Do you or your current IT provider perform regular tests to ensure the recoverability of the stored data? Contact us for your free Back-up and Disaster Recovery Health Check and an account manager will contact you to conduct a 5 minute questionnaire to see how you match up to similar size businesses, get all your questions answered to ensure your corporate data is secure.
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.
As consumers we have become obsessed with connected devices. We like the idea of smart homes, smart cars, smart TVs, smart refrigerators or any machine that can be automated with sensors and an IP address. Yet fewer tasks in IT today inspire more fear than the prospect of protecting corporate networks from this proliferating wave of connected devices. The internet of things phenomenon expands the threat surface exponentially, in turn boosting business risk.
But CIOs often aren’t aware of all of the devices that make inviting targets for hackers. "One of the fundamental issues that faces the internet of things is knowing that they're there and giving them some identity,” says Gartner analyst Earl Perkins. "You can't manage what you can't see."
Factor in the hiding-in-plain-sight machines and BYOD devices, as well as emerging technologies that control office light fixtures, temperature and even window tint, and it's easy to see how vetting what's on the network will only get harder for CIOs. Securing internet of things is a primary focus of this week’s Black Hat USA conference, whose organizers told the Wall Street Journalthat they received 50 proposals for seminars related to infiltrating devices, including how a computer worm could spread smart lightbulbs, how to hack medical systems, and a new kind of ATM skimming device.
Matt Kraning, CTO of security software startup and DARPA spinoff Qadium, says CIOs are focusing on locking down devices operating on the network as a result of BYOD policies while the mundane teleconference systems are ignored. There are tens of thousands of such unified communications and collaboration systems installed in executive boardrooms around the world. These systems use dated protocols, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), aren't encrypted and are rarely kept current on patches.
Imagine this scenario: The entire C-suite huddles with the board for their quarterly meeting. The IP-enabled video conferencing system doesn't work so they call IT in. Turns out the system was properly blocked by the corporate firewall, consistent with corporate policy. But rather than cancel the meeting, the execs order IT to break through the firewall to get the system to work. The big no-no occurs when the IT team doesn't put the firewall back around the equipment, leaving the system open to an enterprising hacker who may eavesdrop on executive meetings.
"They grew up when the phone was just a phone," Kraning says of executives who don't realize the threat that such systems pose. "Most have no insider awareness of IoT and that persists the myth that the problem is not already here." He says mail servers are also potential threat vectors.
IoT security: a victim of market economics?
The enterprise is naturally only a subset of the broader world – one in which the increasing drumbeat of connected devices poses an even greater threat. Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016 and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. Protecting those devices, from smart cars to smart hot water heaters to smart TVs, remains a big problem partly because of a misalignment of economics, says security expert Bruce Schneier.
PCs and cell phones churn every 18 to 24 month so the companies that produce them have financial incentive to constantly refine the security of those devices. But people replace cars every 10 years, refrigerators every 20 and thermostats "never," says Schneier. "There exists no mechanism to patch them because it's not economically viable for third-parties," Schneier says.
The problems will mount as new devices emerge and they, along with the sensors and software used in conjunction with them get cheaper and last longer. “You don’t have the same ecosystem of upgrade in terms of patching, devices and operating system -- none of these things that in a computer world makes them better,” Schneier says. “When your furnace becomes part of the IoT and they say you have to replace the hardware on your furnace every two years... people are not going to do it.”
Assigning fault also plays a big hand in the complex market dynamics. When a perpetrator infiltrates a network through a software vulnerability, we point to the flawed software. But with connected devices forming what is essentially a digital daisy chain, it is difficult to attribute fault. "If you're refrigerator interacts with your router and hacks your Google account, whose fault is it?" Schneier says. "The market economy actually works against securing IoT."
Such security threats can snowball quickly, as Schneier wrote in a blog post last week: “Vulnerabilities on one system cascade into other systems, and the result is a vulnerability that no one saw coming and no one bears responsibility for fixing. The internet of things will make exploitable vulnerabilities much more common.”
An IoT security model
Qadium is tackling the IoT security problem with “global internet sensing” software that scours hundreds of terabytes of data generated by devices configured by a given organization. Indexing a hundred different protocols, calling out to all of the devices that reside on a customer’s network and gauging their responses for anomalies. It finds dark spaces in corporate networks CIOs didn’t even know existed.
“We look at the entire internetperpetually and turn it into an analytics challenge,” Kraning says. The goal is to say, “We know where all devices of interest to a company are.” Qadium’s customers include the U.S. Cyber Command and the Navy.
