From Server Street to the Cloud, It’s a Nightmare Everywhere!!!!
Cyber criminals aren’t waiting until Halloween to trick you into losing your important data from your business, and you shouldn’t wait to put a Disaster Recovery Plan in place to protect your business either! Here’s why…
Since COVID-19, the US FBI reported a 300% increase in reported cybercrimes. Around 90% of attacked companies suffer an average cost of $1.55 million USD each year while the average downtime due to a ransomware attack is 19 days. (Coveware)
For many organizations, these negative impacts can result in compliance and regulatory issues, damage to their reputation and profitability, and in some cases even leads to business closures. Business leaders are increasingly finding that the cost of cybersecurity inaction is too high.
If your organization is attacked, are you prepared? Do you have a ransomware recovery or disaster recovery plan in place?
This Cyber Security Awareness Month, Storagepipe is here to guide you through the process and information that you need to gather, assess, and build upon for effective data Backup and Disaster Recovery. Download your copy of our Disaster Recovery Plan Template here!
What are the biggest threats to your organization’s systems and data today?
Gartner Peer Insights and Storagepipe surveyed 100 IT leaders to discover their concerns, predictions, and challenges when it comes to disaster recovery. Read on for key insights or download the full report here!
When asked what they considered to be the biggest threats to their systems and data today, we found that IT leaders believe cybersecurity threats to be a key concern overall. Nearly half of the 100 surveyed (40%) say that ransomware/malware is their top concern, followed by user error (24%) and backup and recovery failure (15%).
These responses bring up the question…
How strong is your Disaster Recovery Plan?
Is your organization using effective cybersecurity and data protection strategies, solutions and/or services to ensure that your data, and systems and your customers’ data and privacy are protected?
When we asked this question, 96% of respondents said they’re using proactive cybersecurity to ensure the availability of their data, but only 59% of respondents said they’re doing this for their business systems.
Protect your organization from Cybersecurity Horrors with our DR Plan
A well-prepared ransomware recovery plan recognizes that a disruption to your business for even a few hours can result in significant financial and reputational repercussions. The plan should include Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) directives that guide decisions, procedures, and backup and disaster recovery services that ensure that your business survives with as little damage as possible.
(TORONTO, ON; CANADA) – May 17, 2022: Storagepipe, a leader in backup, disaster recovery and cybersecurity services, proudly announces it has been selected as the 2021 Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Partner of the Year, Canada by Veeam® Software, the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection. These seventh annual awards recognize North America Veeam ProPartners and Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners who have not only demonstrated success in providing Veeam solutions to their customers, but who have also provided first-class support, expert knowledge, continued product education, and a true Veeam strategy incorporated into their business. Winners were celebrated during VeeamON 2022, the Modern Data Protection conference of the year, taking place in Las Vegas, NV May 16 – 19.
Storagepipe was recognized as Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Partner of the Year, Canada for demonstrating the best overall performance in areas of consistent revenue growth, collaboration with Veeam and proactive selling, and promoting Veeam solutions and adjacent technologies in Canada.
“We are excited to celebrate and honor Storagepipe as the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Partner of the Year, Canada,” said Matt Kalmenson, vice president of Americas Cloud at Veeam. “More than two-thirds of organizations are turning to cloud-based services to protect essential data, according to the 2022 Veeam Data Protection Trends Report. The opportunity to deliver Veeam-powered solutions and services is at an all- time high, and we’re excited to take this journey alongside our partners for collaborative success and increased profitability. Storagepipe is an ideal Veeam partner, leveraging the Veeam program and resources to build and deliver reliable, revenue-generating Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings. We congratulate Storagepipe on this award and look forward to even greater success in 2022.”
Storagepipe is dedicated to continuing to build on this success through innovation and delivering world-class customer experiences into 2022 and beyond.
“The Storagepipe team is thrilled to receive this continued recognition from Veeam as one of North America’s strongest Veeam Platinum Cloud Service Providers, and Veeam’s 2021 VCSP of the year for Canada,” said Steven Rodin, CEO of Storagepipe. “We continue to strengthen our market-leading position by enhancing our Veeam services and delivering exceptional and responsive solutions that center on our customers’ success. We are honoured that our commitment to building deep technical expertise and expanding the breadth of our backup, disaster recovery, and cloud service offerings for small, mid-sized and enterprise customers has been recognized with this Veeam Impact Award.”
