“By the end of this century, intense, heavy rainstorms that now typically happen only once every 20 years are likely to occur about twice a decade”, the report stated.

So far, the predictions made in the report seem to be accurate:  The last few years have seen a heightened level of natural disasters, prompting thousands of businesses around the world to reassess their continuity and disaster recovery plans. With more and more sensitive data being stored electronically, these companies have begun to take online data backup services seriously in a bid to reduce downtime and avoid extensive loss in revenue.

Last month, Thailand experienced its worst flooding in seven years. Bangkok – the center of commerce and trade in the country – was completely inundated, and hundreds of businesses lost a considerable amount of revenue as a result. Most businesses in Thailand had been slow to adopt cloud computing and backup data centers as part of a contingency plan, but in the wake of these historic floods, companies are taking their data backup seriously.

Monsinee Keeratikrainon, manager of global research firm Frost & Sullivan, said demand in cloud computing services was set to expand more quickly because of natural disasters like the flooding in Thailand.

“The cloud will likely get more attention from companies as they prepare business continuity plans for any future crisis,” she said.

So far, backup centers in Thailand have received a lot of attention:  Demand for offsite data storage centers in Thailand rose by nearly 300% during the floods, mainly from manufacturers who needed to transfer their data to a safe location.

“The cloud market in Thailand is expected to grow by 50% to 1.5 billion baht (USD $47,800,000) next year,” Keeratikrainon said. This growth has the potential to prompt an investment of at least 500 million baht (USD $15,000,000) in expanding online data centers to accommodate demand.

But the growth of the cloud market isn’t confined to Thailand. As natural disasters increase worldwide, the demand for backup data centers is increasing with it.  The United States has recently experienced one of its worst years in natural disasters. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US experienced over $55 billion in damages from natural disasters in 2011, the worst in US history.  This has prompted US businesses to embrace data backup and disaster recovery systems. IT companies that provide support and strategy services for small and medium-sized businesses have experienced significant growth, citing the rise in natural disasters as one cause. ProviDyn, one such company, has increased revenue by 75% in the past year, and recently expanded their staff by 25 percent.

“At its basic level, controlling data is about controlling risk, which means being prepared in the event of disaster so that you can restore your business without losing its most important asset – information,” said Blaine Rigler, general manager of US-based Iron Mountain Data Backup and Recovery. “The amount of information that needs to be protected is growing at an incredible pace, creating new data challenges every day.”

And no other industry feels these challenges more than the healthcare industry. Natural disasters can cause a healthcare facility more than financial loss; it can potentially affect the lives of its patients if their personal charts or prescriptions are lost. Having their data stored remotely is crucial to restoring the facility’s operating conditions. Last May, a tornado leveled St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin, Mo., completely wiping out their Electronic Health Records (EHR). But, because their medical records were all stored in a remote data center, they were able to reduce the devastation of the tornado and quickly return to providing for their patients.

“Within seven days, we had the EHR system up and running again, having retrieved the data from a mobile medical unit,” said Michael McCreary, chief of technology services for Sisters of Mercy Health Systems,  the organization in charge of St. John’s rebuilding efforts.

“We were lucky to have a paperless system that could be restored fairly quickly,” McCreary continued. “Some of the hospital’s old paper records got blown 70 miles away.”

Rise in Global Disasters Means Rise in Data Backup Solutions is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

It is essential that your business is prepared for the unpredictable. During turbulent times it is vital to have a reliable Data Backup and Recovery protocol in place.

Here are some criteria that Backup Technology have put together as a checklist to help businesses ensure their data is protected.

> Automated data backup solution which can be operated remotely:

It is essential that data can still be backed up in an automated and remote fashion when staff are unable to access an office building.

> Utilise an experienced Managed Service Provider with 24/7 availability:

When a Disaster Recovery (DR) procedure needs to be invoked it is essential that a dedicated team can be contacted immediately to begin the recovery process.

> Have a DR plan in place which meets your organisation’s critical Recovery Time Objectives:

It is essential that your DR plan is regularly tested to ensure recovery times are in place and that staff are familiar with the procedure.

> Server Recovery into standby Virtual Environment:

Servers must be recoverable into a virtual environment with secure access ensured to all global users.   

