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Employee devices bring added security concerns

By Cindy Bates

The explosion in recent years of mobility solutions and ‘bring your own device’ policies has had a big impact on small businesses.

In fact, 52 percent of information workers across 17 countries report using three or more devices for work, according to research from Forrester and 61 percent of workers mix personal and work on their devices.

On one hand, there are huge benefits for organizations and employees — employees can be far more productive and work on the go with untethered access to the information they need. Business owners can also realize cost savings while reducing the time spent managing IT.  Yet, there are risks: namely, how do businesses protect confidential information from leaking outside of the organization when employees can access and store data in a multitude of ways across devices.

When employees use personal devices for work, they can be mishandled inadvertently, like an accidental forward of a confidential mail, or in more nefarious ways, such as a hacker gaining access to confidential information through stolen credentials.  According to a Verizon data breach investigation report, 75 percent of network intrusions used weak or stolen credentials to gain access.

It’s important to have a strong device policy in place but even when the rules are clear, there is room left for costly errors. CEB found that as many as 93 percent of employees admit to violating information security policies. That means, depending on your business, there is a wide variety of data that could be at risk.  It may be customers’ personally identifiable information, such as in healthcare, retail or financial institutions, or company confidential information, such as trade secrets, company financials, or employee records.  With so much data available, traditional company firewalls and perimeter solutions no longer suffice to protect confidential information wherever it lives.  Today, many small businesses are cobbling together a number of solutions to attempt to solve this problem.  But none tie it all together until now.

Microsoft has developed Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), which is the only comprehensive solution that protects information assets across four layers: user identity, content, applications & cloud services, and devices.  When combined with Office 365, it offers native protection for applications and services. Best of all, it’s about half the cost of competitive solutions. Not only is EMS flexible and easy to integrate, it offers enterprise-grade security for small businesses. Key security features include:

• Threat detection: Detect abnormal user behavior, suspicious activities, known malicious attacks and security issues right away.

• Conditional access: Control access to applications and other corporate resources like email and files with policy-based conditions that evaluate criteria such as device health, user location etc.

• Single sign-on: Sign in once to cloud and on-premises web apps from any device. Pre-integrated support for Salesforce, Concur, Workday, and thousands more popular SaaS apps.

To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617

Network Assessment & Technology Roadmap

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Azure Backup’s cloud-first approach and why it matters

By Shreesh Dubey as written on azure.microsoft.com

Backup is all about how quickly you can be back up from a disaster or data loss situation. On this World Backup Day, this blog post is dedicated to explaining Azure Backup's cloud-first approach and how it helps you be back up quickly and securely. 

Backup is a deeply entrenched market and companies generally tend to stick with their backup solution unless there are major shifts in the IT infrastructure. When such a shift occurs, companies are open to evaluating alternate backup solutions that offer significant value tied to that infrastructure shift. Virtualization was a hardware infrastructure inflection that happened in the 2000s that allowed companies to significantly reduce their IT costs with the consolidation and portability benefits offered by virtualization. It also allowed new backup players to emerge and the ones that delivered significant value tied to virtualization became successful. The infrastructure inflection currently underway is the shift to the public cloud and Azure Backup has taken a cloud-first approach to deliver maximum value for backup scenarios in a cloud-transformed IT environment.

Cloud-first value propositions

These are the benefits customers would likely expect in backup scenarios as they augment the public cloud to their IT infrastructure:

1. Consistent management experience for Hybrid IT: Companies will be in a hybrid model where in addition to the on-premise IT, they will have a cloud foot print that has IaaS (“lift-and-shift applications”) that possibly extends to PaaS (“born-in-the-cloud applications”) and SaaS (O365). It is important to have a consistent experience to manage backups across the IT assets in this hybrid model.

2. Agility: Business owners are seeking more agility offered by the public cloud where they can deploy solutions from the marketplace to meet their business needs. From a backup perspective, an application admin should be able to sign up for backup and do self-service restores without having to go through a central IT process to provision compute/storage in the cloud to enable backup.

3. Reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): A subscription based model (PAYG) is an obvious benefit of the public cloud, but it is also important to consider overall IT cost for backup. For example, if you need to deploy additional infrastructure in the cloud (compute and storage) for backups your overall costs would be higher.

4. Freedom from infrastructure: This is one of the fundamental benefits companies seek when they move their IT to the cloud and since backup has a significant infrastructure footprint in on-premises IT (storage, compute, licenses, etc), an infrastructure-less backup solution would be a natural expectation for customers.

There are 3 possible approaches backup solutions can take to leverage the cloud inflection and it is important to consider how well they deliver on the above promises in each approach:

1. Cloud as storage: In this model, the backup solution leverages the public cloud as a storage target for backup either for the second backup copy or to replace tape backups. The customer still needs to manage storage in the cloud, pay for any egress costs for restores, and manage bulk of backup infrastructure that is still on premises.

