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Many small businesses will never recover from disasters, natural and otherwise, and the main reason for this is because business owners didn't have a plan to recover their business. Many small businesses don't have a business continuity plan in place to cope with these kinds of event and when they occur, the results can be devastating or catastrophic to life of the business.  According to  Gartner , 50% of businesses that experience a major disruption ultimately fail.

The most common business disaster is data loss, which can result from a number of causes including human error, hardware failure, natural disaster and theft.  Fortunately data loss is easy to recover from if you have a backup solution in place.

• Familiarize yourself with your data – know what you have, where it is and what is most important.

• Consider your backup options. Your backup must be offsite, secure and available for recovery 24/7. One popular option that meets the above criteria, with the added benefit of ease of use and automation, is online backup. Other options include tape or backup to external media.

• If you choose to outsource your backup needs, make sure that you choose a provider that offers security, monitoring and support.

• Decide who will be responsible for either managing you backups internally or working with your selected provider to get your backup solution carried out. 

• Do a run-through of the recovery process. Backup is nothing without recovery, so be sure that you are familiar with the recovery process and confident that it works smoothly. Your provider should be happy to walk you through a test-recovery procedure.

Review your data regularly to be sure you're backing up everything you need. For example, if you add a new server in your office, your backup should reflect this addition. This should be done every other quarter if not every quarter.

In the busy day-to-day operations of most small businesses, there is little time for planning for, or even considering the unlikely event of catastrophic technical failure. This is particularly true of small-to-midsize companies that typically have less IT infrastructure in place.

 A little preparation could literally save your business!

Here are some of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself when determining whether or not your business is ready to recover from a disaster:

• Do you perform backups regularly on every server and employee hard drive in your organization?
•  Do you regularly send your data to a safe, off-site archive?
• Do you have a proven media, drive, software, and automation solution?
• Does your current backup and recovery system meet your business uptime needs?
• Do you use backup rotations to provide good versioning?
• Do you know how fast your data is growing?
• Is your backup scalable for this data growth?

To make the disaster recovery planning process easier, TechTarget has collected their top five resources on business continuity planning for SMBs, starting with a free, downloadable business continuity plan template. To explore TechTarget resources on small business disaster recovery planning, click here. 

I recently had the pleasure to attend Gartner’s Top Predictions for 2012 seminar in Toronto, presented by Research Vice President Hung LeHong.

Working in the cloud backup industry, I wasn’t surprised to hear that while the “Cloud” is driving change, there continues to be concerns around security.  While there are real solutions to cloud security problems, it made me realize how challenging it can be for an enterprise or SMB to wade through all the information relating to security.  It can be difficult to choose a cloud data protection solution that will meet security and regulatory compliance while achieving the technological requirements to ensure data recoverability in the event of human-error and disaster.

When looking for an enterprise-class Cloud Backup solution, you’ll need to understand what you want to achieve and the elements that are important to your organization.  It’s definitely more than just backing up your data.  There are many software offerings in the marketplace that boast their ability to restore at lightening speeds, but what often appears to be missing in the equation is the inability to provide a guarantee that data is restorable in its full integrity. 

Below are some things to consider when looking at cloud data protection solutions:

Your data has to be conditioned constantly to ensure restorability. The following factors can cause data corruption:

1. Disc malfunction
2. Disc controller malfunction
3. Bad sectors on the disc
4. File system corruption

You should ensure the following data integrity and consistency check functionality is embedded in the software to ensure, data restorability:

1. Data consistency – this process should ensure that all the data components have been collected sequentially by the data collector at the enterprise customer’s premises before sending the data to offsite storage in the cloud. 
2. Data has arrived offsite before storage – the online data repository should write all the data being backed up offsite to a temporary location, checks and ensures that all the data has arrived before storing it.
3. Restore validation – this is an actual restore simulation that conducts an actual data restore to a temporary location to ensure data restorability. Think of it as the data restore dry run to prepare for the actual disaster.
4. Autonomic healing – this automated process will run in the background and scan storage in its entirety to ensure data integrity. Data that leaves your firewall should always be  encrypted,  the “Autonomic Healing“ process will check links between data blocks and compare digital signatures between different components for inconsistencies. When corrupted data is uncovered, it is noted and a notification is sent to the originating database to resend the portion of that data that was marked corrupted. This ensures that the data is always recoverable in its entirety in case of a disaster.

When you're shopping for a data protection solution, inquire with your vendor to ensure that the functionality they provide will restore your data, not just during a Disaster Recovery (DR) drill but in the event of an actual disaster (accidently deleted file, damaged hard drive, machine loss or lost site).  There’s a lot you can outsource to the cloud, but responsibility isn’t one of them. Make sure you do your research and due diligence before choosing a cloud data protection solution.

