A Guide To Finding The Right Managed IT Services Partner

IT outsourcing is on the rise as businesses look to streamline operations, reduce complexity and lower costs.  But with increasing market maturity and service availability comes a new challenge: finding the ideal outsourced option. Read on for more....

A Guide To Finding The Right Managed IT Services Partner

To learn more about all the options available to you for meeting your organization’s managed services needs (including security posture and risk assessments https://youtu.be/n2zZjsQVZIs)....plus comparisons of 100s of best-in-class network monitoring, network management, and network security providers....simply ask at the following link (FREE). It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Managed Services

Cloud vs On-Premise....Striking A Balance On Security

The balance between on-premise and cloud infrastructure should be tailored to an organization's needs at any given time. It should mirror an organisation’s risk appetite and its business imperative. Furthermore, better standards for encryption and engineering are needed on a universal scale that are underpinned by the latest legislation.

Cloud vs On-Premise...Striking A Balance On Security

To learn more about all the options available to you for meeting your organization’s data protection and network security requirements….including security posture and risk assessments (https://youtu.be/n2zZjsQVZIs) ....plus comparisons of top tier network security providers and what they have to offer, simply ask us at the following link (FREE). It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Network Security Support

Top 5 Things To Consider For Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Failure may not be an option, but it also may not be something you can avoid. Instead of pretending it's not possible, how about preparing so it doesn't do as much damage, and you can recover from it quickly? You need a disaster recovery plan (DRP). Here are five things to consider for your DRP (with video).....

Top 5 Things To Consider For Your Disaster Recovery Plan

To learn more about all the options available to you for meeting your organization’s data protection and network security requirements…including customized security assessments plus comparisons of top tier network security providers and what they have to offer, simply ask us at the following link (FREE). It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Free Network Security Help

What Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan If Your Legacy Communications And Network Platforms Were To Fail?

This is a question that comes up frequently among users of legacy and secondary market end-users. I find that it is crucial that the end-users receive the necessary technical support and warranties to keep their network up and running at all times. If there ever is downtime, they should have a hardware provider that can overnight new equipment so as to minimize inefficiencies.

At some point in time your legacy systems will no longer be supported and a failure will severely impact your operation.

The lack of support could be technical, the company no longer manufactures the product and parts are harder to find or no longer available, or the lack of support could be no people with the skills necessary to maintain the equipment.

That is one reason that you need to ensure that your plan is tested on a regular basis. These support issues should become evident during the test. If you are using a third party recovery service provider, they may tell you that they no longer support the legacy system. They may make suggestions on what they can do to accommodate your systems, but you may find that the cost is too high. It may actually be better to do an upgrade.

You also need to make sure that any contract that you sign with a recovery service provider will let you upgrade at little or no cost to the contract price. You also need to include a clause that will let you know when the recovery service provider will withdraw support so that you can plan your response.

BCP is not a project, so you need to make sure that the plan is reviewed and tested regularly so that problems can be identified and corrected before an emergency or disaster event occurs.

A disaster recovery plan should include all key componets necessary to run an enterprise. From a network and communications point of view this may include planning for redundancy not only in the Local Area Network but with the carriers. I had a WAN at one client where I had automatic roll over should the main gateway fail at any point. Many enterprise have backup plans with secondary carriers and can re-point 800 numbers within minutes.

DRP planning is different for all enterprises .... but to be effective needs managment support from the top. I suggest you read the following article as a general overiew on disaster recovery.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Insights On Recovering From Disaster...BaaS And DRaaS

Below discusses the benefits of a cloud-based DR solution....  

WHY DISASTER RECOVERY? 

Evolve IP knows we are facing an ever-changing threat landscape. We have all the traditional concepts of what constitutes a disaster whether that’s a regional or geographic issue. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tornados as well as human-made disasters such as power or network interruption, intentional malice, accidental loss, and negligence are catalysts for Disaster Recovery. The new reality is that ransomware and new zero-day malware variants are the biggest threat facing modern IT departments. Evolve IP believes that while having all the right security solutions in place is important the best method of protection is recoverability.  So, what constitutes a recovery window for a client environment?  

• Recovery Time Objective (RT0) – How much downtime is acceptable, and have you quantified the cost of the acceptable downtime on a per-application basis? 
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – How much data loss is acceptable to the business and have you quantified the cost of the acceptable loss?  

RTO and RPO are a factor for both disaster recovery and backup. To determine which is the right solution you’ll have to look at a few different things:  

• Service Levels  
• Application Availability and Impact 
• Retention  
• Recovery Options 
• Failover/Failback Capabilities 

Evolve IP approaches backup and disaster recovery by providing the full spectrum of the solution. They believe in scalability and the continuum of client administration, they can go anywhere in the spectrum from fully self-administered to full management. Evolve IP does the same when it comes to their disaster recovery and backup solutions, there are varying degrees of protection available through different solutions.  

