Really interesting video about big data and the potential growth. We believe that there is a massive opportunity for new businesses to be created to drive this market forward.
Big Data described in a video
August 29, 2012
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Posted by david ricketts
Deduplication and Autonomic Healing Make Data Recovery Fast and Easy
July 10, 2012A 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
Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Asigra Cloud Backup, Backup, Business, Data, Data deduplication, Data loss, LAN, Local area network | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
Integrate Data into Products, or Get Left Behind
July 9, 2012Over the last several years, interest in and excitement about analytics/big data/data mining has grown exponentially. Count me among its biggest enthusiasts, as I firmly believe the potential for the “this changes everything” discoveries are real!
I’m just as excited about “informationalization,” a concept that’s been around for a whilebut has been gaining speed in recent years. The basic idea is simple: Make existing products and services more valuable to your customers by building in more data and information.
Read More
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- BrainPad Accelerates Multiple Web Analytics Systems on Less Hardware : fusion-io (c24.co.uk)
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Posted by david ricketts
Who Is The Custodian Of Your data?
June 25, 2012We’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.
Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Apple, Backup, Data, Dropbox, Google, Hard disk drive, IPhone, Time Capsule | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
85% of 569 business executives and IT leaders report obstacles in managing and analysing data
June 7, 2012This is one of the results that Global Survey: The Business Impact of Big Data produced.
It’s not surprising. In the survey’s definition, “Big Data” comprises – in descending order of sources:
- Word documents
- spreadsheets
- customer databases
- presentations
- online portals / corporate sites
- instant messages
- social media news feeds
- other
- RSS feeds
- Friend Contact Lists.
Key findings show us that the data deluge is real. In fact, the majority of respondents report being overwhelmed by the amount of data in the workplace. Many employees feel constantly distracted by multiple streams of information – this is especially true of C-level executives.
Despite feeling overwhelmed, executives have an insatiable desire for more data. Companies appear to be addicted. The majority of respondents believe information will fundamentally change their business. And yet today, only a minority views their company data as a strategic differentiator. Most, instead, see it as a consequence of doing business.
Check the link out to read the survey
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Posted by david ricketts
80% of Your Data is Unstructured
May 4, 2012Eighty percent of an organization’s data is unstructured (Gartner 2010). Documents are being created constantly by virtually all members of an organization with access to a laptop or workstation, and saved on file servers and SharePoint servers, where they remain for long periods of time—often indefinitely. Unstructured data represents an enormous amount of organizational data inventory.
Unstructured Data Growth Is Exponential
Not surprisingly, with so many individuals creating and storing files, the volume of unstructured data is growing at a phenomenal rate. Gartner estimates that in 5 years, unstructured data will grow by 650% – this roughly equates to 50% year over year growth.
A Greater Portion of it Needs to be Managed and Protected
As the data grows so does the scope of what it contains, and the potential ramifications associated with its loss, exposure, and misuse. As risks increase, they are naturally followed closely by new regulatory requirements, archive policies, intellectual property requirements, and personal confidentiality laws mandating additional protections. In The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?, John Gantz and David Reinsel write, “The number of things to be managed is growing twice as fast as the total number of gigabytes […] By 2020, almost 50% of the information in the Digital Universe will require a level of IT-based security beyond a baseline level of virus protection and physical protection. That’s up from about 30% this year. And while the portion of that part of the Digital Universe that needs the highest level of security is small – in gigabytes and total files – that portion will grow by a factor of 100.”
Data protection is necessary to safeguard an organization’s customers, employees, business partners, and investors. It is fundamental in securing intellectual property and competitive edge, and for maintaining the organizational trust that allows it to properly function. Every organization has at least a modicum of customer information, employee information, product design documents, HR documents, legal documents, blue prints, images, audio and video files that relate to the business and its customers — most organizations have a formidable amount. This data must be protected and managed.
For more information on Varonis and C24 please visit www.c24.co.uk
Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: Big data, BigData, Business, Data, Gartner, IBM, Organization, Services, Unstructured data | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
The modernisation of backup
April 30, 2012The 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
2 Comments | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Backup, Big data, Continuous data protection, Data, Disaster recovery, Information privacy, Organization, Remote backup service, Server Message Block | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
Backup vs Archiving
March 29, 2012There is some confusion amongst SMBs as to the differences between backup and archive. These two processes are mutually exclusive – they cannot occur at the same time and are different processes with different objectives. The most discernable issue around the key differences between the two processes relates to security, compliance and governance.
An archive is just a stored set of organized data and the goal is to achieve an intelligible data set for long periods of time and in a form that enables granular data retrievable. This is important for businesses in highly regulated industries that include healthcare, legal, banking and securities.
Archived data can be stored on multiples types of devices including tape, disk and in the cloud. There are benefits to each; however it is important to determine the length of time for which you will need to keep your archives and the most cost effective means for your business is without sacrificing the integrity of your archives.
