Data is the lifeblood of every organization yet many either fail to backup their data or they are not doing so properly. Losing data can be catastrophic for a business. This white paper explains why backups are important and the challenges they face.
Whitepaper : Building a disaster ready infrastructureJake Weaver
It’s not just hurricanes, fire or other natureal disasters that can bring a business to its knees. Everyday problems such as bad software, misconfigured networks, hardware failures or power outages are much more common. In fact, power failures accounted for nearly half of the declared disasters reported in a recent survey conducted by Forrester
There is no getting around it, if a business today loses accessto its data, it is soon out of business. There are many reasonswhy an organization could find its access to reliable, securedata compromised—everything from a missing laptop to acorporate merger to a hurricane (see Figure 1). Then there are the legal and compliance requirements. In fact, many
organizations that never previously considered themselves tobe potential targets for hackers, or maintainers of sensitivecustomer data, now find themselves every bit as responsiblefor compliance as banks, hospitals and other traditional sub-jects of compliance regulations.
Whitepaper : Building a disaster ready infrastructureJake Weaver
It’s not just hurricanes, fire or other natureal disasters that can bring a business to its knees. Everyday problems such as bad software, misconfigured networks, hardware failures or power outages are much more common. In fact, power failures accounted for nearly half of the declared disasters reported in a recent survey conducted by Forrester
There is no getting around it, if a business today loses accessto its data, it is soon out of business. There are many reasonswhy an organization could find its access to reliable, securedata compromised—everything from a missing laptop to acorporate merger to a hurricane (see Figure 1). Then there are the legal and compliance requirements. In fact, many
organizations that never previously considered themselves tobe potential targets for hackers, or maintainers of sensitivecustomer data, now find themselves every bit as responsiblefor compliance as banks, hospitals and other traditional sub-jects of compliance regulations.
http://www.cloud9realtime.com/ Cloud Computing Disaster Readiness Report by software security giant Symantec in 2012 clearly shows that cloud computing disaster readiness is being embraced in North America and everywhere.
When data that is critical to cybersecurity tools remains in silos, everyone loses. This siloed approach diminishes the value of the data and leaves organizations with incomplete visibility, significant management overhead, and uncertainty about which security tools are actually necessary to ingest and analyze the data to protect the business.
These slides--based on the webinar--help answer the following questions:
- Which cybersecurity tools are necessary for full internal and external coverage, and which are redundant or outdated?
-What are the signs that a vendor can back up their promises, or that they’re exaggerating their product’s capabilities?
-How can you leverage machine learning to reduce security response time?
- How can you combine the strengths of a big data model with adaptive machine learning for more accurate, effective security protection and detection capabilities?
Streamline Compliance and Increase ROI White PaperNetIQ
Streamline, simplify, and automate compliance related activities; especially those that impact multiple business units. This white paper outlines solutions that will help your business gain the maximum return on investment possible while aligning your compliance programs.
Charting Your Path to Enterprise Key ManagementSafeNet
The increasingly prevalent use of data protection mechanisms in today’s enterprises
has posed significant implications. One of the most profound challenges relates to key
management, and its associated complexity and cost. Written for business leadership and
security architects, this paper looks at the past, present, and future of key management,
revealing how emerging trends and approaches will ultimately enable enterprises to optimize
both efficiency and security in the management of key materials.
Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Are Top IT Priorities For 2010 And ...Citrix Online
“Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Are Top IT Priorities For 2010 And 2011”
Key Findings:
• Improving business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities is the No. 1 priority for SMBs and the second highest priority for enterprises for the next 12 months
• IT plans to spend at least 5% more on BC/DR in the next 12 months (only 11% of enterprises and 8% of SMBs plan to decrease spending on BC/DR)
• BC/DR represents between 6% and 7% of the IT budget
Information Security Governance at Board and Executive LevelKoen Maris
Information security governance is a relative new area it doesn't always receive the required attention such as business support, management support and eventually the necessary budgets to keep Mr Evil out. The reasons why information security is not receiving the required attention are plenty, but a main issue that it is failing to get on the agenda could be that the upper levels of an organisational structure do not receive the information required to get their attention, or that companies are risk taking instead of risk averse or it seems impossible to identify value for the business. Security is about avoiding something, where a new application is about adding functionality in order to increase efficiency, production etc… Unfortunately, security is still seen as a business disabler.