DISASTER RECOVERY OR BACKUP?  

Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity; it is preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure vital to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. It ensures that data is available quickly after an outage. Backup, on the other hand, refers to the copying and archiving of computer data so it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The backup system contains at least one copy of all data worth saving, and the data storage requirements can be significant. Organizing this storage space and managing the backup process can be a complicated undertaking. The primary difference between disaster recovery and backup Is that the former is focused on continuing operations with minimal interruption while the latter is focused on restoring operations in the wake of an interruption.  

       Disaster Recovery delivers very aggressive service levels 

• Recovery point objectives of seconds  
• Recovery time objectives of minutes 

Backup delivers service levels that are better suited for a tier 3 application  

• Can you lose 12-24 hours of data? 
• Can the business survive without the application for 12 hours or more? 

Both backup and disaster recovery can leverage ‘replication’ technology in their solutions. What differentiates them is what can be done with the resulting data: 

Another difference between disaster recovery and backup is retention. Here is how they differ in this area:  

THE EVOLVE IP DIFFERENCE  

To help organizations manage costs while receiving contractually guaranteed recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO), Evolve IP applies a tiered approach to DRaaS services. Based on needs and resources, clients can choose between self-managed and managed DRaaS.  With the additional layering of Managed IT, customers are provided full stack, end-to-end application disaster recovery as well as configuration changes in protected environments. With their diverse service portfolio ensures you can recover all the data you need as soon as you need it. So, why Evolve IP?  

• Blue-Chip Vendors – Their Suite is composed of Blue-Chip vendor verified, support and integrated solutions. They use the technologies, tools, and interfaces your team trusts and your executives know including Veam, Zerto, VMware, Nimble, EMC and more. 
• The Evolve IP Compliance Cloud – Verified through third-party compliance auditors, The Compliance Cloud includes true client isolation, encryption in transit and at rest, private VLANs, firewalls and more. 
• Best-of-Breed Solutions – Noted as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, our DR Suite is analyst-acclaimed, vendor-validated and client recommended. 
• Custom Tailored Solutions – Evolve IP will architect what other CSP’s will not, for example, a robust reverse replication solution. Additionally, they accommodate legacy systems like AS400, by providing rack space, power, and network integration. 
• World-Class, Compliant Architecture – Evolve IP’s compliant cloud solutions and intellectual property are built on top of the world’s leading technologies, leverage our globally redundant data centers, and run over the industry’s most robust network architecture. 
• The Evolve IP OneCloud – They are the only provider that can deploy both cloud computing and cloud communications in a secure, virtual private environment. Leveraging Evolve IP for multiple services compounds the ROI of your IT investment by improving efficiencies, decreasing costs and eliminating cloud sprawl. 

To learn more and request a free quote....simply ask here:

Disaster Recovery Solutions

Data Recovery: How To Recover From A Hard Drive Failure

Context:

Unfortunately, most home users, and many business users, do not back up their systems. Moreover, many small businesses have older back-up procedures that are often ineffective for recovering files.
Of course, you can run down to your neighborhood electronics store and purchase a replacement drive for your computer, but what about your data on the failed hard drive? How important was it? Did you save it or back it up?

What to do:

If you need to recover data on the hard drive, the first thing to do is avoid trying to reboot or doing anything that involves the drive. Doing so can actually do more damage to your data.

The only irreversible data loss is caused by overwriting bits, physical damage to the drive platters or destruction of the magnetization of the platters, which seldom happens in the real world. In the majority of cases, the malfunction is caused by a damaged circuit board, failure of a mechanical component and crash of internal software system track or firmware.

In the case of actual hard drive failure, only a data recovery professional can get your data back. And the fact that you cannot access your data through your operating system does not necessarily mean that your data is lost.

As a "rule of thumb," if you hear a clicking sound emitting from your hard drive, or if the computer's S.M.A.R.T. function indicates an error during the boot process, something is wrong. You should immediately stop using the hard drive in order to avoid causing further damage and, potentially, rendering the information on the hard drive unrecoverable.

After receiving your failed hard drive, a data recovery specialist's first step will be to try and save an image of the damaged drive onto another drive. This image drive, not the actual damaged drive, is where the data recovery specialist will try to recover the lost data.

The next step in the imaging process is to determine if the hard-drive failure was an actual malfunction, a system corruption or a system track issue.

System corruption and system track issues are normally fixed by using a specialist's data recovery software. System corruption or system track recoveries do not require processing in a clean room environment.

Conclusion:

Unfortunately, damage to a drive's circuit board or failure of the head drives is not uncommon. In each of these failures, a data recovery specialist should work on the system only in a clean room environment. There, the specialist can substitute parts such as drive electronics, internal components, read/write arms, writing/reading heads, spindle motors or spindle bearings from a donor drive in order to gain access to the data on the failed hard drive. In most cases, the data recovery specialist is able to retrieve and return the lost data.

By Loveleen Talwar