More Data, More Problems? Enterprise Data Protection in the Era of Big Data

July 2, 2012

The explosion of data available today has been both a blessing and a curse to enterprises in all verticals. The ability to collect, store, mine, and analyze huge quantities of data has changed the way that companies do business, providing a competitive advantage to those companies that can best leverage their big data. According to a report by Mckinsey Global Institute, “a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent.” Such an advantage is hard to ignore. Yet the increased storage and use of this data increases the complexity associated with securing that data.

As concerns around data security grow apace with the adoption of big data mentality, some companies struggle to find the balance between collecting enough data to compete and ensuring that their business is not threatened by the likelihood of a compromise. Data protection remains a vitally important element. In fact as more data is collected and stored, data protection should become a more prominent concern for enterprises.

Big data can contain many different categories of sensitive data – customer data, corporate information, and even intellectual property. The vast majority of the data is in semi-structured or unstructured format. Both the quantity and the structure of the data bring with it concerns about security and close on its heels, performance. However, performance doesn’t need to be an issue when considering theencryption of big data. Technological innovations, such as IBM’s AES-NI, can help companies have their data and use it, too.

 

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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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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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Backup vs Archiving

March 29, 2012

There 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.

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When it comes to backup, recovery is key

March 20, 2012

When 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

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Data storage is on everyones mind

March 15, 2012

According 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.

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Backup Lifecycle Management : An Overview

October 27, 2011

Backup Lifecycle Management doesn’t receive much hype, but BLM is an integral part of how small businesses and enterprises backup, recover and restore data. While it might seem obvious, the data critical to business operations does not need to be treated the same as that which is not critical. With BLM, data is managed for long-term archiving and automated searching/restoration.

This is where the method of storing data in the cloud becomes more important – managing information based on how important it is to a business can save money when it comes to cloud storage and backup.

Aligning the cost of backup with the value of data ensures that less important information gets relegated to lower cost, lower performance devices. BLM works by categorizing data into two different types: Active and inactive data.

  • Active data is information that a business needs to stay operational. It’s understood as information that is critical to run an efficient business.
  • Inactive data is defined as information no longer needed to keep the business up and going. With new low-cost technologies for archiving data, including cloud storage, enterprises no longer need to be concerned about being unable to retrieve information from tapes or microfilm.

As information moves from being ‘active’ to ‘inactive’, it’s also moved through a tiered storage system, where higher priority data is stored on higher performance, more expensive devices. Inactive data is relegated to lower-cost, lower-performance devices for storage.

This is the most important aspect to how data is efficiently and effectively managed. What’s essential is understanding how information is used, and how long it needs to be retained. Using this information, companies can develop strategies to manage data (ie. A plan for how it’s to be stored) and minimize the cost of storing it.

For highly regulated industries, such as health care or certain service professions, such as legal or accounting firms, BLM can take on a new meaning when backup up in the cloud. Often the extra layers of legislation governing businesses in these industries change the rules for how long and where companies can backup data in the cloud.

It’s important to note that Backup Lifecycle Management is not a product, but a comprehensive approach to managing an organization’s data. For any business, it’s important to be able to define the policies governing how data is stored, at what point data becomes less operationally critical and when to automatically transfer data to tiered storage. Using this approach will decrease operating expenses, increase revenues, and manage corporate risk by distinguishing between the performance requirements of mission-critical applications, the rapid growth of reference data, and volumes of long-term archive data.

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When it comes to backup, recovery is key

October 5, 2011

When 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.

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The Storage Problem You Can’t Ignore?

July 6, 2011

It’s not news that storage is swamping IT budgets. Our 2011 InformationWeek Analytics State of Storage Survey shows the amount of actively managed storage expanding at around 20% per year. In our practice, we work with a few companies dealing with growth levels in excess of 50%. At this rate, most data centers double storage capacity requirements every two to three years. And as employees start using multiple mobile devices and consumer applications for work, that estimate could be conservative.

In our first InformationWeek Analytics Public Cloud Storage Survey, fielded in April, 59% of respondents using, planning to adopt, or assessing public cloud storage services called out email as the application most responsible for storage growth, followed by increasing demand from new or planned applications (58%). Seventy-six percent said they’re somewhat or very concerned about storage costs, and most CIOs we speak with insist they’re actively seeking to reduce those expenditures while still keeping data available. So you can imagine our surprise that, when asked exactly what they’re spending per gigabyte, nearly half our survey respondents said they have no clue. They have data retention policies, but enforcement is all over the map. When we asked about strategies that could lower storage costs, we got a virtual yawn: Just 10% plan to use external storage services within the next two years. Only half are taking advantage of storage virtualization. Sixty-one percent either make do with the management tools provided by their storage vendors (53%) or don’t actively manage storage resources at all (8%).

