Monthly Archives: November 2016

Facts about Ransomware

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Ransomware is on the rise and can cause a costly and potentially catastrophic situation for organizations.

  • Infection starts at a workstation
  • Workstation can get infected by an email attachment OR by visiting a website
  • Starts by infecting user document folder
  • Spreads to network share that workstation is connected to it
  • AV can automatically remove the infection AND encryption key.  If this happens it can cause the infection antidote to be useless
  • User I presented with Ransom Note (stored on desktop)
  • User NEVER admits to seeing Note (from our experience)!
  • Ransom ranges from a few hundred to THOUSANDS of Dollars OR Bitcoins

To avoid of this have a ROCK SOLID backup partner like Mirrored Storage!

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Disaster Recovery on a Budget (Part 5)

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Disaster recovery (DR) doesn’t always get the attention it deserves at midmarket companies — it can be expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. But studies say that between 80% and 93% of smaller businesses won’t survive beyond the first two years after a catastrophic data loss, proving the necessity of a well-laid disaster recovery plan.

Don’t get caught off guard. New technologies and managed services options have helped make DR affordable on any budget. Learn how to stay protected without spending a fortune in this roundup of disaster recovery strategies and best practices.

Table of contents

   How can you get funding for IT BC?

Securing funds to establish and maintain a business continuity plan is a top challenge for midmarket IT managers. To get around this financial hurdle, one strategy is to use the savings from your organization’s DR preparations to help BC pay for itself.

For example, consolidating servers into a fault-tolerant configuration can reduce your overall risk and operational overhead. And performing a technical refresh can usually eliminate maintenance costs for up to three years.

For more tips on saving money and making room for business continuity in your existing budget, read “How disaster recovery savings can pay for business continuity planning.”

Source: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Staff

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Disaster Recovery on a Budget (Part 4)

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Disaster recovery (DR) doesn’t always get the attention it deserves at midmarket companies — it can be expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. But studies say that between 80% and 93% of smaller businesses won’t survive beyond the first two years after a catastrophic data loss, proving the necessity of a well-laid disaster recovery plan.

Don’t get caught off guard. New technologies and managed services options have helped make DR affordable on any budget. Learn how to stay protected without spending a fortune in this roundup of disaster recovery strategies and best practices.

Table of contents

  What are options for businesses on a budget?

What kinds of affordable disaster recovery services are available for smaller midsized organizations? From options starting at $100 a month to those in the low $1,000’s, there are plans to fit any midmarket budget.

SunGard Availability Services LP’s managed disaster services start at $100 a month for basic recovery services. Customers back up their data however they like and then restore the data themselves on SunGard’s hardware in the event of a system failure. Restoration takes 48 hours or longer.

For $500 a month, SunGard offers infrastructure management (out-tasking production functions to SunGard rather than keeping them internal) which includes space, power and no minimum rack commitments.

For more information on the various pricing tiers and providers, read “Disaster recovery services options for smaller businesses on a budget.”

Source: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Staff

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Disaster Recovery on a Budget (Part 3)

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Disaster recovery (DR) doesn’t always get the attention it deserves at midmarket companies — it can be expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. But studies say that between 80% and 93% of smaller businesses won’t survive beyond the first two years after a catastrophic data loss, proving the necessity of a well-laid disaster recovery plan.

Don’t get caught off guard. New technologies and managed services options have helped make DR affordable on any budget. Learn how to stay protected without spending a fortune in this roundup of disaster recovery strategies and best practices.

Table of contents

  What are your options for outsourced DR?

In the past, midmarket organizations either had to wait 48 to 72 hours to recover data from tapes or pay for more expensive, more advanced solutions offering faster recovery times, such as disk-based replication. Now, Storage as a Service and other disaster recovery/business continuity services are filling the gap with affordable, on-demand solutions. These online services automate functions that traditionally required investment in infrastructure and time. Options include:

  • Backup as a Service: Backs up your servers over the Internet to the vendor site.
  • Storage as a Service (also referred to as disk-to-cloud): Sends a copy of your data to the vendor electronically, versus physically transporting tapes.
  • Replication as a Service (virtual recovery): Replicates your data and system information to vendor sites and recovers your data on virtual machines.
  • Application Continuity as a Service: Recovers business applications.

To learn more about these four subscription-based disaster recovery services, read “New offerings that may cut the cost of your IT disaster recovery plan.”

Source: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Staff

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Disaster Recovery on a Budget (Part 2)

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Disaster recovery (DR) doesn’t always get the attention it deserves at midmarket companies — it can be expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. But studies say that between 80% and 93% of smaller businesses won’t survive beyond the first two years after a catastrophic data loss, proving the necessity of a well-laid disaster recovery plan.

Don’t get caught off guard. New technologies and managed services options have helped make DR affordable on any budget. Learn how to stay protected without spending a fortune in this roundup of disaster recovery strategies and best practices.

Table of contents

Are you overspending your DR budget?

