The number one cause of IT downtime is your employees, not an external threat. They inadvertently delete files, click on ransomware bait, hoard data and don’t test new software adequately. Your data backup and recovery solution probably does an okay job of protecting you from external threats but how is it against more common employee issues?
Thanks
I appreciate you joining today - Hope not to take too much of your time
As Kevin said my name is … and I am the Product Marketing Manager for Unitrends. - Burlington
Want to take the next 20 minutes or so sharing how you can shorten the time between disaster and recovery.
You may think you are protected but today even the shortest periods of downtime are expensive. Even if you believe you can provide your company uptime of 99% it can still cost you about $4M in costs and lost business – assuming average cost of downtime is $9K per minute
The whole reason for recovery technologies is to reduce the amount of enterprise downtime.
Even reducing the amount of downtime from 99.9% to 99.99% can save average enterprises over $4 million a year.
These numbers are what is driving the adoption of these new technologies.
Previous job was an analyst. This jives with my research
Largest cause of downtime is human error – factor in other causes
Traditional DR marketing actually covers just 25% of causes
4% natural disaster – compare this with the % of DR material on the web
5 Currently available technologies – our goal for the webcast. These are available today and they should be in the tool box of every IT organization charged with protecting company’s data and applications
This is the number 2 cause of downtime
Backups are for more than just recovery – touch every aspect of the business
Looking for ways to use backups to increase productivity, eliminate downtime
This is best practices – spin up Tet Dev environment m- on the backup appliance, on a remote server or in the cloud.
Virus scans can sometimes suck up a lot of server capacity. Sometime certain production machines are too impacted to scan for viruses in production. Security Integrated CDM with Unitrends 10.1 allows you to perform this function against your backups.
ClamAV, an open source Linux antivirus software package is now included with 10.1 so you can add a security scan prior to bringing up a test dev environment.
Included in cause #1 – Human error
As an analyst it was hard to get data to research this – no admit that HR was so bad or employee rage would be allowed to grow so large.
Anacdotal evidence is that this is fairly common
Odd that we are discussing a way to give more people access to backups. But this is critical, especially for mid-sized and large companies. Role-based management – let data owners manage their own data.
They see only the data files that you assign, you assign levels of privilege
UI is easy enough for non-technical users to understand and perform tasks
Follow best practices in protecting data.
3 copies, 2 formats 1 offsite
As most employees primarily have access to Outlook, that is the data that they would delete
The basic data protection from Microsoft will not do it – employee deletes data and empties wastebasket – data gone. This is true for SharePoint and One Drive as well. Unitrends O365 protection allows infinite recovery so nothing is ever really deleted.
You should be able to do in 5 minutes what it might take 5 hours to do using Office 365 archiving tools. Plus, you need granular recovery - not just email but things like folders, calendars, contacts, - and broad levels of recovery - entire accounts
Malware / virus is cause number 6
Backups now playing a larger role in limiting impact
Ransomware affects all industries but healthcare and financial the most.
We anticipate new, more powerful ransomware attacks in 2018
Introducing enhanced automated detection and recovery from ransomware
You need a 5 step program to fight against ransomware:
We all know protect and recover
Protect is to have a good virus scanner and educate your users not click on suspect docs
Recover is to have a backup solution as this is the only sure way to recover from an attack. Even paying is not really recovering as you then go on a short list of willing to pay targets
We are going to focus on three steps most organizations don’t consider – Secure, Test and Detect
The first best practice – use a single vendor to handle your entire backup and recovery solution. A multi-vendor solution opens gaps that can be exploited y ransomware criminals. If you have two or more vendors you will be condemned to trying to figure out where your problem lies and which vendor to call for support.
A quick view of our offerings:
A Single fully integrated solution
If you tried to put together your own solution (that is what some vendors require you to do) it could require at least 9-10 components and then you would have tons of interoperability and support issues
The image is our Recovery Series all-in-one hardware backup and continuity appliance. We also have a software appliance call Unitrends Backup that can run on one of your servers and use your existing storage devices.
Unitrends appliances include software to fully integrate with our own cloud but we also work with hyperscale clouds such as AWS and Azure
A formal report with detailed information can be used to for compliance reporting
Many of our Healthcare customers use the report for HIPAA compliance – to prove they have a recovery plan and can meet their forecasted recovery points and times.
As ransomware evolves, so do we
Newer versions encrypt more slowly – we catch it
Unitrends 10.1 includes the ability to quickly and accurately identify ransomware activity as part of every backup
While not an official cause of downtime this is increasing the challenge of backup and data proteciton
2017 Cloud survey found companies protecting larger volumes of data.
We find 10% compounding growth rates per year for total volumes of storage are about average.
PB volumes of data are now not uncommon
Also being told to store them for longer periods of time with data compliance requirements from some industries
Example – pharma – examples
Look to Cloud storage as it is much cheaper than buying SANs or NAS devices. You can also use the same data for DRaaS to reduce downtime. Simple to buy - We offer tiered cloud services:
You can purchase protection just for what you want to protect. You purchase in 500GB blocks the data you want for long term retention of disaster recovery purposes. We can use the same file for both DR or archiving.
Next you purchase the length of time you want the data stored. 90 days – 7 years to forever – most companies have data retention schedules so you can match these to your cloud storage – 3 years for press information, 7 years for tax information, etc.
Then you choose DRaaS services you want – unlimited or you select what workloads to come up, in what order - low cost per instance
Finally, for critical machines we have Premium DRaaS – with a 1 hour SLA – we do monthly testing and present you a report to address any issues found. We understand what you want to do and we make sure it will happen – this is a contractual SLA that you will never get from Azure or AWS.
Those were just sample configurations. We have on our web site a cloud cost calculator.
You can vary the scenarios and make the variables represent your specific requirements. This way you can see for yourself how cloud costs can vary greatly depending on your situation.
Finally – sorry to say – we are all causes of lost data and drags on IT time.
File recovery is the most common, unscheduled, interrupt driven task IT is asked to perform.
Many stories of users calling to say “ Don’t know who lost my file but it is just gone”
Here is the dashboard
See Recover button – easy to identify previous backups, files that are included and recovery is just pushing a single button
These are actually tiles that can be moved
We have some resources that might interest you if you want more information:
Take this 5 Minute DR Checkup to see how prepared you are for the future. You will see what others in the industry project as to the size and timing of a downtime event. You will also receive advice on how to reduce that impact and speed the time of your recovery. The tool also includes access to four calculators you can use to fine tune with your specific metrics and gain insights to your specific set of circumstances.
We have free trials of both our hardware and software backup and business continuity appliances. Go to our website and click on free-downloads.
We have demos and links to contact experts who can go deeper into the solutions I described for you today.
Now back to Kevin to host the Q & A portion of the webcast.