Mark Treweeke's Top Five Tips for Cloud Services and Networking

Mark Treweeke, Redstor's Product Manager gives us his top 5 tips for those looking for an insight into how to overcome network challenges that may be encountered when considering Online Cloud Backup and Cloud Storage Services.

1. The first backup or upload of data to the cloud is likely to take a long time, typically due to large data quantities needed to be shifted over low bandwidth connections. This can be alleviated by using an online backup or cloud storage provider who has a ‘seeding’ option where they ship you a storage device to collect the data before it is shipped back to the service provider and uploaded to the cloud platform.

2. Make sure that the technology that you are using to backup or move data into the cloud is designed for that purpose and has been designed to minimise data transfer over the network through data reduction technologies like compression, block or binary level incremental backups or client-side data de-duplication technology which eliminates blocks of data already stored in the cloud, all of which greatly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported over the network. This type of enabling technology will allow only unique data to be sent after the initial seed backup has been performed.

3. The daily change rate should be something that's appropriate for online backups or cloud storage. If you're creating many tens or hundreds of gigabytes of unique data per day, and you need to back up that data or move it into the cloud every day, you may require greater bandwidth in order for the process to complete in a timely fashion. You’ll have to consider the cost of the additional network bandwidth required.

4. Security over public networks should be of concern, make sure that the enabling software encrypts the data before it is sent over the network and offers ‘end-to-end’ encryption.

5. Networks today are more reliable than ever but enabling technology should still include a strong re-connection mechanism. You don’t want your backup or data transfer to fail and have to re-start all over again because a connection to the internet or service provider was lost, even if it was momentarily. This is especially true for laptop backup, where they regularly lose their connection or move between networks or access points due to the portability of the device, power saving and hibernation options.

Redstor's cloud services include our ever-growing Online Backup service which currently protects upwards of 500TB of data and Redstor Protector, our Laptop Encryption and Backup service. If you require any further information around Cloud services and how these can help you adapt your business please call our office on 0118 9515 200.

Backup Issues and Online Backup

The 360IT event in Earl’s Court London yesterday it highlighted some key data protection issues within the IT industry particularly within the UK. UK based SME’s are amongst the least prepared for disaster recovery planning.

Key figures from the research highlighted the following:

· 44%* did not have the ability to recover data to alternative hardware.
· 50%* of those surveyed admitted to suffering the consequences of downtime at some point in the last 6 months.
*(of 70 SME’s surveyed by Acronis)

Further researched conducted by Vanson Bourne surveyed 600 SME’s which produced some intriguing results.

· 72% of SME’s still rely on an end of day backup strategy which for smaller organisations is recommended, however, considering the survey questioned organisations with the number of employees ranging from 250-1,000 one may expected the hourly incremental data changes to be significant with the potential for data loss to be unthinkable should such a situation arise.
· 10% of SME’s only carry out weekly backups.
· The research also highlighted that for companies whose core competencies are not in IT backup and recovery issues can be extremely stressful with 59% of IT managers feeling stressed and under pressure to deliver.
· In the UK 38% of firms are failing to address desktop backup and laptop backup. Considering a large portion of live “work in progress” data is stored on end user machines this is leaving UK SME’s unnecessarily vulnerable to data loss.

The event also highlighted an industry shift towards “online backup or cloud backup” which is Redstor’s main focus and in particular emphasis on the ability to recover to alternative hardware if the need arises.
The real question for businesses operating in the knowledge economy today is what price can really be put on the safety and security of your data?
Redstor has been addressing these backup and storage issues since 1998 with Redstor Protector, Online Backup and Schools’ Backup as well as enterprise storage solutions and managed storage services for EMC and other recognised industry players.