January 2016 - Latest News from Backup Technology

As reported by the Register this week, Office 365 has suffered another outage, resulting many customers unable to log in to their email.

Only a month previous, on December 18th 2015, an outage hit he UK and Europe mainly effecting customers using the Azure platform although there was some impact on its Office 365 service as well.

The current outage seems more serious however as it has been on going for around 7 days. The issue specifically relates to user accessing their emails via Exchange Online or any application that connects via IMAP.

Microsoft admitted that the impact will have hit a “large number of users”. What caused the issue? A Microsoft update that stopped the IMAP protocol that stopped data being loaded from Exchange Online databases. Not great!

Microsoft released the following statement, to address users concerns:

“As part of our efforts to improve service performance, an update was deployed to a subset of code which is responsible for obtaining the subscribed folder list. However, the update caused a code issue that prevented the list from being automatically loaded”.

Despite promises by Microsoft to fix the issue by the 23rd of January, as of the 25th it was still not resolved.

Microsoft, meanwhile, told users: “The deployment process is taking longer than initially expected due to a configuration issue.

“Engineers reconfigured the problematic portion of capacity and are continuing to monitor the deployment to ensure it propagates throughout the infrastructure in a timely manner. Customers will begin to experience service restoration as the deployment progresses.”

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.