Category Archives: Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery Planning and Cloud Backup – Part II

November 28, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

In Part I, we discussed the need to have a disaster recovery plan, how to plan it, risk identification, budget and military grade security options. In Part II, we will further discuss additional factors.

Analyse Data for Shorter RTO

One of the most critical elements of your plan is detailing how your business will restore its data to be up and running in a short amount of time. It is often referred to as your recovery time objective (RTO). If you have a large amount of data stored online, you need to identify the most important and mission-critical information that would need restored first to get your business back up and running. This will imply that you need to spend time analysing and categorising your data. Upon doing so, you will know what data needs restored in the quickest manner based upon your business continuity needs and which data is not mission-critical.

Recovery Options

A critical element is to make sure your vendor provides multiple ways for you to recover your data. You should be able to restore data via local storage, the Internet, mobile vault or a virtual machine. You should never put your business in a situation with a data backup company that only provides the ability to restore via the Internet. If you have a decent amount of data, your restore time will not be sufficient to meet an acceptable RTO.

High Availability for Downtime

We live and work in such a way that our businesses cannot afford much, if any, downtime at all. You need to be absolutely certain how much time your business can afford to lose recovering from a disaster. If you determine you cannot afford to lose even a minute, you need to make the necessary investments in backups and high availability hosting so you are still running the moment a disaster impacts your business.

Support Hours

You need to know if your vendor has personnel available on call 24/7 and what their response time is; because you are definitely going to need some expert help in the event of a major disaster. Especially, if it occurs at odd hours in the night.

In short, the disaster recovery plan you develop, the kind of team, responsibilities and procedures you put in place, and the kind of online backup service you utilise will be tested at some point in time in your company’s history. Remember, it isn’t a matter of if, but rather when a disaster will take place.

Why BTL?

Backup Technology Limited (BTL) is a Cloud solutions company that provides cloud backup and recovery services to businesses globally. Your data is securely and automatically stored off-site in BTL’s privately owned, state of the art certified facilities. It is accessible 24/7 with monitoring and support provided by certified experts. Powered by Asigra’s industry leading technology, BTL’s cloud backup and recovery services are available to SMB and enterprise-level companies. BTL has been serving its global clients since 2005 and is proud to have major brands in its list of clients, including The British Red Cross, BBC, Siemens, Liverpool Soccer, and many others. For a list of additional BTL customers, go to: https://www.backup-technology.com/about-btl/customers

Disaster Recovery Planning and Cloud Backup – Part I

November 28, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

A disaster recovery plan is essential in today’s business environment since disasters can occur in so many way and do so more frequently with every year. A historical year that really heightened the awareness of disaster recovery planning was 2005 when Hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of businesses in the Gulf Coast Region with most not having a disaster recovery plan in place. Even now 2016, there has been unprecedented tornado, flood, earthquake and other disasters taking place all over the world; some regions receiving the worst disasters than others. Does your business have a disaster recovery plan in place? If not, do not delay after reading this article. Learn from others’ mistakes and put one in place ASAP.

Plan Well

Your plan must detail how your business will handle a disaster. One critical component of your plan needs to be putting a cloud backup and recovery system in place. For those of you that do have one in place, you need to start with a risk analysis. You need to consider risk factors like: malware infestations, virus attacks, human error such as accidental deletion of data or natural disasters. While these are obvious to most, your backup service provider going out of business is one that tends to get overlooked too often. You need to verify its viability the best you can. Unfortunately, we have learnt over the past several years that even the biggest of companies can fail almost overnight.

Prioritise Risks

Once the risk factors have been identified and listed, you must rank and prioritise them. Each one should be given a ranking that is determined on the basis of probability and impact and then given a risk rate of low, medium or high.

Show me the Money!

Budgets can have a bearing on disaster recovery plans, as every plan comes with an associated cost. If you are planning to get your data off-site to guard against the possibility of natural disaster, you need to ensure that your information is stored in secure facilities that are in different geographical locations.

Geographically Dispersed Data

Military grade security points that your data be stored at least 2,000 miles away from your business, the point where your original data is stored. If fulfilling this military grade security is not an option for you, then make sure your cloud backup service provider backs up your data to a secondary and geographically separated data centre. Ensure that the online backup company itself has its own disaster recovery plan in place. Ask them if they have performed any type of fail over testing to ensure they are adequately prepared.

In Part II, we will further discuss the relations between disaster recovery and cloud backups.

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.

Is it Safer to Backup Data in the Cloud?

July 11, 2016 Rob Mackle

Data backup and protection is an important matter; and it becomes more sensitive when you try to backup data to an offsite server with the help of cloud based services. Although the concern is understood, cloud based data is automated, very safe, efficient, and the data is backed up to geographically dispersed locations, typically far away from the origin. As a result, natural disasters, such as tornadoes, wild fire, floods, etc. won’t affect it. The system is also efficient because it doesn’t require hardware changes and more storage space is always available for the users. But, is it safe for everyone? Is there any chance of hacking? I will give answer of these questions below.

Keep in mind that not all cloud backup services are the same. They differ in technology, years of experience, and management. But, one thing is clear that you must know your wants and needs when it comes to protecting your data.

