Tag Archives: cloud backup

The Importance of Backup Disaster Recovery (BDR)

Data Backup, ,
20161028

Cloud backup is a valuable part of a backup disaster recovery plan that ensures your data is secure.

Businesses rely on a complex network of servers to maintain their business operations, but their owners may not understand the various risks that exist in the present landscape. It’s important for business owners to choose different forms of protection against threats and to provide for disaster recovery. A comprehensive plan includes how to back up on-premise and off-premise servers.

Is Your Company at Risk?

Business servers and employee workstations are vulnerable to risks from inside and outside the organization. Your machines could have greater needs for backup disaster recovery (BDR) than you realize. It’s important to conduct a risk assessment to identify the key threats that could affect your servers. While yo might not buy a preventive solution for every risk, you can choose protective solutions for each server.

Do You Need More Equipment?

Your company may also decide to purchase special equipment that physically backs up data stored on each server. Even if you purchase one solution, bear in mind that your backup devices may also sustain damage. Some business owners mistakenly believe that sufficient protection for new servers many spending money once. The reality is that business servers require additional protective measures over their lifetime. Business owners like you need to prevent the actions of malicious people who target businesses. They’re constantly finding new ways to hack business IT systems.

Protecting Servers on the Premises

Some of your servers are located on-premises, and others are at other sites. It’s easy to believe that your building’s security systems can protect all servers, such as security personnel physical inspection of all work areas at night, employee monitoring software, and employee user profiles with frequently changed passwords. Even with these security practices, every server that you own could be compromised. For example, an employee could accidentally delete information or intentionally damage a business machine. Any disruption to a server’s normal operations produces downtime. If multiple servers go down, then your company cannot meet its obligations to customers.

Avoid Downtime

You don’t want downtime in your company. The longer the downtime, the higher the costs to your business. Without adequate backup solutions, important business data could be lost forever. You want to avoid the negative impacts on customers and business partners. You should invest in a comprehensive solution that will back up your data and take over for damaged servers.

Considering the Risks

We have only covered some risks to normal operations, which could be everything from hackers to building fires. A good backup disaster recovery provider will get your servers back up within minutes. If an adverse event damages on-premise machines, your server applications and associated data are immediately backed up. Their respective tasks are assigned to remote servers. Your business applications shift to the cloud and continue to run. For this peace of mind whenever adverse events affect your on-premise servers, count on a relationship with our virtualization company. We want to serve your needs.

What If Your Servers Are in the Cloud?

Not all businesses rely on internal servers, especially organizations that are subject to government regulations for protecting consumer data. Many applications are in the cloud, which means you aren’t able to physically protect servers at their exact location. An external provider’s servers may also sustain damage or total loss. What your company might need is a comprehensive solution that provides backup and recovery solutions to both internal servers and cloud-based systems.

Get Protected

It pays to use proven disaster recovery partners in ways that fit your company’s existing network of servers. Discover the benefits of backup disaster recovery through a partnerships with our company. For more details, please contact us today.

Back up Safely with Datto

Data Backup, ,
20160930

Datto is one of the most inventive and reliable backup technologies available today and a very valuable resource for businesses

Offsite backup is a necessity in today’s Internet. Backing up to a local disk is good, but it’s not enough by itself. Ransomware and physical disasters can hit a disk drive which is attached to a computer, making both of them useless at the same time.

Datto offers some of the most inventive and reliable backup technology in the business. Its geographically diverse data centers have over 200 petabytes of cloud backup storage. If we look at the factors that make up a strong, trustworthy backup service, Datto ranks well in all of them.

Range of services

Datto has backup services tailored for businesses of all sizes, using a hybrid cloud approach. It backs up both locally and to the Datto cloud.  Its ALTO 2, aimed at small businesses, uses a compact dedicated device to provide local backup and connect to the cloud service. It has a 1 terabyte capacity. Its larger relative, ALTO XL, can handle as much as 24 terabytes.

The SIRIS family offers backup of up to 60 terabytes with extremely high security. All encryption happens on the local device, combining the security of local backup with the safety of cloud backup.

Datto NAS is a Network Attached Storage system capable of holding up to 60 terabytes, with integrated local and cloud backup. It retains snapshots of documents in case it’s necessary to roll back to an older version.

Virtual SIRIS and Virtual ALTO are like the services already mentioned, but implemented in software without a separate physical device.

For cloud-to-cloud backup, Datto has Backupify. It backs up Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce, and social media. The aim is to protect files against accidental or malicious deletion, not to guard against the unlikely meltdown of those services. Backupify was originally an independent business, which Datto acquired in 2014. This is a different flavor of backup from Datto’s main product line, and we won’t be discussing it further here.

