July 01, 2009

www.BackupReview.info releases ranking of the top 75 online backup companies, categorized into three sectors: Consumer, SMB and Enterprise; based on predefined standardized criteria, to help users select the appropriate online backup company.

Vancouver, BC, Canada - July 1, 2009 - BackupReview.info publishes the July 2009 list of top ranking online backup companies, categorized into three sectors: Consumer, SMB and Enterprise. The list comprises of 25 companies under each category, for a total of 75 online backup solutions, based on standardized criteria defined on its site. This standardization of selection criteria goes a long way towards enabling users select the right online backup service for their specific needs.

Ezra Brook, editor at BackupReveiw.info says, “With hundreds of companies offering seemingly the same service, choosing the best online backup provider could be challenging. Users need a standard set of criteria on which to evaluate the different services and understand which one would suit them the best. What most users, therefore, look for are reviews that cover all these selection criteria”. Mr. Brook further points out, “factors that generally play a role in selecting online backup service include service requirements such as: cost per GB, cost per PC or per account, security, speed, reliability, uptime, quality, customer service, accessibility and financial standing of the company.”

Since it started ranking the top 25 online backup companies in January 2005, BackupReview.info has been choosing its top picks from all three sectors in one basket. Based on the feedback from the industry players and its readers, the site has further categorized the top ranking online backup companies by sector. Under each category identified — Consumer, SMB and Enterprise - the top 25 companies are presented in order of their rankings. Where available, links to elaborate reviews of the individual companies are provided.

The top 5 online backup companies, from each sector include:

• Consumer: Carbonite, MemoPal, IDrive, Mozy and Keepit
• SMB: DataDepositBox, IBackup, NovaStor, Remote-Backup, and Vembu
• Enterprise: Intronis, CoreVault, AmeriVault, DataBarracks and StorageGuardian

The complete list of the top 75 online backup companies for July 2009 is found here.

Mr. Brook further comments, “Our reviews, daily up to date news, articles and monthly rankings of the top online backup services, are supplemented with the voices from online backup and data storage companies. The CEO Interview spotlight section features interviews with CEOs/VPs and other senior executives of online backup and data storage companies. The ranking of the top 75 online backup companies is the endpoint of dedicated research and hours of hard work on the part of our research team. Interviews with key personnel in the online backup and data storage industry, reviews, articles on backup basics and links to third party websites on the site, bring a 360 degree view of the online backup and data storage industry”.

About the company:
BackupReview.info has been running since 2004 and is dedicated to serving the online backup and data storage industry. By providing all relevant information, BackupReview helps potential users make the right choice for online backup solution.

The site’s daily posts are published in a number of sites, including Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Faves, BlogMarks, Tumbr, its complimentary blog and many other sites. 

Feature highlights of the site include: Daily up to date online backup and storage news, directory of online backup companies, articles on backup basics, reviews of online backup services by its editors, from other review sites, and aggregated online backup companies’ corporate blogs.

Real time Twitter tweets are also featured in the site for keywords: “Online Backup“, “Online Data Backup“, “Online Backup Review” and “Remote Backups” using Twitter Grid. RSS feeds are also available in the site.

For more information, please visit: http://www.backupreview.info/.

Contact:
Mamush Heayie, Managing Editor
editor@BackupReview.info
http://www.BackupReview.info

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

June 08, 2009

Vaserv suspects zero-day virtualization vuln

A large internet service provider said data for as many as 100,000 websites was destroyed by attackers who targeted a zero-day vulnerability in a widely-used virtualization application.

Technicians at UK-based Vaserv.com were still scrambling to recover data on Monday evening UK time, more than 24 hours after unknown hackers were able to gain root access to the company’s system, Rus Foster, the company’s director told The Register. He said the attackers were able to penetrate his servers by exploiting a critical vulnerability in HyperVM, a virtualization application made by a company called LXLabs.

Foster said he’s been unable to reach anyone at LXLabs to discuss the suspected …

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Update Articles:

http://www.theregister.co.uk:
LxLabs boss found hanged after vuln wipes websites

http://www.theregister.co.uk:
Webhost denies poor passwords led to catastrophic hack

http://www.mxlogic.com:
Hack deletes 100,000 websites, software developer kills self

By Chris Winter, TechNewsWorld 
June 09, 2009 

Layoffs and high-turnover periods can be chaotic for IT departments due to their propensity for creating orphaned data. Enterprises can safeguard against lost information by instituting centralized control policies and deploying technologies designed to immediately and easily recover wayward data.

Employees are the lifeblood of any business, and the data they produce is critical to productivity. Unfortunately, during recent uncertain economic times, businesses of all sizes across America have laid off hundreds of thousands of employees. Yet when any employees leave during turnover, important data can be lost or forgotten. Such “orphaned data” can consist of any business information, application or intellectual property that has become unrecoverable because it was left on no-longer-accessible edge devices like laptops that were never backed up, or was simply never transferred to a backup-accessible server.

In times of workforce turnover, organizations need to retain mission-critical data to keep remaining business teams productive. Continued productivity depends on seamlessly retaining every team member’s intellectual property, such as prospect lists, business plans, research or financials, as well as withholding it from unauthorized disclosure. In order to retain this crucial intellectual property, organizations needs to be able to enforce policy to capture and retain any orphaned data.

To safeguard against orphaned data, businesses should take steps to (1) prevent data from being unintentionally orphaned on distributed edge devices; (2) established centralized control over retaining all potentially orphaned data; and (3) deploy technology that is able to reliably, flexibly, and easily recover that data under any circumstances.

Preventing Orphaned Data

The first step in prevention is identifying potential repositories for orphaned data. In order to course-correct business continuity planning and …

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June 12, 2009

By Mark Hatch, VP of Software Development at Intronis

Here at Intronis, we use a framework for our development work that grew from the Agile programming methodology and Object Oriented movement called Scrum. It is also directly related to the principles laid down in the “Toyota Way” and lean manufacturing process. You might ask yourself why and how a manufacturing process could be related to software development, and why a company that specializes in online backup and recovery would embrace it to run the entire company, but we’ll answer that for you!

One of the realities of software development is that requirements change. Sometimes they change faster than the project can be completed, and sometimes they change because what the customers thought they wanted was different from what they actually wanted. How many times have you walked into an ice cream shop thinking “chocolate chocolate chip” and looked at the case and decided on the strawberry cheesecake? How many times have you used a piece of software and said to yourself “wow, this is nice, but wouldn’t it be great if it did this too?” Sometimes what you see just makes what you really want a little clearer.
 
Sometimes the market changes too. Competitors enter all the time and old competitors are constantly changing and upgrading what they offer just as much as you do. Why is it that Toyota gets it so right and upsets the order in the US? How can Toyota be so profitable while a mammoth company like GM is declaring bankruptcy? A company needs to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to changing customer needs and competitive pressure from others in terms of product offerings and cost if they want to survive.  GM failed to do this but here at Intronis, we believe we have found a solution to this problem: Scrum.
 
The whole idea behind Scrum is iteration and small steps that deliver real business value. So instead of focusing on the “Big Picture” while trying to implement the entire project with all items defined beforehand, Scrum starts with the truly American idea of “how can I do the least amount of work and deliver the most value”. Slyly, this doesn’t actually mean working less, it just means working RIGHT. We believe that, while thinking of the “Big Picture” is important, it isn’t as important as developing software that your customers really want and find it ridiculously easy to use. It follows that our customers will know what they want as they see it, and developing software is as much of a partnership with them as it is an engineering feat. We believe that trying to do it all up front in the traditional waterfall method doesn’t work when your partners and customers are the focus, and the market is constantly changing. In order to get it right, you have to be agile in the true sense of the word, and Scrum provides the way to be truly agile.

======================== 

Ed. - We sincerely thank Mark for his contribution.

Mark Hatch is a VP of Software Development at Intronis and his profile is found here.

By Ashish Nadkarni

E-Commerce Times 
June 03, 2009 

There’s only one way to keep data storage costs under control, and that’s to get rid of unnecessary data. That may go against the grain of IT managers who rightly consider backup and preservation as critical to an organization’s health, but when it comes to data storage, there are ways to separate what’s useful from what’s disposable.

It should come as no surprise to any IT manager that your organization’s appetite for data keeps growing every minute. No sooner than a new set of storage tools is deployed, it becomes clear there’s a need for more, and you start planning the next wave of hardware purchases. More hardware means more floor space, power and cooling — it’s a vicious circle.