> Have an established DR site for staff to work from in the event of the primary site being down:

Organisations should have a secondary site which users can work from in the event of their primary site being unavailable.

The London Riots: Being Prepared for the Unpredictable is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

Symantec found that 12% of Asia Pacific SMBs had no form of DR plan whatsoever and 44% of these did not consider computer systems critical to their business. A further 28% stated that disaster preparedness was not a top priority.

Such a lack of preparation is surprising considering the typical SMB experienced 5 outages within the last 12 months. The leading causes of this were cyber attacks, power outages, upgrades and employee errors.

The data at the heart of such SMBs is simply not protected. Less than half of all SMBs back up their data weekly and only 21% backup daily. Forty-five percent of businesses said that they would loose at least 40% of their data in the event of a disaster, and it is estimated that such an outage would cost their customers up to $45,000 per day. This is one of the main issues in that a disaster not only affects the vendor directly, but also their end clients.

The survey revealed that most businesses are not making disaster recovery a main priority until they experience some form of significant data loss. Fifty-four percent of businesses which have put some form of implementation in place have done so in the last six months. However only 28% of companies have actually tried and tested their disaster recovery procedures, which is critical to being prepared.

Findings also reveal that the cost of being unprepared is huge, placing an SMB under real risk of going out of business. The survey revealed that in addition to costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, any downtime often causes customers to take their business elsewhere.

“Disasters are unpredictable and can happened due to natural causes, human errors or IT systems failures. SMBs which handle sensitive data such as customer records, credit card details or personal files, cannot afford to risk data loss incidents,” said David Dzienciol, Symantec’s vice president for SMB and Channels, Asia Pacific and Japan.

“The research shows that SMBs still haven’t recognised the tremendous impact of a disaster. Simple planning can enable SMBs to protect their information in the event of a disaster, which in turn will help them build trust with their customers.”

In India for instance it is thought that SMBs have yet to recognise the huge impact which disaster can have according to Vineet Sood, the head of channels and alliances at Symantec India.

SMBs must act quickly to put Disaster Recovery Procedures in place and ensure that data is secure, in any eventuality.

Asia Unprepared For Disaster: Symantec reveal SMBs in Asia have no DR is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

The article details that data protection is about making data available when it is required and the version of the data required should be available to restore. This broken down into five key phases:

Detection: When a user notices a file is deleted, lost or corrupt, no matter what period of time has past.
Diagnosis: This is when the user must decide what version of the file to restore back when it was still consistent and error-free. This will depend on the company’s backup policy and retention period.

Restoration: This is when the file/folder/database is physically restored, but it is by no means the end of the process. Depending on the accident, before normal operations can be resumed, a restart of all applications, replay logs from a database, or from a journal for a file system might be required. This ensures data loss and down time is kept to bare minimum.

Test and Verification: All of the above is pointless if the file has not been tested and verified that it is correct and working how the user wants. It is only once this stage has been successfully completed that the data recovery process can be signed off.

With a reliable online backup solution in place, that is fully managed, backups can be monitored around the clock. Then, help is on hand when required to help with the recovery and by seeking the correct advice, file retention can ensure that the version of the file you want is available when required.

Data Backup – Its more about recovery is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

Top ranking of all the Cloud Backup vendors is Asigra.

Asigra is a 25-year-old, privately held company focused exclusively on backup, recovery and archiving.

The company has been providing multi-tenant backup and recovery solutions designed for managed service providers (MSPs) since its inception, and has amassed a very large number of partners that offer it as their own, relabeled software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Asigra claims that over 250,000 sites are protected world wide. Initially designed for backup over a standard telephone line, the product has a long history of incorporating data reduction technology. As such, Asigra was one of the first backup solutions to deliver block-level incremental processing whereby only new and changed blocks of data need be transmitted.

The Asigra Cloud Backup software is based on an agent less architecture, with support for remote and branch offices, desktops, virtual environments and now laptops.

Asigra is quick to respond to market trends — notable is its support for CDP, virtual environments and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification.

Asigra started supporting virtual environments almost six years ago. At that time, there were no backup APIs available from server virtualization vendors, so Asigra used the native APIs from VMware and Xen to provide support for VMs. Today, Asigra supports VMware through the vStorage APIs (VADP), as well as through native APIs. Asigra states that the native API method allows for greater granularity, to the file/message level.