Digital has increased businesses’ cybersecurity risk – and yet few have elevated security to a senior leadership concern, according to our recent research. Here’s what businesses are thinking about cybersecurity, and a framework for strengthening their security strategies.
Many small and medium sized businesses are still unaware of the threats that exist. This guide to security threats for SMBs outlines the most common threats and how they can be dealt with.
When Less is More: Why Small Companies Should Think Outside the(Red/Yellow) B...GFI Software
In their “Sector Insight” research study, Aberdeen Group investigated the considerations small business should take when selecting anti-malware solutions. Read this research paper to learn why Aberdeen recommends small businesses be open to endpoint security solutions from vendors other than McAfee and Symantec.
http://www.cloud9realtime.com/ Cloud Computing Disaster Readiness Report by software security giant Symantec in 2012 clearly shows that cloud computing disaster readiness is being embraced in North America and everywhere.
When data that is critical to cybersecurity tools remains in silos, everyone loses. This siloed approach diminishes the value of the data and leaves organizations with incomplete visibility, significant management overhead, and uncertainty about which security tools are actually necessary to ingest and analyze the data to protect the business.
These slides--based on the webinar--help answer the following questions:
- Which cybersecurity tools are necessary for full internal and external coverage, and which are redundant or outdated?
-What are the signs that a vendor can back up their promises, or that they’re exaggerating their product’s capabilities?
-How can you leverage machine learning to reduce security response time?
- How can you combine the strengths of a big data model with adaptive machine learning for more accurate, effective security protection and detection capabilities?
Streamline Compliance and Increase ROI White PaperNetIQ
Streamline, simplify, and automate compliance related activities; especially those that impact multiple business units. This white paper outlines solutions that will help your business gain the maximum return on investment possible while aligning your compliance programs.
Charting Your Path to Enterprise Key ManagementSafeNet
The increasingly prevalent use of data protection mechanisms in today’s enterprises
has posed significant implications. One of the most profound challenges relates to key
management, and its associated complexity and cost. Written for business leadership and
security architects, this paper looks at the past, present, and future of key management,
revealing how emerging trends and approaches will ultimately enable enterprises to optimize
both efficiency and security in the management of key materials.
Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Are Top IT Priorities For 2010 And ...Citrix Online
“Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Are Top IT Priorities For 2010 And 2011”
Key Findings:
• Improving business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities is the No. 1 priority for SMBs and the second highest priority for enterprises for the next 12 months
• IT plans to spend at least 5% more on BC/DR in the next 12 months (only 11% of enterprises and 8% of SMBs plan to decrease spending on BC/DR)
• BC/DR represents between 6% and 7% of the IT budget
Information Security Governance at Board and Executive LevelKoen Maris
Information security governance is a relative new area it doesn't always receive the required attention such as business support, management support and eventually the necessary budgets to keep Mr Evil out. The reasons why information security is not receiving the required attention are plenty, but a main issue that it is failing to get on the agenda could be that the upper levels of an organisational structure do not receive the information required to get their attention, or that companies are risk taking instead of risk averse or it seems impossible to identify value for the business. Security is about avoiding something, where a new application is about adding functionality in order to increase efficiency, production etc… Unfortunately, security is still seen as a business disabler.
Digital has increased businesses’ cybersecurity risk – and yet few have elevated security to a senior leadership concern, according to our recent research. Here’s what businesses are thinking about cybersecurity, and a framework for strengthening their security strategies.
Many small and medium sized businesses are still unaware of the threats that exist. This guide to security threats for SMBs outlines the most common threats and how they can be dealt with.