The total amount of disk storage shipped last year grew 40.5 percent from 2007, according to a recent study by IDC. If you imagine that this appetite for consumption is going to be questioned at some point in the interest of trying to curtail the IT carbon footprint, then you are not alone. Of course, there is no smoking gun, but there are choices you can make to get rid of unwanted data and free up space. That precious space can then be utilized for other purposes, thereby limiting the amount of new storage capacity to be purchased.

Before getting into “slice and dice” mode, it’s important to define what, exactly, is the goal? The goal is to ensure that spinning disk, i.e., online disk storage, is used for storing data that is really valuable to the organization. Any data that is not — and it could be in any shape or form — needs to be appropriately disposed of. Disposal could mean simply deleting it, or it could mean archiving it in another medium, either a magnetic medium such as tape, or an optical medium such as DVD or CD ROM.

Low-Hanging Fruit

What kind of data can be disposed of? Most often, the kind of data that is “time classified” or unstructured …

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By Debra Alban, CNN

(CNN) – With Wi-Fi access at airports, hotels, and aboard airplanes, business travelers don’t have to look very hard for a wireless Internet connection.

But with these public wireless hotspots becoming more prevalent, in addition to more travelers using smart phones for Web access, are business travelers putting themselves at a security risk?

The short answer, some technology security experts say, is yes. But they add that the use of Wi-Fi at these spots is no riskier than at a coffee shop.

“It’s a shared medium, and if you can connect to it, someone else can connect to it and monitor your traffic,” said Marty Linder, a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute CERT/Coordination Center. “That has nothing to do with the security of the network. It’s just the nature of the beast.”

For Fran Hanna, the convenience isn’t worth the risk. The sales representative from Chapin, South Carolina, would frequently bring her computer on business trips and access Wi-Fi through her hotels. Hackers tapped into her computer, resulting in inappropriate material being sent through her account.

She had to get her computer restored twice, which cost her $900. And while she still isn’t sure …

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May 20, 2009

Acronis Survey: Home Users Live Dangerously with Computer Backup Practices

87 Percent of Users Back Up Every Two to Three Months, But 80 Percent Report They Have Suffered Data Loss

BURLINGTON, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Home PCs and laptops storing the ever-changing data, photos, video, music and photos of consumers’ digital lives are backed up by most users less than once a month, according to a new survey of the backup habits of home users conducted by Acronis^®, Inc. (http://www.acronis.com), a provider of affordable, scalable storage management and disaster recovery software.

The online survey of 5,964 home users in North America found that 87 percent of users back up their hard drives just every two to three months or less frequently, far less often than any industry organization or publication recommends. This number is in sharp contrast with another survey finding - 80 percent of users have lost information and had to restore it.

“I learned my lesson the hard way: I had no backups,” reported Ryan McIntosh, a college student in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada. “I installed a program improperly and lost every Windows user account and all the data. Eventually, I had to reformat my drive. I lost two weeks worth of irreplaceable data for school.”

With consumers storing increasing amounts of critical data, those computers must be backed up more often to prevent the kind of catastrophic loss caused by hard disk failure, viruses and malware, unstable software downloads, user errors or physical disaster. According to Robert Thaler, Senior Director, Marketing, Acronis, users must evaluate their unique situations and create backup schedules that match the importance of the data. Many users back up their computers every week or two, with more frequent backups necessary if information changes frequently and is irreplaceable.

“Today, we rely on our laptops and desktop computers to store so much information - financial data, family records, irreplaceable photos and videos - that we need to treat backup and restore as seriously as we do virus and malware protection and be certain backups are scheduled and run,” said Thaler.

Restoring OS, Applications Frequent and Time Consuming
The Acronis survey also found that fully 81 percent of users had to reinstall their computer operating system and software applications. According to the survey, that data loss comes with a significant loss of time, with 48 percent reporting that the reinstallation process took more than four hours.

“I was fortunate enough to recover all my data, but I went without a computer for three days, spent two more days rebuilding it, and it will likely be weeks before I have everything organized again,” reported Gary Clement, of Alexandria, Va., after suffering through a serious malware infection.

“Unfortunately, consumer data loss is more a matter of when, not if - it is inevitable,” said Thaler. “Users should be sure they have full protection in place for their PCs, which means more than just copying files. That’s not disaster recovery. Instead users should back up their operating systems, applications, settings and configurations in addition to photos, spreadsheets and the like.”

Acronis True Image Home 2009, the award-winning backup and recovery software, automatically creates an exact copy of the hard disk and allows a user to instantly restore the entire machine. When disaster does strikes, Acronis True Image Home can restore a computer from a major failure in minutes. For more information about Acronis True Image Home 2009 and for the latest special offer, go to http://www.acronis.com/specialoffers/.

About Acronis
Acronis, Inc. is the leading provider of storage management and disaster recovery software. Its patented disk imaging and management technology enables corporations and individuals to move, manage and maintain digital assets in physical and virtual environments. With Acronis’ backup, recovery, server consolidation and virtualization migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime in computing environments. Acronis software is sold in more than 180 countries and available in 13 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com or contact media@acronis.com.

Contacts:
Acronis, Inc.
Marc Mombourquette
media@acronis.com
or
Birnbach Communications Inc.
Steven Webster, 617-512-8635
swebster@birnbachcom.com

By James Anderson

May 17, 2009

Avsim, one of the most popular online flight simulator sites, has been deleted by malicious hackers. During the attack on the site, the intruders apparently destroyed data on both of the two servers that runs Avsim (www.avsim.com). What’s worse - the founder of the site Tom Allensworth, said they had no external backup - so he has called it a complete loss.

According to Allensworth, they backed up their data daily but only between the two servers - they had no external backup means or plan. Make this be a lesson to all of the other site owners out there, backup daily and backup externally - no matter how many servers you have.

“AVSIM is totally offline at this time and …

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Related News:

http://www.thetechherald.com:
IT perspective: Attack on avsim.com results in total loss

May 12, 2009

By Rafe Needleman

One of the greatest stumbling blocks that a start-up Web service company has to get over is customers’ fear that the company will die and take their data with it. Manufacturers of traditional software can go belly-up without it immediately affecting a product’s utility. And if General Motors went out of business tomorrow (I know, shocking), its cars would still be drivable. But Web services are different. When your cloud app goes under for the last time, it sinks customers, too.

In the best of the bad cases, when a Web service goes offline, the company in question is able to shut down in an orderly way and let its users know long before the servers are pulled off the Net. Large multiproduct companies generally do this well. When Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr, it gave users plenty of time to offload their pictures, or move them to another service. When Hewlett-Packard shuttered the cloud backup system Upline, it likewise gave users fair warning.

But smaller companies may not be able to keep their servers up when …

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April 27, 2009

By Nilesh Ozarkar (nilesho@us.ibm.com), Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Save storage resources, reduce I/O, and optimize performance with new IDS features

Level: Introductory

Starting with IBM® Informix® Dynamic Server (IDS) Version 11.50.xC4, you can compress data and optimize storage in IDS databases. The advantages of data compression and storage optimization include significant storage savings, reduced I/O activity, and faster backup and restore. IDS provides full online support for enabling storage optimization and compressing existing table data, while applications continue to use the table. This article provides an overview of IDS data compression and storage optimization functionality and shows you how to perform both tasks.

Please click here for HTML page or download the PDF file here

May 3, 2009

Summary

April 30, 2009

By Layer 8

So, if the government gave your company $500 million to spend on building a new data center what would you buy and how would you build it? Well, the Social Security Administration is about to find out.

As part of the stimulus bill, or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the SSA got the tidy little sum to replaces its National Computer Center. The SSA in fact says it will need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center-the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications. (This is in addition to a $72 million backup facility currently under construction in Durham, North Carolina).

The current data enter, is 30 years old after all and it supports the backbone of the agency’s automated operations, which are the lifeblood to sorting out the earnings and benefits worth some $680 billion for almost 55 million Americans.

In justifying such stimulus money the SSA said it needs to replace the …

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Related News:

http://news.slashdot.org:
What Kind of Data Center Can You Build With $500M?

March 30, 2009

By Edward Baig

You’ve heard the warnings: It’s not if you’ll lose vital data through some hard drive catastrophe but when. So backing up files is critical. As passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 have discovered, you may want to consider a backup service in the “cloud.”

Few people suffer data loss in quite as harrowing a fashion as Bill Wiley. He was a second row passenger on the plane that was famously forced to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The passengers all survived the crash, of course. But Wiley still hasn’t recovered the two computers he had on board, containing about 250 gigabytes of data from his employer Computer Associates.