Storagepipe’s successful collaboration with Veeam has enabled multiple cloud services and made them stand out in the market, including Veeam Cloud Connect, Veeam Managed Appliances for VMware and Hyper-V, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, and Veeam Replication for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). A world-class in-house technical team and rapid and reliable services provides a Storagepipe Experience that is responsive and trusted by customers across North America. Storagepipe services are offered with exceptional support, security and compliance, along with flexible pricing to address changing business needs. Storagepipe has Veeam support for both VMware and Hyper-V along with extensive Veeam certifications. We are looking forward to showing customers all of the incredible new features in the upcoming Veeam V12 release.”
Recognition of Storagepipe’s growth and collaboration with Veeam based on the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider Partner of the Year, Canada award will help fuel expansion across Canada and the United States as they build on existing and develop new relationships.
Storagepipe’s Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partnership, its vCloud Verified status in the VMware Cloud Provider Program and the expansion of cybersecurity offerings offer immense future opportunities to drive customer benefits. Our team delivers a customer-centric Storagepipe Experience and are truly Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes.
“Storagepipe’s award was only possible thanks to the incredible relationships we have with Veeam leadership and team members in both Canada and the United States. We look forward to continuing to grow and collaborate with Veeam’s dedicated and collaborative team in the years to come,” says Rodin.
“Thank you, Veeam Cloud team for this incredible recognition!”
About Storagepipe
Storagepipe is a trusted global provider of comprehensive Cloud, Data Protection and Cybersecurity services. Since 2001, Storagepipe has provided these robust and secure Cloud, Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Storagepipe delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind. We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Storagepipe Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.
After lagging behind other sectors for decades, many asset-intensive industries are set to undergo a long overdue digital transformation. Billed as “Industry 4.0”, the shift is being driven by the adoption of big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud. The use of data to transform almost every aspect of industrial processes holds huge promise for increasing productivity, safety and efficiency. But it also creates a huge risk around the loss of data and will require these businesses to think very differently about industry data Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) services.
Evolving Data Protection Across Industries
While the computer revolution initially transformed sectors as diverse as finance, entertainment, advertising and e-commerce, there are many others that remained relatively unchanged. Industries such as manufacturing, mining, logistics, energy, and transportation rely heavily on physical assets rather than digital processes. They have typically adopted information technologies (IT) only for administration and communications, while their basic operations remained undigitized.
As progress has marched forward, these industries are now beginning to join the digital transformation movement. Two of the biggest shifts leading to the adoption of digital operations technology (OT) are IoT and AI/machine learning. IoT sensors are enabling many physical processes to finally be digitally measured. Heavy machinery performance, physical asset movements and environmental conditions can now be carefully monitored using IoT sensors, which generate data streams continuously throughout the day.
AI machine learning analytics are then used to process this enormous amount of data to isolate patterns and draw insights on everything from when to plan maintenance, to optimizing end-to-end workflows and sensing environmental hazards. The digital data and machine learning insights can then enable the automation of extremely complex processes. Using digital twins technology, it is possible to model most physical processes using machine learning to continuously tweak operations, improve safety and find better ways to do things.
Machine learning typically relies on access to very large amounts of historical data in order to create algorithms that model the physical process. Whereas typically, logged data of this kind has traditionally been very low in terms of priority, it now becomes much more important, and thus may need to be given different priority in your backup and recovery plans. The AI machine learning programs must continuously go through the data source searching for patterns, even as new data is added. Models are continuously in a state of development and evaluation. They are constantly rebuilt as new data is added, and the model is refined. This closed loop repeats continuously.
This puts much greater emphasis on efficient and secure data storage strategies, including data backup (BaaS) and disaster recovery (DRaaS) to ensure that your systems have access to the right data at the right time. Especially at the beginning of the process during the training of the AI, it is difficult to determine what kinds of data need to be stored, since often the most relevant insights can be drawn from the sort of data that a human operator would simply disregard. As the AI model matures, certain workloads will become more important and will move from long-term, slower storage to very fast storage. AI “training processes” can access terabytes of storage per hour, putting extreme pressure on storage throughput.