As Asigra’s largest global partner with over 5 Petabytes of data under management, Backup Technology are delighted that Asigra have been placed above other managed backup solutions on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The results show Asigra’s abilities to enable partners such as Backup Technology to deliver fully managed backup solutions to household name business and enterprise customers.

Backup Technology currently have several individual customers who protect over 50 Terabytes of De Duplicated data using Asigra. Having worked with Asigra for over 6 years, we are confident that it is the only solution in the market that scales to enable us to protect individual customers of this size. What’s most impressive is that it does it without using any agents, and supports all of the major operating systems and database formats.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disk Based Enterprise Backup and Recovery is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

Over 50% of companies surveyed have no disaster plan in place and 23% of companies don’t even conduct backups on a weekly basis. This is despite 65% of these companies operating within areas susceptible to natural disasters.

Twenty nine percent of companies admitted they had experienced some form of data loss in the past. Such data loss was generally found to occur through humans error, hardware failure, a natural disasters or theft.

Statistics show that the average SMB experienced 6 computer outages within the last year. It appears that despite such figures many SMBs “still think it can’t happen to them.” Says Bernard Laroche, senior director, SMB product marketing.

The main reason appears to be that SMBs simply don’t recognise IT as an essential element of their operation (41%). Although such businesses may not always be using very sophisticated software they often underestimate their reliance on their IT infrastructure. Secondly the usual story is that companies don’t tend to investigate a disaster recovery plan until some form of data loss has already occurred, and it’s too late.

It is vital that SMBs on the whole become more familiar with exactly what data they have, where the data resides and what aspect of that data it would be that would be missed most.

A solution must ensure data resides offsite, is secure and available for recovery at any time. The options include tape backup, external media and Online Backup. Of course the main advantage of backing up online over the rest is the convenience, ease of use and automation the solution allows. The SMB should also ensure that which ever supplier they opt for offers security, monitoring and support. Furthermore the supplier should help companies conduct regular disaster recovery tests in order to ensure the solution is running smoothly.

The simple fact is that SMBs cannot afford to lose data and above all cannot afford to lose critical customer information.

Disaster Recovery in SMB’s is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

An automated message stated, “We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls due to a processing error by the Bank of Scotland. If a transaction has been duplicated this will be automatically refunded. The Bank of Scotland have a recovery plan in place.”

I was promised a full refund for being charged twice for the same goods. Well its five days after the mistake and the recovery plan seems to be taking its time, as I am yet to receive any refund. Not convenient for myself, and one would guess thousands of other banking customers.

Upon looking further into the issue, it appears that similar problems have previously affected customers of Bank of Scotland who are now part of the Lloyds Banking Group. In 2009 shops across the UK received complaints from customers accusing them of being charged twice for the same transaction. The fault was located to electronic point of sale systems and their chip and pin cards.

It is very surprising to see that two different banking groups have experienced similar issues within a short space of time. In both instances it has led to money being incorrectly taken from customer accounts, and the timing of the latest problem comes at the point where many people’s finances are stretched to the limit after the Christmas and New Year period.

It is very possible that the mistake could also lead to people receiving bank charges for going overdrawn and have transactions refused due to insufficient funds. Whilst I am sure that the banks will eventually refund these it is an unnecessary hassle and customers should not have to chase for refunds.

Whilst mistakes can always happen, customers should have been notified rather than having the shock of finding out themselves, and it should not have taken over 5 days to resolve.

It does call into question what Backup, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions the banks have in place to enable them to recover from such incidents.

Natwest and RBS customers experience overcharging is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

More than 2000 people were questioned as part of the research, which attempts to gauge stress levels which result from data loss incidents.

Significantly, it was discovered that there is a difference in response depending on whether the subject is male or female.

Eighteen per cent of males equated receiving news of data loss to being lumbered with a bill which had not been anticipated. Other men who were questioned said that it might be as stressful as being made redundant, crashing a car or becoming a victim of male pattern baldness.

For women, the data loss equivalents were as predictably patronising although presumably accurate, with respondents claiming that it would be similar to the loss of a pet or the inability to squeeze into a pair of jeans before a night out. The most extreme reactions resulted in comparisons with discovering that a close friend or relative had fallen ill.

