The Healthcare Market Opportunityy

August 31, 2012

Over the past 6 months there have been a number of data breaches within the healthcare market. With data security breaches costing the U.S. healthcare industry about $6.5 billion a year1 and even with the recognition of these breaches, 50% of respondents to RedSpin’s (an IT security audit firm) say nothing is being done to protect data2, the healthcare market represents a huge opportunity for managed service provider’s to provide cloud backup and recovery services to address this growing issue.

Market Opportunity Abound

With the size and frequency of data breaches alarming the health care industry, now is the time to capitalize on these unfortunate security concerns by stressing the benefits that cloud backup services offer in terms of keeping records secure as well as ensuring Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance. With more than 19 million individuals affected by major healthcare information breaches since September 2009 and data breaches from unencrypted devices having increased 525% in 2011, this represents a huge market opportunity for managed services providers already selling services into the healthcare market, or those looking to sell to the healthcare market. Not just every managed service provider can effectively ensure adequate healthcare clinic / hospital data protection so ensure you can speak their vernacular and understand all the compliances and regulations required. As a managed service provider looking to offer or already offering cloud backup services, in order to go after the healthcare market, you need to ensure you have a HIPAA compliant cloud backup platform in place with a FIPS 140-2 certification being a huge bonus.

Why Healthcare Clinics/Hospitals Should Invest in Cloud Backup Services from Managed Service Providers to Protect Patient Privacy?

Investing in cloud backup services ensures a secure backup system for healthcare clinics/hospitals where BYOD is prevalent (as well as those that are not) – as not all backup can protect endpoint devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones. Investing in newer technologies improves the reliability and speed of recovery for patient data should there be a disaster and minimizes risk of data theft or loss by utilizing the highest encryption security possible ensuring data is encrypted in flight and at rest and only the healthcare clinic/hospital has the ability to decrypt. It also eliminates the shortcomings of tape backup which includes being expensive, vulnerable to obsolescence, potential inability to recover data due to tape failure or being lost/stolen when transported off-site.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to invest in cloud backup services, please visit www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Optimising your cloud backup

August 1, 2012

You’re ready to move into the cloud, but before you can get there you actually have to get your data to the cloud. Below are some tips on how you can optimize your first cloud backup deployment.

Backup the Most Important Files First

When you sign up for a cloud backup service, your trusted managed  service provider will have to make an initial backup before they can begin to back up your data incrementally. Depending on the amount of data that is required to be backed up and on the speed of the internet connection, this initial backup can take a long time to complete.

With the first backup taking so long, it is important to prioritize your data. You may want to organize your organization’s operational documents (word processing files, spreadsheets, etc) to be backed up first and have uncommon file types backed up last. Depending on your managed service provider, you may be able to determine which files are used most often in your business and back that up first.

Take Advantage of Bandwidth Throttling

Although your initial backup may take a long time, you don’t want it to affect your network during working hours while people are trying to get their work done via the internet. During the day, you should be able to strike a balance between getting your backups done and having enough bandwidth for the workday. After business hours and on weekends you can increase your bandwidth to focus on your backups.

Deduplication and Compression

It’s best to minimize the data being sent over the wire and to the cloud through deduplication, especially if you’re paying for backups per gigabyte on a monthly basis.

One way to decrease the amount of data being backed up (without sacrificing data protection) is to use de-duplication. When seeking the services of a cloud backup services provider, this feature should be standard. The way de-duplication is performed can often be unique to each managed service provider.

Some providers will only back up each file once and if the same file exists in multiple locations, pointers to the files will be created. Other service providers will provide block-level de-duplication. Rather than skipping duplicated files, the software which powers the cloud backup service will create a checksum for each block that’s being backed up and then uses the checksum value as a way of determining whether a duplicate block has already been backed up.

Keep a Local Copy of Backup Files

It’s important that you continue to store backups on premise – it will always be easier and faster to restore data from a local backup then from the internet. Local backups also allow you to further align the value of data with the cost of protecting it. Using the cloud for backup will allow you to recover in any situation when data loss occurs, but creating a second local backup is best for accidental file deletion or to quickly recover a single server in your network.

For more information or to request a demonstration please visit http://www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Deduplication and Autonomic Healing Make Data Recovery Fast and Easy

July 10, 2012

A data loss event is the stuff of nightmares for businesses. Something goes wrong – a natural disaster, a server crash, tapes are misplaced – and  crucial information is lost and business continuity is threatened.  Preventing this scenario is one of the main reasons businesses have backup and recovery procedures in place.