When Less is More: Why Small Companies Should Think Outside the(Red/Yellow) B...GFI Software
In their “Sector Insight” research study, Aberdeen Group investigated the considerations small business should take when selecting anti-malware solutions. Read this research paper to learn why Aberdeen recommends small businesses be open to endpoint security solutions from vendors other than McAfee and Symantec.
As the price of storage and bandwidth continues to drop fast, Cloud-based services are becoming more and more attractive to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) which are seeking to reduce licensing costs, avoid recruiting IT staff and focus fully on their core responsibility - growing the business.
VIPRE Business Takes a Bite out of BloatwareGFI Software
The remedy to bloatware is a better, more efficient product that is specifically engineered to scan, detect and remove myriad security threats without impacting performance and taking a big bite out of the IT capital expenditure budgets. Learn about the scope of the malware problem and strategies that can help you defend against evolving malware threats.
Managing and administering software updates remains one of the most challenging and resource-intensive tasks an IT Department undertakes on a daily basis. This white paper examines the important role played by patch management to help organizations keep their PC real estate fully up-to-date with the latest security patches, without unduly compromising reliability, productivity, security and data integrity.
Your network environment is one of the keys to the success of your business. Most business people don’t fully believe this, even after long discussions and mounds of evidence to the contrary.
Protecting the information you store about your customers and clients is critical to the success of your small company. On the other hand, many owners of small businesses fail to see the need to consistently Data backup for small business owners.
Business Continuity for Mission Critical ApplicationsDataCore Software
Unplanned interruption events, a.k.a. “disasters,” hit virtually all data centers at one time or another. While the preponderance of annual downtime results from interruptions that have a limited or localized scope of impact, IT planners must also prepare for the possibility of a catastrophic event with a broader geographical footprint.
Such disasters cannot be circumvented simply by using high availability configurations in servers or storage. What is needed, especially for mission-critical applications and databases, are strategies that can help organizations prevail in the wake of “big footprint” disasters, but that can also be implemented in a more limited way in response to interruption events with a more limited impact profile.
DataCore Software’s storage platform provides several capabilities for data protection and disaster recovery that are well-suited to today’s most mission-critical databases and applications.
Backup and Disaster Recovery for Business Owners and DirectorsLucy Denver
An essential guide to the top Cyber Scams of 2016 and why having a Backup and Disaster Recovery strategy that works is vital to your business. Learn the top questions you need to ask your IT team or provider about your current BUDR setup with this easy-to-follow presentation from AAG Systems.
It is shocking to note that about 3.5 billion people saw their
personal data stolen in the top two of the 15 biggest breaches
of this century alone. With the average cost of a data breach
exceeding $8 million, it is no wonder that safeguarding
confidential business and customer information has become
more important than ever. Furthermore, with stricter laws and governance requirements, data security is now everyone’s
responsibility across the entire enterprise.
However, that is easier said than done, and for that reason, an
an increasing number of organizations are relying heavily on data masking to proactively protect their data, avoid the cost of security breaches, and ensure compliance.
It is never possible to guarantee that a company is totally secure or that a breach will not occur, however implementing the latest tools and providing ongoing, end-user education will minimize those risks and allow companies to focus more on growing their business rather than repairing it.
Research by AVG shows that although most small businesses understand the need to protect their IT systems, fewer are willing to put it into practice. Out of 2000 SMBs surveyed in the US and UK for the "SMB Landscape Report", more than half (52%) have no IT security guidelines for their staff, while 1 in 7 have no Internet security software or solutions in place at all.
Can your organisation manage today's growth in data? Enterprises that regularly review their data storage can improve storage utilisation by at least 20% #datastorage #cloud
Over the past five years, companies of all sizes have been under increased pressure to improve IT efficiency and effectiveness.
IDC customer-based studies show that each year, the average midsize company experiences 15–18 business hours of network, system, or application downtime. Causes of downtime vary, but aging systems can have components or software that fail, while network connections and power grids can fail at any time because of external causes (e.g., weather, construction work, or natural disaster). Outages occurring during business hours result in revenue loss, as orders are dropped, customers move on, and employees cannot access critical applications. IDC research found that revenue losses per hour averaged $75,000. However, the adoption of best practices has allowed midsize companies to reduce downtime significantly in recent years. Solutions that improve system management, protect data assets from loss and unauthorized access, strengthen network security, and ensure availability directly reduce these losses at customer sites.