Here are the thinks you should consider when thinking about data archiving:
•The archive needs to be able to operate with different data collections while treating them at the same level of integrity — individual data records from a database as well as entire documents
•The access speed of an archive can be slow, but archive should have an extremely high level of reliability
•Data integrity must be maintained over the entire period of the archive existence – there is no point in having an archive that you can’t trust
The key reason for the existence of a backup is to provide an alternative data source in case the primary data source is corrupted or destroyed. Backups are copies of data designed for short-term storage and its most identifiable characteristic is that it will go through frequent replacement and update under controlled circumstances. At that point, the old backup will become less relevant (or irrelevant) for operational purposes and the data will need to be backed up again.
Here are the things you should consider when thinking about data backup:
•The backup needs to be quickly accessible
•The backed up information should survive with full integrity and availability for several months on the backup media
•The backup should be able to span multimedia media (if backup set is larger than media capacity)
•The solution should be intelligent enough to enable different backup sets (full backup, incremental backup, differential backup, etc)
While backup and archive solutions are both very important, they provide two very different functions. It’s important to take the time to understand the difference between the two or consult a managed services provider that can help you better assess your business needs.
1 Comment | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: Backup, Business, Computer data storage, Data, Incremental backup, Managed services, Site Management, Storage | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
When it comes to backup, recovery is key
March 20, 2012When it comes to the cloud backup of data, it seems that we’re constantly bombarded by technologies, speeds and feeds, expensive and low cost solutions, and who’s best out there. We all know backup is important, but sometimes I think that because backup is such a main focus for so many vendors, we often forget WHY we backup in the first place. (So now everyone is saying, “to recover data you idiot.” Keep reading…)
When we look at the SMB space, we’re typically looking at an IT staff of one or two people. These people are also heavily over tasked, and backup is just one of the unglamorous and mundane tasks that has to be done. Not only is the IT staff heavily over tasked, more often than not they’re constantly juggling a “break and fix” solution because of being heavily under budgeted. So at 5:00pm every day, IT has to go into the server room/wiring closet and put in today’s backup tape in hopes that a successful backup is completed by the morning. Sounds simple enough right?
Now, everyone’s entitled to a little time away from work now and again. This is where everything that is bad that can happen, WILL. Now that our faithful IT person is away, this usually gets delegated over to the office manager. Prior to taking vacation, there is a quick meeting that takes place to show our office manager where the tapes are, and what to do on a daily basis in order to get our daily backup done.
Unfortunately what that IT person FAILS to do is show our office manager how to RECOVER data and systems should they need to. Doesn’t it make sense that a backup is useless if we can’t recover from it? So how does showing our office manager how to backup protect the business from downtime should there be a data or system loss event? IT DOESN’T! What if our IT person was out for an entire week and the company lost their Exchange, SQL or other critical server on the first day with nobody having the competency to restore it? The company won’t close down until it’s restored, but how are we expected to continue operations?
I hope that if you’ve gotten this far in this story your head is nodding in agreement to some degree.
Now, let’s look at this exact same scenario if our IT staff from the same SMB Company offloaded the mundane task of backup to a service provider. There would be no need to worry about that tape at 5:00pm every day. No need to hope and pray for a successful backup job to be completed the next morning as our service provider monitors this on our behalf. No need to worry about having to go and ask for capital budget because we have out-dated backup hardware. No need to worry about going on vacation (and yes, IT guys worry about things going wrong when they go on vacation), and no need to train non-technical staff to perform technical operations that effectively don’t serve much of a purpose in the absence of the IT people to begin with.
While that IT person is enjoying their vacation, should there be any data loss, or system outage, our trusted service provider is available 24×7 for anyone in your organization to call to enlist their help to recover (yes, they provide those type of SLA’s for you!).The best part of all of this is that it’s all rolled into a low cost monthly service.
If you’re ready to alleviate the pressure on your internal IT staff, please visit www.c24.co.uk
1 Comment | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Backup, Cloud computing, Data, Hardware, Information technology, Site Management, SQL, Storage | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
Data storage is on everyones mind
March 15, 2012According to Gartner in 2010, 47% of enterprise survey respondents ranked data growth in their top three challenges. The steady growth in the pace of file creation and systems to save all of those files shows no hint of a slowdown.
In 1986, only 1% of data was stored digitally. In 2007, it was 94%. Enterprises are storing 7 exabytes of data and consumers, 6 exabytes. And while individuals generate 75% of the information in the digital universe, enterprises have some liability for 80% of information in the digital universe at some point in its digital life.
Take a look at this infographic that illustrates some interesting statistics about data growth and how it’s being stored. We also define the various technologies you can use for data storage from cloud to dedicated. Hopefully it gets you thinking about what you or your company is doing when it comes to data storage. If you need to address your data issues please contact us for advice.
Leave a Comment » | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Retail IT Solutions | Tagged: Big data, Business and Economy, Data, Data storage device, Data Storage Services, Exabyte, Gartner, Hardware, Storage | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts
