Cloud Backup for the Distributed Enterprise Made Easy by BTL

November 30, 2016 Sam Broadbent

What if you could get all your data into a well-organised repository by installing software that automates it all for you? What if the process took just a few hours and not the thousands of man-hours you thought it would take to complete the task? What if all this could happen continuously (even as you slept or worked on other mission-critical projects) and you wouldn’t have to worry about missing backups? Backup Technology Limited (BTL) has answers to all these questions!

BTL’s solution is designed with people like you in mind. This private cloud solution is equipped with local and remote management features, which allow users to seamlessly perform local backups to their private cloud infrastructure, or perform offsite backups to a public cloud. Even better, users can carry out such backups while they’re away from the office, or choose to manage remote backups from once central location, as BTL permits one to manage all distributed backup jobs via a web-based browser interface.

To address the challenge of backing up distributed data, BTL comes equipped with a web-based management tool, called the Central Management Console (CMC). The CMC enables an IT administrator to handle and maintain all backup and restore processes on distributed employee laptops, PCs, and servers from one centralised location. The data can then be backed up to a single repository in the cloud or to their private cloud infrastructure via the Internet. If need be, the employee may also be given access to the management console, and if so desired, they can manage their own backups and restores.

The CMC is innovative as it allows users to share data or collaborate on backup processes and restores without moving an inch from wherever they are located. They can easily schedule automatic backups and/or continuous backups of information and then relax with confidence that the backups are successfully taking place even if they are engaged elsewhere.

BTL gives your enterprise complete control over its data. The administrator, operating from the CMC, can set up user accounts for all members of the enterprise whether they use a PC, laptop, or are working from a remote location. Authorised and authenticated users can then back up their data over the Internet and store this data on the enterprises private cloud infrastructure or to an online storage repository. If need be, this stored data can also be restored to any machine via the software’s web-based browser and a WAN connection.

Even more appealing, BTL can handle huge data loads and does not need constant monitoring, thus leaving your local computing resources free to be redeployed for other business activities. Data access can be orchestrated independent of available bandwidth from anywhere in the world, and databases can be reconstructed flexibly and quickly on local machines (existing or new) using the data restore wizard provided with the software.

BTL’s cloud backup and disaster recovery solution has recently released with a number of new feature add-ons. For further information on the latest BTL software version, please visit http://www.backup-technology.com/

Controlling your Cloud Data in the Face of Outages

November 29, 2016 Kris Price

It’s hard to imagine that one quick lightning strike could disrupt the business of several companies across Europe, but this is exactly what happened in the summer of 2011 in Dublin.

After a lightning bolt struck a utility pole, causing an explosion and fire, power supply was cut to several businesses and data centres in the surrounding area. According to Amazon and Microsoft — the two companies whose data centres were worst affected — the bolt disrupted power supply to their massive data centres. While Microsoft was able to kick start its services after a few hours, Amazon’s services weren’t resumed until a good 48 hours later. Amazon’s customers spent several frustrating hours waiting for Amazon to report on the status, as the company struggled to set things right and quickly restore their services.

You might say, this is an old news that happened more than five years ago, but this very instance shows how unplanned disasters can strike at any time. With this in mind, Backup Technology Limited (BTL) believes there are several lessons to be learnt from this and many other data centre outages.

Complete dependency on the service provider’s ability to maintain uninterrupted service is foolhardy, to say the least. Customers signing up for cloud services must ensure that they maintain control over their data by making local backups of their data in addition to riding the cloud for all the benefits that accrue from it. BTL urges its customers to take advantage of its Asigra powered software, a hybrid cloud backup solution that ensures full-proof data availability.

BTL is equipped with local and remote management features, which allow users to seamlessly perform local backups to their private cloud infrastructure or offsite backups to a public cloud. Even more beneficial, they can do so even while they’re away from the office. A web-based management console allows one to control and manage all backups and restores via an Internet connection.

To ensure full business continuity, BTL stresses the importance of performing both local and offsite, cloud backup. If backing up data to the cloud, BTL recommends that customers add disaster recovery and business continuity to their list of services.

Unlike larger cloud customers such as Amazon’s public cloud users, BTL users who backup data locally to their private cloud infrastructure, in addition to a cloud service powered by BTL, will not have to wait endlessly for reports about the restoration of services in the event of an offsite data centre disaster. They can connect their network to the local copy of the data and resume their business activities almost instantaneously.