2. Cloud as infrastructure: This is the next level where the customer can run the backup application in an IaaS VM, which can protect applications deployed in IaaS. While it does offer a similar experience, it can only protect IaaS VMs and not the other cloud assets (PaaS, SaaS) and has TCO implications. For example, a single IaaS VM only supports 32 TB of total addressable storage, which is far too small for a backup application so to back up at scale, customers need to deploy additional IaaS VMs, configure scale sets for availability and provision/manage backup storage, all of which adds to the overall TCO for backup. Also, as the name implies, it does not free the customer from infrastructure management which is a fundamental promise of moving to the cloud.

3. Cloud as platform: Backup can be built in a PaaS model to deliver backup as a service and architected to provide a consistent management experience to both on premises infrastructure as well as backup for born-in-the-cloud applications (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). Since all the service infrastructure is owned and managed by the service, there would be no additional costs for the backup and there is complete freedom from managing infrastructure associated with backup.

Azure Backup is architected from the ground-up as a first-class PaaS service in Azure as described in approach 3 and delivers on the cloud promises customers expect as they cloud transform their IT infrastructure. In addition, since it is a first-party service in Azure, it can also leverage other services in Azure to deliver value beyond backup scenarios. For example, rich monitoring and reporting using PowerBI or the capability to do advanced analytics on backup data in Azure.

Compelling backup scenarios enabled by the cloud first architecture

The cloud-first approach of Azure Backup provides unique benefits to customers which are either difficult or not possible in traditional approaches.

1. Native Backup for IaaS/PaaS: Azure Backup seamlessly integrates with IaaS VM by providing an enable-backup experience in the VM blade itself. A VM extension is deployed when the customer chooses to enable backup and with a few clicks, the IaaS VM is configured for backup. Backup can also be enabled via ARM templates and it supports all the features of IaaS VMs such as disk encryption, premium disks etc. This capability will be extended for SQL Azure, Azure Files, and other Azure PaaS assets like WebApps and Service Fabric for a first-class backup experience in Azure.

2. Restore as a service: One of the key concerns customers have when they store their backups in the cloud is the restore experience. There are egress costs, the time it takes to restore data back on premises and handling encryption requirements. Restore operation typically requires all the data has to be restored on premises or a restore appliance needs to be hydrated in the cloud to browse items from the cloud restore points. Azure Backup, restore-as-a-service feature uses a unique approach to mount a cloud recovery point as a volume and browse it to enable item-level-restore. The customer does not need to provision any infrastructure and the egress from Azure is free which are both unique value propositions of Azure Backup. This feature is currently available for IaaS VMS (Windows and Linux) and on premise Windows servers. The same capability for System Center Data Protection Manager and Microsoft Azure Backup Server will be available over the next few months.

   

3. Secure Cloud Backups: Azure Backup leverages Azure authentication services to provide multiple layers of security to secure cloud backups against malware attacks such as ransomware. While the predominant ransomware attacks are limited to infecting on-premises data, some of the more evolved ransomware attacks also target backup copies of the data. Typical infections include reducing backup retention, re-encrypting data, and deleting backup schedule/copies that are initiated from compromised machines.  Azure backup has several layers of protection to prevent and alert against such attacks.

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Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%

Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.

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Azure Site Recovery & Backup

As statistics go, it’s telling.  Ninety percent of executives recently surveyed agreed that they needed a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. Is your organization one of the 90 percent still without a BCDR plan? If so, we can help.

Drive Business Results Through Microsoft Azure Site Backup & Recovery (ASR)

Simple, Automated Protection: With Azure Site Recovery, protect Hyper-V, VM Ware, and even physical servers. Orchestrated recovery of services in the event of a site outage at the primary data center. Create multiple recovery plans to fail over only certain applications when you have a particular failure in your data center. Test Recovery with Confidence. The Test Fail-over feature ensures you have confidence in the recovery solution and meets SLAs for your business. Perform planned fail overs with zero loss of data when you know about a disaster situation in advance.

Did you know...

According to research by the University of Texas, only 6% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, while 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years. ASSESS, ENABLE, and CAPTURE with your business' Azure Site Recovery plan. Call 800-208-3617 to get started!

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5 keys to simplified mobile protection

Mobile devices - Manage your company resources, regardless of device

Apps - A single platform to manage every app

Data - Protect data wherever it goes

Infrastructure - The foundation that enables mobility

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Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%

Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.

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How to Survive Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday brings a lot of great things, like crazy discounts, free shipping codes, and the best deals for online shopping.  The holiday also brings a  lot of bad things, like data breaches and server crashes.  As your employees (and customers) may be online shopping all day, don't let your company data go unprotected.  A Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution can keep your business safe while the sales commence.

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Securing productivity, collaboration and enterprise data is critically important as organizations digitally transform.

3 Obvious Reasons You Need A Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan

• You need to protect your company data from security threats and hackers. Did you see all the recent news of political breaches by hackers who exposed “secure” data?

• Natural disasters do occur and 90% of companies that experience one week of data downtime go out of business within 12 months.

• Systems do crash, data gets erased or corrupted, viruses attack.

With vast quantities of vital data moving through your business, even with limited resources and budget, it is critical for an organization to have a true business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. This is the only solution to deliver an advanced insurance policy against loss of data and downtime.

Managed Solution provides a Business Continuity/Backup & Disaster Recovery Service to protect data from loss and prevent costly downtime in the event of a catastrophic server failure.
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Learn More About Backup & Disaster Recovery

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