All posts by Callum Huddlestone

How IT Services Play an Influential Role in Legal Industry?

July 31, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

To handle complicated cases effectively, law firms do not leave any stone unturned. In order to meet promised deadlines, lawyers select all types of operations and applications for assistance. In other words, they are badly in need of service providers to run their law firms smoothly. Law firms have important data (case updates, record of communication with clients) to deal with. Loss of these important files is great disaster for a law firm. You can cope with the situation when right back up plan is selected for disaster recovery.

If you run an IT company trying to add a law firm as one of your clients, here are some guidelines to follow:

Law Firms Depend on Applications
It is absurd to think that only Internet connection and hardware support is enough to run your business. Law firms must know the type of applications — such as case management applications — necessary for their business. They need to select cloud backup program to backup valuable applications and files.

Law Firms Need to Get IT Experts Support
As a professional service, a law firm must need to differentiate its services. If your services are not prominent, you cannot go beyond certain limits. Solicitors are required to receive education credits to demonstrate legal IT trend; however, all courses need to be approved by governing bodies or bar associations.

Influential Policy is your Legal Responsibility
What are the liability policies of your business? Discuss these liabilities with an expert insurance provider. In case, something disastrous occurs, you must have policies to support your clients. In case, your clients suffers a loss due to catastrophe, they claim that your company did not perform what was necessary for disaster recovery. By using cloud backup service, law firms can handle liability issues and manage continuous workflow.

Show References Proudly
To get prominent position, show your references and some interesting clients stories on web page. By publishing your clients’ list, you are definitely exposing your clients to competitors. Your competitors will try to poach your clients; and if they are successful in poaching your clients, chances are they have done a better job than you, and you probably deserve to lose the account.

Legal Sector is Closely Integrated Industry
Lawyers are closely integrated, well connected with each other, and others in the community. They can recommend a good service to other lawyers. If, especially, a law firm is satisfied with a cloud service that they subscribe to, they won’t hesitate from endorsing them. This will lead to many referential clients.

Legal Sector as Controversial Group
Lawyers are responsible people who work to meet deadlines, which are — in most cases — firm deadlines. As such, lawyers work could influence lives, productivity and continuity of a business. In case, one of your servers is not responding and you do not have a disaster recovery plan, get ready for a harsh reaction.

Understand the Importance of Technology
Lawyers depend on legal administrators for running their business smoothly. Whenever an advanced technology is launched, they compare the prices to decide whether to invest on that technology. It is job of the cloud services provider to inform them about severity of potential loss when disaster recovery solutions are not implemented. It is highly beneficial for law firms to use IT technology and provide distinctive and manageable services to their clients.

Facts about RAID & Strategies for Data Protection

July 22, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) stores data on multiple hard disks to improve performance. It is considered that RAID is one of the best solutions available for protection of valuable data. For software or hardware implementation, RAID supports single disk failure; however RAID is not perfect system for ongoing data security.

RAID level 1 works in a systematic way where two disks are available for storing similar data. In case, one disk fails, clients can use data from another disk. Drawback of RAID is that it cannot verify the corrupted disk thus unable to inform the system. If failure is not noticed, system will keep on working and copying data from the corrupted drive to the good drive. As a result, more problems are created due to this shortcoming of RAID. In IT environment, data security is obligatory for business continuity. Disaster can occur anytime due to man-made or machine or human errors. Some of the reasons are as follows:

Power outages
Improper shutdown
Virus infection
System freezes
Bad disk sectors
Hard drive failure
Improper eject before disconnecting storage devices

RAID Levels

RAID is available in various formats. When higher level is selected, it gives more satisfactory results than the previous levels. As compared to other levels, RAID 5 is acknowledged for reliable swapping and great performance. By using RAID 5, companies can take out corrupted arrays from NAS devices and servers anytime without switching off the system. RAID 6 has twofold parity structural design, which can cover data even if two disk drives are corrupted. In spite of parity features, RAID cannot be considered a perfect system for data protection.

Strategies for System Protection

If it is your priority to select RAID, you need to protect your system by following these strategies:

Apply Disconnection and Shutdown Procedure

Give training to workers how to disconnect storage devices and shutdown the system properly. They must know that not following this procedure could lead to data corruption.

UPS System

To cope with issues such as brownouts, surges and power outages, you must have an Uniterruptible Power Supply (UPS) that can work without any outage. In case electrical source is not available, UPS works as backup system for data protection.

Handle Issues Immediately

If there are problems in your system, restarting the system does not necessarily solve the issues. Instead, troubleshoot to determine the actual problems and solve the issues instantly.

