Category Archives: Data Loss

Is Virtualisation / Agile IT Exposing Businesses to Data Loss?

December 2, 2013

Virtualisation is fast becoming the standard in IT infrastructures, giving IT managers decreased deployment time, and increased flexibility.� Regardless of where that virtual environment resides, the cloud or onsite, IT professionals now have the ability to spin up new servers in minutes.� With all the positives that Virtualisation brings (there are numerous), is this new ease of deployment leading to careless planning and deployment which is leaving business exposed to data loss?

For example, if a new SQL server was required for testing or development of a new business application, traditionally a new server would be required.� This process includes an application for the expense to management or the finance department, there was then the waiting time for delivery, deployment and configuration. �Standard practice would then be to add the new server to the backup routine during the deployment or configuration stage.

In a virtual environment, �that new SQL server can now be agreed, spec�d and deployed in a morning through the Hypervisor GUI or Cloud provider’s interface.� All to often backups are not included in that process, or everything is backed up including elements that shouldn�t.� This careless or blas� attitude to deployment and backups could be costing business money, in more ways than one. Let’s not forget that this scenario only deals with a test server. In virtual environments, business critical servers, such as exchanges or live database servers are often hosted, meaning that backing up that virtual server (or preferably the entire environment) becomes a necessity.

Consider the company is using a capacity based backup model, being billed on a per GB or per TB basis.� The new server has 2Tb of data residing on it, some needed some irrelevant.� The addition of the whole server would see a dramatic increase in the business’s backup costs.

Now consider that the server wasn�t added to the backup cycle and 4 months of development work for the new application all resides on said server.� However the day before deployment of this application, the underlying storage fails, and 4 months work is gone forever, or at the very least is difficult to recover, costing more time and ultimately money. �

With the importance of IT systems growing each day, it has never been as important to ensure that effective and efficient backup systems are in place that give your business the protection and recovery capabilities that are needed to minimise impact and cost to the company. Company networks and infrastructures are becoming increasingly diverse, as more products become available. Having a backup product in place that can manage all important aspects of a business’s IT infrastructure is a vital part of good business practice.

Storm Batters Southern Britain

October 29, 2013

A huge storm has battered southern Britain over night and into Monday morning. The storm, named St Jude, is the largest experienced in the country for years and has already caused a huge amount of damage, as well as the tragic loss of four lives.

Winds of up to 99mph have been recorded which has left nearly a quarter of a million homes without any power, as well as rail and road networks in chaos. Flights to and from Southern Airports have also seen disruption.� The Environment Agency has advised people to stay in doors if they don�t have to travel, which has had a knock-on effect on businesses throughout the south of England.

Train companies have had to cancel or reduce their services, with Southwest Trains, East Coast, First Great Western, Virgin West Coast just some of the providers cancelling services on Monday morning. London has also been greatly effected, with disruption to rail and air travel common across the South East in general.

It is events like this that should focus many businesses on how their data is protected and whether they have in place an effective and fully tested Disaster Recovery plan. With people finding it difficult to get to their place of work, an effective DR plan utilising Backup Technology�s Online Backup and Virtual Disaster Recovery services means workers could effectively work remotely from their home without the need to travel in such circumstances. Whilst businesses should be protecting their data with regular backup routines, are these backups managed and fully offsite, should the unthinkable happen and an office or place of work is destroyed?

One of the most important commodities in today’s world is data, whether it be customer details, communication data (such as emails) or critical documents. Taking the time to plan for potential disasters is a key part of maintaining a good service to customers of all businesses!

Adobe Suffers Large Security Breach

October 15, 2013

Nearly 3 Million of Adobe’s customers have had their private information compromised during a cyber attack on its website, Adobe has confirmed. Adobe also stated that it was investigating the illegal access of some source code for its products, which included the hugely popular Adobe Acrobat and ColdFusion.

Adobe�s chief security officer, Brad Arkin stated that Adobe �deeply regretted� the incident. He states �We believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders. At this time, we do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from our systems. We deeply regret that this incident occurred. We�re working diligently internally, as well as with external partners and law enforcement, to address the incident.”

In an interview with the BBC Chester Wisniewski, who is a senior advisor at Sophos, thought that the breach could be very serious. He went on to say “billions of computers around the world use Adobe software, so if hackers manage to embed malicious code in official-looking software updates they could potentially take control of millions of machines. This is on the same level as a Microsoft security breach,” he added.

Security experts Brian Krebs and Alex Holden are assisting Adobe with their investigations. The two discovered a 40GB cache of Adobe source code while investigating attacks on three US data providers, Dun & Bradstreet, Kroll Background America, and LexisNexis. Mr Krebs�said�the Adobe code was on a server he believed the hackers used.

