Category Archives: Disaster Recovery

Fundamentals for Managed Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Services

July 20, 2015 Stewart Parkin

Many companies are facing problems due to unsatisfactory data recovery plans. Some of them are not paying attention to key points; whereas others do not have relevant strategies. For companies, it is highly important to have appropriate backup and recovery system. For this purpose, they search for reliable services which give surety of business continuity, even if disaster strikes. It is often assumed that plan for disaster recovery (DR) is similar to business continuity (BC). In fact, plan for DR covers IT operations and infrastructure, whereas BC plan covers entire organization.

There are some fundamentals which DR Service providers must consider. The following five fundamentals give guideline to develop a well executed DR and BC:

1/ White Glove Service

It is the responsibility of the service provider to arrange disaster recovery plan, handle accomplishment, make schedule for backups and provide testing facility. White glove service works to improve recovery plan to support business resiliency. As a result, clients get enough time for other business concerning tasks.

2/ Undisturbed Deployment

There are many companies that do not have proper system for recovering data. In traditional Information Technology, it is a bit challenging to plan, implement or administer projects that need money for investment, time and staff. Only a managed solution can give instant and reliable results. Service providers must have straightforward unending management with automated procedures to update the recovery of applications and data system.

3/ Clients’ Control over DR Plan

Only a managed service provider gives some control to clients over DR operations. For this purpose, clients are given relevant tools to test disaster recovery plan, system backup and folders and files recovery processes. Though white glove treatment is provided, clients must have enough knowledge to carry on simple recovery operations. Clients’ know how of recovery operation is critical if you are pressed with RPO and RTO.

4/ Proper Tools for Smooth Integration

For managed disaster recovery, clients must be empowered with relevant tools. White gloves services supply tools that can simplify the managerial aspects and help in seamless consolidation of IT environment of the company while integrating personnel, processes and tools that are already available.

5/ Affordable Solution

When companies get DR management service for business continuity, they need vendors that are within their budget. Vendors are providing solutions for business continuity that most of companies cannot afford. Service providers can make disaster recovery plan affordable, as well as beneficial for clients by offering cloud computing services. One of the advantages of the cloud is that companies are able to scale up or scale down depending on the resources needed while only paying for the resources they have used.

Disaster Recovery as a Service is the dominating segment of DR market. By 2018, MarketsandMarkets projects that the DRaaS segment will reach the $5.7 Billion figure. Therefore, IT providers are given an opportunity to get maximum profit in the coming years. If you are an IT company planning to get a slice of the DRaaS market, please contact us and we will assist you in reaching your goals.

Disaster Recovery of Backed up Virtual and Physical Machines

December 8, 2014 Kris Price

Not being prepared for disaster is not an option. Total environmental duplication is expensive. Attempting to recover only when there has been an incident is tempting the fates. These traditional approaches to disaster recovery create a lot of uncertainty and even stress for the organisation.

The growing sophistication of the cloud holds out a promise for backup and recovery of both physical and virtual machines. Cloud backup vendors are “disaster aware” and make elaborate provisions for recovery of their customer data. The disaster recovery efforts indirectly benefit customers who sign up for cloud based backup and recovery accounts.

At the core of the disaster recovery best practices that is instituted by the cloud vendor is—data replication. Replication helps the vendor rotate the backed up customer data offsite. The replications use high-speed connections for streaming the data and double protecting it. The replication servers are separated geographically from each other, to protect the information against natural disasters that may impact any single data centre. The vendor may create a hot site and a disaster recovery site with failover provisioning to ensure that customers always have access to their data even when the primary server experiences a shut down.

However, it should be noted that virtual machine replication is a complex task and not all cloud vendors have the technology required for the purpose. Traditionally, the data contained in the virtual machine has streamed through the primary server before it is backed up to the replication server. When the virtual machine has to be restored, the virtual machine can be brought online by restoring the virtual disk to the production stage. All this may take a lot of time, and time is the scarce commodity during a disaster.

Improved cloud replication management technologies allow cloud vendors directly stream the data from the virtual machine to both the primary and secondary servers directly. This enables instant recovery of the virtual machine (which exists in the production stage on the secondary server) even when the primary server experiences an outage. Disaster recovery plans can be implemented instantly. Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) can be tightly coordinated. Check with your cloud vendor on this point.

The integration of VM replication with the data protection solutions offered by your vendor is a bonus. It will empower your organisation and keep you prepared for all kinds of disasters.

Microsoft urges users to uninstall BSOD update

August 19, 2014 Sam Richardson

Microsoft’s latest round of Tuesday updates brought about a subtle U-turn from the software giant after some users experienced the blue-screen of death (BSOD) following its installation.

The update MS14-045 was supposed to fix three separate issues, among other things, but it wasn’t long after its release that users were complaining that their PCs, mainly Windows 7 PCs, were getting stuck in the blue screen mode when the PC was next switched on. The severity of the issue was such that many users were unable to get out of the blue-screen mode without booting up the machine using original install media.

