Chris Whitside's blog

“Everyone is doing backup these days,” says Gregory Tellone, CEO of American Business Continuity Centers. “So Asigra partners need to differentiate themselves from all of the SOHO services that only do backup and avoid the topic of recovery – which, of course, is the whole point of doing backup in the first place.”

And, of course, he’s right. The beauty of Asigra is that it makes differentiation easy. Partners can combine Asigra with many hardware configurations and other service offerings to make their entire package much more attractive and helpful to their targeted customers.

Mr. Tellone’s company differentiates by offering affordable Disaster Recovery services to companies of all sizes that don’t want the cost of maintaining their own backup facilities. His company assembles an entire office, anywhere in North America, within 48 hours of a disaster and restores your infrastructure to fresh hardware within minutes. That’s laser focus  and they promote no other services. As Tellone puts it, “Recovery – it’s all we do at Continuity Centers.”

But that’s a lot, especially if you’re a company worried about losing everything in a fire. Data recovery is certainly a big part of it but we’re also talking office space, furniture, computers, office equipment, phones, satellite, wireless networking and so on. The service is called Flexible Workgroup Recovery and is available in cities throughout the US and Canada. Customers, referred to as members, subscribe to FWC as a service. Continuity Centers also offers traditional hot-site in the New York Metro area.

Since they are so focused on just one market segment, Tellone’s team is forced to get creative. “We ask ourselves every day, during each test and each recovery, what we can do to make recovery even more affordable and easier for our members,” he says.

Often, that means more than one answer. For instance, they offer SecureVault Private Cloud Backup and Recovery (Powered by Asigra) for long term backup storage plus they offer Instant Business Recovery (automated failover to a replicated server based on CA ARCserve RHA®).

“A lot of creativity has gone into service design at Continuity Centers,” says Asigra sales manager Tyler Fergusson. “For instance, they also provide some clients with full system recovery services—from their Asigra backups to a warm production environment that’s always standing by. Thoughtfully planning, and investing in the right hardware and software platforms, can provide extra value. That certainly helps a provider stand out from the competition.” 

It’s also the kind of creative service design that can boost revenue while helping other service providers at the same time. Tellone says nearly a third of the business for his Flexible Workgroup Recovery service comes from other providers, including Asigra partners. They resell the service from Continuity Centers to round out their own services (at no extra cost to them), ensuring their customers are completely covered for disaster recovery.

Continuity Centers is just one example of creative differentiation. There are many more. It’s not about being all things to all customers. It’s about being focused on the needs of specific customers and being the best in the business for that segment.

It’s so sad when a child is lost to disease or accident. It can take a long time for parents to recover from such a tragedy. So, it is even sadder when they later get a phone call reminding them of their loss, “Uh, hello, I’m calling from Misericordia Hospital. Sorry, but we lost a portable hard drive that contains pictures and other health information about your dead child.”

Bereaved families and patients were among 233 people alerted that their information was missing. Two surgery videos and 3,600 photos of wounds, lab specimens and the pictures of dead infants, all labelled with patients' names, went missing from the Misericordia Hospital in Edmonton. They were stored on an unencrypted portable hard drive lost during an office move in January this year.

The 306 bed acute care facility is operated by Covenant Health System. Covenant, in turn, is a member of the US-based St. Joseph Health System, a successful not-for-profit health system. According to Covenant, encryption of all data is policy but, in this case, a staff member neglected to follow that policy.

 So, what we have here I suppose is a sad but useful learning opportunity. Let’s look at the costs that any organization like Covenant might expect for trusting in policy alone to protect the private information entrusted to them:

• Emotional pain caused to innocent victims of lost information
• Litigation threat from emotional pain caused
• Litigation threat if identities are found to be stolen and used
• Staff time lost searching for missing hard drive
• Embarrassment and damage to professional image of organization
• Time and costs of dealing with remedial measures
• Costs of implementing new security that should have been in place the first time
• Fines and legal costs for breaking privacy laws in certain jurisdictions
• Second tier costs yet to be discovered

Now, let’s look at the costs of the portable hard drive backup system. At $50-$100 each, portable hard drives probably seemed like an inexpensive and simple solution. Oops, wait a minute, we had better add a little more to cover the admin costs of maintaining those drives and purchasing new ones every few years. And add a little more to cover the cost of encryption software that our policy demands. And we should probably add more to cover staff time to ensure backups are done regularly. Hmm, and I wonder what we will need to spend to ensure those drives are stored securely offsite.

Well, maybe those costs are okay as long as the backups are secure. Too bad that encryption and disciplined backups are such a pain for staff – sometimes they just forget about it. If only there was a simple, automated way to backup private information with bullet-proof encryption – a way for us to adhere to policy that would save us from all the headaches and hidden costs.

OK, does anyone have any ideas?

To read the original article from the Edmonton Journal, please click here.

When it comes to VARs and MSPs developing cloud computing strategies, VMware has a simple message for partners. “Virtualization is the cornerstone of the cloud; you can’t get to the cloud without virtualization,” asserts Doug Smith, senior director of global channels at VMware. 

And so begins a recent post on Talkin’ Cloud by Joe Penetieri, Memo from VMware: Virtualization is First Step to Cloud.  Later in the post, Smith adds, “I think virtualization is the first step to the private cloud. You’re separating out the hardware infrastructure from your IT compute needs.”

OK, I get it: cloud life goes better with virtualization. You get much greater flexibility with your data plus all the green and financial advantages of requiring fewer physical servers. The post goes on to look at the emerging virtualization landscape where competitors are vying for larger pieces of a market dominated by VMware. What struck me, though, was the straight-up talk connecting virtualization with Cloud initiatives – public or private.  So why would anyone – MSP or any business with cloud aspirations – drag their feet?

Well, maybe some so-called “expert” (or a drunk in a dark alley) once told them that virtualization is too complicated and expensive for any business smaller than enterprise, and pointed to backups as a major roadblock:

•  you need different backup solutions for hardware and virtual machines
• one solution won’t work with a variety of virtualization platforms
• it’s too difficult and expensive to maintain all the agents required on each virtual machine
• backup agents pollute the virtual environment and degrade performance
• you can’t restore to different physical or virtual machines
•  recovery requires many steps plus backup and database experts
•  backup solutions are not easily and affordably scalable
•  you can’t get true CDP (Continuous Data Protection) or even backups with a short RPO (Restore Point Objective)
• you need special hardware or a certain operating system

Nine points and Asigra has one response: WRONG … on all counts. If you were hesitating on virtualization because you thought backup and recovery was going to be an expensive problem, download this Asigra paper, Virtualization Support. Real Backups of Virtual Environments. Then get moving on the road to virtualization – this roadblock is gone.