Immediately Adobe said that it is resetting the passwords for customer accounts it believes were compromised, and that those customers will get an email alerting them to the change. Whilst also recommending customers affected change their passwords and user information for other websites for which they used the same ID.

For those US customers whose debit or credit card information is suspected of being accessed, Adobe is offering a complimentary one-year subscription to a credit-monitoring programme.

Adobe said it had notified law enforcement officials and is working to identify the hackers. All information can be found on the Adobe blog, here.

L.K. Bennett Selects Backup Technology to provide their Asigra Cloud Backup and Recovery Solution

August 28, 2013 Rob Mackle

Company Ends Maintenance, Performance, and Security

Concerns of Tape-Based Backup Solutions

London – August 27, 2013 – Backup Technology, the leading Enterprise Level Cloud Backup and Recovery Specialist provider since 2005, today announce the extension of their five year partnership with L.K. Bennett. The company made the changes in 2008 after it began suffering from backup cycles that exceeded available backup windows as well as failed backups and restores.

Click to Tweet: L.K. Bennett Selects Backup Technology to provide their Asigra Cloud Backup Solution #backup #cloud

Headquartered in London, UK, L.K. Bennett (http://us.lkbennett.com/) is a luxury fashion brand defined by its British heritage. After using a tape-based backup solution for years, the company realised a change was necessary when its backup environment began suffering from increasing backup windows and failed data recoveries. The company sought to modernise its backup environment by transitioning to a cloud-based data recovery solution, which included the Asigra Cloud Backup Connector provided by Backup Technology Limited (BTL). As a result, L.K. Bennett has eliminated the inefficiencies of tape backup and recovery to improve overall business uptime.

L.K. Bennett currently backs up over 14 TB of production data in a very complex environment that involves a mixture of physical and virtual systems (Dell workstations and HP servers), and multiple connections from the company’s multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) across sites in London and the United States. As such, the company’s tape-based backup system required extensive management time. In addition to tape management and data recovery headaches, storing data onsite was an additional security concern which required IT management to move data offsite and out of Greater London.

Having been a customer of cloud backup and disaster recovery provider Backup Technology Limited (BTL) for over five years, L.K. Bennett turned to BTL for an enhanced solution to its data protection challenges. With limited bandwidth, L.K. Bennett needed a WAN-optimized solution in order to meet its requirements. “We did our research to find a provider with market experience and a customer base to match,” said David Van Eck, Head of IT at L.K. Bennett. “That provider was BTL.”

L.K. Bennett modernized its backup environment with services from BTL to protect data that included SQL databases, iSeries data, application data from Microsoft Exchange, as well as a large volume of unstructured data. BTL was able to provide its Asigra-based solution to automatically and regularly back-up and protect data, according to policies set by L.K. Bennett. The solution also provided the ability to connect to local network storage to further increase the local recovery capabilities.

Van Eck from L.K. Bennett reported that the switch to the Cloud Backup Connector Appliance helped the company to achieve several business benefits. “Through a centralized online monitoring portal, we receive guaranteed backup and recovery for all of our data systems as a professional and fully managed service,” said Van Eck. “The backup forms the basis for our enterprise-wide data recovery solution, which is essential to L.K. Bennett.”

“The most common recovery is of emails or contact items,” added Van Eck. “BTL provides high-performance local recovery as well as online backup and virtual disaster recovery, which is key to our organization as downtime can be very costly. The Service has been reliable and when data needs to be restored it is always available on demand. The ability to restore emails at a granular level back to the same or a different location is invaluable.”

“Cloud-based data recovery allows L.K. Bennett to overcome the limitations of traditional backup software and legacy tape solutions,” said Rob Mackle, Direct and Channel Sales Manager EMEA at BTL. “Asigra’s Cloud Backup Connector Appliance is a tool that allows companies like L.K. Bennett to securely protect their business data and meet regulatory requirements. Should they lose one or multiple servers or sites, BTL’s Virtual Disaster Recovery also allows their systems to be restored and operational with minimal impact to the business.”

About Backup Technology

In 2005 Backup Technology was formed specialising in business and enterprise level Online Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions. By utilising a market leading technology, BTL has quickly established itself as one of the World’s leading Backup and Disaster Recovery providers.

Backup Technology has a strong global presence, from their head office in Leeds in the UK; they have expanded to offices and data centres in the US, as well as establishing partnerships in Europe and Australia. BTL’s core business has been built around their partnership with the world’s leading software provider for Online Backup, Asigra. Backup Technology became Asigra’s first ever Global Partner of the Year in 2008 and then became Asigra’s first European 3D Hybrid Partner later that year. Other awards include Best Competitive Takeout (2010), Best Hybrid Cloud Implementation (2011) and Best Vertical Enterprise Cloud Marketing (2011). The company has also received many industry awards and had articles featured in publications such as the Financial Times, the Independent and Computing Magazine.

