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Gone are the days of being able to store your precious data on backup tapes - what with the new advances in backup/recovery software, tapes are just too time consuming, cumbersome and a hassle to manage compared to the alternatives. Unfortunate and unpredictable natural disasters are teaching businesses that they need to have a disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place that does not include or augments tape backups kept on-site or close to the data center.

With a property portfolio comprised of 164 properties and totaling approximately 16.9 million square feet of gross leasable area, including 143 shopping centers, ten development/redevelopment properties, five non-retail properties and six land parcels, Equity One, Inc. has a lot of data to manage.

Equity One Inc. was faced with protecting their data at several locations and ensuring business continuity for their operations. They turned to RestorePoint powered by Asigra, a technology company providing data protection and disaster recovery solutions for critical customer data.

"Working with RestorePoint and Asigra gives me confidence in my data protection plan," said Ivan De Moya, IT Director of Equity One, Inc. "I know that if I ever need to restore, it will take a few minutes rather than several hours. It's about the recovery, not only the backup, and I know that Asigra and RestorePoint will keep my data safe."

A feature that appealed to Equity One, Inc. with RestorePoint services was Asigra's agentless architecture, which means Asigra agents don't have to be installed on every machine that requires backup. Instead, Asigra software is installed on a single machine (physical or virtual) and backups everything on the network, from user files to ERP databases.

To learn more about Equity One and how a cloud backup service powered by Asigra allows them to ensure increasingly large amounts of data are recoverable in case of a disaster, view the complete case study.

Managing data has become one of the most important and complex IT challenges for businesses of all sizes. Organizations are creating and saving data in unprecedented quantities. This amassing accumulation of data represents a company's most valuable asset and it must be backed up wherever its location, protected/encrypted, stored and made available to the organization whenever and wherever it is needed. Watch this video Asigra Version 12: Recover NOW from ANYWHERE to learn more about how your data should be protected.

Businesses using traditional tape back-ups rather than cloud-based alternatives could unknowingly have a major gap in their disaster recovery plans, according to research conducted by Icomm Technologies.

Leading IT service provider Icomm Technologies surveyed 121 SMEs in the UK about their back-up solutions – finding that 73% use old-fashioned tapes to back-up data. Tapes, which are increasingly being replaced by cloud-based storage, are more prone to failure and are more subject to human error than newer options of protecting and recovering enterprise data. Additionally, the research also showed that 90% of SMEs using tapes never ran a test backup to ensure their backup method was in proper working order and that data was recoverable in case of user error or a disaster-like event.

Icomm's, Ian Callens, Sales Manager said: "The words 'disaster recovery' usually conjure up images of fire, theft and terrorism but a simple server failure is much more likely and can be just as disruptive... our new findings suggest that many businesses would not only lose data but also face delays of several days to restore their back-ups if they had an IT failure."

To learn more about disaster recovery plans and Icomm's total research findings, read the full article

In November, Asigra, the first enterprise-class cloud backup software to achieve NIST FIPS 140-2 certification and to provide support for everything from data centers to servers, desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones, launched their newest version of Asigra Cloud Backup™ software; the industry's first enterprise cloud backup and recovery software solution to backup corporate data residing in SaaS and PaaS platforms.

According to Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President, Asigra, Asigra Cloud Backup protects more than 550,000 sites around the world through an extensive partner network of service providers who deliver cloud backup and recovery services as private, public or hybrid cloud deployment models to enterprises. View the video now to hear more about the innovative features in the current release, and how Asigra allows you to recover now from anywhere.

Features and advantages of Asigra include:

1. Virtual Disaster Recovery
   
   1. Allows customers to recover data instantaneously
2. Ability to Manage Snapshots directly from disk to array
   
   1. Make sure customers can identify data in unique user cases/scenarios
3. Expanded Mobile Device Support
   
   1. Providing you with the ability to backup and recover different file types
4. Enterprise Cloud to Cloud Backup and Recovery for Saas and PaaS Applications
   
   1. Data protection and immediate support for cloud-based applications such as Salesforce.com

These advances just scratch the surface. Asigra Cloud Backup™ comes with all the same security and recovery and restore assurance (R2A) features that are hallmarks of the Asigra platform. Asigra Cloud Backup enables recovery NOW from ANYWHERE in the enterprise. To learn more about Asigra view the product brochure.

