Category Archives: Business Continuity

ClouDRaaS at TechTrade Yorkshire

August 23, 2016 jane robertson

We are delighted to announce that we are exhibiting at the inaugural Techtrade Yorkshire event at Elland Road in Leeds on September 8th.

The whole day promises to be a great opportunity for everyone working in the IT industry in the region to learn from and network with each other as well as the region’s business leaders.

There are some great speakers lined up and our Disaster Recovery specialists will be on hand on Stand 43 to demonstrate our world-leading ClouDRaaS solution and to discuss the challenges you face around data and your IT infrastructure.

If you would like to book an appointment please click here to give us your details.

You can find out more about event here. Tickets for IT decision-makers are FREE.

Look forward to seeing you there!

@techtradeyorks
#TY16

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Vs. Traditional Disaster Recovery (DR)

July 13, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

Disaster Recovery (DR) systems are difficult to operate, harder to configure. They also get quickly outdated, and cost much more than just backups. To the contrary, DRaaS is a cloud based service, which offers testing flexibility, costs much less than DR, easier to deploy, keeps pace with the company changes and strategies, and offers the ability to test the ongoing plans on a regular basis.

How Do You Make a DR Plan?

You can make DR plans with the help of cloud based methods. You will need to consider the potential threats present to data centres while devising and testing disaster scenarios. Such threats as employee sabotage, hazardous weather, systems downtime, hackers, breaches and power outages should be outlined as potential disasters. Identify the most common apps that need to be restored immediately. Go over the list again and prioritise by importance. You are also suggested to make the plans to limit the activities against the data centre and its efficiency. Users can develop the basic infrastructure with the help of servers, network connections, applications, software and storage devices. All these parameters have vital roles in the development of good infrastructure for disaster recovery.

Appointing staff having relevant professional experience can help in the development of DR plans and infrastructure required. IT professionals know how to manage according to the requirements of clients. IT departments spend more time for the development and maintenance of DR plans. New applications and approaches are invented by developers working on disaster recovery options and protocols. IT admins also test these DR plans in order to find the best efficiency level for optimised performance.

Developing New DRaaS Solutions:

Cloud always provides better options for the data protection and recovery. The cloud is most efficient, providing latest updates in order to create better data recovery and storage. The cloud has introduced modern automation and virtualisation for high level flexibility.

Cloud’s Limitations:

DRaaS might have limitations, especially, when cloud vendors do not have complete system redundancy. Suppliers can’t justify the cost of building new data centres that cater to the needs of each user’s infrastructure setups. As a result, they cut corners. A good DRaaS will develop systems that resist outages to some degree.

Even though cloud based DR increases the company network bandwidth, it is better than conventional options. The users are also required to choose the right DR plans favourable for their business and activity. It is no longer a question of how cloud backup service providers can assist the clients in the matter of disaster recovery.

Communicating Data Breaches with Employees

June 16, 2016 Rob Mackle

Data breaches happened less frequently in the past. With the increased activity in ransom-ware, data breaches are now becoming a daily occurrence. Major corporations like Sony, Domino’s and Home Depot have been hacked. It is believed that there will be more data breaches in the coming months and years. If, as an employer, you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of a data breach, how are you going to communicate the breach to your employees? What happens after the security breach?

Be Transparent

Employers should notify the breach to employees as soon as possible once they have all the facts about the breach. Employees have the right to know about the breach incident directly from the employer, rather than from the rumours circulating. On the other hand, the companies are also required to make sure that workers will keep the shared information strictly confidential or at least until it is officially announced.

An Inside Job?

It is essential to ensure that employees are receiving the right information in a timely fashion. Tell them that concerned department has started investigations about the matter; without divulging too much details into the breach, so as not to alarm the culprit in case it is an inside-job.

An Outside Attack?

Share more detailed information (as they become available) about the breaches if your investigation confirms that the cause is not internal. Update them as frequently as possible. This will ensure that the workers are not worried about their personal information. Personal information, like: address, social security numbers, birthday, salary amount, etc. could be recipes for an identity theft.

Personal Information

You need to think about Data Protection Act (DPA). In the UK, for instance, businesses must adhere to DPA. This act ensures that employers holding personal information on their workers must keep the information safe and secure. DPA is very helpful to avoid information breaches.

Businesses must report data breaches to the Information Commissioner in the UK. It also makes sense that employers inform and update their employees at the same time. If it is confirmed that employees’ personal information have been compromised, then the employer should offer support to its affected employees. Advice such as what the next steps should be and what to do if unauthorized credit card transaction is posted in their account. Detailed procedures should be described so that the victims can take immediate action whenever they face identity theft or unauthorized bank transaction.