Backing up and storing data can have a significant impact on the operation of your IT department – performing backups over the network takes up bandwidth and the backup data  can take up significant storage space. That’s why it’s important to use a backup and recovery solution that provides deduplication, one that supports both local and client-side duplication at the LAN level as well on a global level across all protected sites. The solution should identify duplicate data by looking for the same data queued up for backup more than once and compare the data based on content, so it doesn’t matter if the files have different  names or are stored on different servers. After an initial, full backup, the solution should only transmit new or changed data so it doesn’t negatively affect bandwidth.

By eliminating redundant data, data deduplication optimizes the backup environments, reduces costs and makes recovery faster and easier.

However, data deduplication is just one necessary aspect of your cloud backup and recovery solution. Imagine going through the trauma of a data loss event only to find the data you recovered is useless because it is corrupted. Just when you thought you were out of the  frying pan, you find yourself in the fire.

To  keep that worst case scenario from happening, your backup and recovery solution  needs to perform Autonomic Healing. Autonomic Healing acts as an immune system  for your network by constantly scanning all backup data for corrupted files. This can include corrupted files as well as ones with logical inconsistencies  caused by third-party technologies, such as faulty file systems or network  packet loss.  Before the file can cause  any harm, Autonomic Healing sends notifications so a fix can be applied during  the backup process. Autonomic Healing ensures that backup data is constantly in  a valid state, so when it comes time to restore, you have confidence in the  data.

The only cloud backup and recovery solution that  provides you with both deduplication and Autonomic Healing is Asigra Cloud  Backup™. To find out more information on how Asigra Cloud Backup can ensure you can recover and  restore your data to resume business operations quickly, visit www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Who Is The Custodian Of Your data?

June 25, 2012

We’ve all had it happen – a hard drive crashes, or a lap top dies and valuable information is gone. Some people take the precaution of storing important information on another device, such as an external drive, or put it in the cloud by sending it to Google Drive or Dropbox. A common assumption among people who do this is that their data is safe and secure.

This assumption turns out to be wrong, as an individual found out when his Apple Time Capsule died. He was using the device to store important information, including photos of his child, and when the device failed he was unable to retrieve any of the files. Losing that information spurned him to bring a lawsuit against Apple for just over $25,000 to replace the hardware and for compensation for the lost memories. A lawyer by profession, this individual argues in his claim that the defect in the Time Capsule amounts to a breach of contract, and that it was Apple’s responsibility to protect and keep the information secure.

If he had read the service agreement closely, (but honestly, who does?) he might have realized before it was too late that Apple places the burden of backing up the data stored on a Time Capsule on the user’s shoulders. The Time Capsule is intended as a storage device, not a backup device, but the difference between the two is lost on most people, as the thinking goes that if you are storing your data somewhere other than your computer, you are in effect, backing up your data.

People think the same way about storing information on cloud services. Most people think that if you upload a document to Google Drive, it is safe and protected. However, as with Apple, Google places the responsibility of backing up that data on the user, so if a document were to go missing, it’s not Google’s responsibility to restore it for you. Last week Amazon suffered a power outage that made people unable to access certain cloud services for a period of a few hours. No data was reported lost, but if you were running a business and were unable to access some important information, it could have had serious consequences. A recent reportpublished by the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) states that a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 well-known cloud services since 2007 had an economic impact of more than $71.7 million US dollars.

What this all means is that you need to have a backup and recovery plan in place. Losing photos can be devastating, and for a business losing information can mean the end of the business. Instead of relying on devices that eventually fail and cloud services that can be interrupted, you need to use a reliable backup solution that will keep your data safe and also allow you to restore missing information easily. Click here to connect with a Powered by Asigra Service Provider who can provide you with information on the best way to backup and recover your data.

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Posted by david ricketts

Gartner Report: Backup and Disaster Recovery Modernisation

June 7, 2012

55% of Gartner’s 2011 CIO Survey respondents are currently pursuing modernization, suggesting that the CIO focus enabled funding and implementation of IT DRM modernization.

Once considered an afterthought or a very expensive insurance policy for a low-probability event, IT DRM is increasingly becoming an important data center initiative and an ongoing optimization priority for many client organizations.

In this report, you will find a thorough analysis of Gartner’s findings from their 2011 CIO survey and Gartner’s business recommendations which include:

  • Invest in IT disaster recovery management (IT DRM) modernization to meet increasingly stringent business resilience requirements.
  • Invest in classifying applications and services based on mission-critical requirements to develop appropriate recovery tiers that balance risk mitigation with affordability.
  • Charter a backup modernization initiative to assess current recovery capabilities, scope present and future recovery requirements, and prepare enhancement service options to be addressed.
  • Look to deploy, or more fully deploy, recent proven backup products, such as incremental forever or synthetic full processing, de-duplication, server virtualization improvements, and snapshot and replication integration.