Safe Surfing

Online world has malicious stuff which can affect the performance of your system. If you do not follow safe surfing strategy, malevolent websites could corrupt your data.

BDR Strategy

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) planning gives surety of data protection even if hard disk fails. System without backup and recovery plan is always at risk.

RAID Recovery Solution

If your organization suffers because of corrupted data, there are chances to recover lost data by repairing the damaged disks. RAID recovery software rebuilds damaged arrays in configurations, software and hardware. For data security, companies can get data recovery software in commercial, as well as free versions. Perform the proper research and search online to select the right software for resurrecting the damaged data.

How SMBs Examine Cloud Storage Options

July 16, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

To reduce chances of data loss due to hardware failure, human blunder or cyber criminals, small businesses are searching for automated and affordable cloud deployment. Companies prefer to use cloud storage facility to get access to valuable documents in case they experience a disaster.

When small companies adopt cloud based affordable solutions, they get an opportunity to improve performance of employees. For instance, employees who are working on a particular project in the office are able to carry on the work if they happen to be at home or just happen to be at another location of the company. It is possible for workers to select different devices to use stored data in the cloud for sharing some of the important tasks with colleagues without wasting a single minute.

Need of Cloud Storage for Small & Medium Sized Businesses

Many SMBs have adopted cloud backup services. A Spiceworks research covering almost 1,400 professionals from IT department of small and medium businesses worldwide revealed that more than 60% are using cloud based solutions. A year later the figure has grown to more than 80%. Given that the study involved IT professionals, who are subject experts, and tried to find out their preferences, we can safely say that data storage and recovery systems have given satisfactory results to online companies.

What are the motives behind an increase in cloud storage? It is noticeable that clouds are specifically used for web hosting services, disaster recovery and data backup. Presence of reliable backup system to recover data reduces the downtime costs as well.

Selection of Cloud Services

Companies are using cloud services for data storage for an easy way to access their data. In reality, all services do not offer same services for the same price; so at times it becomes difficult to comparable services. Bandwidth is paramount concern when cloud storage solution is adopted. Customers having limited bandwidth get advantage from inexpensive seeding service because accessible backup version is first stored on physical drive then delivered to data centers whereas new backup images are sent to clouds. Some offer bandwidth throttling and others help eliminate or reduce bandwidth issues by offering a free Bare Metal Restore drive service.

When our customers face catastrophe, cloud offers virtualization built in capabilities. Therefore, businesses can download files or run their specific system in the vendor’s cloud for a period of time. Our cloud users run disaster recovery program to retrieve data in a matter of minutes or hours (depending on the SLA) . On the other hand, non-cloud users require almost two weeks for recovering data.

Backup Technologies’ cloud storage services are distinguished not only for bandwidth issues, but we use cost effective system to meet the demands of our customers. There are various cloud storage service providers which will force you to buy blocks of storage space per device. Contrarily, our service permits companies to pay only for required space that will be used for data storage.

Consider all cloud services, their backup and disaster recovery options before making final decision. Select the company which fulfils all of your requirements, including data security, bandwidth management system, and pricing.

eDiscovery- Fulfilling Legal Mandates

June 29, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

“Data Search” and e-discovery are terms that spring up often and often in the context of compliance to legal mandates. How does cloud computing facilitate the process? Here are a few insights into what cloud service providers do to help customers keep their data discoverable for legal purposes.

Cloud computing challenges all assumptions about physical boundaries. This increases the need to protect the data and secure the privacy of individuals who entrust their personal information to business entities. This drives the need for new types of metadata that can ensure data integrity, security and privacy of the individual in an increasingly virtualized environment. The new metadata must create new types of relationships with content in an environment where sharing is integral to computing. New supports and safeguards must be evolved as new dangers emerge and evolve if legal mandates have to be fulfilled.

Electronic data in the cloud may take many forms. These include evidentiary material in the form of telephone logs, transactional data, emails, instant messaging traffic, all manner of corporate communications, documents, records, video and sound recordings, and any other kind of relevant textual or non textual information. All this material must be securely stored, easily accessible, formally indexed, uniquely identified and e-discoverable. There must be a common, flexible, extensible framework that facilitates deduplication, conversion, evaluation, summarization and storage of this information in retrievable electronic formats.

Cloud software systems store all the above information in encrypted formats and generate metadata containing document properties for ease of discovery. Metadata is data about data and is a time tested system for data discovery in the world of computing. Complex metadata is becoming the foundation for targeted advertising as well as mandated legal data discovery systems. Analytical support for this process may include limited entity extraction (eg email header) for pattern matching purposes and to cluster documents according to identified topics. Review solutions may permit user defined document sets with time based selection controls. Text analytics may discern important entity relationships and extract these features for classification and analysis of documents in storage.

