We’ve reached the final article in this 8-step program. Throughout the last 7 articles, I’ve laid the foundation for expanding your backup services to a true recovery offering by establishing the Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives for each critical data set, application, service, or server, and introducing various kinds of recovery services you can provide: Virtual Disaster Recovery Continuous Recovery File Versioning File Level Recovery Virtual to Virtual

We’re nearly at the end of this series of articles covering the ways you can improve business recovery, while increasing your service revenue. I’ve covered a number of ways to recover entire machines using virtualization as both a platform for disaster recovery, for continuous recovery, and in cases where going virtual to virtual makes sense. While virtualization plays a dominant role in the infrastructure for many of your customers, some still have specific servers still run

Virtual to virtual (V2V) recovery involves the backing up and recovering of virtual machines. So you may be thinking that your customer already has a virtual infrastructure, so why would they need V2V recovery services? Great question, right? But there’s one presumptive point in that question that may not be true when recovery is required. When you consider your customers with a VMware or Hyper-V-based infrastructure, and think about the idea of offering V2V recovery, you pro

In my previous article (in this 8-step “recovery” program for businesses) I talked about the recovery of critical files, the recovery point objectives (RPOs) for them, and how file versioning helps meet the customer need to recover files that simply don’t change very often. But most files don’t fall into the “this is critical, but it doesn’t change much” category; I think you’ll agree that most fall into the “I created this once and never touched it again” category. So are th

If you work for a small business, you probably believe you’re not a target for cyber crime, largely because you have little of value to be stolen. You’re not alone. Almost half (44%) of small business management don’t see cyber crime as a priority either. But with 42% of small businesses experiencing at least one attack in the past 12 months, that thinking needs to be turned around. Phishing, malware, zero-day attacks, application vulnerabilities, and good old-fashioned autom

Most backups are relatively small because they only contain changes made (at a file or, even better, a block level) since the last backup. But while you’re backups are busy grabbing the latest and greatest, some files simply don’t change very often and are, therefore, overlooked. For example, take an organizational chart—it is important, but won’t change daily. Now add to this the fact that your default retention of backups may only be, say, 30 days, with a few archives at mo

In my last article, I discussed how some applications are so critical, they need to be recovered using timeframes in terms of minutes – even when there’s no hardware available – making virtual disaster recovery (VDR) the second step towards building a solid business recovery program for your clients. VDR is useful in addressing the need to meet a particularly restrictive recovery time objective (RTO), but what about when a system is so critical that it has an equally restrict

In the wake of so many security breaches, each news report seems to always focus on two things and two things only: The number of people/credit cards/passwords etc affected and the cause of the breach. Take a database breach at Comixology – the “cause” was a hacked database. Not surprising, as the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report cites 92% of breaches involve outsiders and 52% of those breaches involved hacking. Like most breaches, we’re never given more detail

Your business could use some additional revenue, and your clients could use some additional protection. It’s a vicious circle that only you can break. You already back up a good portion of their data, applications and systems, so what’s wrong with what you’re doing today? Is there really more to offer? In this 8-part series, I’ll focus on 8 ways you can increase revenue, provide better service, establish more protection for your clients, and improve your ability to recover th

You just got the call: your Exchange server is not sending or receiving email. Your one and only Exchange server. OK, this is bad. You drop everything and begin to check the Exchange server for problems. It is up? Yes. Are the needed services running? Yes. Does it have enough disk space? Yes. OK – time to check the Event Logs. It can’t find a domain controller. Time for a ping test. Check. NSLookup? Check. OK… what in the world is going on? Read the entire blog here. Need con