Wiley had been good about backing up files on the two computers by …

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March 26, 2009

Data is one of the most critical assets in any business. Having a back-up plan and strategy in place should be high up on a company’s priority list.

Backing up your is one of the most important areas of your business, yet can often be neglected. Without a back-up plan in place, a business can risk losing company data that cannot be retrieved.  

Systems are at risk from all kinds of things such as virus attacks, human error, power surges, theft or fire, so it is recommended that owner managers draw up a back-up plan that will secure their critical information. 

So why is it so important for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to back up data? Loss of data is irreplaceable, according to Eoin Blacklock of KeepITsafe.ie, which specialises in online data back-up. “Every SME spends time imputing data into computers, for accounts, payroll and customers. All the data stored on it is vital to the company. SMEs usually offer professional services to a wide customer base and hold extremely confidential and valuable information for their clients.” 

Company data is not being held in high enough regard, given that the likelihood of …

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By Roland Sars
Co-founder and Director at BackupAgent.com

An online backup is a service which allows users to backup and restore computer data over the internet to an external location. This article attempts to give an overview of online backup and its important elements.

An online backup is a service which allows users to backup and restore computer data over the internet to an external location. Usually, the user needs to install client software, which allows him to select the data to backup, the frequency of the backup (schedule) and also to restore data from the server when needed. Typically, the client software compresses and encrypts the data before transferring it over the internet to the remote location. Online is often referred to as ‘remote backup’, ‘internet backup’, ‘offsite backup’ or ‘IP backup’.

History

The first online backup software providers arised in the late 90s. However, the service became more and more adopted early in the 21st century. An important trend that influenced the rise of the online backup market is the increasing bandwiths. Since online backup services transfer lots of data over the internet, the upload-speed is the bottleneck. 2006 and 2007 showed a tremendous rise in the number of online backup service providers. These years, also Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) entered the market and online backup is often referred to as BaaS (Backup-as-a-Service).

Why using online backup?

Online backup is positioned in the market as ‘hassle-free’-backup. The client software makes sure that the backup runs automatically (typically once a day), and status reports are sent by email. The service eliminates any kind of human interaction. Alternatives like burning CDs, DVDs or tapes need to be handles by humans, which is time-intensive and therefore cost-intensive. Online backup saves time, resulting in a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Typical features

These features are commonly offered by many online backup providers:

Ease of use

An online backup service needs to be very easy to use. Peaple without any IT knowledge should be able to implement it, configure it and use it. Therefore, an user friendly interface is needed.

Application backup

In order to make an easy backup of frequently used applications, most online backup software contains easy-to-select shortcuts for backing up Outlook, Outlook Express, Favorites and System State.

Versioning

Multiple versions of the backup data can be sent over the internet allowing the user to archive his/her work. The versioning can go back days or even weeks in time.

Data compression

In order to save bandwith, the data is compressed before being transferred over the internet. Most of the online backup solutions have this feature.

Data encryption

Most online backup solutions have an encryption technology in their software. This makes sure that all data is encrypted on the client PC, before being sent over the internet. Commonly used technolgies are Blowfish and AES (128, 256 or 448 bits). This makes online backup services secure.

Incremental data backup

Many online backup software software products has applied data reduction technology to its backup software. This technology leverages the fact that most of the business data is relatively static: once created, the data undergoes only minor daily changes. Many online backup software products therefore detect the changes in the dataset, compares with the previous backup and only backs up the newly created or modified data, incrementally. This can also be done within a file (on block-level), which is extremely convenient for large files (e.g. database files). This technology further minimizes bandwith traffic.

Additional features

The following features are not critical but are very conveniend when using an online backup service.

Open file backup

The ability to back up files that are extensively opened, such as Outlook files (*.pst) or SQL database files can be useful. Such ability allows IT administrators to run back up jobs any time of the day, not requiring setting aside server maintenance time. Most online backup products need an add-on for this. Higher-end products support this natively.

Multiple platforms

A multi-platform backup service can back up multiple platforms such as the various flavors of Windows, Macintosh, and Linux/UNIX. Many newer entrants in the online backup industry only back up Windows XP and Vista.

Webaccess

Very convenient for the user is the functionality to access and restore data through a normal web browser. This allows the user to access his/her data on any location with internet, without the need to have the client software installed (e.g. internet cafe).

Database backup

Many online backup software solutions contain plug-ins for backing up the most frequently used databases, such as MS Exchange and MS SQL. This makes solutions very convenient for SMB companies, having a Small Business Server (SBS).

Filtering

The possibility to filter-in or filter-out a certain file or type of files. The user can e.g. select to backup his/her whole C:-drive, except for .dll-files or .tmp-files. Or backup his/her C:-drive, but then only the .doc-files and the .xls-files.

Bandwith throttling

This feature allows the user to configure using more or less bandwidth at various times.

Seed-load technology

Very useful, however not many online backup services offer it. This feature allows the initial backup of a large volume of data to a local hard drive, which can be shipped to the remote storage location. This eliminates the first backup over the internet of days or weeks. Subsequent backups will be made incrementally over the internet. This method saves time and bandwidth.
Additionally, in case of a disaster, the backup data can also be restored using a local hard drive. This allows the user to be back-in-business ultra-fast.

Users of online backup

Online backup is targeted at many segments.

Consumers

Online backups is very convenient of consumers, for backing up photos, personal files and music files. User friendliness and attractive pricing are key success factors in this segment.

Stong in this segment: Mozy, Carbonite.

SOHO/SMB

SMB customers are a large target audience, having mission critical data that needs to be backed up. Typically these customers have several PCs or Servers to be backed up. Important success factors in this segment are user friendliness, functionality/features and reliability/standing of the supplier (SMBs tend to backup their data only to trusted companies).

Stong in this segment: BackupAgent, Ahsay.

Large businesses/Enterprise

This segment usually has a few hundreds to tens of thousands of employees, and accompanying laptops. Additionally, enterprises have large files and database servers. Important success factors in this segment: integration with existing platforms, easy deployability and functionality/features.

Strong in this segment: BackupAgent, Connected, Asigra (server-backup).

Industry categorisation

The online backup market contains many providers. This section will explain the different players in the market.

Vendors

Vendors of online backup software are responsible for the manufacturing of the software, and not for providing it to the end-user. Many vendors have an indirect maket approach and select resellers and service providers to supply the software for them to the market. These vendors also allow their software to be branded to the brand of the reseller.

Examples of vendors of online backup software:

Ahsay, Hongkong Vendor of JAVA-based software, offered to smaller IT-service providers and resellers. Small and attractive priced software packs. Large install base around the globe.

Asigra, Canada Vendor of software for remote office/branch office online backup/recovery. Specialized in centralized data management and agentless backup. Heavy solution targeted at server backup for Enterprises.  

BackupAgent, The Netherlands Vendor of an online backup solution, targeted at resellers like ISPs/hosting companies/telco’s and System Integrators and VARs. Easy to use software containing much functionalities. Especcially usefull for SOHO and SMB backup. Large install base in Europe and growing in USA and Latin America/Asia.  

Connected (Iron Mountain), MA, USA A vendor of software for PC-backup. Targeted to Enterprises for backing up laptops.

Vertically integrated players

Parties who develop their own software and also directly offer it to the market, without resellers or service providers in between. Covering the full chain, from development to delivery and support. Mainly parties who aim at large volumes of users by an attractive pricing proposition.

Examples of vendors of online backup software:

Carbonite, MA, USA Carbonite is online backup for consumers, attractively prices for unlimited storage.  

Mozy, UT, USA Mozy is an online storage product from Berkeley Data Systems, founded in 2005. Mozy is software for backing up laptops and small servers. The company was acquired by EMC in October 2007.

Service Providers

Typically parties who do not develop the online backup software themselves, but providers using software of a vendor and offer it branded as their own solution to the market.

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Ed.: We thank Roland Sars for his contribution.

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Related News:

BackupReview.info Interviews Roland Sars, Co-Founder, Director of Marketing and New Business Development at BackupAgent.com

By David Strom, PC World

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Online backup makes a lot of sense: It gives you off-site peace of mind and the security that comes from knowing that someone else is keeping your data safe and sound. The trouble is that, while there are dozens of individual service providers, there are just a few designed for enterprises and small businesses.

Good choices for backup services are those that work on non-Windows machines that you need to backup, as well as those allow you to use one account to backup multiple PCs and multiple users. Three notable vendors that offer these features include iBackUP.com, SpiderOak, and Amerivault.com.