IT Solutions for 3 Common Small Business ProblemsBrooke Bordelon
Many time consuming IT problems can be side-stepped by establishing a solid network from the get-go rather than playing catch up with problems as they arise..find out how with these IT solutions.
Data minimization refers to the practice of limiting the collection of personal information to that which is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish a specified purpose.
The Threats Posed by Portable Storage DevicesGFI Software
In a society where the use of portable storage devices is commonplace, there is a real risk to business. The threat that these devices pose to corporations and organizations is often ignored. This white paper examines the nature of the threat that devices such as iPods, USB sticks, flash drives and PDAs present and the counter-measures that organizations can adopt to eliminate them.
Email is a critical communications tool. Email downtime means a loss of productivity, possible compliance and regulatory issues related to data loss, or even lost revenues. Minimizing email downtime is an increasingly important part of an organization’s messaging infrastructure and of its disaster prevention and recovery strategy.
Data is the lifeblood of every organization and business. Data theft and data loss through negligence or hardware failure can cause irreparable damage if the data is not easily retrievable. That is why making regular backups of an organization’s data are so important.
Virtualization enables companies to build fully functional infrastructures that are easily recovered and maintained with minimal effort and reduced hardware costs. Through cloning and replication, IT industries can replicate and test clients' environments without breaking clients' business continuity.
Managing a large and growing PC estate is no simple matter, particularly if you are doing it manually. Keeping a close watch on a couple of PCs can be straightforward, and a diligent IT manager will manage to keep such machines fully patched and free of troublesome software. But what happens when your estate grows beyond one or two machines?
This technical white paper gives an overview of how GFI EventsManager works and discusses installation and deployment issues while enabling you to calculate the number of GFI EventsManager instances required on your network.
How to Perform Network-wide Security Event Log ManagementGFI Software
This white paper explains the need to monitor security event logs network-wide and how you can achieve this using GFI LanGuard S.E.L.M. (now GFI EventsManager). It is written by Randy Franklin Smith, author of the in-depth series on the Windows security log in Windows 2000 & .NET Magazine.
How to configure IBM iSeries event collection with Audit and GFI EventsManagerGFI Software
This document explains how to configure and use GFI EventsManager to collect IBM iSeries (formerly AS/400) audit events through Audit, a software tool developed by Raz-Lee.
Through the recent acquisition of Katharion™, GFI Software is able to offer a hosted email filtering solution in conjunction with GFI MailEssentials™ and GFI MailSecurity™.
In an Osterman Research survey conducted during January 2011, decision makers and influencers demonstrated that they are decidedly pessimistic about the future of spam and malware problems for 2011.
This white paper provides a technical explanation of NDR Spam and recommend solutions that can prevent or limit exposure to this kind of unsolicited email.
How to tell if that pop-up window is offering you a rogue anti-malware productGFI Software
Rogue anti-malware products are a bane for every Internet user, especially those who have little or no technical knowhow. These are hundreds of scare ware ‘products’ on the Internet. This white paper examines this type of scam, explains how they work, what to look out for and how to prevent your computer from being infected.
Email is a critical communications tool. Email downtime means a loss of productivity, possible compliance and regulatory issues related to data loss or even lost revenues. Minimizing email downtime is an increasingly important part of an organization’s messaging infrastructure and its disaster prevention and recovery strategy.
The goal of GFI MailEssentials Complete Online is to improve business productivity by reducing the volume of junk mail. While MailEssentials Complete Online detects a vast majority of today’s junk email, we are continually working on new approaches to combat the increasing sophistication of spammers. Greylisting is one of the ways MailEssentials Complete Online reduces junk mail and saves you time.
CPU emulation has been used over the years for a multitude of objectives. It allows an application compiled for a specific target platform to be run on a host platform with a completely different or overlapping architecture set.