Rapid recovery

If a system fails catastrophically, restoring it can be a tedious process. Datto’s ALTO and SIRIS enable fast recovery by backing up not just files but entire system images. In case of a disaster, they can create a virtual machine from the snapshot and have it running. ALTO and SIRIS offer hybrid virtualization; SIRIS also offers pure cloud virtualization. The result is almost no downtime, even in case of a disaster that knocks out the primary computer.

Verification

A backup isn’t much good if it doesn’t work. ALTO, Virtual SIRIS, and SIRIS 2 use “Screenshot Backup Verification” of system image backups. This consists of booting the system image as a virtual machine and taking a screenshot of the login screen. It notifies the administrator if the VM fails to boot.

Geographic distribution

A cloud backup service needs wide geographic distribution for maximum safety. Datto has data centers in Pennsylvania, Utah, Canada, the UK, and Australia. Customers have the option of selecting the physical location of their backup; sometimes this is necessary for legal reasons. It keeps its facilities guarded at all times, monitoring physical access with biometric scanning and logging of activity. Datto’s security practices follow the ISO 27000 and 27001 standards.

Data security

In addition to physical security, Datto follows high data security standards. It allows detailed access rules, so that customers can control access by IP address, geographic location, time, and other factors. All files are stored in strongly encrypted form.

Disaster recovery

Datto’s services are heavily oriented toward disaster recovery, which has stronger requirements than simple backup and restoration. Those who want a simple offsite file backup will find more straightforward approaches elsewhere. For those who need strong backup protection and can’t afford extended downtime in case of a disaster, Datto has a range of solutions for all business sizes.

SystemsNet provides managed services to keep your network running and safe. For more information, please contact us.

Is Intronis Online Backup the Right Choice for Your Company?

Data Backup, ,
20160811

Itronis’ cloud-based data backup makes it easy to manage, store, access, and secure your data online.

Failing to back up your data leaves your company vulnerable to severe financial losses. Should you lose your data permanently, or fail to restore it at an acceptable speed, your employees will become less productive, your business operations will get derailed, and your customers will lose trust in you.

It’s important to choose the right backup solutions, as they don’t all perform equally well. One strong option comes from Intronis and their cloud-based data backup. There are a number of compelling reasons to go with Intronis for your company.

 

What are some of the benefits of using Intronis Online Backup?

  • Flexibility. You can adjust your Intronis Online Backup plan to fit your business needs, including the types of data you want to back up, where you want them backed up, and your data recovery goals. You have options for backing up your data both on the cloud and locally.
  • Security. Intronis Online Backup has powerful security features, including 256-bit encryption and highly protected facilities when you back up your data on the cloud. State-of-the-art security is critical for protecting your data from theft, tampering, and unauthorized exposure. If your organization works in any way with medical patient data, know that Intronis is compliant with HIPAA regulations.
  • Dependability. When businesses discover that their data backup measures have failed, it’s a horrifying experience. It often occurs in the aftermath of an IT disaster, when they seek to recover and restore lost data, only to find that their backups are corrupted or otherwise useless. Intronis backs up your data reliably in more than one location, so that even if one of their facilities gets disabled by some kind of outage, your data remains available elsewhere.
  • Reduced downtime. Being able to recover your data quickly is key to minimizing losses after an IT disaster. Earlier this year, an article from Information Week Network Computing estimated the costs that downtime extracts from businesses; companies in North America collectively lose hundreds of billions of dollars each year due to downtime. It’s important to note that smaller businesses are especially vulnerable, and can’t always recover from prolonged downtime and permanent loss of data. Whatever backup measures you use, you need to ensure that you can recover your data quickly, with a priority on the data that’s more critical for your business operations.
  • Useful for different environments. For example, Intronis supports Hyper-V and VMWare, making their backups applicable to virtual machines.
  • High-quality tech support. Their tech support is free and based in the US. They respond quickly and offer clear, effective guidance for any problems you may encounter.

What about alternatives to Intronis? A look at Carbonite

When choosing an online backup solution for their company, Carbonite comes up as an alternative to Intronis. But is it the better choice?

It’s generally better to choose Intronis over Carbonite. With Intronis, it’s easier to manage backups and restoration; centralized management gives you more control and a better idea of what’s going on. Backups tend to be slower on Carbonite, and in some circumstances they’re prone to data loss. Carbonite also doesn’t support network drives, and its sharing features are limited.

Intronis is a popular choice for managed service providers (MSPs) because of its reliability, high-quality security, ease of management, strong performance, and responsive tech support. For companies with a variety of data and high volumes of data, Intronis is the more suitable choice.

What will ultimately work best for you? Don’t hesitate to contact us for specific advice tailored to your company and its needs. Whatever backup solution you ultimately choose, it’s important that you have the option of backing up your data securely on the cloud. High-quality cloud-based backups ensure that you have off-site copies of your data that can get quickly restored should you suffer an IT disaster.