Some of the more notable services–such as …

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By Gerry Blackwell
March 19, 2009

Online storage – uploading your data over the Internet to a service provider’s data center – makes such perfect sense that the market is now glutted with vendors all hoping for a share of the anticipated revenue. And that is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Storing your data online, also called “cloud storage” however, makes particularly good sense for small businesses, and especially for highly mobile employees. Here’s why.

Online services save you the trouble and expense of setting up and managing backup and archival storage systems. You typically pay the service provider for as much capacity as you need, or sometimes for unlimited storage – and you don’t pay very much for it.

Because the data is stored remotely at a secure data center rather than on your own premises, it’s in some ways safer. If your office burns down, you can restore data over the Internet, from anywhere.

And if you need to restore data or access archived or shared files while traveling, you can do it without having to rely on potentially insecure and hard to set up virtual private network (VPN) connections to your office. Plus, again, you can access files from any Net-connected computer.

An Overheated Market

Competition is generally a good thing – it keeps prices low and …

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March 3, 2009

By Mike Fernandes

Mike Fernandes Director of Product Management & Services CYA Technologies

The amount of data that companies must store is growing at an enormous pace as regulations including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SEC 17a-4, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure —to name just a few—place an increasing burden on enterprise storage, backup and recovery needs. Fail to protect information in a recoverable state, and company officers face fines, other penalties and even jail time.

Matters are made more complex when enterprise content management (ECM) systems are in use. The benefits of ECM - workflow, collaboration, and integrated management of information assets - bring an extra level of responsibility when it comes to protecting the content and metadata within them. That extra level of care required primarily relates to ECM metadata –audit trails, digital signatures, workflows, renditions and other “data about data,” which must be backed up with the content it supports in a synchronous manner to ensure full recoverability and compliance with regulatory mandates.

Most C level executives believe the information in their ECM systems is …

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March 5, 2009

By Alice Clarke, Adam Turner, Charles Wright, Garry Barker, Mandy Salomon

We (http://www.smh.com.au) asked five correspondents to explain how they backed up their computers. This is what they said.

ALICE CLARKE

I learned about the virtues of backing up the really hard way. Although I’d been relying on computers since primary school, it wasn’t until VCE, when my mother’s notebook (containing the only copy of the one-woman play I had written for my year 12 drama assessment) was stolen that I decided it was time to buy a USB key. This tiny key seemed like the perfect way to back up all my important documents, until it suffered a terrible watery death in the washing machine, taking several, possibly brilliant, short stories with it.

Not one to mourn for long, I acquired a MacBook of my own and recently invested in a giant, heavy-duty 2TB external hard drive, on which I stored all of my music and made sure always to back up my documents and applications. This solution was surely the winner.

Then tragedy struck. The external hard drive inexplicably failed, causing me to lose my safety net and all my music. Even though I was able to recover most of it using my iPod and CDs, it still sucked.

For now, this story has a happy ending. Having learnt from the many errors of my ways, I seem to be going pretty well. At home I have set up a monster network of doom, utilising the hourly Time Machine backup function of my family’s six Macs. I even make sure I do a weekly backup of my MacBook Pro on a Time Capsule at another house, in case of fire, failure or ineptitude. And, to add a giant safety pin to this belt-and-braces approach, I even back up the really important stuff on my MobileMe iDisk online.

But, as the saying should go, three things in life are certain; death, taxes and loss of data.

ADAM TURNER

I can say from experience that there are two kinds of hard drives: dead and going to die. Thankfully my …

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March 04, 2009

By: Curtis Breville

With companies cutting back on capital expenses and massive layoffs being made, online data backup storage services are being taken more seriously. Like any storage solution, there are key questions that need to be answered by any potential online backup service provider so you understand the risks involved. Here’s a list of questions to ask a potential online data backup provider.

1. What protection exists for my data once it is in the backup service’s hands? Your data may now be stored elsewhere for safekeeping, but can you report back to your compliance officers/auditors that this new place is secure with no liability risks?
2. How can I provide an audit trail to compliance officers, and when it is time for the data to be expired …

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March 2, 2009
By Johnnie Konstantas

Johnnie Konstantas Vice President of Marketing Varonis Systems

I.    Obstacles to achieving compliance in 2009
Most industry experts agree that the events of the last year will lead to more and stricter regulations. This is particularly bad news for resource strapped IT departments who are already challenged to meet current requirements. Most businesses find that the annual effort for SOX compliance drains resources and is highly disruptive to operations. Now, with budgets and headcounts tightening, IT departments don’t have the time or the people to devote to what they know is really required to meet SOX and other regulatory mandates: drafting and implementing sustainable GRC processes.

The good news is that necessity often begets invention, and technologies are now available to help or-ganizations automate some of the more labor intensive processes of GRC. Implementing them early in the year is a move that can help GRC practitioners get through this annual audit cycle, despite dimin-ished resources, and make subsequent audits easier and more efficient.

II. How data governance can help organizations with compliance initiatives
Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) is a broad reaching initiative that …

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Friday February 27, 2009

Courtesy of GlobalDataVault.com

12 Part Series on Business Continuity Planning by Will Baccich, CEO of GlobalDataVault

Series covers:
Part 1 - Ten Disaster Planning Steps

Part 2 - Developing a Business Continuity Plan - Why Do This?

Part 3 - Budgeting

Part 4 - Surviving Utility Disruptions

Part 5 - Risk Assessment

Part 6 - Employee Involvement

Part 7 - Evacuation Planning

Part 8 - In-house Shelter

Part 9 - Vital Emergency Supplies

Part 10 - Emergency Communications Plan

Part 11 - Internet Security

Part 12 - Supporting Employees Following a Disaster

==============================

Ten Disaster Planning Steps, No Cash Required - Part 1

December 04, 2008

By Will Baccich, CEO, GlobalDataVault.com

This post introduces a series covering basic business Disaster Recovery Planning.

Here are ten important disaster recovery planning steps which require no cash.

1. Meet with your insurance provider to review current coverage.

2. Create procedures to quickly evacuate and shelter-in-place. Practice the plans.

3. Talk to your people about the company’s disaster plans. Two-way communication is central before, during and after a disaster.

4. Create an emergency contact list, include employee emergency contact information.

5. Create a list of critical business contractors and others whom you will use in an emergency.

6. Know what kinds of emergencies might affect your company both internally and externally.

7. Decide in advance what you will do if your building is unusable.

8. Create a list of inventory and equipment, including computer hardware, software and peripherals, for insurance purposes.

9. Talk to utility service providers about potential alternatives and identify back-up options.

10. Promote family and individual preparedness among your co-workers. Include emergency preparedness information during staff meetings, in newsletters, on company intranet, periodic employee emails and other internal communications tools.

Be sure to see www.ready.gov for more details about disaster recovery planning.

==============================

Developing a Business Continuity Plan - Part 2 - Why Do This?

December 05, 2008

By Will Baccich, CEO,  GlobalDataVault.com

Preparing a Business Continuity or Emergency Plan takes time and effort and requires some investment. In my previous post, I provided a list of 10 steps small businesses can take which do not require any cash investment.

In this post and the remainder of the series, I’ll cover in some detail the process of preparing a Business Continuity or Emergency Plan. Some parts of this process will require an investment as well as some effort. So, why do this?

- According to the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen after a major disaster.

- OSHA requires that businesses with 10 or more employees have a written emergency plan.

- Dependency on computer technology makes recovery more complex, and therefore, makes planning more important.

- Preparedness improves the chance that a company can recover, including recovering financial losses, market share losses, as well as equipment and inventory.

- Being well prepared facilitates compliance with regulatory requirements.

- Being well prepared helps companies protect employees.

- Being well prepared improves business security and enhances its credibility with employees, customers, vendors, and investors.

- Preparedness may help reduce insurance costs.

Finally, it is not easy to build a successful business. And it is all too easy to fail. All businesses should take the simple steps we’ll discuss here as a means to protect what they have worked so hard to build.

In my next post, I’ll discuss budgeting for the project.

==============================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 3 - Budgeting

January 04, 2009

By Will Baccich, CEO,  GlobalDataVault.com

Budgeting for Disaster Recovery

Understanding all the changes that could become an integral part of daily business operations is vital to the success of any business continuity plan.  It is important for the management team to determine the most essential elements that will enable the business to thrive in the event of a disaster.  In the end, it is strategic budgeting that will ensure the availability of all the essentials.  The best way to prepare a budget for your project is to devise it from a cost/benefit analysis.  This analysis should cover the following areas:

Initial and Ongoing Resources, Time and Effort

• Prepare for costs associated with third-party contracts.
• Calculate costs for administration, training and testing.
• Ensure the facility is up to code - inspections for wind, fire and seismic resistance.
• Consider costs for protecting the facility - smoke detectors, fire suppression systems, flood protection, an insurance policy that covers natural disasters.
• Physical security, electronic security systems.
• Prepare for costs associated with both electrical and data backups.
• Potential costs for storing critical business data offsite.
• Costs for customizing areas to protect electronics from flood waters.
• Costs for emergency kits and associated supplies.
• First aid and CPR training for staff.
• Potentially an expert to evaluate the proficiency of your natural disaster preparedness and business continuity plan.