If you would like some more information about the local briefing, you can comment on this blog post or contact me via Twitter -- @CloudBackupGirl  

The data protection market has changed considerably over the past decade.  There has been a fundamental shift away from relying solely on tape for backup and recovery to using cloud-based backup solutions to address challenges that include backup performance, reliability, and recovery time objectives. 

With the proliferation of virtualized infrastructure, big data, the Consumerization of IT, growth in remote and branch office data and the need for high availability, has introduced a new set of requirements for the software responsible for data protection and recovery.         

While we’re in the cloud backup business, we understand the role tape may play as part of an overall backup strategy, especially for large enterprise organizations. With data that requires significant periods of retention; it makes sense to move backups onto lesser expensive devices – including tape. 

With that being said, we don’t believe tape should be the primary method of backup for any organization of any size. There are significant drawbacks with using tape, especially in the SMB market where it is used as the primary means of backup. Here are some examples: 

Limited Time for Backup

Tape is slow. It's common to see once per day incremental or differential backups that follow a once per week full backups. Organizations don't want to see backup operations significantly impact production resources, so these backup operations are pushed to the wee house of the morning and to weekends.

Slow Recovery

To put it bluntly, recovering from tape can be absolute hell.  It’s slow, error-prone and can be difficult depending on the number of tapes for which data has to be recovered.

Equipment Challenges

It is not uncommon for tapes to be useable only in the drives that wrote the data in the first place with the software that did it. So, recovering with a new tape unit might not be possible.

Tape was once the de facto standard for backup and as a result of its many challenges and with functional needs increasing, the next generation of data protection and recovery options became available  including both disk and cloud backup.

Here’s where I sell you on the cloud, right? Not quite, that’s the not the purpose of this post. I’m more interested in determining if you’re comfortable using outdated backup technology to keep your company going after disaster strikes?  I also want to tell you that it’s important to modernize your data backup infrastructure if it is out of date.

How much of your business is at stake if you’re unable to recover your organization’s most important data assets after a disaster?

By looking at the marketplace, it appears that organizations of all sizes tend to be conservative when it comes to making large scale changes to backup infrastructure even though there are new processes and opportunities (deduplication, continuous data protection, incremental forever, etc.) that can be exploited to improve disaster recovery and streamlined operations.

I hope that by reading this post you’ll start to think more about your backup infrastructure. Interested in learning more about managed cloud backup services? Click here to connect with a Powered by Asigra Service Provider who can perform a Free Rcoverability Assessment  with no obligations for your organization to determine if your data can be recovered quickly and efficiently in the event you need to.

For 26 years, we’ve helped Managed Service Providers make the right decisions when graduating to a new cloud backup and recovery platform. We’ve recently put all that experience into a concise 8 page guide with the goal of helps Service Providers in their decision making process.

This guide is best suited for the progressive Managed Service Provider that is intent on growing their business. The guide will provide you with a list of the questions that you need to consider to  get  a clear understanding of the needs of their current customers and prospects, and should help you make a careful assessment of whether  your technology platform is future-proof.

In the pages you will be supplied with the key questions and discussion points you’ll need to consider when determining whether your business and clients are being well served by your current backup and recovery service platform

If your current platform or provider is keeping your cloud backup managed service offering from achieving its full potential, you may need to consider an alternative.  

To access your copy of this complimentary guide, please click here. 

It's well-known that the nature of sales and marketing, specifically effective strategies that fuel sales and drive demand, has changed dramatically over the last several years. Digital technologies and social media have truly given customers a voice - an opportunity to engage with companies they do business with and share feedback, whether positive or negative. Further, the customer buying cycle has evolved with the firm establishment of online research as a critically important component. Customers are seeking information that informs and adds value to their decision making process, and they now have access to copious information from a variety of resources - including your competitors.

This shift has resulted in the need for companies to develop a strategic focus on nurturing longer term relationships prospects and customers, as well as invest in content marketing.  

Defining Content Marketing

According to Wikipedia, content marketing is "an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty."

Executed effectively, content marketing can significantly help you nurture relationships with prospects and customers - leading to a high level of customer loyalty and increased demand generation for your company's products and services. 

Becoming a Thought Leader

The motivation behind content marketing is the belief that educating the customer results in your recognition as a thought leader and industry expert. The focus is on informing customers and prospects about key industry issues and topics, sometimes mentioning the products and services you offer - but not overtly spouting their virtues. For example, you may chose to write a blog post that educates customers and prospects on data storage compliance regulations in industries such as financial services and healthcare. Or, alternatively, you could execute an email marketing campaign to provide customers and prospects with access to a white paper that provides detailed insights and information on a relevant topic. 

A variety of tools can be used for content marketing, including:

• E-newsletters
• Blogs
• Social media
• Videos
• Webinars
• White papers
• Company website

Companies need to consider which tools are most appropriate based on their specific target customer.

