Disaster Revovery

Don’t Forget Data!

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There’s a lot to consider when writing a business continuity plan. The plan needs to establish the process for continuing business operations in the event of a disaster, incident or outage. Business continuity plans don’t focus on IT systems, but the departments that are supported by IT, including sales, customer service, and HR. In addition, it’s essential to plan for the protection and recovery of the company’s data.

Why is it so important to protect data? To put it simply, your data is the lifeblood of your company. Without it, you can’t fulfill orders, communicate with customers, product reports, measure progress, contact employees, market your business and more. Data is essential to both day-to-day operations and long-term objectives, which is why it’s so important to include in business continuity discussions.

A good business continuity plan will cover both data protection (the process of safeguarding information from corruption or loss), and data recovery, (the process of restoring data that has been lost.) And because most data loss occurs due to simple human error, not large-scale incidents or outages, it’s important for each and every business to include data in business continuity plans.

But how should data be incorporated into the plan? Disaster Recovery Journal recently shared a few basic tips, which we’ll summarize here.

 

Backup:

First and most importantly, ensure that your data is backed up, either physically or virtually.

Recovery:

Consider colocating data on the cloud so that it can be recovered in the event of a loss. This limits downtime by allowing employees remote access.

Remote Data Movement:

Copy data to a location outside the primary physical location, or better yet, to the cloud. This will ensure that it remains safe through fire or natural disaster.

Storage System Security:

It’s important that your storage facility is accessible to employees. However, it’s vital to protect it from unauthorized users who may have bad intentions.

Test and Test Again:

Make sure all essential employees know the procedures for backup and recovery, and run drills to ensure that data can be easily recovered in the event of a loss.

 

From data backup and storage to cloud colocation, Vaultas can help your company prepare for disaster. Give Vaultas a call at 888-998-2858, or contact us online. With custom solutions to meet the most demanding IT needs, we’ll work with you to find the best solutions for your business.

The Benefits of Server Hosting

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As companies continue to transition more of their data and operations to digital platforms, the need for a sufficient and secure hosting service becomes even greater. Depending on a company’s size and resources, it often makes more sense to enlist a server hosting service, like Vaultas, to maintain and oversee the company’s physical hosting.

But what are the benefits of using a hosting service?

First, a refresher: server hosting is the offsite management and maintenance of a company’s hardware hosting resources – the physical and virtual servers on which data is stored. Read our previous blog post to learn more about the different variations of server hosting.

There are many benefits of server hosting. When physical hosting services are outsourced, so are the financial and personnel resources involved in maintaining a server onsite. This can result in significant savings – both in time and money – and is especially beneficial for smaller companies who can’t afford a dedicated IT staff.

In addition, server hosting usually significantly increases a company’s protection against disasters, ransomware, and other security threats. Hosting services protect their clients’ data with firewalls, backups and physical security measures, protecting it against whatever threat might occur.

Finally, if your company seeks to host an application or website, there may be special skills required to support those platforms. An experienced physical hosting service will have the necessary knowledge, saving the company the effort and cost of having to hire or train someone skilled in that area. At Vaultas, we engage a network of vendor partners to support most applications, and our data center environments allow us to offer customers the reliability necessary to support the applications that are critical to business continuity.

Ready to switch to a hosting service for your data, website or applications? Learn more about Vaultas’ dedicated hosting service, then get in touch to receive a custom quote from our experienced hybrid IT professionals.

Five Important Things to Include in a Disaster Recovery Plan

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With the ever-increasing threat of ransomware and other forms of cybercrime, it’s becoming apparent that a disaster recovery plan is no longer an option – it’s a necessity. Many businesses have put DR on their to-do list for 2018, but are unsure of where to start. If you’re in that situation, give Vaultas a call – we can help you along every step of the disaster recovery planning process.

No matter your industry or business size, the experts at Mission Critical agree that there are five essential elements that should be included in your company’s disaster recovery plan. We’ll summarize them below.

 

  1. Define Trigger Points

What is the point at which the company will put its disaster recovery plan into action? To determine this, it’s important to perform a business impact analysis and create a risk profile.

  1. Determine Authority and Documentation Management

If an outage occurs, who is in charge of guiding the company through the DR plan? This should be more than one person – ideally, all members of the IT team should be able to follow the procedures laid out in the plan, and document the steps taken.

  1. Application Prioritization

Determine which services take priority, based on which have the greatest impact – financial, reputational or otherwise – on the business, and order them accordingly.

  1. Set a Testing Schedule

A good disaster recovery plan will include a schedule for review and testing of that plan. It’s important that the plan stays current, and that the team knows how to execute it seamlessly.

  1. Continual Evaluation

Along those lines, remember that a disaster recovery plan should be a dynamic and evolving strategy. Companies should continually work to evaluate and improve DR plans, especially following an outage.

 

Have questions or need help creating and implementing a disaster recovery plan for your business? Vaultas can help! We’ll create a personalized solution for your company’s specific DR needs, and ensure that you have the tools to implement it. Get in touch today to get started!

Ransomware Reinforces Importance of Disaster Recovery

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We’ve written multiple blog posts about the importance of having disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Outages – whether caused by severe weather, a power outage, or some other unforeseen event – are common, and a disaster recovery plan is essential to ensure that business operations continue as usual and data is not lost. In the last few years, ransomware has become more common, and is causing more disruption than ever before. So how can companies guard their business systems?