Specialized Industry Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Services
For many businesses this hyper reliance on data is new territory, and it is important for them to engage a company that can provide expertise on how best to manage, protect and recover their data. One very good option is to choose a partner that provides Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). This offers a practical solution for companies of all sizes, and especially those with limited IT personnel resources and capital to handle unpredictable disaster and emergency events. Leveraging specialized DR services enables businesses to focus their OT teams on core business needs while providing stand-by supportive resources when they need a helping hand the most.
It is important to plan carefully for what gets recovered and in what order because the AI data stores can be so large. This requires careful analysis of the criticality of your operations and systems, and the necessary order in which data needs to be recovered. Working closely with your DRaaS provider, you can create playbooks for exactly how to respond to different disaster scenarios, test them and then train your personnel to follow them.
A good DRaaS partner will also have extensive experience in helping companies recover from many different kinds of disasters including cybersecurity events, which are a new kind of threat for an asset-intensive industry as IoT introduces new avenues for attack along with enhanced connectivity.
As we embrace autonomous technologies built around IoT, AI and machine-learning, we are unleashing tremendous productive potential — all based on data. We are also setting ourselves up for serious difficulties if the data is lost. A good DRaaS partner can help you to navigate and survive events of this nature and ensure that your business thrives in its new data-driven model and is not crippled by the loss of it.
Your Industry Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes
Storagepipe is a trusted global DRaaS provider of comprehensive Cloud, Data Protection and Cybersecurity services and can help to provide guidance as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.
Since 2001, Storagepipe has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Storagepipe delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind. Storagepipe is an accredited Microsoft Office Level 1 backup and DRaaS provider.
We are driven to be your trusted industry data backup and DR partner and to ensure that we deliver a Storagepipe Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability and support that your business demands.
Contact us today to discover your options around data loss prevention solutions and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as Cloud to Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365and Storagepipe DR services. Regardless of internal user error, ransomware attacks, or when a disaster strikes, ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.
You’ve embraced remote working – are you still secure?
The trend towards remote working has been growing for several decades, but recently due to world events, many businesses have had to adopt supporting technologies and processes quickly and under pressure. The remote working trend has also dovetailed with the move to the cloud and software-as-a-service applications like Office 365. Cloud services are a great help in implementing remote working and in helping teams to collaborate even when not working in the same location. Cloud-enabled services and applications are often misunderstood, however, when it comes to security measures. Along with their SaaS services, businesses also need to consider using cloud-based security and disaster recovery services in parallel from a trusted DRaaS provider.
SaaS and Cloud providers like Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and others promise to secure the infrastructure that hosts the cloud application. But these SaaS providers are not responsible for covering all of the possible data and security issues that can arise, so customer support for backup, replication, and recovery services needs to be considered.
While the cloud provider takes care of the infrastructure, data and access remain the customer’s responsibility. The access risks compound as workers increasingly work remotely and communicate through email, which is the number one vector for malware.
Secure access to the cloud for remote workers today is usually ensured by either using an SDP or split-tunnel VPN. In either case, the security of remote access relies on user authentication. It is important not to make the mistake of relying on the employees to set up and manage their passwords. Individuals are notorious for setting easy-to-remember but also easy-to-guess passwords. Set up strict corporate password policies and enforce them. Also enforce regular intervals for employees to update their passwords.
Even with these stricter password policies in place, businesses would also be wise to employ multi-factor authentication (MFA). There are a number of ways for bad actors to manipulate or trick your employees into unintentionally revealing their passwords making it a good idea to have a second authentication method as a further roadblock. Traditionally, MFA was done using tokens, but it has become much simpler today to use the employee’s smartphone to send a code that they then enter into the SaaS login credential screen. There are a number of good choices for MFA available such as Google Authenticator, or options recommended by Microsoft. Need help determining which MFA solution is the best fit for you? Ask our Microsoft 365 experts today!
Even MFA access through SDP or a VPN will not always guarantee security for your most precious data; internal employees can also act maliciously. Therefore, it is a good idea to design your internal data access policies to ensure that each end user only has access to the applications and data that they need to do their jobs.