Worst Case Scenario

• Potential staff recruitment and new hire costs.
• Replacement of software and hardware systems.
• Consider devices and technologies that will enable staff and management to communicate in the event of an emergency.
• Potential moving costs.
• Financial and operational consequences should critical functions not being able to perform.

Potential Savings

• Discount insurance premiums that may be obtained by putting a disaster recovery plan into effect.
• Enhancing system stability and availability through upgrades and security mechanisms.
• Opportunities for outsourcing critical business aspects that would otherwise prove cost-prohibitive onsite.
• Structuring environments that afford more onsite business functions.

Budget estimates for the project will vary, largely depending on whether training tools and other resources are coming from within or through an outside vendor.  When budgeting for what’s essential, things that can go wrong as well as potential benefits, you get garner a much better idea of the expenses the project will incur.

=========================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 4 - Surviving Utilities Disruptions

January 07, 2009

By Will Baccich, CEO, GlobalDataVault.com

Surviving Utilities Disruptions

Coupled with untimely natural disasters, disruption to the power supply and other utility services is one of the biggest threats facing businesses today.  This is especially true for those with operations that impact an infrastructure consisting of other businesses, social services and the consumer public.  Preparing for utilities disruption is a critical step that your business continuity plan cannot do without.

Because many businesses rely heavily on electricity, gas, telecommunications and other vital utilities, a thorough plan should cover the following:

• Plan for service interruptions that may occur during and after an emergency situation.  Determine which utilities are the most essential to daily business operations, consider possible backup sources and speak with service providers regarding potential alternatives.
• Learn when and what utilities should be turned on or off by staff.  Utilities such as gas and electricity should only be handled professionals.
• Purchase a backup generator to power the most critical business functions during a disaster.  Be sure to test the backup system’s functionality from time to time and never operate a diesel generator within the facility as it may expel dangerous gas.
• Determine how you will communicate with staff, customers, providers and others if the main source of communications should fail.  Consider two-way radios as well as other devices that do not rely solely on electricity as a source of power.
• Create an alternative means for accessing the internet and other vital networks.
• Consider health provision as well as the distribution of food and water supplies.
• If the onsite facility consists of refrigerated food and beverage, locate a vendor beforehand to purchase ice and associated supplies.

The impact power outages and other utility disruptions can have on large business firms, energy-intensive organizations and service providers have the potential to be catastrophic.  Because a wide range of disasters may occur, various factors need to considered, evaluated and analyzed.  A thorough disaster recovery plan will reduce the risks of damage to the facility, machinery and systems, loss of service and production, disruption in the network infrastructure and supply chain and loss of personnel.  Most importantly preparing for utilities disruption will dramatically reduce the risks of credibility damage and finances.

==============================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 5 - Risk Assessment

January 09, 2009

By Will Baccich, CEO, GlobalDataVault.com

Preparing for Threats through Risk Assessment

A successful business continuity plan involves preparing for the unexpected.  No one ever wants to overindulge in negativity, yet it is only practical to be realistic in this day and age of untimely disasters.  A major part of any disaster recovery plan is assessing the potential risks the business will be exposed to in the event of a disaster or other emergency situations.  It is a must to consider all types of probable incidents as well as the impact each could have on the organization’s ability to perform normal business operations.  This can be a very complex task but the information in this article will provide some insight and guidance for what needs to be considered.

The Threat List

Risk assessment is all about discovering and analyzing the array of disruptive situations that can possibly affect day-to-day business operations.  Some of the potential events include:

Environmental Disasters

• Flood
• Blizzard
• Freezing conditions
• Electrical storms
• Tornado
• Hurricane
• Earthquake
• Drought
• Fire
• Landslides
• Environmental hazards
• Tsunami

Deliberate or Organized Disruption

• Act of sabotage
• Act of terrorism
• Act of war
• Theft
• Arson

Disruption of Utilities

• Power failure
• Loss of water supply
• Loss of gas supply
• Loss of communications services
• Loss of drainage
• Loss of waste removal supply
• Hardware and System Failure
• Air conditional failure
• Ventilation control failure
• Production line failure
• IT hardware failure

Security Breach or Compromise of Business Information

• Malware infection
• Network attacks
• Theft of data
• Unintentional disclosure of sensitive information

Other Probable Emergency Incidents

• Violence in the workplace
• Neighborhood hazards
• Public transportation disruption
• Employee morale
• Legal disputes
• Negative publicity
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Health and safety regulations

Believe it or not, this list is far from complete as there is much more that needs to be considered.  However, it should give you a good idea of the wide range of potential threats your business may encounter.  A positive aspect is that there are a number of tools and services available to properly assist with risk assessment and its role in your disaster recovery plan.  Several professional consultants and organizations can aid your project by employing various strategies that are in line with local and international standards.

==============================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 6 - Employee Involvement

January 12, 2009

By Will Baccich, CEO, GlobalDataVault.com

Employee Involvement in Emergency Planning

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning is an enormous project that cannot be completed by one person alone.  It is essential that your project involve employees at each level so that everyone can prepare and protect all aspects of the business.  Instead of formulating a roster of your employees right away, I suggest that you first consider the make up of your team.  For example, what employees are best suited for being a part of the team?  What abilities and qualities do you feel make them a good fit?  What roles and responsibilities are they capable of handling?  The answers to these questions will go a long way in forming the best possible team for the project.

Below I have complied a checklist that will help you determine who in your organization may be fit for certain responsibilities.  It will also give you several ideas on how employees can be more involved in disaster recovery and emergency situations.

Getting Employees Actively Involved in Emergency Planning

• Make sure you involve employees at all level in the plan.  Keep in mind that strategic planning will enable staff with disabilities and other special needs to play a critical role in the project as well.
• Take advantage of emails, newsletters, staff meetings, intranet sites and other communications mediums to effectively discuss emergency plans and procedures with all employees involved.
• Establish a set of policies and procedures to warn staff members of emergencies. Particularly, you should determine who will communicate with employees who may not speak fluent English and those who are hearing-impaired or suffer from other disabilities.
• Set up a communications medium for communicating with staff during and after an emergency.  This could be a special page on the company website, an email alert or voice recording system.
• Designate a phone number that allows employees to call in and let everyone know they are okay in the event of a disaster.  Make sure that everyone keeps their calls brief so that others can get on the line.
• Encourage all employees to arrange alternative means of transportation for traveling to and from work in case normal modes are interrupted.
• Maintain a record of employee emergency contact information, emergency kits and other essentials at an off-site location.

No one looks forward to a disaster, but when getting everyone involved, the entire organization can survive an emergency situation and quickly get normal business operations back in order.

==============================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 7 - Evacuation Planning

January 15, 2009

By Will Baccich, CEO, GlobalDataVault.com

Creating a Thorough Evacuation Plan

When faced with a disaster, one of the hardest decisions your team will have to make is whether to stay onsite or vacate the premises. Unfortunately, some disasters are so catastrophic they require that everyone leaves the facility immediately. It is no secret that a business who plans for an emergency and devises an exit strategy performs better than those who don’t.

Here are a few tips for developing a sound evacuation plan:

• Devise a system that lets you know exactly who is on the premises during the time of a disaster. This way, both employees and customers can be accounted for. It may also help rescue services to account and/or search for individuals.
• Determine who has the authority to initiate an evacuation. It is a good idea to develop a chain of command that enables others to give the order if the designated individual is not available.
• Specify who will be responsible for shutting down critical operations and locking up the facility during an evacuation. This is another instance where you should train additional staff in case the designated individual is unavailable.
• Devise a special strategy for employees and customers who may require assistance in getting out during an emergency.
• Make copies of building maps with clear markings of all the important utility areas and emergency routes. These maps should be made easily accessible to all employees and management as well as first responders and emergency personnel.
• Consider emergency lighting such as flashlights to use in the event of a power outage.
• Designate an assembly site that everyone knows to meet at. Stress the importance of people letting the designated management know if they are unable to reach the site.
• Take a headcount as everyone arrives at the meeting site. Make sure you know who and when someone leaves the site to ensure that everyone is accounted for.
• Decide who will be responsible for letting the team know when conditions are clear to return back to work.
• If your business functions are run out of multiple buildings or in another location, be sure to create evacuation procedures specific to each individual facility.
• If your business shares or leases space with other companies, ensure that those organizations along with the building owner is dedicated to collectively practicing evacuation procedures.