BTL are fully ISO 9001 (April 2010) and ISO 27001 (May 2010) certified, ensuring consistent quality management procedures are in place and all security processes are followed and documented. The ISO 22301 certification has also been achieved (January 2011), meaning BTL has an independently audited Business Continuity Management system in place to offer additional peace of mind for its customers.

BTL currently employ 35 full time staff all of which are fully trained and certified by Asigra in Toronto. This ensures that BTL offer consistently high service levels to all customers and have an unrivaled knowledge of the Asigra product. With individual customer data sizes ranging from 1TB to over 2PB, BTL currently protect and manage in excess of 14 Petabytes.

For more information visit www.backup-technology.com.

Backup Technology UK Backup Technology USA

4220 Park Approach 4801 Wooday Drive

Thorpe Park Suite 300 East

Leeds Houston, Texas

LS15 8GB 77056

0800 999 3600 800-220-7013

sales@backup-technology.co.uk sales@backup-technology.com

US Federal Reserve Bank hacked by Anonymous

February 8, 2013

The US Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) has released a statement detailing that personal information has been stolen from their servers during a hack attack. The hacktivist group Anonymous are thought to be behind the attack, although this has not been confirmed by the FRB. During the attack, the details of 4,000 bank executives, thought to be part of a contact database used in the event of natural disasters, were released.

In an official statement, the FRB put the attack down to the exploitation of “a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product”. The statement went on to say “exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue” and that although personal information was stolen, no “critical operations of the Federal Reserve system” were affected. The contact database that was stolen contained such details as work addresses, mobile numbers as well as computer log in details. However the FRB, in an internal statement, had advised that “passwords were not compromised”.

The hacking group Anonymous used this latest attack as �a protest against the prosecution and recent death of Aaron Swartz. It is widely thought that pressure put on Swartz by his impending prosecution caused the 26 year-old to take his own life. Swartz, a co-founder of such internet landmarks as RSS news feeds and the social news website Reddit, was to be prosecuted on allegations of infiltrating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and stealing data, which could have resulted in a 35 year prison sentence.

Anonymous have been behind many infamous cyber-attacks in recent years, such as an attack on UK Government websites, as well as the Pentagon and News Corporation. The inspiration behind many of Anonymous’s attacks are internet censorship and surveillance, although this particular attack was linked strongly to the death of Aaron Swartz.

This latest attack raises questions for the banking sector, who will want to know more about how the hack was achieved and if it’s something they should be worried about. What was the “temporary vulnerability”, and why did it exist in the first place? Despite the fact that this attack did not affect “critical operations”, US banks, who have to share information with the FRB, this attack potentially puts their sensitive data at risk.�Aside from that, banks will be worried that if the FRB can be hacked into, what’s to stop their own IT security from being breached?

In all of this is the message that despite a recent prosecution of an Anonymous member, the group is still able to wreak havoc in a variety of �ways and affect a range of organisations.

Data Protection: how much do you value your data?

September 12, 2012

Within recent weeks, there have been two data loss incidents which have been widely reported, from a large national oil company who have suffered from a cyber-attack to an individual who lost everything as hackers managed to gain access to his iCloud account. It is now imperative that if you value your data, you will do your all to ensure that it is appropriately protected.

The world�s largest oil firm, Saudi Armco, was successfully targeted by hacking group The Cutting Sword of Justice. They used a computer virus, known as Shamoon to cause the damage which resulted in 30,000 workstations being affected.

All the affected workstations have now been fully restored and have been added back onto the internal network. It did take a bit longer for the website to be brought back online and for their email service to be in full working order, the impact of this data loss has been significantly reduced due to the data protection measures that were in place.

This attack demonstrates the importance of adequately protecting your data, be it business data which if lost, could have a detrimental impact on your company or personal data such as family photographs which are priceless. Keeping one copy of your data is becoming more unsecure as each day passes and can cost thousands of pounds to recover your data if it hasn�t been properly backed up.

This is shown when stories about Matt Honan�s data loss experience were published when he had his iCloud account hacked. This resulted with hackers wiping his iPad, iPhone and MacBook. Hanon had to pay for the services of a data recovery specialist who managed to recover around 75% of the deleted contents but this came at a cost.

Honan stated, �The bottom line is that I have all my photos and all the home movies I�ve shot. Every one of them. And seemingly all of my most important documents as well. That felt like a miracle. The bill for all this? $1,690. Data doesn�t come cheap.�

At the end of the day, it comes down to how much you value your data. There are several ways to backup your data from USB hard drives and tape to independent cloud backup services. Due to the vast range of products that are available, there is a solution out there which will protect your data and save you time and money in the event of a disaster.

Do you value your data? Do you protect your data?