To view full article visit: http://eddblogonline.blogspot.com/2011/06/storage-problem-you-cant-ignore.html

Thanks to ediscovery news as well.

If you need to address your storage issues, C24 are experts at on premise and cloud based storage and are currently helpding countless organisations address this ever growing problem. For more information visit www.c24.co.uk

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Cloud Backup Leader Asigra Introduces Latest Model

June 6, 2011

Asigra, a leading cloud backup recovery and restore (BURR) software provider since 1986, is bringing a lot of firsts to the market with its latest offering. Today, the company introduced the Asigra Cloud Backup v11 with Cloud BURR industry firsts including: data protection of handheld devices, including tablets and smartphones; the first multi-tenanted client to reduce dramatically management resources; and the industry’s only automated cloud license server.

The new software also takes the title as the first enterprise-class cloud backup platform to protect the entire digital footprint, including storage, servers, desktops, and laptops; to provide data recovery and restore assurance (R2A) for consumers, and to establish new performance benchmarks.

“Our CEO back in 1986 lost his data and he was looking for a solution that would provide in his mind recovery assurance,” Ashar Baig, senior director of product marketing, told TMCnet in a recent interview about why Asigra’s new version was introduced. “Since then, we’ve used this term a lot called R2A which is recovery, restore, assurance, which means that the data is always going to be restored back to you.

” Asigra Cloud Backup v11 offers a variety of benefits including the fact that it will become an industry-first SMB and enterprise-wide cloud backup, recovery and restoration support for tablets and smart phones for end-to-end protection of the digital footprint.

This expanded support allows rollback to any point across any device to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO/RTO), according to company officials. The Apple App Store, Android (News – Alert) Market and Amazon Appstore now carry Asigra’s mobile backup app. In addition, the latest Asigra version guarantees that it will make good on its promise to return lost data, unlike other consumer backup solutions.

“Lots of consumer backup solutions out in the marketplace provide unlimited backup but they don’t provide recovery assurance that your data is going to be recoverable,” Baig said. “There’s no reason to back up the data if you are not going to be able to recover it so the one thing we do on the enterprise class is we offer R2A.

Our software does five things in the background to make sure that your data are recoverable.” Among those things are data integrity checks– data corruption checks and restore validation.

Other highlights of version 11 include an automated Asigra world-class cloud license server which provides the industry’s highest level of management automation of any cloud backup solution for service providers and end-users; a comprehensive and intuitive Web-based command center that provides complete visibility, control and management of the entire Asigra environment; up to 400 percent performance improvement; and support for 10 Gbps LAN interfaces on storage hardware, network switches and servers.

Moreover, the internal Asigra processes have been improved to handle much faster data read/writes. “How organizations protect their data is increasingly determined by user-driven trends, such as the integration of mobile devices in business environments,” David Farajun, CEO of Asigra, said in a statement. “The launch of version 11 reaffirms our commitment to overcoming the challenges of today’s evolving IT environment by providing the finest technology available to meet the needs of our customers. There simply isn’t a better end-to-end data protection solution in the world.”

Asigra Cloud Backup v11 provides a “simple, single, adaptable, and flexible” cloud BURR platform for end-to-end data protection – from handhelds to distributed data centers, according to company officials. The version offers data protection for Apple (News – Alert) iOS devices such as the iPad, iPod, and iPhone and Google Android–based tablets and smartphones.

“It will be important for IT professionals to deploy comprehensive backup and recovery strategies if they hope to reduce the staff requirements, capital expense and operational inefficiencies of managing multiple islands of data protection in the enterprise,” Dave Russell, research vice president for Gartner (News – Alert), said in a statement.

“Cloud backup, recovery and restore providers that deliver more holistic solutions will see their message resonate rapidly with the growing number of organizations plagued by backup challenges.” Added Baig, “We have 400,000 end customer sites that are protected by Asigra. We have been in business 25 years. But of all these end customer sites if anyone ever initiated a restore their data was always restored to them. That’s a very powerful statement to make in this day and age.”

Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication’s social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a bachelor’s degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Article source: http://it.tmcnet.com/channels/cloud-communications/articles/182569-cloud-backup-leader-asigra-introduces-latest-model.htm

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