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Protect and extend your datacenter

As written on microsoft.com

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.

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BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY

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United Airlines Uses Azure Site Recovery to Build a Disaster Recovery Solution

Source: customers.microsoft.com

To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”

Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.

With Azure Site Recovery:

• Safeguard complex workloads against outages

• Support heterogenous environments (including Hyper-V)

• Leverage computer resources

• Reduce infrastructure costs by migrating workloads to Azure

Using Azure as a destination for disaster recovery eliminates the cost and complexity maintaining a secondary site, and replicated data is stored in Azure Storage, with all the resilience that provides.  Site Recovery provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. You can also run planned failovers with a zero-data loss for expected outages, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. After failover you can failback to your primary sites. Site Recovery provides recovery plans that can include scripts and Azure automation workbooks so that you can customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications.

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.

Learn more about professional services provided by Managed Solution

Network Assessment & Technology Roadmap

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

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Disaster Recovery Service with Azure

Source: azure.microsoft.com

Any technology user knows the worst feeling is watching your screen go blank and knowing your data is lost.  Microsoft Azure has a Disaster Recovery Service to ensure your data and devices are protected, no matter what comes your way.  Orchestrate your perfect disaster recover plan with:

• Automated protection and replication of virtual machines

• Remote health monitoring

• Customizable recovery plans

• No-impact recovery plan testing

• Orchestrated recovery when needed

• Replication to—and recovery in—Azure

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Replication and disaster recovery to Azure

Replicating your workloads to Azure enables new capabilities. Applications can be Migrated to Azure with just a few clicks, or burst to Azure temporarily when you encounter a surge in demand. Run reports and analytics on copies of production workloads in Azure without impacting users. DevTest new versions of applications with copies of live data, and then seamlessly put the new version into production in your datacenter.

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Simple, automated protection and disaster recovery in the cloud

Your environment can be protected by automating the replication of the virtual machines based on policies that you set and control. Site Recovery can protect Hyper-V, VMware and physical servers and you can use Azure or your secondary datacenter as your recovery site. Site Recovery coordinates and manages the ongoing replication of data by integrating with existing technologies including System Center and SQL Server AlwaysOn.

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Orchestrated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)

Automate the orderly recovery of services in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter with Site Recovery. Bring over applications in an orchestrated way to help restore service quickly, even for complex multi-tier workloads. Easily create disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure classic portal, where they are stored. The disaster recovery plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand, including the execution of custom Windows PowerShell scripts and Azure Automation Runbooks, and pauses for manual interventions. Customize networks by mapping virtual networks between the primary and recovery sites, and test disaster recovery plans whenever you want without disrupting the services at your primary location.

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The Managed Solution team would like to congratulate Alexander Soler on completing an in-person training and competency exam for Storagecraft last month. Alex is now a StorageCraft Certified Engineer, with an expertise in backup and disaster recovery.

Since the launch of the Home Run Derby program in May 2015, engineers have successfully passed over 5 dozen exams.

3 Obvious Reasons You Need A Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan

1. You need to protect your company data from security threats and hackers. Did you see how cheating site Ashley Madison was breached by hackers who exposed "secure" user data?

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

3. 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. Learn more.

By Jef Cozza / NewsFactor Network

There may finally be some good news in the war against spam. The overall percentage of spam among e-mail messages dropped to 49.7 percent last month, the lowest level since 2003 and the first time the figure has been below 50 percent in more than a decade, according to a new study by Symantec.

Symantec reported its findings in its "Symantec Intelligence Report" for the month of June. Enterprises in the mining sector had the highest spam rate, at 56.1 percent, according to the report. The manufacturing sector was a close second at 53.7 percent. The finance, real estate, and insurance sectors had the lowest of any industry, at 51.9 percent.

Spammers seemed to treat all businesses pretty much the same with regard to size, however. On average, companies experienced a spam rate of between 52 percent and 53 percent no matter the number of employees. The only outlier to this pattern was companies with 251-500 employees, which experienced a 53.2 percent spam rate.

Phishing Falling

Although it may have seemed as though attacks were on the rise last month with a number of high-profile hacks, phishing and malware-based attacks actually fell slightly in June, as one in 2,448 e-mails was a phishing attack, down from one in 1,865 in May. Manufacturing was once again the biggest target for spear-phishing attacks, as 22 percent of all such attacks were directed at manufacturing organizations. Nevertheless, that number is down from 41 percent the previous month.