Getting Started

Leveraging content marketing to cultivate thought leadership and build sales over the long term requires a well thought out plan, hard work, perseverance, and devoted resources. It isn't easy, but given the right focus, it is very achievable. 

Consider the following questions when developing a content marketing strategy:

• What information do prospects often ask you for, when evaluating your products and services?  
• What information can you provide, that would truly provide them with value and make their decision easier? 
• How can you best provide information to prospects? Via a blog? Emails? Videos? Webinars?
• Do you have the in-house resources to create the content?
• What other online resources, such as industry blogs, trade media, or association websites can you pull content from?
• Are you prepared to share content on a regular basis?

If you would like to learn more, and you have some time to spare, please listen to this interview with content marketing expert Marcus Sheridan (aka The Sales Lion).

Cloud compliance issues arise as soon as you make use of cloud storage or backup services. By moving data from your internal storage to someone else's you are forced to examine closely how the data will be kept so that you remain compliant with laws and industry regulations.

It's a common misunderstanding that regulatory compliance requirements preclude many organizations being able to leverage outsourced, managed cloud services. Depending on the cloud services provider you choose, you may not only be able to meet your existing compliance concerns, but the cloud provider is likely to have controls and processes that improve your compliance program.

The main questions in regard to compliance:

Virtually every regulation requires organizations to adequately protect their physical and informational assets. To do this, there is an implied and assumed ability to control and prove:

• What information is store on the system?
• Where is the information stored?
• Who can access the system?
• Is the access appropriate?

All of these questions imply some level of ownership of the assets in question, and that is where cloud compliance issues become apparent. In the public cloud environment, you are able to answer the first of those questions with certainty; the other four however, end up posing a compliance problem.

In a typical corporate data center or a co-location center, everyone knows where the disk and physical server reside, and that fact can be proven during an audit. Even a shared service provider can typically tell you which physical systems you are utilizing and identify the data location for audit purposes.

As far as the "who" is accessing your data, you can control that inside your organization, but you also have to take into account that your provider’s staff can access your systems as well.  The main people you need to be concerned about in this regard are the administrators, both systems and application. With that being said, regardless of who will have access to your application and storage data offsite, it should be encrypted before it leaves the boundaries of your organization

Finally, the question of "why" they need that access. This is basic as it relates to security – access should be based on job role and a clear description of the level of access needed should be provided.Working with a reputable managed service provider may be an excellent way to leverage expertise and processes you may not otherwise have in-house, and mitigate some risk by assigning responsibility to a 3^rd party you can hold accountable to protect your data.  The cloud is rapidly becoming the data protection platform of choice for highly regulated industries because more organizations are leveraging the expertise of these pure information-centric service providers.

To learn more, please download the "How to Choose a Cloud Backup Service Provider" whitepaper.

Please join us and MSPAlliance on Wednesday April 11^th at 2PM EST for a virtual roundtable discussion on  “How to Successfully Differentiate Your Cloud Backup Business”

More and more IT companies have shifted toward a managed service focus, selling similar services, often using literally the same hardware and software as the competition.  This has created pricing pressures and pushed our industry towards commoditization.   Differentiation is the best form of defense against commoditization, but differentiation doesn’t just happen, it needs to be a deliberate element of your ongoing growth strategy. 

More and more IT companies have shifted toward a managed service focus, selling similar services, often using literally the same hardware and software as the competition.  This has created pricing pressures and pushed our industry towards commoditization.  Differentiation is the best form of defense against commoditization, but differentiation doesn’t just happen, it needs to be a deliberate element of your ongoing growth strategy. 

In this webinar, you will hear from two Managed Service Provider executives as they share their real world experience on how differentiation has helped their businesses increase market share leading to the growth of their cloud backup offerings. Also discussed will be the strategy that led them to become vertical market specialists leaving commoditization and their competitors in the dust.

Moderator:  Charles Weaver, CEO and Co-Founder, MSPAlliance 

Speakers:

• Jeff Cato, Vice President, Marketing, CoreVault
• Nicole Leach, Marketing Manager, Locknet
• Peter Kujawa, President and COO, Locknet
• Tracy Staniland, Sr. Director, Corporate Marketing, Asigra

Who Should Attend

• Managed Service Providers
• Value Added Resellers
• System Integrators
• Telecommunications Providers
• Cloud Service Providers
• Any organization interested in offering or obtaining Cloud Services 

To register, please visit http://www.mspnews.com/webinars/asigra/cloud-backup-business-3-12.htm

March 31^st was World Backup Day.  We can thank a few of the forward thinking community members of Reddit for dreaming up this initiative to spread awareness and remind everyone to secure their digital assets. It also gives us a reason to not only celebrate the need for backup, but it’s heroes as well.  