When handling business data backup plans, smart IT admins look at all their options and will not hesitate to implement local backup AND offsite cloud backup with an MSP to ensure security and business continuity at all times. BTL recognises the ground realities surrounding data management by large third parties. This is why BTL focuses its attention on customer needs and urge its customers to build in an extra resilience and maintain data redundancy.

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.

What is Continuous Cloud Backup and What are its Many Advantages – Part II

November 3, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

In Part I, we defined continuous cloud backup, and discussed its effects on bandwidth. In Part II, we will further discuss the benefits of continuous cloud backups.

Frequently Modified Files

Regardless of the myriad advantages brought about by continuous data protection, most enterprises do not implement this function for all their files, with a hybrid arrangement of both continuous and scheduled backups usually resulting in the most efficient overall backup scenario. Oftentimes companies will choose to implement continuous backup only on files that are frequently modified and thus more potentially subject to being saved incorrectly or even corrupted during the saving process.

File Size

It should be mentioned that, as far as the taxing of system resources and disk write operation are concerned, continuous data backup works better for smaller files than it does larger ones, so usually the administrator of the cloud backup account will designate a cut-off point for file sizes to be backed up continuously, avoiding potential bottlenecks that could take place if multiple employees happen to all begin modifying relatively large files at the same time.

Data Corruption

In addition to helping to protect companies from data loss, continuous online data backup can also protect you from file corruption as well. In the event of data corruption, due to either disk write errors or even computer viruses, continuous data protection can allow you to easily retrieve previously saved, clean versions that may not still be saved on the company’s computers or databases. Of course, some data loss might still occur for any file information that was generated after the corruption took place. However, having said that, the implementation of a “journaling file system” (a method of saving data that can be configured in some operating systems, wherein changed data is stored on a “journal file” before being committed to the main file system) can bring about a scenario in which companies can even restore file information that was created after a file became corrupted!

Powered by Asigra

Needless to say, Backup Technology Limited (BTL) knows a little bit about continuous cloud backup. In fact, so much so that its Continuous Backup technology, powered by Asigra, is one of the key components of its suite of cloud backup services for small to mid-sized to enterprise businesses, is a very important feature that only select few cloud backup service providers can offer! Using this technology, BTL constantly monitors your system for files or folders that have been modified and then continuously copies just the part of the data that has been changed, compresses that data and then encrypts it so that it can be sent quickly and safely back to its servers in order to be instantly ready for retrieval if ever the need arises!

Network Traffic

BTL’s state of the art client software automatically senses how many employees are accessing the system at a given time and throttles bandwidth appropriately when usage levels are at their highest, so your company’s system performance will never be compromised in any way due to the continuous backup process.

For more information, visit www.Backup-Technology.com

What is Continuous Cloud Backup and What are its Many Advantages – Part I

November 3, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

As any user of cloud backup knows, one of the biggest advantages to backing up in the cloud is the fact that backups can be automatically scheduled, making for one less task that has to be monitored by a company’s IT department, while also avoiding any chance for human error to get in the way of the scheduled backup process. However, recent advances in cloud backup technology have brought about yet another level of consistent, dependable data backup practises, continuous cloud backup.

What is Continuous Cloud Backup?

With continuous cloud backup (also known as continuous data protection or real-time backup), your small to medium-sized or enterprise business can enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that anytime certain files are modified in any way that this change in information will be automatically sent off to the cloud backup provider’s servers, offering you true continuous protection from data loss. Indeed, even the tiniest change in a file will be instantly copied to the cloud backup servers at the time that the user makes it, and, through the use of a process called “file versioning”, previous versions of files will be available for retrieval from the cloud backup cache, even if these versions no longer exist on the company’s system! Critical to this process is the automatic generation of a time stamp to go along with each new version of a file that is being automatically saved, rendering the finding of the correct previous version of a file easily and quickly achieved.

Continues Backups and Bandwidth

Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the word “continuous” makes it sound as if continuous backup is indeed “more backing up” than scheduled backups, continuous backups actually take up much less bandwidth and system resources, with only the parts of files that have been changed being backed up, and not the whole file. These changes are often quite small, sometimes only amounting to a few bytes of data, so system resources are thus preserved at both ends. For this reason, continuous data protection is the ideal backup solution for any company that finds it difficult to find consistent times when their networks are dormant enough to perform all their backups at once, without detracting from system performance. In the same way, companies that are generating large quantities of highly important data 24 x 7 also benefit greatly from this cutting edge data protection technology.

In Part II, we will further discuss the many advantages of continuous cloud backups.