Data Backup

This new eBook provides you with 10 important questions to ask yourself as you review your current data backup strategy along with 10 action items you can take to effectively protect your data.

by Greg Shields, Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert

The following is a blog about the security issues with mobile hotspots and other devices common in today’s workplace, from Crain’s Cleveland Business Information Security Blog, written by M URSULA HERRMANN.  We have posted her blog posts before and they have been met with great reviews.  This one should be no exception.

When employees bring their own devices, they also bring headaches

You allow your employees to bring their own smart phones to work. One day your enterprise’s connection to the Internet goes down. Joe from marketing is not concerned. He sends an internal email around to some of your other employees, giving them the SSID and password to a mobile hot spot he’s set up using his phone’s wireless connection. “I’ve got 4G; we won’t even notice the difference,” he says.

Everybody he’s emailed turns on wireless on their laptops and gets back to work. As word of mouth spreads, others configure their phones as hot spots as well and share the information. Your entire office is happily working away while your assistant is calling your Internet provider to get an ETA for repair.

Is it a good thing that your employees have found a way to work?  Sure — if you don’t mind that your corporate data is now flowing over networks you have no way to control. Suddenly, your firewalls, network intrusion detection, vulnerability scanners, sniffers, loggers and real-time monitoring all are useless.

Not only are your employees’ smart phones’ carriers now controlling your data flow, but you have no control over how secure their hot spots are. Someone could be connecting to one of them and seeing whatever is on Cindy’s laptop. If that just happens to be company proprietary information, you’ve just given away the store.

Aside from being very vigilant, or not allowing BYOD at all, there are some things that you can do to discourage your users from setting up mobile hot spots to do their work. You can set up a secondary Internet connection that is, perhaps, less robust than your primary connection but that can be used if the primary connection goes down, and fortify it with NIDS and monitors so that you have control over it. Your users then can connect to that network and continue to do their work, but you need to make sure that they connect to the regular network when its Internet connection comes back up.

You can monitor for “rogue” wireless access points in your office space — which you should be doing anyway — and if your users are using their smart phones to create hot spots, you can take action. If you are going to do this, you should make sure that setting up such access is specifically disallowed in your security policy — which it should be — and make sure that your users have signed an Acceptable Use Policy if they are bringing their own devices in.

You can prevent your users from connecting to wireless at all from their work machines, but if they are using laptops, that may be a little harder to do, since presumably you would want them to be able to make such connections when they are traveling or working from home. Another similar solution might be to have those with wireless capability use an alternate workspace if you are not already doing that, so that they will (presumably) already have safeguards for their machines and data in place when they connect to the Internet. All other users would be restricted to Ethernet only, so that they wouldn’t have the ability to connect to a rogue wireless hotspot.

The problem of BYOD and Bring Your Own Network isn’t going away, but there are ways that you can manage it. Just be aware that this scenario can occur, and take steps to prevent it before it happens.

AppAssure: advantages for business data backup

Most businesses are well-aware of the need for regular network server backup. This awareness, however, does not necessarily mean that such businesses have hit upon the best method for meeting this need. There are, of course, a large number of possible IT solutions that can assist with backing up a network server. One that offers outstanding advantages is AppAssure, a software package from industry leader Dell. AppAssure stands out as being both easy to use and fast to perform the required backups.

Versatility

AppAssure is able to perform backups in a variety of environments, helping to guarantee business continuity and seamless disaster recovery for not only Windows Servers, but also SQL servers, Microsoft Exchange servers, and environments that are using virtual server solutions. Specific virtual server backup needs that AppAssure can meet encompass Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere, which is the virtualization choice for a majority of companies worldwide.

An all-in-one approach

By addressing the needs of both virtual and physical environments with a single backup product, AppAssure saves businesses money, certainly. It also, however, saves them an even more valuable commodity: time. Using one product means a single learning curve instead of multiple ones – and that learning curve becomes even more advantageous when AppAssure is deployed as part of an overall managed services approach, with a skilled IT company providing remote services related to data backup.

AppAssure advantages

No business likes to have employees stymied in their ability to process daily workflow. AppAssure helps to meet productivity needs by allowing backups to proceed at a highly accelerated rate. Backups with AppAssure can be completed in less than one-tenth of the time needed for traditional IT solutions for backing up data. Recovery, when needed, is equally fast.

In addition, because AppAssure contains integrated deduplication of data, it helps to reduce company costs for storing data by as much as 80%. Yet data protection with AppAssure is even better than is the case with traditional backups performed at intervals. The use of incremental snapshots helps to capture changes that have occurred since the last full backup was performed. This practice tends to reduce potential loss of data.