Great Lakes Computer Corporation

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Data Protection

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Data Protection Case Study for Educators and Government Agencies

Dell AppAssureGreat Lakes Computer is proud to call ourselves a member of Dell’s PartnerAssure Program.  Dell AppAssure is the industry’s leading software for backup and replication for voicemail, physical and cloud comuting environments.

We also have a number of government agencies and School Boards we work with and provide services, from our managed print to our Data Protection services.

Below is a case study of how the entire state of Alabama’s Education system reduced their recovery time from 24 hours to 2 MINUTES.

Learn more about the author Bob Martin

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Beware: “Changeup” Malware Threatening Data Security

“Changeup” Worm infecting SMB’s and large businesses worldwide

Date protectionFew businesses want worms invading the premises, but night crawlers are probably preferable to what office supply retailer Staples has had to contend with during the past week.  The company, based out of Framingham, Massachusetts, was forced to lock down its computer systems after it realized that shared drives were infected with the Changeup worm.

The firm notified employees of the data security problem via email, an ironic choice considering the fact that Changeup infections are often spread in the same way.  Computers may also become infected with the Changeup worm when users click on malicious links contained on social media networking sites.  Last November, computer security expert Symantec issued a warning about the Changeup worm, citing an increase in the total number of infections that it detected.

Once the worm has managed to infect a system, it spreads itself onto both mapped and removable drives in a bid to propagate still further.  The malware has been dubbed the Changeup worm because the author of it has continued to alter it in order to keep one step ahead of programs such as anti-virus and anti-spyware suites, which aim to provide computer systems with data protection by neutralizing and quarantining malware.

Threat management expert Marc Maiffret commented on the ways in which businesses can protect themselves against threats such as the Changeup worm, saying: “Malware doesn’t discern between consumers and corporations.  If companies were doing the right things such as egress filtering to control executables coming in and out of the environment, they should be able to safely mitigate this type of malware.”

Staples has yet to comment on whether or not the incident put any consumer data at risk.  Businesses, large and small, often make efforts to keep such data off shared drives, but in some cases they fail to implement such a policy consistently.

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Online data backup: no longer discretionary

SMB’s recognize online data backup as a necessity

Free eBook AppAssureA growing number of small- and medium-sized businesses around the nation are beginning to recognize online data backup as necessary rather than discretionary expenses.  Increasingly, such businesses see data recovery as a critical need of the organization and regard online backup and recovery options as the most viable and affordable means of assuring that needed data will be available for daily workflow even when unforeseen events interfere with the regular operation of the business.  This trend, however, is nothing new; as far back as 2009, over 40% of SMBs were citing automated methods of data recovery from backups as a crucial IT need.

Barriers to adoption

Even though the need for automated online backup is apparent to even the smallest of businesses these days, not all SMBs have yet adopted the technology.  A variety of barriers to adoption exist, but when SMBs are polled, two factors stand out above the others: security and cost.

Cost considerations

A common approach of small businesses to online backup is to assume that this technology is only affordable for the big players in the market.  Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Many online backup suppliers actually price their services in ways that make them highly accessible to small businesses.

A popular model in this regard is the pay-per-gigabyte approach, in which a business is assessed a variable charge during each payment cycle, with the charge directly reflecting the amount of bandwidth or storage actually consumed during the time period in question.  Thus, a small business that needs only a relatively tiny amount of backup space can be sure that they are not paying for capacity that will ultimately go unused.

Security

In this context, data security concerns can actually be ironic; businesses that back up their data on site and store it on the premises are actually open to more data loss scenarios than those that utilize an online backup solution.  A flood or fire in the office, for example, stands an excellent chance of destroying both primary data and all backups if data sets are stored in the same geographic location.  In contrast, backing up data in the cloud, which is an integral part of online automated backup, guarantees that a localized event cannot destroy all copies of the data in question.

Learn more about the author Bob Martin

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