According to Perkins, who says Qadium competes with Bastile Networks, Great Bay Software and ForeScout Technologies, such technologies play a useful role in helping CIOs discover what’s on what he calls the “network of entities.” However, the challenge doesn’t end there. A second set of technologies is required to isolate and neutralize malware or other network incursions. Securing connected devices, he says, requires a multi-layer approach that involves providing the proper policy enforcement for existing devices and those that will come onto the network in the future. This is no trivial task.
"We've reached an era in computing now where we are able to project a pervasive digital presence into the edges of business and into the edges of life -- on the human body, in the human body, in the house, in the car,” Perkins says. Gartner estimates spending security technologies to protect the Internet of Things will top $840.5 million by 2020.
What does the future of IoT security look like? Schneier, who has closely watched the cybersecurity market evolve over the last three decades, says the federal government must provide regulatory oversight into cybersecurity by establishing a new federal agency – ideally a Department of Technology Policy – to regulate the industry, similar to how the FCC was created to regulate airwaves and the FAA guides airlines. For now, Schneier says the government remains woefully behind on IoT awareness.
Yet Schneier remains cautiously optimistic about the industry’s chances to solve the complex challenges – like it always has – over time and through trial and error. The solutions “will be like everything we do in computer security to date -- a hodgepodge of things that work pretty well," Schneier says. "We'll muddle through, screw it up and get better."
See how Japan Airlines will transform the way airline mechanics are trained with a mixed reality app built for Microsoft HoloLens. This is just the beginning of what JAL expects to achieve with HoloLens.
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Why Every Small Business Needs a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
As a digitally active business in 2016, you can’t afford to lose your data. Whether at the hands of a natural disaster, human error, or cyber attack, data loss is costly and extremely risky. That’s why you need a backup and disaster recovery solution.
As a small business owner, you’ve probably asked yourself this simple question at least once: “What is BDR?” Well, the most basic definition is a combination of data backup and disaster recovery solutions that are designed to work together to ensure uptime, diminish data loss, and maximize productivity in the midst of an attack, natural disaster, or other compromising situation. In other words, BDR solutions keep businesses safe when trouble strikes.
According to research by Security Week, the total volume of data loss at the enterprise level has increased more than 400 percent over the past couple of years and the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. With the rise of big data, cloud computing, and BYOD policies in the workplace, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for businesses to protect their private data.
IT Web suggests that the total cost of data breaches will be more than $2.1 trillion by 2019. This is in part due to the fact that small businesses don’t always take security seriously. They wrongly assume that it’s the big corporations that face the highest risks. Unfortunately, this is a false assumption.
A Verizon report says that small data breaches -- those with fewer than 100 files lost -- cost between $18,120 and $35,730. Unless these are expenses that you can easily sustain, it’s time to implement a BDR plan.
Five reasons why SBOs need a BDR plan.
When small businesses don’t have a BDR solution/plan in place, it’s typically because they’re unclear about the true value of BDR.
Let’s review some of the top benefits to give you an idea of why these solutions are so important to the health of your small business.
1. Protects against effects of natural disasters. Whether it’s a flood, earthquake, hurricane, blizzard, or other extreme natural disaster, there are plenty of uncontrollable circumstances that can cause your business to experience downtime. And, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, more than 90 percent of companies that experience at least seven days of data center downtime go out of business within a year. Let that sink in. While a BDR plan won’t prevent a natural disaster from occurring, it will protect your data and ensure that downtime doesn’t compromise your company.
2. Lessens impact of cyber attacks. As more and more data is moved online, cyber criminals are increasing their efforts and focusing on businesses that they believe are unprotected. In most cases, this means small businesses that appear vulnerable. Once again, a BDR plan can limit the impact of an attack and can prevent your business from losing valuable data.
3. Keeps client data safe. Do you store a lot of confidential client or customer data? If so, you can’t afford to lose this data or let it slip into the wrong hands. A BDR plan ensures that all of this information is properly stored and controlled. As a result, you don’t have to worry about damaging your brand reputation, should an unforeseeable incident arise.
4. People make mistakes. While natural disasters and cyber attacks are discussed more than anything else, the reality is that your own employees are sometimes responsible for the biggest data losses. Mistakes happen and a single poor choice can end up compromising data. That’s why it’s so important for businesses not only to train employees properly, but also invest in backup solutions.
5. Systems fail. Finally, we all know that hardware, machines, and other systems fail. Regardless of how much you spend on your technology, no solution is perfect. Even systems that come with 99.9 percent uptime guarantees will falter every once in a while. As such, businesses must invest in robust BDR plans that account for all of these risks.
