • Take a full-disk snapshot of the device for forensics

Not only does Swimage fill Autopilot gaps, it can replace Autopilot entirely. Some Swimage advantages (in addition to those listed above) include:

  • Easy implementation and customization
    • Begin using the base functionality of Swimage in a few hours
    • Integrate with other systems, such as SCCM (if desired)
    • Customize Swimage configuration for your organization’s needs with the assistance of Swimage’s implementation staff
  • Training and support
    • Receive training for you and your team on how to use Swimage to achieve maximum efficiency in your IT department
    • Contact your dedicated Swimage technician for support
  • Light overhead
    • Maintain thousands of individually configured devices with one person
    • Resolve most issues with zero-touch, Tier-0, or Tier-1 support
  • Control
    • Maintain full control over the company’s image and policies
    • Maintain control of device settings and data
  • Asset management
    • Detailed asset information for each PC
    • Monitor PC health and compliance

Either as a stand-alone solution or integrated with Autopilot, Swimage can improve your organization’s Modern Desktop Experience.

To learn more, please visit www.Swimage.com/benefits/autopilot-alternative/ or email info@Swimage.com.