Ransomware is a software that uses encryption in an effort to lock up a computer or company’s database and upload files into the hard drive. A ransom note will be sent, demanding money (usually in the form of Bitcoins) in exchange for the private decryption key.

Below, we’ll share a few tips for protecting your business from ransomware. Above all, it’s important to have a solid disaster recovery plan in place. Contact Vaultas to learn how we can help.

Be aware

Because ransomware can attack an IT system from a seemingly-innocent email, link or file, it’s important to educate all employees on possible sources and origins. It is, of course, important to invest in data protection technology, but it’s also necessary to create and enforce policies around prevention.

Know how to spot ransomware

Ransomware is sinister because, at first glance, it looks relatively normal. It is generally transmitted in .png or .txt files buried in an email or link. It will work fast, encrypting and locking up files within a few minutes. Know and educate employees on what ransomware looks like and what to do if they suspect they have clicked on a corrupt file.

Make a contingency plan

Even with the best protection plans in place, ransomware can easily still strike. If and when that happens, make sure your company has a detailed disaster recovery plan.

With the current increase in events occurring in Minnesota and across the country, industry experts predict that ransomware is no longer an “if” situation, but a “when.” When ransomware attacks, will your business be ready with a disaster recovery plan? The cost of most disaster recovery solutions is far less than the cost of a single attack, so it’s in your company’s best financial interest to invest in DR today.

If you want to learn more about creating an IT disaster recovery plan for your business, get in touch today. Vaultas’ business continuity service streamlines disaster recovery, keeping your business operating through any disaster or disruption.

Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity

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If you’ve been tasked with writing disaster recovery and business continuity plans for your company, you may be confused. Are disaster recovery and business continuity the same thing? Can I write just one plan to cover both?

Although they seem similar, disaster recovery and business continuity are different. They play unique and important roles in a company’s contingency planning, so it’s important to write a separate plan for each.

However, the plans will be closely related, and likely written in conjunction with one another. The information gathered during the business continuity planning process helps to determine the details of the disaster recovery plan, and vice versa.

Disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans are designed to work together, and are often implemented at the same time following an outage or incident. But they cover fully different aspects of a business, as we’ll discuss in detail below.

Disaster recovery refers to the plan implemented by a company’s IT department to bring systems back online with minimal data loss following an outage. The outage can either result from a disaster or it can actually be the disaster. And the outage can be as minor as email, an online service or the phone system going offline, or the entire IT system going down.

Business continuity refers to the plan that establishes the process of continuing business operations following an outage or incident. This does not include IT systems, but refers to the departments IT supports, such as customer service, sales, HR or others. The business continuity plan will work to keep all parts of the business running when outages occur.

It’s important for all Minnesota businesses to have both IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Outages are common, and businesses should be prepared. At Vaultas, our experienced Minneapolis data solutions experts can help you plan for the worst.

Whether your data is in our data center, your data center or a national cloud provider’s environment, we can preconfigure a solution that keeps you operating right through any disaster or disruption to your business. Contact us for more information.

4 Reasons Why You Need DRaaS and Business Continuity

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Today, when you pay attention to the news, you hear a lot about data breeches, natural disasters and the inevitable network failure. It pays for every company to have a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan in place for their business. No business can sustain a network failure of any kind in today’s marketplace, no matter what size they are.

According to Cloud Strategy Magazine, here are “four reasons to put cloud-based business continuity on your short list of IT priorities:

  1. Eventually, your company will suffer a disaster.

It could be tomorrow, next week or next year, but at some point your key data will disappear. This could be from a natural disaster, hacking, hardware crash, or service outage – at some point it will happen.

According to the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council, 75% of companies are failing in terms of disaster readiness. In the last year, one in four companies have lost most or all of their data for “hours or even days.” If it happens to you, you will want your recovery to be quick, efficient and successful.

  1. Cloud-based business continuity is ready for prime time.

Backing up important data remotely is now mainstream. But “storing data in the cloud for recovery back on-premise obviously does not equal business continuity” according to Cloud Strategy Magazine.

While it is more than just storing data in the cloud, “When DR/BC take place in the public cloud, large workloads and data sets are already stored there, meaning they can be easily and quickly brought online to help your business continue operations as soon as possible.” You will want to find a DRaaS solution that will let you test easily and frequently with both large and small tests, at varying times of the day, so you can replicate what potentially could happen in a disaster.

  1. The DR/BC trifecta finally arrives.

Affordability, automation and scalability – what IT teams need to look for in failover solutions. Now that DRaaS solutions are more available, the cost has come down to match the demand. Business continuity automation is becoming a standard offering now from major providers.

The scalability comes from the DRaaS providers who offer a multitude of services to fit the varying needs of businesses. Providing cloud computing, hybrid IT, disaster recovery and more to ensure all of your business practices are covered within the cloud.

  1. Business resiliency is now within your reach

Now through automation, or a supporting team at a qualified data center, automating the testing helps to keep the management headaches at bay. Testing your DR/BC is the fundamental practice that ensures that your plan will work when it needs to. The more automated it can be, the less time it will take your IT team to regularly test the system to make sure it’s simply working.

Business resiliency is now available to companies of every size. Finding a DRaaS partner who can understand your needs and tailor a scalable, affordable solution to your company is a must. The team at Vaultas can help you create your DR/BC plan to ensure smooth, uninterrupted business operations. They will even give you a free assessment to get you started. For more information, contact Vaultas today.