It would be better to develop a database or provide a fully dedicated hotline so the staff can call and ask questions about the breach.

Official Press Release Statement

It is important to communicate with all employees, informing them that they are not authorized to speak to the press media about the incident at all times. Tell them that it is a standard process and everyone should obey this because the breach is related to company’s reputation and business.

Remember that data breaches are juicy stories. Reporters and bloggers love to write about them. Many true and false stories will be written. The key is to share the details with employees and release an official press release. You can win the trust of your employees by sharing timely information with them. This will give them more confidence and they will not share the details outside the company. The last thing you want is for the employees to learn about the breach from a third-party website or other traditional media.

3 reasons why your business should adopt DRaaS

March 21, 2016 jane robertson

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions make essential safeguarding of applications and data both more accessible and effective for small and large businesses alike.

Whether it be a natural disaster, human error, cyber-attack or hardware failure, an interruption to IT services can be catastrophic for businesses. To deal with the challenges associated with storing and potentially recovering large volumes of mission-critical data, organisations have a compelling option in DRaaS.

DRaaS is a cloud-based solution that provides near instant replication of your servers. In the case of downtime, whether scheduled or unscheduled, DRaaS enables you to failover to a copy of your infrastructure and failback to your original infrastructure when it’s ready, maintaining business continuity.

Whilst high-budget enterprises have typically had Disaster Recovery (DR) infrastructures in place for some time, the emergence of DRaaS yields several advantages that make the same capabilities possible for all businesses.

1. Disaster Recovery as a Service Reduces Costs

It’s simply not viable for many businesses to purchase, configure and manage a secondary site to failover to in case of disruption. It requires a huge upfront expenditure on hardware, plus unpredictable data centre operating costs.

DRaaS solutions are much more affordable. There are no upfront costs, but simply a monthly, manageable bill for leasing resources. Ongoing costs, such as those for electricity usage and maintenance, are the responsibility of the vendor.

You also only pay for what you use – a benefit that typifies the cloud – and there’s no need for overprovisioning, as would be required with a traditional DR infrastructure.

2. DRaaS Provides Access to Enterprise-Grade Protection

New technologies are revolutionising DR, and the speed and efficiency that can be achieved in data protection. For instance, advancements in virtualisation software have made Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) of just minutes and seconds affordable.

For organisations that choose to operate their own DR infrastructures, adopting new, advanced DR software poses both logistical and financial challenges.

Leading DRaaS solutions will include the latest software as standard, enabling the same simplified data replication, rapid RTOs and RPOs and comprehensive data protection that enterprises have access to.

3. DRaaS Refocuses Your Business Strategy

DR can be a burden that bogs down your IT department. It can involve extensively managing a secondary site, performing regular, intricate failover tests and reviewing recovery capabilities to meet compliance requirements. This distracts IT from core strategy and responsibilities that develop your business.

More than the sum of its parts

DRaaS solutions provide access to new technologies, technologies that can automatically test and invoke your DR infrastructure, enabling your internal team to focus and prioritise tasks that are central to your long-term business strategy. As data security becomes an increasingly important responsibility for organisations of all sizes, DRaaS offers affordable, yet complete protection.

A DRaaS solution, as an alternative to configuring and managing your own DR infrastructure, is a formidable option for any business looking to exploit the efficiencies and innovation of the cloud.

To find out more about DRaaS from BTL click here or download our data sheet

Why Do Businesses Fail to Adopt Disaster Recovery as a Service?

March 8, 2016 Rob Mackle

With a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, small and large businesses alike can access comprehensive protection against downtime of mission-critical applications, which was previously only achievable for enterprises with significant IT budgets.

However, many organisations still overlook DRaaS solutions based on perceptions that are not necessarily accurate.

In this blog post we look at four common reasons why businesses opt against investing in DRaaS solutions.

‘We can’t afford Disaster Recovery’

Full Disaster Recovery (DR) is traditionally seen as a luxury reserved for big-budget enterprises. After all, configuring a secondary site for rapid failover involves considerable hardware and data centre investment.

By outsourcing your DR to a vendor with a cloud-based DRaaS solution, you eliminate these upfront investments and the need to overprovision. Advancements in cloud-based technologies enable DRaaS customers to run virtual infrastructures on any hardware, so there’s no need to maintain and replace specific hardware.

This makes comprehensive DR for all of your applications achievable with a limited budget.

‘We can’t afford rapid RPOs and RTOs’

Traditionally you needed deep pockets to achieve business continuity with DR solutions. Rapid Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – i.e. the maximum period where data may be lost and the target time for the resumption of services – required extremely frequent snapshot replication of your applications and an always-on hot site with the required supporting infrastructure.