There is a good chance that the authorities will not arrive in time to orchestrate an evacuation. By implementing your own strategy into the continuity plan, you can better assure that everyone makes it out and quickly get back on the road to recovery.

==============================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 8 - In-house Shelter

In-House Shelter

During an evacuation, there may be instances when it is best to stay in your location and form a shelter in a special area within the building to avoid dangerous conditions outside.  In such situations, knowing how and where to take shelter can be a matter of life or death.  When it comes to disaster recovery,it is critical to understanding the impact of different threats and prepare for all the possibilities.

Below are a few tips for devising a sound in-house shelter plan:

• Create a warning system.
• Test the systems regularly to be sure that they work and everyone responds accordingly.
• Be sure to account for employees or visitors in the building who have physical disabilities or do not speak English.
• Make sure all employees are onboard and understand the importance of sheltering.  While you can’t force them to participate, knowing upfront can prevent confusion and encourage cooperation.
• Make sure everyone is accounted for upon arriving to the shelter.
• Check off employee names on a prepared roster.
• Take a head count of all employees, customers and visitors.
• Assign specific tasks to individual workers beforehand and keep track of their responsibilities.  Be sure to designate and train alternate employees in case the assigned worker is unable to perform.
• Stock all shelter locations in advance with emergency supply kits.
• Frequently practice the in-house shelter plan to make sure everything goes accordingly.

In-house Shelter Plan for a Tornado

When planning for a tornado, there are a number of specifics that must be covered to ensure adequate protection.

Instruct everyone to a cellar or basement, as they provide the best protection against tornados.

If no underground shelter is available, the next best option would be an interior room or hallway on the lowest level possible.  The same is true if your business operates out of a high-rise building.

Instruct everyone to huddle in the center of the room and stay away from windows, doors and walls.  Remain in the shelter location until receiving word that the tornado has completely passed.

When disasters strike, knowing whether to stay or go is a tough decision.  If the authorities instruct you to stay or leave, it is best to do so immediately.  However, because you may not have contact with the authorities, having an in-house sheltering plan is essential.

==============================

Business Continuity Planning - Part 9 - Vital Emergency Supplies

February 16, 2009

Do you find that the older you get, the more there is to worry about?

As a teenager and student, life can be pretty care free. But then along comes a proper career, getting on the property ladder, meeting a partner and starting a family. And as your responsibilities grow you have more things to protect and look after.

Your business is no different. The more years you put into it, the more you will feel the need to protect it and ensure no-one can hurt it. No wonder people refer to their business as their baby!

Without getting into the area of reputation damage, product failure or an employee stealing your clients from you, there are broadly speaking five areas to be aware of that could badly affect your business. And they are all based around some kind of impact to your premises.

Even if you run a home based business, some of these could affect you. In fact in many respects they could hit you harder – if you lose your home and business premises in a single incident, your life will be harder to get back on track.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) invovles anticipating problems that could affect normal day to say business, and having a plan in place to deal with it. So here is Bytestart’s look at the five business killers and what you can do to prevent them and be prepared for them.

Fire: Perhaps the single most devastating event that can affect a …

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February 15, 2009

By Robert Annunziato

Many businesses owners/ executives think that just because your business has a RAID storage system or you backup your data to tape, external hard drive, or to another server that you are protected in the event of a hardware failure, fire, flood, or theft.  This is all only part of the process.

To truly safeguard your data, your backup media must be taken offsite or your data stored to another physical location.  If you backup your data and still keep the media in the same building, you have not mitigated your risk.  Manual processes that involve an employee taking the media offsite are subject to failure.  What happens if the employee forgets one day to run the backup or take home the media, quits, or something happens to that employee?

The other question you need to answer is how much data can you afford to lose?  If you lost a weeks worth of data, would your business be able to function?  This question needs to be answered as it determines how often you need to run your backup routines and take that media offsite.  If you can afford to lose a weeks worth of data, then you can run your backups once a week and take them offsite.  If you can only lose a single day worth of data, then you need to run your backups daily and take the media offsite.  What if your business can not afford a loss of an hours worth of data?

There is an alternative to these manual backup processes.  One that is becoming very popular is online data backup.  With this backup method, you have software that resides on your server, desktops, and laptops.  This software is configured to identify what data needs to be backed up and how often it needs to be backed up.  Once you set it up, you are all set.  No more manual backup process.  The software will run at the interval you set and examine your data to see if any of the data files you identified for backup have changed.  If so, or there are new files, those files are backed up.  The files are encrypted not only before transimitting over the network, but also on the storage servers of the company you signed up for online backup.  It is very secure.

You should also plan to test your restoration process a least once a year to ensure that you can restore all of your data and how long the process takes as part of your disaster recovery testing. To restore the file, you go into your software, click on the file(s) to restore and they are restored.  Large amounts of data can take some time to restore, but arrangements can be made with the storage company to overnight an external USB drive with all of your data, if necessary.

For computer users, individual file restoration is a great feature.  How many times have you worked on a spreadsheet or presentation and saved your file over a previous version?  Or, you deleted a file accidently and it is no longer in your recycle bin?  You can restore individual files up to 30 days ago to get back to the version you want.

Online backup offers a more convenient, more thorough, and more timely method of ensuring your business data is backed up.  Dont take a risk with your business by not having a a good disaster recovery process for your data.  Talk with your IT service provider to ensure that you have a sound disaster recovery process for your data.

Robert Annunziato
President - A2Z Technology Solutions, Inc.
770-884-1029
info@a2zts.com
www.a2zts.com

February 12, 2009

By Phil Dotree

Online data backup is a safe and reliable way to begin backing up your files, and as any tech department will tell you, data backup is an absolutely essential part of computer maintenance. That being said, there are some common issues with the current crop of online data backup services, just as there are issues with any new technology. Here’s a look at some common problems that you might encounter while backing up your data with an online service.

1. Slow Connection Speed - By far the biggest problem with online data backup is connection speed, as it varies enough from service to service and user to user to cause significant issues. After all, if you’re a …

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February 11, 2009

Every few months, there’s another horror story about lost tapes or stolen laptops, and we’re left wondering if the information stored on the missing media will be put to some nefarious use, thereby adding personal injury to a public relations insult.

The importance of protecting these media has become a no-brainer. But managers are often hampered in their efforts because they buy into one or more of the following six myths of movable media:

Myth 1: Tapes are obsolete.

The humble magnetic tape, a seeming relic of the mainframe and batch-processing era, has given way in some instances to disk-to-disk backups to remote sites over networks. But for rapid and efficient backup, archiving and restoration of large quantities of data, there’s no beating tape.

Iron Mountain Inc. offers both data backup over a network connection and tape storage at its sites. “In a disaster scenario, when time is of the essence, there is nothing more efficient than putting a collection of tapes in a vehicle and driving it to a recovery site,” says Ken Rubin, a senior vice president at the information protection and storage company. “And the bandwidth limitations on transporting terabytes or petabytes of data over the line make that impractical.”

Still, some users want to move on. “We are trying to get out of the tape business because of the threat of physical loss,” says Christopher Leach, chief information security officer at Affiliated Computer Services Inc. He says ACS is setting up a service to send encrypted data backups to clients via a Web browser if the files aren’t too big.

Myth 2: Protecting tapes and laptops is a job for technical people.

The protection of information technology is, of course, a job for IT. But there is …

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February 11, 2009

By Laura Buckley

Exploit shrinking budgets with consolidated backup appliances

In the current economy, companies must find ways to do more with fewer dollars and fewer resources.  One key area that IT departments should look at to save money is their backup systems and procedures.  It is easy to say that organizations must be more current and efficient in their backup, recovery and archiving procedures, but throwing more manual activity at this problem accomplishes little.

In addition, resources allocated to this process results in other processes with more visible economic value losing resources. Few companies have the luxury of being able to assign all of the resources required to address all of their important tasks optimally. The reality is that most organizations now count on increased productivity to drive profitability.  This means accomplishing more with the same or fewer resources. An integrated backup solution supports this need.

Integrated solutions save money during the evaluation and purchase cycle

Pressure is growing on all organizations to fully protect their data and recover it as efficiently as possible.  Evaluation of a bewildering number of point solutions and possible combinations can be overwhelming. Companies often spend up to 18 months just identifying their options, and the number of choices available continues to expand.  It was not too long ago when the decision on a backup solution often included just one piece of software. Now, organizations must decide on all of the hardware, and perhaps even multiple software applications.  The decision making process must include the compatible and scalable nature of each hardware component, and a number of capabilities, such as CDP (continuous data protection), sophisticated archiving, email archiving, “hot” backups of databases and data de-duplication.

Considerable time and resources can be saved during the evaluation and purchase cycle when companies consider an integrated, scalable, automated solution pre-configured to address all data storage and protection functionality – often called an appliance.

When buying individual components to build a solution, an organization makes a huge trade-off. Buyers search for components optimized for their specific function; so, a company searches for a best-of-breed solution. This purchasing process takes time and a complex set of comparisons to work with compatible vendors. An appliance vendor, by contrast, picks the best and compatible components and takes ownership of them all.

The “backup” appliance vendor will have a more holistic view of an organization’s problem and is more concerned that the entire data storage and protection solution works to satisfaction. A vendor of a specific component, by design, has a narrower view of the entire solution. A disk manufacturer is mostly interested in the disk, and a software manufacturer is mostly interested in the software. A manufacturer of a backup appliance, in contrast, will have an interest in providing and supporting the best of all of the components that comprise the solution, including the disk, software, server, etc.

Upgrading an appliance is also easier for the end user. When an organization upgrades, it can be sure that all components will still be compatible with each other.  With a point solution, an upgrade of one component often results in an entire system needing to be reconfigured. Finally, a backup appliance can enable a company to set its own tailored- retention policies and to buy only the capacity that it needs. The business dictates the functionality of a storage solution, rather than the reverse.

Integrated solutions save money during implementation

Once a decision is reached, implementation of solutions that are comprised of parts from many vendors can take weeks, even months, to accomplish and are quite often never completely put into operation.

Problems that can arise during implementation are similar to problems that will arise during day-to-day operations of the solution.  These include component compatibility issues and vendor support “finger pointing.”

Installing an integrated appliance solution will save considerable time and money.  In most cases, appliances are installed and completely operational in three to four days.  Since the component integration has already been certified and completed by the appliance vendor, and because the appliance vendor provides support on all of the components, finger pointing and compatibility problems are eliminated.

Integrated solutions save money during daily operations

IT individuals often have a broad knowledge of many technologies with little in-depth expertise of any particular one. This is necessary to support the range of platforms, applications and networks, normally installed in an organization and is particularly true in small and medium sized businesses.  A backup, recovery and archive solution configured with many distinct hardware devices and various software applications adds to the already onerous task of the “generalist” by requiring separate management of each. Compounding this added complexity is the fact that these systems are often from different vendors, which can confound attempts to diagnose and solve problems. IT staffs must support a growing and diversified systems environment with no appreciable increases in resources, and now they must find time to contact multiple vendors to identify and then fix problems with their various technologies.

The challenge then becomes identifying a vendor capable of taking ownership of everything within a chosen solution and employing network-wide diagnostics that can isolate the problem and recommend an optimal remedy. This sounds simple enough, but the reality is that even major vendors often support hardware from one place and software from another, with little cooperation in between.  An appliance vendor provides integrated support for the integrated solution.   There is only one point of contact for any problem or question related to the appliance.  This significantly reduces the amount of time required for problem resolution, allowing the IT staff to re-direct resources to other critical business issues.

In addition to the problems with failure, identification and resolution, which can take up valuable IT staff time, a multivendor backup and disaster recovery system still has the mostly manual “best practices” requirement to pull off. Administrators must manage procedures to produce off-site disaster recovery copies of data, physically handle the copies and then transport them to a safe place. They must do this while keeping an inventory and method for easy retrieval later. These tedious and redundant tasks often lead to mistakes that absorb even more time and put the entire data protection function at risk due to manual errors. By automating this process with an appliance solution, IT eliminates most manual errors, freeing staff for other initiatives and supporting an organization’s drive to increase productivity.

A component solution also has several management interfaces, while an appliance has just one. This singular view will enable an organization to change components and technologies both in size and in type without altering the interface. This eliminates the need to re-train personnel every time a component is changed. The distinct management views of each entity do not disappear; they present transparently and operate underneath the single interface. There are software products that can manage all the components of a conventional system and provide one interface. Software products, however, present a multiplicity of options to customers, designed to work with all of the possible hardware components that may be included within a solution.

Consequently, both hardware and software components taken individually tend to be complex or quite general in their management approach, limiting their eventual functionality.   The conventional integration of components approach requires manual and diagnostic activities that consume both human and system resources. An appliance can address this problem by simplifying these tasks.

Integrated solutions save money by optimizing restore operations

Companies must define their recovery point and recovery time objectives and measure the financial impact of these decisions, which can be significant.

With a point product solution, companies are often tied to traditional methods of backup and data retention with full and incremental backup tapes that are rotated offsite on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly schedule.  When a restore is needed, the appropriate tapes must be recalled and then searched and replayed to restore data.  Depending on the amount of data to be restored, this process can take many hours or days.

With an appliance, a copy of data is stored locally, while a second, identical copy is stored offsite for disaster recovery purposes.  When a file, directory, device or entire system must be restored, the data is immediately available and the restore is optimized through robust database indexing technology.

Recovery policies for backup data versus archived data, including retention and time to recovery, are distinctly different.  The conventional approach used to be that when we made a copy of something, we eventually archived that same copy. IT staff considered the archived copy sitting in an offsite location as the disaster recovery copy. This method is no longer appropriate, nor can it be successful. These activities need distinctly different policies that drive point-in-time captures, online backups and offsite copies.

Considerations when evaluating an appliance

An appliance, being a single product, is easier to install, manage, support and expand. Below is a short laundry list of things to consider when evaluating an appliance. An appliance solution to backup, archive and disaster recovery should:

• Optimize backups and restores so that an organization is only required to use backup functions for the capture of incremental changes. It does not force companies to repeat backups of existing files. The technology is designed for full restore capability, i.e. for any date in time and any file or set of files, volumes or systems identified, up to and including an entire enterprise of data. It also should provide multi-streaming capability that optimizes the movement of large files across networks. Most importantly, backups must be online and immediately available for restore.
• Comply fully with policy management. Compliance must be an integral part of a company’s backup, restore and disaster recovery.
• Restore files and databases within a practical period of time that does not negatively affect a company’s operations. Restores often fail because the data either could not be found or retrieved in time, or the expected time and cost of a possible restore exceeds the time and cost of re-creating the data. An appliance should include both backup and restore performance enhancements to meet an organization’s chosen window for restoration.
• Efficiently use media. Media are tools, not the technology, in a backup and archive solution. Each media type has capabilities and functions that it does particularly well. Optimizing media capability requires including all the available media in a solution, allowing the customer to take advantage of each media’s proper application for backup, archive and disaster recovery. Disk, tape, even optical media should be employed based on business requirements. In addition, an appliance should facilitate smooth transitions as media types and sizes change.
• Automate daily functions and reduce administrative hours. Most daily backup functions are repetitive. The solution should automate where possible, then, anything that is not a monitoring activity.
• Provide a foundation for future data storage needs, such as content management and support of ILM initiatives.

In sum, to save money and resources, organizations should look beyond the conventional and outmoded approaches of multi-vendor backup solutions to recovery solutions packaged and implemented with appliance approaches that incorporate the best in component technologies.

Laura Buckley is president of STORServer, Inc., founded in 2000 to provide simple, adaptable and scalable solutions for data protection.

February 08, 2009

Note: You will need to sign up at EncryptionReports to download these reports.

This Ponemon Institute annual survey documents the high costs that result when companies lose customer data.

United States – 2008 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach

Download Report - The annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study tracks a wide range of cost factors, including expensive outlays for detection, escalation, notification and response along with legal, investigative and administrative expenses, customer defections, opportunity loss, reputation management, and costs associated with customer support such as information hotlines and credit monitoring subscriptions.

First conducted over four years ago, our initial study established objective methods for quantifying specific activities that result in direct, indirect and opportunity costs from the loss or theft of personal information, thus requiring notification to breach victims as required by law or policy.

Our current analysis of the actual data breach experiences of 43 U.S. companies from 17 different industry sectors takes into account a wide range of business costs, including expense outlays for detection, escalation, notification, and after the fact (ex-post) response. We also analyze the economic impact of lost or diminished customer trust and confidence, measured by customer churn or turnover rates.