Segmenting your data collections is another good policy to adopt for additional Cybersecurity and data protection. Having all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. Using various software-defined networking techniques such as SDPs or SD-WAN, you can literally define the connection between the user’s device and a specific server. They can be completely restricted to this network slice. Finally, think carefully about which workers get remote access; not everyone needs it all the time.
One main vector for security breaches is via email “spear phishing” attacks, which attempt to induce people to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers by posing as reputable companies.
Phishing is a common technique for extracting passwords from employees with some IT professionals reporting 1000+ phishing attempts hitting their email inboxes a month. Other malicious email campaigns include sending attachments with embedded trojan code, or links pointing to compromised websites that auto-download malware onto users’ systems.
All employees are at risk of making a split-second poor decision and exposing their computer to these attacks. Threat actors are adept at choosing topics that people are eager to learn more about, often playing off trending fears and anxieties to lessen people’s natural caution and common sense. As a sign of the times, many organizations are reporting increased email phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many messages claiming to offer breaking news or free tests. Once the pandemic has finally abated, threat actors will move on to the next anxiety-provoking topic.
While Microsoft and other email SaaS providers often try to help to filter unwanted senders’ messages by verifying the IP address to guard against phishing, oftentimes their off-the-shelf attempts lack comprehensive protections and may lag behind in updating against the latest threats. IT professionals should look to enhance their email security by looking for Managed Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus solutions that offer services for scanning both inbound and outbound emails to eliminate spam and known attacks, and Managed IT Services for analytical reporting, Cybersecurity and on-demand expertise from a trusted DRaaS provider.
While it is critical to stay on top of the latest security threats and trends, it is also the case that malicious actors are constantly innovating new attack strategies. Barely a week goes by that some new kind of threat is launched and discovered. From denial of service to trojan horses and ransomware, you can never rule out the possibility that your business will be the next headline victim and cautionary tale.
How does a DRaaS Provider enhance Microsoft 365 data protection and cybersecurity?
That is one of the most important, but not the only, reason to have a comprehensive backup and rapid disaster recovery service. Another reason is that employees unintentionally delete data all the time. In fact, they are the most common source of data loss. Even IT professionals can make configuration mistakes that can open data to being hacked or even lost. So, a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery option is essential for restoring your data.
This is where cloud services expand their usefulness from a means to collaborate efficiently, to storing and protecting your critical and everyday business data. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has become increasingly important in an era of escalating natural disasters, cyber-attacks targeting critical public institutions and businesses, and sophisticated social engineering campaigns bombarding your business day and night.
The good news is, as the importance of DRaaS has risen, the affordability has too. Many savvy organizations are leveraging the flexibility and rapid responsiveness inherent in cloud-enabled backup and recovery. After all, one of the many reasons that you adopted a cloud model was to get away from the capital costs and ongoing operating expenses associated with running and maintaining your own internal data infrastructure. Now that there are a range of cost-effective disaster recovery services available, businesses are finding that DRaaS makes good common sense.
In addition to helping you to recover from a disaster, an experienced DRaaS provider can also proactively help you to prevent data disasters from occurring in the first place, and enable your business to work securely no matter where your end users are located. As a third-party specializing in helping businesses to recover from various disasters, they are best placed to anticipate what your business might face in the future. They can help you to design your security approach, as well as prioritize your data resources, segmenting them and working with you to create a plan for ensuring that the most critical data is restored as quickly as possible to keep you up and running.
The possibility of remote working and cloud-based services have been a godsend for many businesses, allowing them to remain operational in these difficult times. It is unlikely that the workplace will return to what it was and remote work is probably the new normal or highly significant for many businesses going forward. Your DRaaS provider can make sure that you do it securely and ensure that you can also recover gracefully if anything does go wrong.
Storagepipe is a trusted global DRaaS provider of comprehensive Cloud, Data Protection and Cybersecurity services and can help to provide guidance as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.
Since 2001, Storagepipe has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Storagepipe delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind. Storagepipe is an accredited Microsoft Office Level 1 backup and DRaaS provider.
We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Storagepipe Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability and support that your business demands.
