Non-Compliance is Very Expensive

November 16, 2015 Damien Garvey

For enterprises and businesses, compliance is a term that shows the company is following laws and regulations concerning business, personnel and clients. For businesses, compliance is not optional. In fact, it is obligatory for organizations and divergence to this act results in form of penalties.

Accounting scandals of a number of corporations made it necessary to establish an act therefore the Act Sarbanes Oxley was passed against such companies. As a result, non compliant enterprises have to face penalties such as loss of D & O insurance, imprisonment, heavy fines and lose exchange listing. It is given that investors do not have an interest to invest in non-compliant organizations. In case, CFOs or CEOs give fake certifications, they will face charges of one million dollars fine for their un-willful wrong doing. On the other hand, charges for willful doings are up to five million dollars. In addition to penalties, CEOs and CFOs can be imprisoned for up to ten to twenty years based on the evidence presented.

HIPAA is an act concerning health insurance portability & accountability. HIPAA is applied to service providers dealing with health care departments. The act also equally applies to health care associates. If service providers are unable to meet the demands of HIPAA Act, they will be fined severe penalties. Health care providers are castigated when they ignore standard of HIPAA. In such cases, the Secretary has the right to charge $100-$50,000 for each violation, up to a maximum of $1.5 million for identical provisions during a calendar year.

Another important part of HIPAA is its relation to personal health information (PHI). When sensitive information such as PHI of patients is disclosed, health care providers are penalized for their carelessness. In case this infringement is willful, up to $50,000 penalty, with a year imprisonment or both is imposed on the wrong doer. Conversely, if the violation is done with false pretences, an amount of $100,000 is imposed, with five years imprisonment or both. However, if such violation is for to get commercial benefits, a fine up to $250,000, with 10 years of imprisonment or both is imposed.

Punishments related to PCI-DSS and data protection act impose charges of up to $500,000 for data breaches. Non-compliant companies not only get charged fines, but also have to face long lasting penalties, such as credit card activity shut down, loss of business, staff cost during recovery process, detailed and increased audit requirements, charges of printing clients’ notification, printing costs, emailing costs, as well as loss of clients’ trust.

Controllers of non-compliant data are also punished by Data Protection Act. They are required to get registration and follow data protection act to become qualified for processing sensitive information of customers. If data controllers do not get registration, they can face litigation and penalties. On the other hand, data controllers and agents who misuse personal client information in other ways that are not mentioned in the act, they could be charged under the civil or criminal act sanctions.

In short, non compliance can be terrible and costly for companies.

The Roles of Third Party Companies in Data Protection

November 13, 2015 Stewart Parkin

Due to data breaches, protection of personal and health information has become a vexing issue. Numerous organisations, including health care industries have lost sensitive data. The data typically includes details of vendors, patients, staff, health id numbers, contractors, etc. When such data loss happens at a hospital, the hospital in question usually apologizes for the inconvenience that staff and patient have faced due to the data breach. In some cases, they try to shift the responsibility to some other entity, claiming that the data theft was a “result of negligence by an outside contractor” that was initially hired as an “expert” in handing sensitive data.

But, does shifting blame to a third party right? Third party companies are selected due to their surety to store and handle sensitive data properly to begin with. They make their living handling such data and it is not in their best interest to lose any data.

To gain the trust of affected individuals, some vendors who lost data due to breach, take the responsibility of providing timely information and offer credit monitoring services for the affected accounts. Providing these services shows that the company has taken the responsibility and acted on it to calm down individuals, who are worried about their sensitive data.

While the vendor has acted to address its responsibilities to communicate affected accounts according to legal mandates and federal regulations, the fact is that sensitive data, including identities have been stolen. It is annoying that theft of information will impact on affected parties for a longer period of time. There is the possibility that the affected parties can sue the organization for negligence for a millions of dollars. Such type of incidents raise questions about data security and precautions against data breaches.
• Is it good to share sensitive information with third parties for data storage?
• How do third parties give assurance to organizations that data will be protected and will never be accessed inappropriately or misused?
• What is the liability of a third party for the data in their custody and what type of charges can be applied when information is misused?
Though the answers of these queries are not easy, the popularity of cloud storage services, as third party service providers, has brought these questions to the forefront.

Enterprises trusting their data to third parties must make an effort to ensure that the data is safe and secure. Enterprises should spend their time and energy to weigh up the reliability of the third party and their data protection claims. Here are some questions that can help in searching suitable third part cloud storage service:
• What is the method of data storage in repository?
• Is the encryption methodology certified by a reliable authority?
• How do people access sensitive data and who has access to the data?
• What are the liabilities and rights of an organization in case of data breaches?
• Does the vendor share sensitive data with anyone? If so, with whom and why?
• Does the secure cryptographic mode of data security are really impregnable or not?
• Does assurance of sensitive information protection check in veracity by service vendors?
• Does the vendor take the responsibility of data protection and guarantee of data breaches due to negligence?
When your company gets the answers of these questions, it becomes easy to evaluate your service provider and their security protocol. Answers to these questions will help in understanding the level of data security and selecting the suitable service to protect sensitive information.