What to look for in a BDR solution.
Once you determine that your business needs a BDR plan in place, how do you find the right solution? While every business is different, start by analyzing the following:
•Hardware compatibility. Depending on the hardware that your business uses, you may need a BDR solution that’s specifically tailored to your current setup. Keep this in mind as you compare options.
•Scalable pricing. As your business grows over time, you’re going to collect and store more data. A flexible pricing model will allow you cost-effectively to scale according to your demands.
Around-the-clock support. You never know when disaster will strike. Make sure that your BDR vendor has 24/7/365 technical support available.
•Strong reputation. Finally, it’s important to consider the BDR solution’s reputation. How long has it been on the market? What do customers say? The answers to these questions will tell you a lot.
If you can find a BDR solution that meets these four criteria, then you’ve probably found the right solution for your business.
Protect your business.
Nobody wants to assume that something bad is going to happen to their business – and hopefully you’ll never be exposed to any of the risks highlighted in this article – but the harsh reality is that you’ll likely face one of these issues at some point in the future.
There’s no way to prevent a cyber attack, natural disaster, technical malfunction or uncontrollable human error, but you can protect your business from costly data loss by investing in a solution that aids in data backup and disaster recovery. Frankly, it’s unwise to wait any longer.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
Backup and disaster recovery solutions powered by Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery, built on Microsoft’s trusted cloud platform, protect and extend your datacenter. Site Recovery’s replication capabilities help protect critical applications and extend your datacenter securely to Azure, enabling recovery, dev/testing and migration of applications to Azure—all while you control data privacy and access. Azure Backup is a scalable solution that protects your application data and gives you visibility into where and how the data is managed. Azure Backup retains data for up to 99 years with zero capital investment and minimal operating costs, helping you meet your compliance obligations.
The public cloud is disrupting how modern enterprises back up their mission critical applications. Operations Management Suite delivers a purpose-built, intelligent backup platform that makes Azure the ideal replacement for ailing legacy solutions. Azure Backup, an OMS service, protects your investments across your datacenter, hosted clouds, and on Azure.
With up to 99 years of retention, Azure Backup meets or exceeds even the most demanding regulatory and business requirements. You can depend on Azure’s largest portfolio of compliance standards and certifications in the industry.
Use Azure as your disaster recovery site and eliminate the capital and operating expenses of maintaining a secondary datacenter.
Leverage Azure’s secure infrastructure to test copies of your production workloads, without impacting production users, or test new versions of applications while maintaining updated production data.
Creating new workloads in the cloud is easy, but migrating existing productions’ applications can be a daunting task. Operations Management Suite makes migration chores a thing of the past. Site Recovery, an OMS service, effortlessly replicates complex production workloads and allows you to validate their functionality before performing a migration. Gain peace of mind with the operational assurance of state-of-the-art security and encryption of Azure.
Operations Management Suite delivers purpose built intelligent backup platform makes Azure the ideal replacement for ailing legacy solutions. Azure Backup, an OMS service, protects your investments across your datacenter, hosted clouds and on Azure.
You can depend on Azure’s largest portfolio of compliance standards and certifications in the industry.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
Azure Backup is a simple and cost-effective backup-as-a-service solution that extends tried-and-trusted tools on-premises with rich and powerful tools in the cloud. It delivers protection for customers’ data no matter where it resides: in the enterprise data center, in remote and branch offices, or in the public cloud; while being sensitive to the unique requirements these scenarios pose. Azure Backup, now in a seamless portal experience with Azure Site Recovery, offers minimal maintenance and cost-efficiency, consistent tools for offsite backups and operational recovery, and unified application availability and data protection.
Unified solution to protect data on-premises and in the cloud
99.9% availability guaranteed
Reliable offsite backup target
Efficient incremental backups
Secure—data is encrypted in transit and at rest
Geo-replicated backup store
Protect your critical assets wherever they are
Your data and applications are everywhere—on servers, clients, and in the cloud. Backup can protect your critical applications, including SharePoint, Exchange, and SQL Server; files and folders; Windows servers and clients; and Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machines.
Due to business or compliance requirements, organizations are required to protect their data for years, and over time this data grows exponentially. Traditionally, tape has been used for long-term retention. Backup provides a compelling alternative to tape with significant cost savings, shorter recovery times, and up to 99 years of retention.
Your backup data is secure over the wire and at rest. The backup data is stored in geo-replicated storage which maintains 6 copies of your data across two Azure datacenters. With 99.9% service availability, Backup provides operational peace of mind.