As the World Backup Day site explains, your computer's hard drive — the part where all your data is kept — is the computer component most likely to break down unexpectedly:

There are a number of ways a hard drive can fail. A head crash is exactly what it sounds like: when the read / write head (the "needle") crashes into the hard drive platter, ruining the drive. The actuator arm can break, so that the arm can't move around and read data. The electrical components inside can fail, the drive could become corrupted etc.

Furthermore, the hard drive is the only part of the computer that can be damaged by software (without even physically touching the drive). Viruses, malware and accidental deletion can all damage the data on a hard drive. Though this data can sometimes be recovered, the easiest solution is to back up data on the drive before it becomes an issue.

And just how likely are you to have trouble with the component "most likely" to break down, you might be wondering? The statistics are probably a bit worse than you might've imagined:

[Hard drives] fail at an annual rate of 3 percent: every year, 3 percent of new hard drives fail, and this rate gets higher as the drive gets older. With a three year-old hard drive, the annual failure rate is around six percent. And remember: when a hard drive fails, if the data isn't backed up, it's gone.

With a three year old drive, the annual failure rate is 6 percent.

While that number seems low, it’s actually pretty high when it relates to losing EVERYTHING on your computer.  You’d probably take the stairs if you knew the elevator to the floor of your office had a failure rate of 6 percent!

While hard drive failure might cause data loss, there are other things that happen more frequently and are caused mostly by human error, including accidental deletion of important files, theft or loss and physical damage.  There are also acts of nature, which can wipe out your digital data such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.

World Backup Day is all about awareness. Are you proactive or reactive? Protecting your data before disaster strikes will save you a lot of time, money and heartache! Remember, Murphy’s Law – anything that can go wrong will go wrong! It’s only a matter of time.

To learn more about World Backup Day, please visit www.worldbackupday.com and to learn more about cloud backup,  download our complimentary guide: What you Need to Know About Cloud Backup.  

There is some confusion amongst SMBs as to the differences between backup and archive.  These two processes are mutually exclusive – they cannot occur at the same time and are different processes with different objectives.  The most discernable issue around the key differences between the two processes relates to security, compliance and governance.

An archive is just a stored set of organized data and the goal is to achieve an intelligible data set for long periods of time and in a form that enables granular data retrievable.  This is important for businesses in highly regulated industries that include healthcare, legal, banking and securities.   

Archived data can be stored on multiples types of devices including tape, disk and in the cloud.  There are benefits to each; however it is important to determine the length of time for which you will need to keep your archives and the most cost effective means for your business is without sacrificing the integrity of your archives.

Here are the thinks you should consider when thinking about data archiving:

• The archive needs to be able to operate with different data collections while treating them at the same level of integrity -- individual data records from a database as well as entire documents
• The access speed of an archive can be slow, but archive should have an extremely high level of reliability
• Data integrity must be maintained over the entire period of the archive existence –  there is no point in having an archive that you can't trust

The key reason for the existence of a backup is to provide an alternative data source in case the primary data source is corrupted or destroyed.  Backups are copies of data designed for short-term storage and its most identifiable characteristic is that it will go through frequent replacement and update under controlled circumstances. At that point, the old backup will become less relevant (or irrelevant) for operational purposes and the data will need to be backed up again.

Here are the things you should consider when thinking about data backup:

• The backup needs to be quickly accessible
• The backed up information should survive with full integrity and availability for several months on the backup media
• The backup should be able to span multimedia media (if backup set is larger than media capacity)
• The solution should be intelligent enough to enable different backup sets (full backup, incremental backup, differential backup, etc)

While backup and archive solutions are both very important, they provide two very different functions.  It’s important to take the time to understand the difference between the two or consult a managed services provider that can help you better assess your business needs.

This year, SMB Nation and SMB Technology Network are holding the second annual “SMB 150 Awards,” which are designed to select and recognize the top 150 influencers in the SMB channel.

Asigra Executive Vice President, Eran Farajun has been nominated as a candidate for the SMB Awards. What makes the SMB 150 Awards unique is that the nominees and the final 150 are selected by the SMB channel community itself through a voting process.

Eran is dedicated not only to Asigra, but to helping move the cloud backup industry forward and most significantly in the last year has made the following key channel/partner investments:

• Partner support group
• Partner sales/marketing portal enhancements
• Introduction of BackupHeroes.com, a partner/customer community designed to serve as an independent resource where all industry participants collaborate on the topic of data protection.

Voting will be open through April 6th. You can vote for the channel executives that you feel  should make the list, one vote is allowed every 24 hours. The awards gala will be held on May 16th at the iconic Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles, California.

To vote for Eran Farajun in the SMB 150 Awards, please click here.