United Kingdom – 2008 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach

Download Report - This 2008 Ponemon Institute benchmark study examines the costs incurred by 30 organisations after experiencing a data breach. Results were not hypothetical responses; they represent cost estimates for activities resulting from actual data loss incidents. This is the second annual survey of this issue.

Breaches included in the survey ranged from less than 4,100 records to more than 92,000 records from 10 different industry sectors.

2008 has been the year of the public data breach in the United Kingdom. The independent authority responsible for Data Protection in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has reported over 277 breaches of significant volume since the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) breach in November 2007.

Our current analysis of the actual data breach experiences of 30 UK companies from 10 different industry sectors takes into account a wide range of business costs, including expense outlays for detection, escalation, notification, and after the fact (ex-post) response. We also analyse the economic impact of lost or diminished customer trust and confidence, measured by customer churn or turnover rates.

Germany – 2008 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach

Download Report - Jahresstudie 2008: Kosten von Datenpannen in Deutschland
Die Vergleichsstudie zu den Kosten von Datenpannen im Jahr 2008, durchgeführt durch das Ponemon Institute basiert auf den Informationen aus 18 Unternehmen, die mit einem Fall von Datenverlust oder -missbrauch konfrontiert waren. Die Ergebnisse der Studie resultieren aus den Kosten für alle Aktivitäten bei realen Datenpannen.

Die Spannweite der in dieser Studie erfassten Datenpannen reicht von Fällen mit weniger als 3.750 Datensätzen bis zu Fällen mit mehr als 90.000 Datensätzen. Insgesamt wurden Daten aus zehn unterschiedlichen Branchen erfasst.

Unsere aktuelle Analyse von Datenverlust- und -missbrauchsfällen in 18 deutschen Unternehmen aus zehn unterschiedlichen Branchen erfasst einen weiten Bereich der mit diesen Vorfällen verbundenen Kosten - einschließlich der Ausgaben für die Aufdeckung der Datenpanne sowie deren Auswirkungen und die notwendigen Reaktionen. Wir haben zudem auf Basis von Kundenaktivität und Umsatzkennzahlen die ökonomischen Folgen analysiert, die aus dem verlorenen oder zumindest eingeschränkten Vertrauen von Kunden resultieren.

Also you may download the 2007 Reports for same countries:

• Germany – Jahresstudie 2008: Kosten von Datenpannen in Deutschland
• United States – 2007 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach
• United Kingdom – 2007 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach

February 08, 2009
By Anna Barrington

Working in the Data security industry we tend to see some terrible examples of broken computers, lost data, and companies often reeling under the impact of the problems this creates. Occasionally we hear of businesses forced to close because of data loss, or other serious computer problems.

One friend recently had to re-do several months worth of accounts when a computer hard drive failed. Thankfully they now have a data backup strategy in place!

Needless to say, just about all of these problems are preventable, so we would like to start the new year with some tips about how to secure your business data, and give yourself an easier life and a better night’s sleep throughout the coming year.

Off-site Backup
Back up your data properly. One statistic recently quoted was that 80% of SMEs have not yet implemented offsite data backup. So how to recover their data when the computer fails? You can use a cost effective secure data backup and recovery service such as Forward ITC to keep a regular off-site backup - which is there whenever you need it, and can be instantly restored in the event of a computer failure, building fire, break in or other disaster.

Backing up manually is not a reliable solution, as it only happens when you remember - and so often people don’t. If you hadn’t got around to backing up for a month, would you have lost a complete quarter’s accounts? Backing up on site is also not the full solution. It might protect you against a computer failure, but what about a building fire. Backing up automatically and off-site is the only approach that is not a gamble!

Free Anti Virus Software
Many computers come with Anti Virus products pre-installed, and a short free trial period before they start asking for money. We usually leave these running until the trial expires, and then remove them (Control Panel / Add & Remove Programmes / Remove). Our current preferred Anti Virus programmes are the free offerings from AVG and Avast. Avast has the least impact on computer performance in our experience, but we have seen it let some through. AVG is what we are currently using. It also has a nice extra which advises you which web sites are dangerous, and is also installed for free. If you want to pay a little more for a really bullet proof solution, then NOD 32 is also very thought of.

Software Expiry
Never ignore the warning pop-up windows which tell you that your anti-virus protection has expired. With a broadband connection, infection by a computer virus is likely within a few minutes!

Impersonation
Be aware that some viruses impersonate services that you trust. For example one nasty virus we had to deal with recently displayed an icon that looked like the standard Windows XP security center, so the user clicked it, and the virus installed. The rule of thumb is this - if the messages are bullying or threatening you to click to save your computer, your life, or whatever, it’s usually malware. If you can’t close the page (another malware trick) then close your browser quickly. If the browser won’t close, then use the keys Control / Alt/ Delete to open the Task Manager (Windows), and kill the browser process. When you re-open the browser it will go back to your home page and the danger will have passed.

Maintain your firewall. If you are using Windows XP, service pack 2 includes a very good one. If you are using another operating system, then either buy one, or look on the internet for a free one. Whilst free programs are not as good as commercial releases in most instances; they still offer reasonable protection against most attacks. A couple of well thought of FREE firewalls are Zone Alarm and Comodo.

Windows Update
Keep your computer up to date with Windows Update. Threats and vulnerabilities are fixed regularly and can be automatically installed on your system. This can be accessed using Start / Programmes / Windows Update.

Spyware and Adware
Some malware can get into your computer and be missed by your Anti Virus software. One way to mop up the rubbish is to use the malware programmes (Free) Lavasoft Adaware SE, or Zone Alarm which are great at picking up Trojans, viruses, adware, and other nasties. These two products are both good but do not co-exist all that happily, so I would pick one or the other.

Defragment
Defragment your hard drive occasionally. This will tidy your files and generally improve system performance.

Full System Scan
Perform a full system scan, using your up to date anti-virus software at least once a week for added security.

Strange Behaviour
Watch for strange computer behaviour. This is normally a sign of impending component failure or uninvited software doing unwanted things. Getting advice quickly can save both time and money.

Data Encryption
Encrypt all data stored on removable media such as pen-drives and CDs. PGP Free for Win XP can be downloaded from pgpi.org It can encrypt hard-drives and DVD’s as well, so even if they do get lost your data remains your business.

All the programmes suggested here can be found with a quick Google search using their names, and installed and running in a few minutes to keep your PC running, your data safe, and your business concentrating on growth and improvement, rather than picking up the mess.

About the Author…
Anna Barrington writes for Forward ITC - For More information and to visit our website go to http://www.forward-itc.co.uk/..

Online Data backup and Recovery: Forward ITC provide a high quality and robust offsite managed data backup service. Based in Cornwall UK, their solution is available online and worldwide.

January 28, 2008
By Russell “Software” Henley

One of the biggest questions I always get asked as a consultant is what/how/why should I backup in my business, and how should I plan my Disaster Recovery and Business continuity around that backup?

The specific answers to these questions depend on a number of factors, but this blog should give you some clear guidelines and techniques to solve them.

A quick few definitions:

Business Continuity (BC) - this is the approach that says ‘How can I keep my business going should something happen?’
Disaster Recovery (DR) - this is the approach that says ‘What do I do if a disaster happens?’

The two are closely intertwined, but separate issues. Business Continuity is about what is in place to maintain business functions - and it includes plenty of non-IT related considerations (office space, stock, telephony, staff etc.). Disaster Recovery is about the short term plan to get from a failure state (i.e. servers stolen) back to a better state. DR is short term, BC is long term.

There is one important caveat with this blog - these are GUIDELINES. Individual businesses have individual requirements and these may not be correct for you.

To start with we’ll discuss the first question - what to backup?

What?

Firstly, the old rule of ‘backup it all up’ is somewhat flawed - data grows exponentially in all companies, and will overflow your backup method at some point. You may not simply have enough room to backup everything, or a big enough time window.

The simplest approach is to first have a good filing system, then break all your data into one of four categories.

The filing system is key to this - lots of SME business rely on Windows, Outlook and some kind of server yet a lot of them don’t have it setup to store everything in one place. This means each laptop, desktop and server has its own little set of critical data that isn’t backed up. The same can happen in a more corporate environment if the IT guys aren’t on top of this. This means your PC crashes and dies and you’ve just lost your business forecast. And then you are on the phone to a data recovery company and spending thousands of pounds (more on this later), or worse it’s been stolen and it’s now gone forever.

Centralising this is simple, but requires a bit of knowledge …

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