 

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Posted by david ricketts

Gartner Report: Does Intergrated Backup and Archiving make sense?

May 28, 2012

“By 2015, only 15% of organizations will attempt to converge backup and archiving policies and processes, up from 5% today.”  – Gartner

Backup and archiving has long been thought of as complementary, yet few organizations have effectively implemented these technologies together. Deciding whether or not to unify backup and archiving is a tough decision that many organizations face. This complimentary Gartner research report outlines the pros and cons. You’ll learn the impacts of not implementing these technologies together effectively including:

  • Continuously increasing storage costs and increased governance risk
  • Failing to address users’ requirements
  • Not able to support legal, compliance and user objectives efficiently.

Check out the report to learn the top recommendations for integrated backup and archiving.

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Posted by david ricketts

Small Business Disaster Preparedness

May 8, 2012

Many small businesses will never recover from disasters, natural and otherwise, and the main reason for this is because business owners didn’t have a plan to recover their business. Many small businesses don’t have a business continuity plan in place to cope with these kinds of event and when they occur, the results can be devastating or catastrophic to life of the business. According to Gartner , 50% of businesses that experience a major disruption ultimately fail.

The most common business disaster is data loss, which can result from a number of causes including human error, hardware failure, natural disaster and theft. Fortunately data loss is easy to recover from if you have a backup solution in place.

  • Familiarize yourself with your data – know what you have, where it is and what is most important.
  • Consider your backup options. Your backup must be offsite, secure and available for recovery 24/7. One popular option that meets the above criteria, with the added benefit of ease of use and automation, is online backup. Other options include tape or backup to external media.
  • If you choose to outsource your backup needs, make sure that you choose a provider that offers security, monitoring and support.
  • Decide who will be responsible for either managing you backups internally or working with your selected provider to get your backup solution carried out.
  • Do a run-through of the recovery process. Backup is nothing without recovery, so be sure that you are familiar with the recovery process and confident that it works smoothly. Your provider should be happy to walk you through a test-recovery procedure.

Review your data regularly to be sure you’re backing up everything you need. For example, if you add a new server in your office, your backup should reflect this addition. This should be done every other quarter if not every quarter.

In the busy day-to-day operations of most small businesses, there is little time for planning for, or even considering the unlikely event of catastrophic technical failure. This is particularly true of small-to-midsize companies that typically have less IT infrastructure in place.

A little preparation could literally save your business!

Here are some of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself when determining whether or not your business is ready to recover from a disaster:

  • Do you perform backups regularly on every server and employee hard drive in your organization?
  • Do you regularly send your data to a safe, off-site archive?
  • Do you have a proven media, drive, software, and automation solution?
  • Does your current backup and recovery system meet your business uptime needs?
  • Do you use backup rotations to provide good versioning?
  • Do you know how fast your data is growing?
  • Is your backup scalable for this data growth?

Some ideas, for more information please contact www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Cloud Security and offsite back up

May 3, 2012

When looking for an enterprise-class Cloud Backup solution, you’ll need to understand what you want to achieve and the elements that are important to your organization. It’s definitely more than just backing up your data. There are many software offerings in the marketplace that boast their ability to restore at lightening speeds, but what often appears to be missing in the equation is the inability to provide a guarantee that data is restorable in its full integrity.

Below are some things to consider when looking at cloud data protection solutions:

Your data has to be conditioned constantly to ensure restorability. The following factors can cause data corruption:

  1. Disc malfunction
  2. Disc controller malfunction
  3. Bad sectors on the disc
  4. File system corruption

You should ensure the following data integrity and consistency check functionality is embedded in the software to ensure, data restorability:

  1. Data consistency – this process should ensure that all the data components have been collected sequentially by the data collector at the enterprise customer’s premises before sending the data to offsite storage in the cloud.
  2. Data has arrived offsite before storage – the online data repository should write all the data being backed up offsite to a temporary location, checks and ensures that all the data has arrived before storing it.
  3. Restore validation – this is an actual restore simulation that conducts an actual data restore to a temporary location to ensure data restorability. Think of it as the data restore dry run to prepare for the actual disaster.
  4. Autonomic healing – this automated process will run in the background and scan storage in its entirety to ensure data integrity. Data that leaves your firewall should always be encrypted, the “Autonomic Healing“ process will check links between data blocks and compare digital signatures between different components for inconsistencies. When corrupted data is uncovered, it is noted and a notification is sent to the originating database to resend the portion of that data that was marked corrupted. This ensures that the data is always recoverable in its entirety in case of a disaster.