Where is the Data Stored?

The cloud has become more popular, but most don’t seem to know what it actually means. Most of the people have concept that using the data storage service is risky because they think that all the data in the cloud usually go to a cyberspace where hackers can easily go and access it without any problem.

Well, this could be true if you are not using reliable data storage services. Cloud is a very simple service with data servers in data centres, connected with the main storage and user’s personal account. Internet is a network of servers that carries the data to and from data centres, just like a highway is for vehicles.

Data centres are very protective areas where highly skilled and reliable workers are appointed for the management of servers. In most of the cases, only a few reliable persons are given access to these data centres. The workers are allowed to access the data centres with several physical security options and with the permission of users, who provide the secret PIN to open the storage vaults. Video surveillance system is used for 24x7x365 in order to ensure security of data. Many do not label their data centre as “Data Centre”, for security reasons; they are just typical buildings that blend with the neighbourhood buildings.

Data centres can not be physically robbed. We have never heard such stories. However, it has a cyber-based system linked to the computers of users. No doubt that there is a minimal risk of cyber-crime or data hacking, but it is very rare, because cloud backup companies have come up with sophisticated systems that can keep hackers off their servers.

Hackerproof?

Is backing up in the cloud really hackerproof? The simple answer is yes and no. If the technology used is a sub-standard, hackers can get access to the data centres with the help of specialised hacking protocols. However, the latest security systems have made it very difficult. For instance, multiple security levels (using emails, phone numbers, and physical statements) have made it almost impossible for hackers to access and compromise data.

Your data is much more secure being backed up in the cloud, where it is handled by qualified security experts than it is in the basement of your home. Modern security applications and tools are implemented in order to ensure that there will be no risk. On the other hand, users are also encouraged to monitor the activities.

Factors Affecting Backup Consolidation of Laptops, Servers and Endpoints

June 10, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

IT managers want to consolidate backups. They try to bring this project to CIO’s attention at times by writing a reminder on the IT’s whiteboard every year, especially during budget approval. The purpose of this backup consolidation is simple: protection of the data while increasing the speed of data recovery and storage process and reducing costs. However, most of the efforts related to backup consolidation have not been successful, as data continually changes in the organisation. As a result, most of the small to medium sized enterprises have given up hope of utilizing CIO a single consolidated backup solution.

There are numerous problems in data consolidation process especially the lack of a single dominated solution. The data protection system fragments when users implement applications. Nowadays, Cloud is the only remaining hope for the SMEs. Cloud has brought us bespoke services, ensuring the data protection requirements. SMEs are beginning to appreciate the value of the cloud; it has now matured and has evolved into disaster recovery and long term archival in addition to basic backups and data protection. Let us discuss additional points on how cloud backup can help the SMEs to implement useful data protection strategies.

Elements of Change:

The very first thing in the process of consolidation is the historical information about previous fragmentation. Recent technologies have brought several changes in this area.

Following things have forced the IT departments to invent new solutions for data consolidation:

Rapid data growth;
Home/remote offices;
Cloud-based applications;
Demand for faster recovery;
Increased workforce mobility;
Desktop and server vitalisation.

Specialized Applications:

Most companies have got their specialized data recovery options, but they will need to have a single solution if they want to utilize data consolidation. For instance, it would not be a good decision to recover thousands of emails when a few emails are lost. This is why the email database backup and recovery system must know how to recover the desired emails in less time. Modern and specialized backup applications are more useful to generate such results.

The Mobile Workforce:

Today, the Internet has enabled the widespread adoption of “work from home”. A vast number of people are telecommuting, and at times are referred as mobile workforce. Such initiatives save commuting time, reduce Carbon footprint, encourages green thinking, and saves money, and office real estate. Mobile workforce can access data in a network from office or any place with the help of an Internet connection. All this has completely changed the network reach assumed by traditional backup service providers.

Mobile workers usually use laptops, which are not usually protected. If protected at all, it would be done using separate backup solutions. With the proliferation of Smartphones and tablets, a typical mobile worker now has at least three devices — each of which creates data — which are prone to theft and loss. Mobile data has become important and it always needs to be protected. This can be done with the help of specialized data backup option, such as Asigra’s agent less solution.

Consolidation Requirements:

To make backup consolidation successful, it is required to match with modern IT architecture. Following steps will be required for this purpose:

Consolidation should be extensible for innovative dedicated applications. This will help the IT departments to make changes in future in order to create compatibility.
The IT applications should work in all types of environments (high or low bandwidth connectivity). This will enable the system to continue backup process from any source.
It should be efficient to utilize Internet in order to create backups. This will be good if devices or systems are being used outside the area of local network or administrator.
It should recover data quickly, allowing a variety of recovery point and recovery time objectives, with minimal data movement, block data transfer, across LAN and WAN.

Will the Cloud Consolidate Backup Easily?

It leads therefore that the cloud will be able to consolidate backup without any problem. As a matter of fact, cloud has a natural backup system enabling it to work worldwide with various applications. It has excellent tendency to work with low or high bandwidth connection, different computing gadgets, Smartphones and networks.