DRaaS vendors have adopted emerging, cost-effective virtualisation technologies that minimise RPOs and RTOs to just seconds and minutes. For instance, new DR software uses asynchronous replication at the hypervisor level, resulting in quicker, cheaper and more flexible failover.

Furthermore, DRaaS enables you to rely on the infrastructure of a vendor to gain rapid restore times. This will typically consist of a high-speed, fibre network connecting its data centres and stringent SLAs.

‘We don’t have the resources to manage Disaster Recovery’

Some organisations have a dedicated team to manage DR, but obviously this is out of the question for many.

A major advantage of DRaaS is that it outsources the replication, failover and failback processes, so you don’t need specialist resources and expertise. Some vendors have automated one-click systems to easily test and invoke an entire DR infrastructure, and then failback to the original infrastructure. This makes business continuity achievable with minimal human intervention.

‘We do not prioritise Disaster Recovery’

Planning for something that has not happened before or is seen as highly unlikely may prevent you from prioritising DR above other business processes and activities. However, the potential damage that downtime can cause to your businesses finances and reputation is so great that DR must be a top priority.

This is reflected by research that found that 70% of organisations that suffer from a severe IT disaster go out of business within a year.

By utilising a DRaaS solution, you can fully safeguard your organisation from lengthy data loss and lost revenue from downtime, without taking your IT department’s focus and budget away from other responsibilities.

It’s vital to examine your DR plan and processes, and consider the range of options that are available to your business. DRaaS is an attractive, yet often misunderstood option that offers exceptional efficiency and reliability in preventing costly downtime.

ClouDRaaS from BTL offers reliable and rapid response Disaster Recovery in the cloud.

To find out more click here or download our data sheet.

File-Sharing Services & Strategies of Enterprises to Avoid Security Lapse

January 4, 2016 Stewart Parkin

File-sharing services may give some benefits to organisations, but security breaches could end up costing the company thousands of dollars. Due to carelessness of employees, sensitive information of clients could get leaked and companies have to pay charges for violation of HIPAA regulations. As a result, file-sharing services are believed to be major threats to secured data. Though most of the companies might take security measures, they cannot share the files effectively to end users. One of the reasons is that companies lack visibility into how employees use the services.

Why File-Sharing Services are Used?
Companies find file-sharing services useful when they are required to transfer documents to clients on regular basis. Though there are limitations applied to email services, content managers find it to be a reliable solution for communicating with developers, freelance writers, vendors and designers. The platform is not only inexpensive, but also gives facility to communicate and share information irrespective of time. Many services offer a basic starter package for free and allow you to buy additional storage at affordable rates.

Drawbacks
Enterprises require many security features which are missing from file-sharing services. For instance, some file-sharing solutions lack encryption and as file-sharing is mostly of a public nature, confidential files could end up at the wrong hands. The convenience of file-sharing services is provided at the cost of consistency. Moreover, anywhere and anytime feature of file-sharing often leads to compliance issues.
The disconcerting drawback is loss of trust that is developed by end users on the services of the companies. Perhaps, the problem is created due to carelessness of newly appointed employee, who is not an expert; and they might delete some of the important files or heap of folders by mistake. Improper management of data is the most serious threat that makes way for malware or hackers’ attack.

Ways to Tackle File-sharing Issues
File-sharing has so many disadvantages, so enterprises are applying strict approaches to handle file-sharing services. It is the reason why many companies do not allow their employees to check mainstream file-sharing platforms. When companies pay penalties against compliance and security breaches just because of employees’ slip up, it becomes reasonable to apply an extreme approach to avoid such issues.

There are three basic methods to cope with issues concerning file-sharing services in the enterprise:

Careful Selection
Is it necessary for organisations to embrace latest file-sharing services? Cloud services are not accepted by all organisations. A small number of enterprises are getting the benefit from these services. Careful selection of cloud services is mandatory when organisations need custom fit solutions to fulfil their business and compliance requirements. Security features, cost, privacy settings, storage space, and maximum size of uploaded file are some of the factors that are considered before choosing a cloud service.

Customise Business Solutions
Do you need a service like Google Drive or Dropbox that is more secure and reliable? It is possible to have such type of platform by building a customised solutions. Tailored business solutions allow file-sharing as well as team work along with security of mission critical data within the enterprise. All organisations do not have resources to build customised solutions. They have an opportunity to hire services to get on-demand solutions.

Block File Storage Platforms
In order to avoid security breaches, IT managers should block unauthorised file-sharing platforms. Administrators have to configure hardware and firewalls to block particular IP addresses.