Technical Support Levels for Small, Medium, and Enterprise Businesses

November 10, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

Companies signing up for cloud backup and data storage services are not just looking for backup solutions. They want more than that; they want a partner that can give them support at all times. Companies anticipate to get support from the subject experts to keep their valuable information safe. They expect the experts to know how to backup data, what is important for their company, where to keep the data, and when to make backups. These companies prefer to reduce the number of technical workers in their offices, and instead rely on the technical skills of the service providers to solve any software issues and backup problems. Problems can occur at any time, therefore, such enterprises need round the clock support. Technical 24 x 7 support is what they expect from service providers.

Then, the question arises whether cloud backup firms can provide 24 x 7 technical support or not? Understandably, service providers cannot give Yes or No answer to this question. However, they have various types of services, including: Web-based Support, which is given by all service providers. This service includes FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions and their relevant answers. In addition, all service providers offer Contact Form to write your queries and get answers from the support team within a day or two. Forms are delivered to a given email address of technical staff and customers need to wait for their turn to receive answers.

A small number of service providers have established their Discussion Forum for clients. Common issues are discussed here by users and support team takes relevant actions to solve their issues. Though such forums can be used any time, users cannot expect to get an immediate response from staff.

Many online backup service providers use software to send Alerts when recovery or backup process stops working. In case of data breaches or access of Unauthorised User to get sensitive information, automated alerts are generated to inform the service provider or the administrator or both. Software is programmed to give response whenever there is a threat to customer information. Such type of software informs service providers when clients cannot solve out issues or unable to show reaction against security alert. To overcome such situations, service providers generate periodic alerts or call the client directly with a request to solve the issue and provide proper guidance.

There are some sophisticated backup services that provide additional support services at a reasonable rate. Clients are given favour to keep in touch with technical staff through phone calls to get solution of hardware or software issues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On the other hand, onsite assistance is given at premium basis, where by a technical support staff may be stationed at the clients’ location all day through out the term of the contract to solve out issues as they arise.

Customers need to decide what kind of technical support level they need to sign up for while they are evaluating a potential solution. Before signing up with an online backup and recovery service, companies should check the nature of the services offered and their own requirements. It is required to go through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in detail.

When customers have understood the different service levels available, they can select the right service provider. Backup Technology provides 24 x 7 technical support and built-in automated alert system, which notifies concerned parties in case of failed backups or recoveries.

Reduce Operational Costs by Modernising your Data Centre

November 9, 2015 Kris Price

An increase in energy cost, outdated data centre infrastructure, and lack of responsiveness to current business requirements are some of the reasons that contribute to the decision to modernise a data centre. Administrators of data centre evaluate long-established approaches and come to a decision on how to restructure, update and organise data centres to meet business requirements. Moreover, data centre modernisation help in providing high-tech services to clients for business continuity, data recovery, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Data centre administrators need to pay attention on various ways of overcoming operating costs to gain competitive position in the market.

Plans and strategies are the backbone of data centre modernisation. Process starts with an appraisal of existing IT realities and updated vision of the future. Efforts are made in the direction of standardising, consolidating, automating, virtualising infrastructure, migrating, supporting tools and architectural frameworks. Deep associations among business units, application development, and IT infrastructure operations will help in finding in-house problems and solutions to pressing issues.

Data centre need to plan a way out by finding where investments are achievable in the network infrastructure, storage and server area. In addition, modified service levels are conveyed to accomplish performance metrics that are associated with transformational activities and intermittent reassessment to form business strategy.

It is the job of data centre admin to choose and put into practise most up-to-date technologies. Returns on Investments (ROI) are determined by the optimisation level of server. Modernised data centres are need to do their best to improve protocols for policy management, operational reliability and competitive position in market. Data centre are interested to increase their savings by working on reducing system downtime, and human errors. They also need to work on improving success rates for patch rollouts and applications.

For contemporary data centres, agility is the hallmark, as these are designed for long-term growth. Provision of latest servers and immediate response to change requests are features of the modern data centre. They are capable to accomplish resources immediately through designing flexible and effective computing model.

In data centres, power is considered one of the significant factors in increasing operational costs. Thermal assessment determines the temperature in various areas to find out hot and over cooled areas. In order to keep the temperature in balancing positions, optimal equipment and raised floor approach is used.

Data centres need to operate and develop by checking energy efficiency. Reliable data centres give guarantee that they are following green computing while reducing carbon footprints. It is possible for data centres to decrease energy use, Carbon Dioxide emission by combining storage units, processors, and storage sites, data centres can save maximum energy and operational cost. To reduce cooling cost, arctic locations are much favourable where the environment is much cooler and will be easier on the cooling fans and help with maintaining an optimal temperature.

How Can you Overcome Storage Management Challenges?

