Category Archives: Online Backup

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 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.

BTL Cloud Backup Product Features – Part II

November 1, 2016 Damien Garvey

In Part I, we discussed BTL’s sought after features like, agentless architecture, encryption, DS-Client, DS-System, and how to speed up LAN restorations. Here in this Part II series, we will further discuss BTL cloud backup’s great features.

IT Administrators are also armed with Service Level Agreement management and Budget Allocation and Capacity Management interfaces. Also included are features such as Email Message Level restoration; Bare Metal Restoration; Client System monitoring and SNMP integration.

BTL cloud backup solution is available to all Channel Partners, enabling Managed Service Providers (MSP) to deliver IT services to their clientele without the need to buy, install or manage any infrastructure.

BTL cloud backup users will be able to store and access their data in a secure, hosted environment, eliminating their need to purchase and host their own hardware and software infrastructure, utilising BTL’s vast infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing the end user to manage their budget while taking advantage of operating expenses, rather than the typically taxed capital expense budget.

BTL is not just a cloud backup and recovery company. It is more than that. It provides beyond its flagship data backup and recovery product, allowing users to sign up for a disaster recovery and business continuity services. BTL’s DR and BC will allow companies to be ready to continue their daily routine in case of a natural or man-made disaster.

No one is immune to data loss. Data could be lost at any time. At some point or another, organisations could suffer data loss. Although no one really wants to ever use a disaster recovery solution, BTL is always ready and available to minimise the impact of any downtime, by deploying its secure and cost-effective DRaaS solution.

BTL offers a real opportunity to its Channel Partners, especially those with limited resources of their own. Partners can ensure their clients have 24×7 access to their data, along with round-the-clock customer support, without having to make major investments in their own infrastructure or staffing. At the same time, they will be building their recurring revenue base, a true win-win opportunity.

Some additional features of BTL, powered by Asigra, include:

User friendly;
State of art Data Centres;
Granular levels of control;
Potential for customisation;
Simple to install and maintain;
LAN Speed disaster recovery;
Cost effective simple licensing;
24 x 7 x 365 days technical support;
Secure, reliable, scalable and infinitely integrated;
Initial-no-bother disk or wire based legacy system seeding;
Ability to geo-locate and remotely wipe lost or stolen devices;
Non-invasive and almost invisible backup and recovery systems;
Innovative, adaptive with sophisticated testing in real world scenarios;
On-premise Exchange data protection with Exchange Web Services (EWS) Backup Set;
Faster backup by retrieving only changed blocks in VMs from one backup session to another;
Data protection enhancements for Microsoft Hyper-V, including incremental backup for virtual machines in both standalone and cluster Hyper-V server configurations;
Supports Oracle Linux as an installation platform for DS-System, Backup Lifecycle Management (BLM) Archiver, and Remote Virtual Disaster Recovery (RVDR);
New support matrix additions and updates, including: VMware 6.0, Windows 10, backup and data restore on Oracle 12c, backup for Oracle Database on Solaris 11, and bare metal restore for the Windows 2012 R2 Server core.

To learn more about BTL, please visit www.backup-technology.com

BTL Cloud Backup Product Features – Part I

November 1, 2016 Damien Garvey

Cloud backup software has come a long way. Today, the average software has powerful and sophisticated features. One of the best breeds of software in the cloud backup space is Backup Technology Limited (BTL) software. BTL’s software is powered by Asigra, a leading cloud backup enabling company since 1986. The most striking feature of BTL is its agentless architecture. Professional data administrators will always appreciate the advantages of BTL’s software. Security is never compromised, as it comes with encryption key that can save and recover data to and from the vault systems. The complexity and size of problems are thereby minimised; upgrades are centralised from the vault system, and data backup and recovery becomes a streamlined process. Furthermore, licensing is easy to set up, as a single license acquisition takes care of all the future needs of the organisation.

BTL manages file databases intelligently. Every single file of the database is identified and managed by proprietary algorithm, and the end-user can remain completely unaware of the intricacies that enables the backup of different kinds of data files, from multiple operating system environments, using a single interface.

How does all this happen? BTL’s cloud backup technology consists of two components: the DS-Client, and the DS-System. The DS-Client is installed on a dedicated Windows, Macintosh or Linux server and target backup machines are identified. The DS-Client also allows versioning, which means that backups can be available for a quick restore.

Using standard APIs on the target machines, the system automatically logs into the backup system and captures the data securely. The DS-Client, then processes, compresses, encrypts and transmits the data from the target machines using delta blocking and common file elimination technologies, commonly knows as de-duplication. The system is very intelligent in that it runs un-interrupted in the background, segregating corrupted files; correcting them or marking them for re-try at a later date.

The DS-System is at the core of Asigra Cloud Backup technology. It is installed in an enterprise or service provider data center, or in an IaaS cloud. The DS-System efficiently aggregates data from all remote DS-Clients and maintains, manages and validates the online backup repository.
BTL allows the use of Local Restore tool in order to speed up LAN restorations. Depending on your needs, you can use such tools, as:
• Long Term Storage Policy Making Tool — is a discovery tool to automatically ascertain characteristics of primary data, Client and System Monitoring, Email Message Level Restore, Bare Metal Restore capability, and SNMP Integration.
• File Summary Tool — provides both a synopsis and detailed scanned file information. The report is easily modified with several filters allowing a group of files to be specifically analysed.
• LAN Discovery Tool — identifies the characteristics of data, such as when the last time it was accessed, its age, and file size. This will help the user to make business decisions about how they want their data stored and recovered.
In Part II of this series, we will further discuss BTL’s main features in details.