Things You Should Know About Disaster Recovery In 2016

As a business leader, you probably know a person or two whose businesses suffered a great deal after losing their data. Indeed, losing data can be a crippling occurrence in business. Therefore, it is not surprising that many business owners are either actively looking for disaster recovery solutions or already have a disaster recovery plan in place, sometimes even before disaster strikes. While some might see this as paranoia, available statistics show that most businesses are unprepared to deal with disaster. These business people who prepare for the unknown are probably the people the rest in the business community should be asking advice from. In any case, it has never hurt to be prepared.

Some of the challenges of disaster recovery include the fact that many misconceptions remain in the business community about what DR is and what it is not. Other business men and women assume that disaster preparedness is about signing up for it with a certain company and everything else falls into place. Sadly, they could not be more wrong. Therefore, we have listed some of the things you definitely should know about disaster recovery this year.

Disaster recovery goes beyond systems and data

The problem with thinking that disaster recovery only deals with systems and data is that many companies end up deciding to either go all in or entirely refrain from investing in DR. The right approach would be in prioritizing some applications ahead of others. Applications that connect you directly to your consumers should be given priority. Others that only deal with the internal systems of your business could be considered later. In other words, your disaster recovery plan should be based on the impact your systems and data would have on your business, with those that would be most devastating to your business operations getting preferred.

Data protection is a must and must be done properly

In today’s business world, you cannot choose whether or not to protect your data. You have a responsibility to your customers to keep their information safe. You also must keep your business information and secrets secure from those who would want to steal it and push you out of business. That is why backing up your business data should be a companywide policy. In addition, every time data backup is done, data backup verification must follow shortly after. There are times that systems fail leaving you thinking you have backed up only to later find your backup systems are empty. Truly, it has been found that data backup errors contribute up to 40% of data recovery failures. Your business should not have an acceptable amount of data that it can afford to lose. Even 10% could be too much.

Backing up your data will not be enough

While backing up might seem to work seamlessly when you are an individual with your laptop data backed up, the story takes a different path when you are dealing with a business enterprise. Firstly, your business has a number of computer technologies and infrastructure. That is why even though you may have been doing a good job doing backup, equal level of effort must be put into putting the data together again during recovery. Your recovery tools should therefore be recent and uptodate. This would ease the recovery process and ensure that your production environment continues running effectively in the post recovery period.

More Companies Migrate To Office 365. Is It Time For You To Do The Same?

There has been a lot of talk about Office 365. The apparent excellence of this Microsoft product is, perhaps, what is informing many businesses to migrate. SharePoint & Office 365 Entrance Consulting is a good example of Office 365 and sharepoint migration services that many business leaders use to ease the sharepoint migration process. In today’s marketplace, the business organizations that realize the benefits of migrating to Office 365 and make the move are increasing efficiency and enjoying improved productivity. Using Office 365 has also been found to lower production costs. Let us dig deeper into the top reasons why you should migrate to Office 365.

Increased productivity

This is made possible through the first cross platform support that allows access to documents from PCs, Macs, iOS, and android devices. This allows employees to use the devices they have at hand. Secondly, Office 365 can be used anywhere at any time, making it possible for employees to gain quick access with considerable ease. Office 365 also comes with the ability to share and collaborate its features and documents.

Flexible deployment options

This includes:

Premises deployment – involves deploying Office 365 business, business premium, E3 or proplus plans that come with the full local installation of the 2016 version of Office 365.

Cloud deployment – involves migrating back-end services like exchange and SharePoint to the cloud.

Hybrid deployment – allows for both premises and cloud deployments

Predictable and manageable costs

Office 365 gives organizations flexibility and the ability to scale up based on a predictable cost structure. In addition Office 365 offers an easy transition to a more flexible licensing arrangement with a familiar cost structure.

Always up to date

Subscribers are always updated to the latest version of Office 365 regardless of deployment type. Software assurance is sorts of an insurance policy that helps organizations receive the latest version of Microsoft products among other features, without the need to buy new licenses arising. Office 365 does away with the need for this package being solely for the purpose of maintaining the current version of Office 365.

Support during and after migration

Buying office 365 from a reputable firm will give your business access to expert help during and after migration. A good Office 365 Consulting firm should include in the package migration planning and assistance as well as continuing dedicated support even after the deployment is complete. Office 365 is the collaboration tool of the future for increased productivity at the workplace.  Office 365 will introduce your business to increased productivity. It will also help you manage costs.

Managed Services Toronto: How Do They Operate?