November 6, 2015 Rob Mackle

Enterprises have noticed an increase in data volumes of up to 60% on a yearly basis. Hardware limitations can also make it more difficult to deal with such volume of data effectively. Proper planning, effective technology and talented staff are required to tackle the issue. The situation becomes even worst due to regulatory compliance and virtualization technology laws.

Effective storage administrators introduce new policies, put into practise helpful tools for resource management, and use financial resources for capacity planning. Before initiating all these jobs, they need to recognise the types of data, relevant applications, storage requirements, and then they need to review all of their policies in order to have an effective storage system in place.

Data administrators work to recognise factors responsible for data growth. Consequently, they will understand all the factors and will be able to answers questions of when, what, why, where and how of data storage. Storage environments are not similar; they differ in their size, requirements and architecture. It is necessary to understand queries, such as “What is driving data growth?”, “What type of tools do you need?”, “What are storage policies and when these were evaluated?”

Visibility and ease of access are the two major driving forces that work behind data storage. When data is visible properly, it helps storage administrators to identify certain problems associated with data storage. Consequently, they select right technologies that are suitable. Moreover, they update technology to check data paths and avoid blockage at certain positions where data growth is maximised.

Storage administrators use capacity planning in order to determine data storage requirements for a limited period of time. They can determine on various kinds of storage, time limit for storage (retention period), data growth projections, and which data must be stored in offline and/or online data repositories. It depends on storage managers to select technology for allocating the right amount of data to given applications. Usually, thin provisioning approach is selected by most storage administrators, as it helps in assigning the exact amount of capacity at the right time.

Capacity planning works in collaboration with reclaiming assets. Administrators need to reclaim, from time to time, underused or unused storage space. Data experts estimate that up to 15 percent more physical storage space can be freed up if unclaimed storage is used properly.

Data disasters are always in mind of storage administrators, therefore, they introduce strategies to strike against unexpected situations. It is the reason why storage management makes it easy to manage disasters. Skilled administrators take automatic snapshots of critical information of business data and design standards for reliable recovery before disasters strike. It is their job to continually monitor backups and simulate recovery scenarios through backed up data. It gives surety that the storage administrators are competent enough to handle disaster conditions.

Due to the presence of cloud data storage, it becomes possible to think about new data storage and delivery techniques. Enterprises that are using cloud computing services have reduced their operational and capital costs. In addition to low cost, they have enhanced flexibility to store and access data. Cloud storage plays a very important role in overcoming storage management challenges. It enables security, control, business resiliency, visibility, and automation of cloud backup and recovery.

Assess Cloud Storage Services Before Actually Using Them

November 4, 2015 Callum Huddlestone

While cloud backups and storage and recovery solutions are great for your organisation, it is important for you to know that it is not without limitations. For that reason, SMBs that are currently planning to move to the cloud must take some time and check the advantages and disadvantages associated with cloud backup services before migrating to the cloud. So, the extent at which the pros associated with cloud storage outweigh the cons, will determine your decision whether to jump in the waggon and ride the cloud or not.

Cloud backup and storage has been made an interactive backup and storage option suitable for both small, medium and enterprise organisations through bandwidth and capacity optimisation technologies, and multi-tenant architectures on the Internet. There is integration of range of business continuity solutions with the concept of server abstraction; and provision of high availability of critical workloads are the product of the solutions generated in the cloud. This will also facilitate the speeding up of time to market by using highly developed file imaging and site recovery options, coupled with all-embracing interoperability and best practises.

Cloud backup and storage service providers use high-tech tools in order to meet with the needs and demands of their customers. The migrations, upgrades and outdated technology are abstracted to the level of the service provider, giving users the freedom to enjoy data storage as a measurable utility with easy payment option. There are lots of security services that are made available at the price of subscription to the customers in the cloud and some of them include: file compression, disk based backup, encryption, duplication of data, server and storage virtualisation, application of particular security, and tiered storage using security authorisation. Some of the service providers improve their service by incorporating 24/7 customer support, which helps to intimate the customer against any form of security violations.

As cloud services are based on the Internet, the service consumer may not really be in control of the service level agreement (SLA) or even performance guarantees. Limitation of bandwidth is capable of making storage and data recovery a tedious and difficult task. There may be problems with exit strategy if the organisation decides to pull out from the agreement. Termination fees, cancellation charges, data extraction costs are the possible issues you may face. That is why you need to examine the SLAs before signing on the dotted lines.

Therefore, SMBs should embark on a though assessment of cloud services before hitching their waggon to the cloud. You can get competitive edge in your niche and also redefine your company just with effective planning and implementation in the cloud. It is recommended that you embrace the cloud, but ensure that you are entering this market being vigilant and alert. Therefore, you should not migrate to the cloud without getting a real understanding of what you are engaging your company into, as well as the potential disadvantages and advantages associated with cloud services.

At Backup Technology, we are always ready to assist you in your efforts to migrate to the cloud by taking the time and advising you at all levels. We will help you get over bandwidth issues by seeding your initial data to our servers with no hidden fees, with clearly spelt out SLAs.