Most organizations recognize the importance of a disaster recovery plan — in the event of a system failure or disaster, it will ensure high availability and quick recovery of mission-critical applications. But a number of IT organizations still have not been able to properly balance technology costs with the needs of the organization. They apply what they feel are the proper levels of protection, when in fact they may be overspending.

Why? When organizations determine service-level requirements, recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, they often make the mistake of trying to keep the business running as if nothing happened. This can result in plans and services meeting the needs of one or two critical applications but being overkill for all others.

And while this can prevent employee inconvenience and related workflow disruptions, working to avoid these short-term losses is often not worth the extra expense.

Are you overspending? Read “Are you wasting disaster recovery budget to avoid employee inconvenience?” to learn more.

Source: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Staff

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Disaster Recovery on a Budget (Part 1)

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Disaster recovery (DR) doesn’t always get the attention it deserves at midmarket companies — it can be expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. But studies say that between 80% and 93% of smaller businesses won’t survive beyond the first two years after a catastrophic data loss, proving the necessity of a well-laid disaster recovery plan.

Don’t get caught off guard. New technologies and managed services options have helped make DR affordable on any budget. Learn how to stay protected without spending a fortune in this roundup of disaster recovery strategies and best practices.

Table of contents

  What should a DR plan include?

About half of all small and medium-sized businesses have a disaster recovery strategy or business continuity (BC) plan, but when the time comes to put such plans into action, organizations realize they are missing some key components.

A complete, well-tested plan can make it easier to get back to business as soon as possible. Make sure disaster recovery strategies avoid critical data loss and miscommunications, and that they include elements such as:

  • Authentication and validation tools.
  • Personnel contacts, info and methods.
  • A priority order for resource recovery.

Get the full list in “What you need in a disaster recovery (DR) plan.”

Source: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com Staff

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Backup Audit

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Data Backup Audit, something you CAN’T afford to ignore

 

In my daily talking with businesses I see a lot of business owners and principles that don’t really understand the risk they are taking with their livelihood, savings, kids college education, retirement, etc.  This is NOT limited to small non-technical companies, but those of all sizes and industries.

In that last few weeks I have been doing some work without involvement or access to the Information Technology professional.  In my research I have become quite good at discovering the existing backup software or lack thereof.

Here is a brief summary of what I found:
– 1.4m medical images not backed up successfully since 2004.  They believed they were.
– 600k medical record images not backed up successfully since 1999.  They believed they were.
– 700k medical images where the backup drive filled up 2 days before I found it.  CD creation secondary system created blank CD’s for an undetermined amount of time.
– 15 GB of accounting practice data not ever backed up before.
– QuickBooks files for business NEVER backed up prior to my audit w/ an existing customer.  They believed they were using the built in remote backup, but were pointing to a local full drive.

My questions to you;
– Is your data being backed up?
– Are you willing to bet your business on the answer?

I am willing to do a free 1 hour assessment at your site for a limited time, based on availability.

Call me BEFORE you have an issue.

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

Too Good to be True

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If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

Like your dad, mine taught me that life truth at an early age. While I tested it several times growing up what dad taught me turned out to be true again and again. Here are a few that I ran into that you might relate to ranked by age for me:
– 12 Albums/Tape for .99
– Free Stamp/Coin Proofs
– Any sign-up for Free Vacation/Car/$1mil/etc
– Sign-up for Free for 30 days, just cancel (victim of this one X times)

I would challenge anyone looking for a cloud backup service to do testing of that service. Don’t give your credit card information to try the free service. Test it to see if it is really free. Ask questions of others (Search, Blog, Testimony, etc) for their experience. Think about it, if you are loading data to a provider where the volume exceeds the raw cost of the storage then what your dad taught you MAY come into play.

From my research, understanding being in the industry and talking with customers of many of the providers (also testing myself) there are ways that many providers limit those that “take advantage of the system”; AKA using more than they are paying for. The most common practices they limit the volume of uploaded data allowed per day (i.e. 100mb per day – less than 10 photos with digital most cameras). Another common practice is “expiring old files”. This can be as little as 90 days. I personally take digital photos that I load on my PC, edit and backup for storage FOREVER. It is NOT OK with me for files to be deleted EVER much less in such a short time.

We added a customer that tried several of the popular services without success. The primary reason what service and support. When we talked with them about the above issues they admitted that they had seen both techniques with in the first month of us. This is much faster that I had experienced, so I am creating new accounts of my own and trying again.

Lastly, I have another Truth about backup:
“We manage our customer’s backups, other services manage credit cards.”
In other words, their customers won’t hear from them unless the credit card doesn’t work. Our customers hear from us when there is an issue.

We look forward to helping you.

Mirrored Storage | Secure CLOUD Solutions for Business | mirroredstorage.com
Mirrored Storage provides cloud backup, cloud storage and a full range of Information Technology services to businesses in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding area.
By John Neibel | mirroredstorage.com

File-Based Backup

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File-Based Backup – The business was started with a file-base backup solution back in November 2008 with only a couple of customers that needed a backup service that was set-up for them, which was missing in the  market.  The business grew by setting up the backup system for customers and adding the management component that included checking it every day.

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