8 out of 10 employees turn to ‘stealth cloud’ for quick IT fix, putting company data in danger

November 1, 2012

84 per cent of employees are putting company data at risk as they secretly access consumer cloud solutions such as DropBox and SkyDrive in the workplace, says Computacenter research, Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services. With no visibility of files available to IT managers, employees are opening networks up to potential security threats.

The research, conducted amongst 150 IT decision makers highlights that employees are being forced to turn to consumer cloud products to share files as current business systems simply cannot offer the same level of service.

“Stealth cloud is a major issue for organisations,” says Paul Casey, Cloud Practice Leader Computacenter. “These cloud products are very convenient, easy to access, simple to use and perfect for remote working. Unfortunately, most IT departments don’t offer similar file sharing tools which are secure and as a result are losing the battle to keep company data on the office network.

“The second an employee stores files and data using a solution such as DropBox, IT managers lose all visibility of what is going on and potentially confidential information and intellectual property is open to security threats and breaches.”

These threats are understandably keeping IT managers awake at night with 56 per cent worried about possible security breaches and a further half wishing they had full visibility of what data is stored within the cloud.

Casey concludes: “It is imperative that businesses address this problem now. It is clear that everyone knows the risks of consumer cloud products, but until the correct solutions are put in place or alternative sanctioned solutions, employees will continue to turn to consumer clouds to get the job done – no matter what the consequence might be.”

If you would like advice on the creation of private ‘dropbox’ type technology please contact http://www.c24.co.uk for more details

Thanks to http://www.cloudcomputing-365.info/news_full.php?id=23373#

 

 

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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

Its all about the recovery

April 4, 2012

Enterprises and vendors alike often focus so much on data backup that sometimes they forget about the reason that they backup the data. Customer’s focus should be on data Recovery not data backup.

All vendor solutions in the marketplace backup customer data but it requires real data stewardship to ensure that the data can be restored when needed. Over our 24-year history, Asigra has developed best practices around data stewardship to ensure data restorability if the customer looses a file, disk, machine or the entire facility.

The 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. Filesystem corruption

Access to metadata is not sufficient because bad sector on a disc can render metadata unreadable.

Following data integrity and consistency check functionality is embedded in Asigra software to ensure, data restorability:

  1. Ensuring data consistency – this process ensures that all the data components have been collected sequentially by the DS-Client (the data collector at the enterprise customer’s premises) before sending the data to the DS-System.
  2. Ensuring all data has arrived offsite before storage – Asigra’s DS-System (the online data repository) writes 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 runs on the DS-System in the background, scans the entire storage to ensure data integrity. Since the data at the DS-System is encrypted, the “Autonomic Healing“ process checks links between the data blocks, compares digital signatures between different components for inconsistencies. When corrupted data is uncovered, it is marked as corrupted and a notification is sent to the DS-Client to resend the portion of that data that was marked corrupted. This ensures that the data is always recoverable in case of a disaster.
  5. Backing up the DS-Client database to the DS-System – this ensures that if the DS-Client is lost it can easily be rebuilt with the appropriate backup structure.

When you’re shopping for a backup solution, please inquire from 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). If you require further information please contact C24 or visit www.c24.co.uk

 

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Posted by david ricketts

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