The issue sparked a raucous response on the Microsoft support forum website, with nearly hundreds of comments being made to a single thread. The comments also mentioned similar issues with other updates released as part of the same round of updates.

Since the alarm was raised Microsoft have removed the affected patches from its website, but they are still being pushed out by Windows auto-update, and so many users will still be able to download the faulty packages.

Microsoft released this statement; “Microsoft is investigating behavior associated with the installation of this update, and will update this bulletin when more information becomes available”. The company then revised the FAQs for the update itself, stating “Microsoft recommends that customers uninstall this update. As an added precaution, Microsoft has removed the download links to the 2982791 security update.”

However, the patch wasn’t erroneous in all cases, with many reporting successful updates to individual PCs as well as to hundreds of client machines.

Unfortunately for users, bad updates appear to be all too frequent with the latest Windows products. 2013 was a particularly bad year for faulty updates with more BSOD issues reported as part of an April 2013 update, multiple problems with MS Office updates in August and September, and problems with a Windows 8.1 update issued in October.

This incident, and others like it, all emphasise the importance of having a sound backup of important data, regardless of its nature. Through using Asigra, Backup Technology can provide you with a reliable service to backup your critical data. Asigra’s versatility makes it ideal for backing up all major data types, whilst its automated nature means it can be configured and forgotten about until its needed.

Make an enquiry today on our website!

ASOS saved by effective Disaster Recovery

July 10, 2014 Sofie McGrath

One of the UK’s biggest online fashion retailer ASOS suffered a fire at their Yorkshire based distribution centre in Barnsley on the evening of the 20^th June. Unfortunately for ASOS, this was one of their main distribution centres which held around 70% of their total stock and consequently 20% of their stock was damaged.

This raised huge concerns for the fashion forward crowd that they wouldn’t be able to order their prized packaged for a long time.

Trading was seized temporarily, however due to the company’s effective disaster recovery system that was in place, the site was back up and running 48 hours later.

The fire highlights just how important it is to have backup and disaster recovery process in place. Taking into account just how big the fire was, ASOS have to be praised for the quick response which other retailers should really consider.

Backup Technology attend annual Asigra Partner Summit Awards

June 19, 2014 Kris Price

Well its that time of year again, the annual Asigra Partner awards which Backup Technology were proud to attend last night. This is the sixth year in a row Backup Technology have been in attendance and it was a great event all round.

The awards acknowledge all partners who’ve achieved great success in the last year utilising Asigra Cloud backup as well as a chance for the Asigra community to meet.

The 3-day event includes conferences, keynote speakers and the awards themselves. In attendance from Backup Technology were Rob Mackle, Oliver Kelly and Dom Glover as well as Mike Colsante from the Backup Technology U.S. division.

Backup Technology were presented with two awards on the evening; one of 8 partners who have been brand advocates of Asigra though their work on social media as well as industry platforms such as Spiceworks. Also winning the Unsung Hero of Backup Award for EMEA.

Backup Technology would like to congratulate all who won an award last night in what was a superb evening and conference.

CEO of Asigra David Farajun says:

“2014 has been an excellent year for cloud-based data protection as businesses of every caliber are challenged with protecting more data than ever spread across an increasing number of computing endpoints. As our service providers prove on a daily basis, these challenges are easily overcome with the right technology and team in place. The Asigra 2014 Partner Awards Program is a showcase of those partners who have demonstrated exceptional prowess in the market and we applaud their efforts as we ensure business uptime for our mutual customers.”

Awards at the Double for Backup Technology

June 18, 2014 Sam Richardson

We’re delighted to have picked up two major awards at the Asigra Partner Summit in Toronto last night. We came away with the awards for Unsung Cloud Backup Hero and Brand Advocate.

The Asigra Partner Summit recognises the ability to drive innovation and deliver business value to a range of organisations including Fortune 500 Companies through successful public, private and hybrid cloud backup and recovery deployments.

David Farajun, CEO of Asigra, said: “2014 has been an excellent year for cloud-based data protection as businesses of every calibre are challenged with protecting more data than ever spread across an increasing number of computing endpoints. As our service providers prove on a daily basis, these challenges are easily overcome with the right technology and team in place.

The Asigra 2014 Partner Awards Program is a showcase of those partners who have demonstrated exceptional prowess in the market and we applaud their efforts as we ensure business uptime for our mutual customers.”

Rob Mackle, Sales Manager EMEA for BTL, said: “This is fantastic recognition for the work we do with Asigra to provide secure and reliable protection for the huge amounts of data being created by enterprise business.”

Asigra is the world’s leading Cloud Backup software developer and BTL is its largest global partner.

BTL’s Cloud Backup offering based on Asigra software fits the Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud requirements for any size of environment, on and offsite. It provides an Enterprise and WAN optimised solution, allowing large amounts of data to be protected over small bandwidth connections. BTL’s proprietary portal enables centralised web-based monitoring and consolidated daily emails giving customers full transparency of backups on a real time basis.

For more information email sales@backup-technology.co.ukor Tweet us @backuptech

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