 

Managed Services are service delivery designs accessible to organizations that provide checking and management of IT systems over the wire. Systems like servers, security, networks and storage are observed and managed by third party companies that specialize in contract technologies.

Most of the Managed Services Toronto companies offer various levels of services that are supported by the level contracts. The skill to offer this service has been proven to operate for remote connections from one place in the world to another. 

How does the Managed Services operate?

Managed Services Toronto providers can bring certified professionals that observe incidents and handle them through resolution.

Most managed services are made on ITSM toolsets that give automation.  If any client device has a problem, an alert is received by the monitoring device.

The tool will compare every issue to the alarm threshold. If the issue meets the alarm criteria, a ticket is quickly made in the provider’s ticketing system and modern algorithms are applied to assure of efficient automation and prioritization.  The prioritization must be taken extremely seriously and every incident needs to be directly assigned a resolution time based on priority.  Engineer’s particular to the technology of the tool are instantly alerted of the latest Incident and are immediately able to begin working the problem. 

Why would businesses want Managed Services?

When businesses refer to managed service providers, they are usually trying to resolve important pain points in their IT organizations. But there is a multitude of unseen benefits that companies may get through a managed services relationship.

Businesses with no managed services relationship are depending on their internal devices to aid them resolve and pinpoint IT service problems. Managed service providers, nonetheless, usually use more modern toolsets to ensure quality service. This means immediate diagnoses as well as faster remediation, but it also gives them a way to data and information that may be of no value to clients, data that no one initially thinks to ask for – and which can mean surprising included benefits for the client company.

How to determine if Managed Services is right for the business?

The best way is to examine some of the most usual reasons for applying managed services and find out if they are applicable. If they can determine with one or more of the following, there is a strong chance that managed services can assist them.

The cost to manage IT internally is:

• High turnover in IT resources

• Desired resources not available

• Need to lower IT complexity

• Does not keep up with technology

• Reduce the need for crisis management

Plan & Enact

Delegating the management of the company’s technology must be a way for CIOs to increase their service levels and lower their expenses in the process. The key to deciding the right managed services partner is a through up-front investigation of their services and rules, and a drilling down into the way they perform their business by knowing what questions are important to ask.

Corporate Security Systems: What Needs To be Addressed?

The corporate world is experiencing a continuous growth of cyber threats through a variety of ways via email, web and even social media. The most prominent incident was when a major US retailer’s credit and debit accounts were devoid of 110 million records with a malware in its point-of-sale system.

It is just one example of the many ways by which businesses can be vulnerable and the truth is, there are still a lot of ways by which cyber-attacks can threaten businesses.

Below is a brief overview of the common threats that corporate security systems need to address:

Website threats

Malware can enter a system through a variety of web surfing applications. An example is through Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. A normal-looking website can generate requests to various sites that then take advantage of vulnerabilities, let us say Twitter. The exploit then gives access to the hacker the acquired Twitter accounts of their visitors. Web 2.0 applications often use XML, XPath,  JavaScript and JSON, Adobe Flash and other similar feature-rich applications that can be injected with malware. Often times, these malware can bypass your anti-virus defenses.

Another form of a website threat is the “drive-by” download. When an innocent user visits a website, a malware is automatically downloaded to their computer. Occasionally, a pop-up window will appear and the visitor will click the “OK” button and that is when a small program like a Java applet, an ActiveX control and similar, will be installed on the visitor’s computer without them knowing. There have been cases that a malware is being served to unsuspecting visitors from legitimate websites have been hacked. These are grave issues for websites being maintained by smaller businesses. In mid-2013 there has been an instance that approximately 30,000 new sites are being created per day just to be used for malware distribution.

Spam

Although spam is the least “interesting” when it comes to email threats, it has actually significantly dropped in terms of proportion since the late 2010. Though spam still continues to be unwantedly received by many organizations, an anti-spam solution that is part of corporate security systems is still able to filter over 70% of the mail on a daily basis. Prior to 2010, the number is at 80-90 percent spam. Also, these enormous unwanted emails still consume the precious bandwidth and storage spaces in workplaces.

Direct attacks

Direct attacks can include a number of exploits. Hackers can own business by using a known vulnerability in a web browser. They can also exploit older versions of a browser or ActiveX control. This is actually an issue with teleworkers who do not update their computer systems to get the latest security patches available. Often, measures implemented are different with office or work computers.

While it is a fact that every organization has its own limitations when it comes to resources like infrastructure, staff, or training, it is still not an excuse to put everything at work at risk. A corporation should give priority to these ongoing threats, after all, it is your business that is at stake here, not another entity.