Contact us today to discover your options around partnering with us to provide your customers with data loss prevention solutions and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as Cloud to Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365, email archiving, and Storagepipe DR services. Regardless of internal user error, ransomware attacks, or when a health disaster strikes, ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.
You may already be managing backup services for some of your clients, but haven’t yet expanded to offering a complete disaster recovery service. Or you simply haven’t added Managed Backup or Disaster Recovery (DR) to your service portfolio at all. Either way, there are good reasons to consider offering your customers DR, not just as a source of recurring revenue, but also as a sticky service that can create a more trusted advisor relationship that leads to new business. It has become easier to add DR to your portfolio with the advent of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), especially when working closely with a DRaaS partner.
DRaaS is a perfect example of an on-demand cloud service that is always-on and scales with your client’s needs. For you and your customers, there is the added benefit that you don’t need to keep a second data center for redundant servers and communications services. An additional perk for you is that DR brings in new customers, such as SMBs, that will find it easier to start small and scale as they grow.
DRaaS offers three other main benefits to your customers:
Immediate recovery from any kind of disaster with system failover to a secondary infrastructure within minutes.
Depending on needs and resources, customers get the flexibility to customize the scope of recovery from all types of disasters, from malware and ransomware to hurricanes and wildfires.
DRaaS offers seamless redundancy and no single point of failure to keep data securely protected in the cloud and away from the primary site.
Working closely with a customer to plan for recovery from a disaster that could jeopardize their business, requires that you get a clear understanding of their key operations and those parts of the business that are mission-essential. This disaster recovery planning approach is more strategic and collaborative between provider and customer than with a managed backup service, and requires you and the customer to predefine playbooks for exactly how to respond to different disaster scenarios. This is your opportunity to take your relationship with your customer to a new level. If you are able to add value and insights, you can earn their trust and develop a longer-term relationship with greater revenue potential.
Working on the disaster plan will involve taking the customer through a thorough risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. You may ask, which components are the most important and how do they impact their critical business functions? You will need to calculate both the financial and non-financial costs. Besides loss of revenue, there is the potential loss of opportunity; for instance, companies that recover faster, gain a competitive advantage.
The goal of all this analysis is to develop with the customer what they believe is their realistic recovery time objectives (RTO). In other words, how long can their infrastructure afford to be down? This is often a compromise between what they view as ideal and what they can afford. Similarly, you will also set the recovery point objectives (RPO), which define what level of data must be recovered and at what time-based increment or schedule, which should follow directly out of the analysis of critical business functions.
Qualities and Benefits of a Reliable DRaaS Partner
Having a technology partner that is focused on providing disaster recovery can be helpful during this process. A good DRaaS partner will have extensive experience in helping companies recover from many different kinds of disasters. This experience can be leveraged in formulating a sound disaster plan. And should the time come that a disaster does occur, it’s good to have team members onboard who routinely handle disaster situations and are able to meet the challenge with a measured and effective response that only comes with experience.
Your DRaaS partner will be particularly useful in the setting and defining of RTO and RPO objectives. These objectives set the parameters for the SLA you agree to and defines your relationship and your obligations going forward. This includes identifying the cost-effective services and configurations that are recommended for your customer to meet their RTO and RPO, including full or partial failover, and hot site or warm site replication. It is critical to get it right at the beginning, and this is where the extensive experience of a DRaaS partner can be drawn upon to ensure that the defined service achieves the customer’s objectives as well as your own.
Finally, your ultimate objective in defining a DR plan for your customer is to identify where they are most vulnerable and to help them to address those weaknesses to prevent disasters altogether. Again, you will have to move the needle on your relationship to go beyond reacting to their needs to anticipating them, and as a result positively shape the way they operate their business.
This is why DRaaS is much more than an additional revenue stream or a sticky service, although it is both these things. It is above all an opportunity to move you from being regarded as just a service provider to being a trusted strategic long-term partner for their business.
Storagepipe to the Rescue
Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes
Storagepipe is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection and security services and can help to provide guidance as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.
Since 2001, Storagepipe has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery Services from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Storagepipe delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.
We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Storagepipe Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability and support that your business demands.