How cloud technologies and providers can help in the transition to new IT paradigms

Newton's laws of motion work even beyond the world of physics. Nowhere do you see them more at work than in today's enterprise IT departments. As users have begun to demand increasing flexibility in the choice of devices, operating platforms, and service options, buoyed by the rise of concepts such as bring your own device (BYOD), consumerization of IT, and self-service provisioning, enterprise IT departments have been slow to respond to change – sometimes even resisting change. This is a classic case of the law of inertia in action. However, even as enterprise IT departments scramble to respond to the changes in the way people work, they have very little choice but to go along with what is fast becoming the new ways of working.

Fortunately for them, cloud computing as a technology has matured significantly and is finding widespread acceptance in enterprise environments. This is good news as using cloud technology and partnering with a cloud services provider is the fastest and painless way to ease into the new realities of the enterprise IT workplace. Why do I say this? Let me explain.

Enterprises are laggards in the adoption of new technologies and paradigms. (Of course, this statement does not apply to every organization, there are always some who are free spirits or early adopters, but for the most part the enterprise tends to be resistant to change). It is here that cloud technology and service providers can help provide the levers to ease the transition to a new approach.

By itself, cloud computing as a technology is inherently flexible. From cost to location and technology, the cloud opens up new vistas and provides options that might not have existed. For example, the cloud can obviate the need for new capital expenditure offering you a "pay as you go" alternative. And there is no lock-in of any kind. Should you change your mind, it is always easy to migrate to a new model or federate your data and applications across clouds and even cloud providers. And for those that fear about the security of the data, cloud technology today provides better options than mainstream approaches. One example of this is for enterprises to look for technologies that have obtained accreditation from well known industry affiliations or government approvals such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) FIPS 140-2 certified encryption that is provided to enterprise cloud backup and recovery solutions that provides assurance that data is encrypted both in-flight and at rest and provides enterprises with methods to protect data in all endpoint devices such as laptops, smartphone and tablets. As part of the due diligence process, enterprises need to ask to ensure they are selecting and deploying technologies that have been tested and have received industry accreditation from the appropriate standard bodies.

Cloud service providers help ease the process of transition. Well versed in new IT paradigms, they bring skills and expertise that they glean from their many customer implementations. This helps enterprises add capabilities to their IT department without incurring the costs and efforts of hiring new employees or the time needed for newly hired or trained employees to ramp up. It also helps change mindsets and culture – accelerating the fostering of the services paradigm in IT and in bringing renewed accountability and service level agreement driven operations. Such cultural changes may take much longer and may be much tougher to implement in-house. Other than these softer benefits, of course, are the more tangible and well known benefits of lower cost and higher returns on the invested dollar.

"If I have seen farther than others, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants", said Isaac Newton, the inventor of the laws of motion (which includes the law of inertia). Cloud technologies and service providers are big and powerful giants in today's world. Enterprises that want to go far in the future and stay ahead of competition need to take the leap!

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune shares a great reminder about the importance of backing up your data. Unfortunately the individual below had to learn the hard way that his data was more valuable than his laptop. Which begs the question, would you pay for the return of your lost data? And how much would you actually pay? For example, if the data contained a critical project or beloved family photos, how much would you be willing to offer?

Here's what happened:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that develops and promotes measurement, standards, and technology. Federal Information Processing Standards Publications (FIPS PUBS) are issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). FIPS 140-2 is the most current security requirement for cryptographic modules, or encryption. Asigra was the first Cloud Backup and Recovery vendor to have received validation that its encryption meets these strict standards. View Asigra's FIPS 140-2 Certification. What does this mean for users of Asigra Cloud Backup™?

Business Benefits of NIST FIPS 140-2 Certification

Storing your mission critical data in a service provider's cloud is often a source of contention for enterprises as security and reliability is of utmost concern (as well it should be). What a service provider who utilizes a NIST FIPS 140-2 certified backup and recovery software provides to the enterprise and the users of the backup and recovery software is data that is encrypted at flight and at rest. Not only that but Asigra's technology ensures that the customer is provided two encryption keys – one at the account level and another one at the customer end that aggregates, encrypts and compresses the data. Only a person who knows both the keys can restore the data in unencrypted form from a secure offsite vault. Because we take security so seriously, our software is agentless meaning we don't have traditional agents utilizing a port in the firewall for every agent, creating vulnerability in the server architecture.

Award-winning Asigra Cloud Backup and Recovery is secure, trustworthy and dependable. To learn more about the business benefits of agentless backup software including increased scalability and decreased costs, view our chalk talk: Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra's Agentless Software.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could buy your licensing capacity in bulk to better improve your flexibility and customer responsiveness?  With the innovative Asigra Cloud License Server you can.