Backup is efficient over the network and on your disk. Once the initial seeding is complete, only incremental changes are sent at a defined frequency. Built-in features, such as compression, encryption, longer retention, and bandwidth throttling, help boost IT efficiency.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
On July 6, 2016, the workplace as we know it changed forever. Okay maybe not forever, but it has changed for as long as employees remain more or less obsessed with being "the very best, like no one ever was" (for full Pokémon theme song lyrics click here). According to staff reporter Tess Townsend of inc.com, Pokémon Go is creating distractions in a variety of office settings. One company has warned employees there will be consequences for playing at work, putting up a sign saying, "We are paying you to work, not chase fictional video game characters with your cell phone all day. Save it for your break time or lunch. Otherwise you'll have plenty of time unemployed to 'catch them all.'" In addition, a recent CareerBuilder survey shows about 24 percent of employees spend time at work on their smartphones playing online games (pasadenastarnews.com).
If this doesn't scare you, maybe the thought of your employee's phone with company data being stolen at a Pokémon Lure will. Ryan Miller of USA Today reports, "teens, whose ages range from 16 to 18, are suspected to be behind 10 to 11 armed robberies in St. Louis and St. Charles counties in which they allegedly used the app to bait victims". The teens reportedly used lures at Poke Stops to bring more people to an area, and then robbed them, including mainly stealing their smartphones. Now imagine if one of your employee's becomes a victim, leading to a major security breach at your company. Suddenly a fun, nostalgic game has cost your company a boatload of money.
But what if Managed Solution could give your business the tools you need to keep your employees on track, while also protecting your company data from theft at popular Poke Stops and Lures?
Keeping Your Data Safe while Employee's "Search Far and Wide"
You've just updated a document containing private client information and sent it to your top salesperson. Then, said salesperson finds a Poke Stop by his favorite pizza place featuring a Lure. He only needs to catch one more Eevee to evolve, so after grabbing a few slices, he heads over to the Lure. But BAM! out of nowhere two people wearing masks push him down, steal his phone, and eat his pizza. Now your company's private information is at risk for being viewed, shared, and possibly even sold. What do you do next?
The Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is the comprehensive cloud solution to address your consumerization of IT, BYOD, and SaaS challenges. As your employees are out getting robbed, EMS lets you protect your data with:
A comprehensive set of access control and data protection capabilities.
Self-service password reset for your people, to reduce helpdesk calls
Multi-factor authentication options for greater security
Machine learning-driven security reports for visibility and threat management
Selective wipe of apps and data for greater security
Information protection from the cloud or in a hybrid model with your existing on-premises infrastructure
Meet the needs of your mobile workforce—and their runaway devices.
The best part? With Microsoft EMS, you can instantly wipe a stolen device, with just one click. Now you no longer have to send passive aggressive emails warning employees about the dangers of Pokemon Go. As far as you are concerned, you can have peace of mind with your data safe and sound.
One of the highlights of Pokémon Go is getting players outside and on-the-go, but the downfall to this is employees need constant mobility with their work accounts so they can stay connected while making sure their eggs hatch. Office 365 has mobile apps available on both iOS and Androids. With Office 365, you can be sure that employees will still get your Outlook emails, be able to edit spreadsheets with Excel, and access OneNote - no matter where their Pokémon Go adventures take them.
Real-time co-authoring
Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and other Office tools make collaboration effortless with real-time co-authoring. Let multiple employees work on a single spreadsheet at the same time, so you can avoid constantly editing, sharing, re-editing, and re-sharing documents. Just make sure co-workers aren't making spreadsheets about where the coolest Pokémon are located nearby.
Collaboration and connectivity
As Pokémon Go has created more and more travel opportunities, Skype for Business prioritizes collaboration and connectivity to keep everyone in the office in the loop, no matter where they work from. If your employee is working outside to train at the gym by the office, Skype for Business lets you show them step-by-step how to do something on the new database by presenting your desktop so they can see exactly what you're doing on your screen. Communicating, collaborating, and connecting with remote employees (or simply those die-hard Poke masters), is perfectly attainable with Skype for Business on Office 365.
Productivity tracking
Track what employees are doing, so they know they need to stay productive, and you know when they're doing more Pikachu hunting than actual work. Office 365's Planner gives you the capability to create and assign tasks, both to yourself and to anyone within your company. For each task, you can state your progress, add files and links, and update with comments. This keeps both you and your employees on track, whether or not the nearby Pokémon gym just got taken over by Team Valor.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