When you’re shopping for a data protection solution, inquire with your vendor to ensure that the functionality they provide will restore your data, not just during a Disaster Recovery (DR) drill but in the event of an actual disaster (accidently deleted file, damaged hard drive, machine loss or lost site). There’s a lot you can outsource to the cloud, but responsibility isn’t one of them. Make sure you do your research and due diligence before choosing a cloud data protection solution.

For further information ref cloud back up please contact C24 at www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

The modernisation of backup

April 30, 2012

The data protection market has changed considerably over the past decade. There has been a fundamental shift away from relying solely on tape for backup and recovery to using cloud-based backup solutions to address challenges that include backup performance, reliability, and recovery time objectives.

With the proliferation of virtualised infrastructure, big data, the Consumerisation of IT, growth in remote and branch office data and the need for high availability, has introduced a new set of requirements for the software responsible for data protection and recovery.

While we’re in the cloud backup business, we understand the role tape may play as part of an overall backup strategy, especially for large enterprise organizations. With data that requires significant periods of retention; it makes sense to move backups onto lesser expensive devices – including tape.

With that being said, we don’t believe tape should be the primary method of backup for any organization of any size. There are significant drawbacks with using tape, especially in the SMB market where it is used as the primary means of backup. Here are some examples:

Limited Time for Backup

Tape is slow. It’s common to see once per day incremental or differential backups that follow a once per week full backups. Organizations don’t want to see backup operations significantly impact production resources, so these backup operations are pushed to the wee house of the morning and to weekends.

Slow Recovery

To put it bluntly, recovering from tape can be absolute hell. It’s slow, error-prone and can be difficult depending on the number of tapes for which data has to be recovered.

Equipment Challenges

It is not uncommon for tapes to be useable only in the drives that wrote the data in the first place with the software that did it. So, recovering with a new tape unit might not be possible.

Tape was once the de facto standard for backup and as a result of its many challenges and with functional needs increasing, the next generation of data protection and recovery options became available including both disk and cloud backup.

Here’s where I sell you on the cloud, right? Not quite, that’s the not the purpose of this post. I’m more interested in determining if you’re comfortable using outdated backup technology to keep your company going after disaster strikes? I also want to tell you that it’s important to modernize your data backup infrastructure if it is out of date.

How much of your business is at stake if you’re unable to recover your organization’s most important data assets after a disaster?

By looking at the marketplace, it appears that organizations of all sizes tend to be conservative when it comes to making large scale changes to backup infrastructure even though there are new processes and opportunities (deduplication, continuous data protection, incremental forever, etc.) that can be exploited to improve disaster recovery and streamlined operations.

I hope that by reading this post you’ll start to think more about your backup infrastructure. Interested in learning more about managed cloud backup services?

If you need further information please visit http://www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Getting started with cloud compliance

April 18, 2012

Cloud compliance issues arise as soon as you make use of cloud storage or backup services. By moving data from your internal storage to someone else’s you are forced to examine closely how the data will be kept so that you remain compliant with laws and industry regulations.

It’s a common misunderstanding that regulatory compliance requirements preclude many organizations being able to leverage outsourced, managed cloud services. Depending on the cloud services provider you choose, you may not only be able to meet your existing compliance concerns, but the cloud provider is likely to have controls and processes that improve your compliance program.

The main questions in regard to compliance:

Virtually every regulation requires organizations to adequately protect their physical and informational assets. To do this, there is an implied and assumed ability to control and prove:

  • What information is store on the system?
  • Where is the information stored?
  • Who can access the system?
  • Is the access appropriate?

All of these questions imply some level of ownership of the assets in question, and that is where cloud compliance issues become apparent. In the public cloud environment, you are able to answer the first of those questions with certainty; the other four however, end up posing a compliance problem.

In a typical corporate data center or a co-location center, everyone knows where the disk and physical server reside, and that fact can be proven during an audit. Even a shared service provider can typically tell you which physical systems you are utilizing and identify the data location for audit purposes.

As far as the “who” is accessing your data, you can control that inside your organization, but you also have to take into account that your provider’s staff can access your systems as well. The main people you need to be concerned about in this regard are the administrators, both systems and application. With that being said, regardless of who will have access to your application and storage data offsite, it should be encrypted before it leaves the boundaries of your organization

Finally, the question of “why” they need that access. This is basic as it relates to security – access should be based on job role and a clear description of the level of access needed should be provided.Working with a reputable managed service provider may be an excellent way to leverage expertise and processes you may not otherwise have in-house, and mitigate some risk by assigning responsibility to a 3rd party you can hold accountable to protect your data. The cloud is rapidly becoming the data protection platform of choice for highly regulated industries because more organizations are leveraging the expertise of these pure information-centric service providers.

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Posted by david ricketts

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