As a service provider, it is guaranteed that your clients will have different amounts of data and rates of data growth. You can purchase licensing capacity based on projected need and have the real time adaptability you need to respond to the changing requirements of your customers - easily distributing sub-terabyte provisioning options amongst customers based on their individual needs.

In Asigra's latest Chalk Talk, Pavan Vyas, Product Marketing Manager explains this innovative technology and its business benefits for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). MSPs who utilize this feature are able to:

• automate licensing capacity management
• automatically meet the backup and recovery needs of your clients
• minimize disruption to your clients' work through failover protection
• reduce the staff time devoted to managing each client
• support multiple deployment models including public, private and hybrid clouds

In the traditional world of data protection, backups and snapshots were considered as substitutes or alternates - and that doing one meant that you didn't need to do the other. Due to the fact that snapshots took birth in the world of storage, it remained an arcane technology to backup administrators; managed and controlled by the storage administrator. However, this separation of responsibilities led to the creation of islands of data protection. Many times the storage administrator and the backup administrator both protected the same data leading to inefficient use of resources and a lot of confusion when looking to restore the information at the time of a data loss.

With the growing popularity of big data and with rapid growth in data volumes, the need to protect data using a quick and efficient approach is becoming ever more important. This need is exacerbated by the fact that businesses are becoming global and backup windows are shrinking. Snapshots offer a perfect solution with their rapid hardware based data protection capabilities which ensure that large data backups can complete in very short time intervals. We're not alone in holding this view. Jason Buffington from ESG also spoke to this very idea in his blog post regarding snapshot based data protection.

And so, at Asigra we have been making enhancements to ensure that the two approaches come together in our software. In V11.2 we announced support for software based methods for snapshot data protection. In V12, we have gone a step further introducing the support for hardware based snapshot data protection in our platform. And with the aim of aiding the integration of snapshots into the role of the backup administrator, we have built in the Snapshot Manager interface which provides the capabilities to the backup administrator to schedule, manage, and control the entire snapshot process using the familiar Asigra interface.

At Asigra we believe that in this world where convergence is the new mantra and where silos are being torn down every day, this change needs to permeate the backup world as well. A true enterprise class software solution needs to provide backup administrators with all the tools, technologies and methodologies needed for data protection without building in additional barriers to its adoption. It is for this precise reason that the Snapshot Manager is integrated into our platform with no additional licensing.

One of our partners, The Data Vault (TDV) created an excellent video on Data Recovery that delves into the reasons companies need an active backup and recovery platform, like one powered by Asigra.

Watch, and learn why it's important to backup to the cloud and how you can save both time and money:

Watch on YouTube.com: youtu.be/AsBns8fcxLY

The financial services vertical has traditionally been one of the largest spenders on technology. Financial firms, faced with the need to cut costs, improve customer service, and keep to regulatory requirements are constantly on the lookout for new and innovative solutions and technologies. Incidentally, the financial services space is also one of the most open towards seeking the help from external service providers for their information technology needs. All of this makes financial services firms an attractive market for you to offer IT services to.

In particular, when it comes to data backup and recovery services, financial services firms such as banks are facing a number of challenges:

• Big data: Banks are grappling with the rapid growth of data. Not only do banks have to adapt to new data streams and formats, they are also challenged by the pace of data growth. All this places huge challenges on data protection infrastructure
• BYOD: Bring Your Own Device movements are gaining ground in enterprises; banks are not going to be able to hold off much longer. As a result, banks will need the ability to protect their data on all devices including mobile endpoints such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
• Consumerization of IT: As users begin to demand consumer like experiences such as self service provisioning, IT departments in banks will look for opportunities to provide end users with a lot more control of their data and its destiny.
• Data Security: As hacker activity increasingly begins to target banks, it is essential that any IT asset added to the mix is capable of ensuring the security of the firms' information assets as well as ensuring that it does not create any new threats to the firm's IT infrastructure.
• Ever reducing RPOs and RTOs: While data is increasing at a rapid rate, the tolerance towards recovery times and recovery points is constantly decreasing. Instant recovery is almost an expected feature today as is the requirement for multiple levels of redundancy.

To read more about this very interesting topic, click on the tiles below.

https://asigra.lookbookhq.com/overlay/pavanvyas/banking-data-losses