This whitepaper examines the challenges in integrating malware protection into broader product offerings, provides an in-depth review of the VIPRE® SDK, and covers the benefits of partnering with the GFI Advanced Technology Group to deliver the most efficient and effective protection solutions available.
GFI MailSecurity can be deployed as an SMTP gateway or as a VS API version for Exchange 2000/2003. This technical white paper describes each operating mode and helps you decide which to deploy and whether you should deploy both.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered Quality
Understanding Data Backups
1. GFI White Paper
Understanding data backups:
why SMEs need them
Data is the lifeblood of every organization, yet many either fail to
back up their data or they are not doing so properly. Losing data
can be catastrophic for a business. This white paper explains why
backups are important and the challenges they face.
2. Contents
Introduction 3
The state of SME data backup and recovery 3
Challenges facing SMEs 3
Solutions 4
Summary 4
About GFI® 5
Understanding data backups 2
3. Introduction
If people are a business’s most valuable resource, then data is the fuel that drives and sustains it.
Data, in all its forms, is the key to a successful business. Data helps establish strategy, assures appropriate
billing, keeps records and myriad other essential tasks. Without data, a business can fail, making the preserving
of data nothing less than a strategic priority. This applies to businesses of all sizes, but especially to small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
How important is guarding against data loss? Is survival a good enough reason? Of the companies that lose
their data, 90% are out of business within two years and nearly 50% are unable to ever reopen their doors
(London Chamber of Commerce) .
While small and medium-sized enterprises don’t typically generate the same amount of data that larger
enterprises do, they still need the same kind of protection to ensure the timely recovery of essential business data.
The state of SME data backup and recovery
Data has a great disadvantage compared to PC hardware in that it can be lost, and once lost, never easily
replaced. You can get a hard disk replaced under warranty, but the new one will come to you totally empty.
However, data has a great advantage that compensates for this weakness: it can be readily and easily duplicated.
Given the above, and with so much on the line, you would expect that SME owners and managers have the
situation well in hand. Unfortunately, it appears that they don’t.
A recent survey by Rubicon Consulting found that while SMEs are grappling with explosive data growth, the
backup processes they have in place often put that data at risk.
The survey also found that 92% of companies have deployed some form of data backup technology, yet
50% of them have lost data. Of the companies that lost data, approximately one-third lost sales, 20% lost
customers, and one-quarter claimed the data loss caused severe disruptions to the company.
Concerns about potential data loss run high among SMEs. Respondents rated backup as their second-highest
computing priority, after defense against viruses and other malware, and ahead of issues like reducing costs
and deploying new computers. Yet nearly one-third of SMEs surveyed do nothing to back up their data.
In many instances, when they do, these SMEs do not fully back up the data stored on company computers.
About a quarter of SMEs conduct no backup of desktops, and another 13% do only informal backups where
employees decide the frequency and which files are protected without any guidance. The situation is similar
for servers; about 20% of SMEs conduct no server backup.
When backups do occur, most backup files are not stored remotely. More than half of all backup files on
desktops and servers are stored in the same location as the originals, a foolish decision which leaves the
company vulnerable to permanent data loss. According to survey results, causes of data loss are diverse.
Although natural disasters are often cited as a risk, onsite disasters are the primary contributing factors of
data loss. 63% of respondents cited hardware failure as a cause of data loss incidents, 27% from deliberate
sabotage by employees and 27% from theft.
Challenges facing SMEs
A foolish frugality seems to govern the approach many SMEs have to safeguarding data properly. There is
an inherent misconception that with money and staff time at a premium, there’s always something more
pressing to do than manage backups. As shown above, that sort of reasoning, attractive as it might seem to
some, jeopardizes a company’s assets as surely as deciding to leave the company cars in an unlocked parking
lot, with the keys in the ignition, because it’s too expensive and resource intensive to collect the keys. No one
would accept that solution.