We, at Backup Technology, believe that the legal discovery challenge is not in the data storage, but in the generation of metadata. Millions of users with trillions of files and billions of generations can recover the smallest bit of data from the cloud server if the metadata is properly generated and securely stored in the system. Backup Technology has proven the potential of its technology by ensuring that the right kind and quality of metadata is generated every time a bit of data is uploaded to its servers. Our team knows how it can be scaled up, reliably stored and quickly discovered.

Empowering Collaboration

June 17, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

Collaboration has been around for two decades now. Yet, companies who have looked over collaboration options available over the LAN, exhibit unease around the concept and seem to prefer to use email for collaboration rather than collaboration tools. But, email has its limitations as a collaboration tool. Users can collaborate with only one user at a time and a number of versions of a document may be generated as multiple users work independently on the same document and return it to storage server. The process of shuffling the documents back and forth between the users can also hamper productivity and may even prove deterministic as it allows for only one working style.

The cloud has empowered collaboration by transforming Outlook and Word into collaboration tools. The barriers for entry such as large monetary investment in collaboration tools have been removed and the pay as you go model ensures that the tools are just a click away. SharePoint servers linked to the cloud become all the more powerful as partners and contractors integrate into the workflow and remote branch office no longer feel isolated from decision making as they have access to the same tools.

Interestingly, collaboration is accommodating and absorbing a number of emerging devices/ communication modes into workflows. The mobile worker, the smart phone, the iPhone or laptop user can quickly and easily link up to the network and collaborate with their colleagues stationed across the globe. IM, Facebook, LinkedIn and other modes of communication add on to the collaborative process, creating a dynamic, buzzing business environment.

This multiplicity of collaboration tools has naturally highlighted and intensified questions around security. But, it must be remembered that the focus on security is greater with mobility and cloud vendors have made security enhancements to meet these new challenges. Moreover, documents passed around for collaboration are often hedged around with access rights, roles and privileges unlike email documents which travel as mere attachments to the mail.

We, at Backup Technology, believe that collaboration will be the way of work in the future and have strengthened the collaboration tools that are available with our software. Collaborating with the right secure software is a low risk, high reward option. You are welcome to test drive our product. Sign up for a trial and check out how our product, helps your organisation capitalise on the new opportunities that open up with collaboration.

Prevent Data Failure with Effective Data Storage in the Cloud

June 5, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

A loss of data can be crippling to a business. Data failures can be costly and time consuming. How is it possible to prevent this from happening? Storing data in the cloud — while not foolproof — is one option.

It should be noted that prior to storing data in the cloud, companies have to ensure that they have an effective data model in place. That is something they need to do before they approach a cloud based company to store their data in the cloud. Not doing so could create unforeseen difficulties for them, and would compound their ability to access the services that cloud based companies have to offer. This is the responsibility of individual companies to ensure that once they start cloud computing that they reduce the risk of anything going wrong. Working with a cloud based company is a partnership and both partners have to ensure that they are doing what they can to make the partnership work.

Structure your data intelligently before storing in the cloud

In fact, proper information management in this technological age is crucial to a smooth functioning of a business. In order for data to be effectively stored in the cloud, the database must be intelligently structured prior to storing data in the cloud because having to redesign the physical structure of the database after storing data in the cloud can be time consuming and costly. Corporations need to ensure that prior to enlisting the services of the cloud that their data is protected from database failure. Once that it is done, they are ready to store their data in the cloud, and be safe in the knowledge that they can access it when they need it and that it is safe and secure.

Avoid defective data models

There may be a variety of reasons why a company’s logical data model may be defective. Some of the reasons (among other things) include a company’s failure to consider use cases of different users, a failure to use appropriate software modelling tools, and a failure to accurately and comprehensively define relationships between entities.

Safe, Mobile, Scalable and Easy

Storing data in the cloud is relatively safe and is easy to retrieve. In addition, the beauty of the cloud is that unlimited amounts of data can be stored and accessed whenever and wherever the end user requires it. In addition, if data is lost, it can be easily retrieved. Cloud companies have data recovery processes that make this possible. How to retrieve lost data can be spelled out in a business service level agreement (SLA) prior to engaging the services of a cloud based company. Spelling things out clearly is a good way to ensure there is no miscommunication.

So, before you approach a cloud based company, make sure that your data is ready for the cloud. This makes it easier for your company and for the cloud service provider, whom you beginning a new partnership with. Doing so will ensure that your cloud computing experience will be worry free.