Phishers also continued to concentrate their efforts on both the smallest and largest companies, with enterprises with 1 to 250 employees experiencing the most attacks, and companies with more than 2,501 employees in second place.

The number of vulnerabilities also declined in June, down to 526 reports from 579 in May. There was also one zero-day vulnerability reported last month, stemming from Adobe Flash Player, the same number as in May.

Not All Good News

Despite the good news, there were several troubling developments in Symantec’s report. There was a grand total of 57.6 million new malware variants reported in June, up from 44.5 million created in May and 29.2 million in April. The increase in malware variants may indicate that hackers are changing tactics, according to Symantec.

“This increase in activity lends more evidence to the idea that with the continued drops in e-mail-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape,” Ben Nahorney, cybersecurity threat analyst at Symantec, said in the report.

In addition to the increase in malware variants, ransomware attacks were up in June, with over 477,000 detected during the month. While still below the levels seen at the end of 2014, June represented the second month in a row that ransomware attacks increased since reaching a 12-month low in April. Crypto-ransomware was also up in June, reaching the highest levels since December.

On social media, meanwhile, hackers continued to rely primarily on manual sharing attacks, which require victims to propagate the scam by sharing content themselves. In the last 12 months, manual sharing attacks accounted for more than 80 percent of social media attacks.

Source: http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Spam-Falls-to-Lowest-Level-in-Decade

Data Loss: Risk Management, Backups, and Disaster Recovery: By George Fedoseyev, Server Engineer, MCSE: Server Infrastructure

Throughout my consulting career, I have always viewed business continuity as one of the main areas of focus. It does not matter whether we are working with a home user or a large corporation – the customer’s data integrity has always been and will be priority number one. It is imperative to pause your day to day operations and find the time to think about the potential consequences of ignoring your backups, not having disaster recovery, or performing risky activities.

It always surprises me the amount of unnecessary risks the IT departments take. When performing system cutovers, migrations, and upgrades it does not take much to check on the status of the backups for the systems one is working on. In the unfortunate circumstance when the backups are not adequate before the scheduled migration, the migration or any activity should be postponed until the backup situation is resolved. Often IT departments are under heavy pressure from other business units to deliver under strict deadlines; however, data loss should never be allowed to occur. As a Server Engineer at Managed Solution, we strive on providing the highest quality work and minimizing risks. I am proud to state that Managed Solution has great guidelines to mitigate risk when it comes to backups with our BDRs, practices to check backups prior to cutovers, and overall awareness of the situation. I am happy to see engineers back out of risky projects and put a hold on cutovers involving risks of data loss until the underlying issue is resolved.

Every business should view their backups as the cornerstone of IT. Go to your IT department right now and ask them how confident they are in their backups and how much backup history can your existing system provide. Are you satisfied with the response? If you are a small or medium size business, or even a large one, the answer might be no. Why is this the case? Why do businesses often ignore the most crucial aspect of IT operations or do not invest enough to make sure that their business is resilient to data loss? This is the question that we often ask our clients when planning to build out their environments. Under certain conditions a poorly timed backup and server failure can cause irreparable damage to the business or even force it to close its doors for good. It is strongly encouraged to re-evaluate your backup and disaster recovery plans as often as possible and to ensure that they are aligned with the business needs.

“Hey, I’m mitigating risk according to best practices and my backups are in good shape. I got my bases covered.” I’m sure we are all happy to hear that from any client. There is a small culprit, however. Where will the backups be restored to? Is there enough server resources available to absorb the full load of another failed server? How long will it take a vendor to deliver another server to your location, if not? What are your options if your primary file server with 5 TB of data goes down? How long will it take to restore all that data? All of these questions should be considered and discussed with stakeholders before the disaster strikes.

When any IT professionals follow risk management, backups, and disaster recovery best practices, they can come out looking like heroes in an otherwise very poor-looking situation. These practices will reduce the amounts of business productivity and financial losses, stress, and overnight repairs. Do not wait until it is too late, learn on mistakes of others, and prevail and prove your system is ran by a true professional!

About the author:
George Fedoseyev is a server engineer with over ten years of experience working in Information Technology field. Most of his professional career George has worked with as a managed service provider focusing on infrastructure, messaging, and SharePoint design and implementation. Originally from Saint-Petersburg, Russia, George has moved to sunny San Diego in the early 2000.

Articles by George Fedoseyev:

• Data Loss Risk Management Backups and Disaster Recovery

• Password management…why should I care?