Understanding data backups 3
4. Given their smaller budgets and lack of in-house IT expertise vis-à-vis larger enterprises, SMEs require solutions
that are both cost-effective and easy to use, meaning the top challenges SMEs face with regard to data
protection include:
»» Implementing comprehensive protection with minimal impact on business operations: It is
estimated that data volumes are increasing by as much as 50% per year. At the same time, the demand for
higher system availability is shrinking backup windows. Together, these trends are placing greater pressure
on small to medium-sized enterprises to improve backup efficiencies and deliver prompt recovery. Gone
are the days when critical systems could be shut down to perform backup operations.
»» Meeting increasingly stringent backup and recovery requirements: The requirements to recover
lost or corrupt data to a specific point in time and reduce the overall time to restore data are becoming
more stringent and are now often measured in hours instead of days. Increasingly, tape-based backup
infrastructures are unable to meet these requirements.
»» Dealing with limited backup administration resources: This is a key issue particularly with smaller
companies that may not have dedicated IT staff or backup administrator. The result is that a large
percentage of critical data is generated by distributed clients; and an inability to protect this data can
leave SMEs open to data loss that can have a significant impact on the business.
»» Deploying disaster recovery strategies cost-effectively: As the Rubicon Consulting survey made clear,
data protection practices aren’t where they should be for most SMEs. Too often SMEs lack the resources,
administrative expertise, and off-site storage required to provide true disaster recovery capabilities.
»» Maintaining a secure backup and recovery strategy by providing adequate security, including encryption
and virus protection, plus centralized management of an entire data protection infrastructure, ensuring
backup data is protected and efficiently managed.
Solutions
SMEs may not need the scale provided by enterprise backup and recovery solutions, but they do need the
same functionality. That means policy-based backups, automated operations and centralized management
should be key design tenets to help lightly staffed SMEs effectively manage system and data protection
operations. Integrated disaster recovery capabilities, meanwhile, make it easier to rapidly restore complete
systems. Newer technologies such as disk-based backup, snapshot backups, data de-duplication, continuous
data protection and cloud-based backup options can help SMEs address shrinking backup windows,
increasingly stringent RPOs/RTOs (recovery point objectives/recovery time objectives) and recovery reliability
concerns.
The technologies to implement these solutions do exist, but many SME managers and IT staff can feel
overwhelmed by the technology and often, the cost of the solution, leaving their business vulnerable to an
avoidable disastrous outcome. While there is no one answer that fits all needs all the time, SMEs would benefit
from a backup solution that allows for automation and centralized management of their backup practices.
Summary
Far too many SMEs engage in risky backup strategies and methods that are born out of a combination of
failing to prioritize backup and recovery strategies properly; misplaced optimism that leads them to think “it
can’t happen to us”, and some uncertainty over what methods to pursue. Many, when they have a backup
strategy, fail to implement it fully, leaving them at risk but instilling a false sense of security.
These faulty methods can, when data loss occurs, negatively impact an SME’s bottom line, sales and customer
relationships, which explains why so many data disasters are followed by bankruptcy.
By developing data backup and recovery strategies and deploying appropriation solutions regarding backups
of important data on a timely basis, SMEs can ensure that their data, or most of it at least, will never be truly
lost; at worst, some will be lost and they will experience the inconvenience of restoring it in the event of a
hard disk failure, for example. That is an infinitely better outcome than going out of business.
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5. About GFI
GFI Software provides web and mail security, archiving, backup and fax, networking and security software
and hosted IT solutions for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) via an extensive global partner
community. GFI products are available either as on-premise solutions, in the cloud or as a hybrid of both
delivery models. With award-winning technology, a competitive pricing strategy and a strong focus on the
unique requirements of SMEs, GFI satisfies the IT needs of organizations on a global scale. The company has
offices in the United States (North Carolina, California and Florida), UK (London and Dundee), Austria, Australia,
Malta, Hong Kong, Philippines and Romania, which together support hundreds of thousands of installations
worldwide. GFI is a channel-focused company with thousands of partners throughout the world and is also a
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
More information about GFI can be found at http://www.gfi.com.
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