A recent study also looked at the way in which students deal with data loss. A fifth of respondents said that they had deleted data by accident and a further 70 per cent said faulty hardware had resulted in data loss in their daily lives.

Hard drive failure was cited by 66 per cent of students as the key reason for data loss which in turn, had an impact on academic work and performance at school, college or university.

Fifty five per cent of respondents to LG’s data loss study said that they did not have a disaster recovery plan or any significant backup capabilities to restore their precious personal data. Experts believe that in most cases, this is simply because people do not have enough space on their computers or portable storage devices to preserve larger files like pictures, music and videos.

It is impossible to put a value on the data which every man and woman stores, whether it is family snaps, business documents or financial information, which puts the onus on users to properly protect their information.

Stress of data loss measured is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

A recent survey conducted by Applied Research, on the state of backup and recovery capabilities in virtual environments, showed that nearly half of enterprise data stored on virtual platforms is rarely backed up and that over 60 percent of virtualised servers are not incorporated into disaster recovery plans. Considering disaster recovery now comprises of more than a quarter of annual IT budgets this is a worrying sign.

As the market highlights there is certainly no shortage of disaster recovery solutions designed to protect virtual environments. The fact of the matter is that virtualisation actually makes recovery of servers and infrastructures that much easier by increasing performance and flexibility. In today’s world we are seeing organisations host infrastructures in the cloud, so it is strange why there is still this inability or unwillingness to ensure successful backup of virtual environments. As many solution providers demonstrate the cloud provides a much more flexible backup and disaster recovery framework then traditional solutions and often at lower prices.

Reliability has often been an area of concern for organisations looking to implement virtual environments especially with mission critical systems and data. The fact of the matter is that virtual environments performance and resilience is excellent, although however good a solution is one still can’t stress the importance of data backup and disaster recovery. The variety and expertise of backup and recovery providers’ worldwide means no data or systems should ever be excluded. Such features as CDP and ‘hot’ database backups mean that not only recovery time objectives are met but recovery point objectives are achieved.

Data is the lifeblood of any organisation, so every measure should be taken to protect it. Virtual infrastructures are playing an increasingly vital role in enterprise data infrastructure, but to leave it out of the DR equation is surely a step too far.

Disaster Recovery is lacking in Virtualised Environments is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.

Backup Technology Limited and Terian Solutions LLC announced today at the Gartner Data Centre Conference Las Vegas, the completion of a merger to create the world’s largest managed Online Backup and Disaster Recovery specialist

The combined entity will retain the Backup Technology name and brand to build on its existing international presence. The partnership means that Backup Technology now protect over 5 petabytes of data for a global customer base which includes The Red Cross,  Master Lock, Liverpool Football Club, Energy XXI and the UK Government Offices.

The merger is expected to significantly increase adoption of Backup Technology’s services in the United States and Europe by allowing multinational organizations to utilize a single centralized Backup and Recovery solution and choose if their encrypted data should reside in European or US Data Center’s. This approach ensures that Backup Technology customers are compliant with European and US Data Protection and Data Retention Regulations such as FIPS-140, Sarbanes Oxley, and PCI- DSS as their data will always reside within their chosen territory.

Backup Technology and Terian utilise the market leading Asigra Cloud Backup software and both companies had achieved Asigra’s highest level of partnership, 3D Hybrid.  Backup Technology is now the only organisation in the world that can boast 3D Hybrid Partner Status in Europe and the USA, this accreditation allows the company to provide Public Cloud Backup Services, Private Cloud Backup Solutions and Cloud Backup Services and Support for Resellers and Partners.

The new organisation will continue to operate from its existing offices and datacenters, with the European head office in Leeds, UK and Data Centers in Manchester and London. The US head office will remain in Houston, TX along with Data Centers in Texas and New York.

Both Backup Technology and Terian are among the few backup service providers that truly manage the day-to-day backup and recovery requirements of their clients.  In reality, most backup companies merely provide their customers with space in a vault and reactive support.  This approach leaves the day-to-day burden of backup and recovery squarely on the shoulders of the often overworked and understaffed enterprise IT departments.

Backup Technology provides 24/7 support for customers and monitors all elements of their infrastructure around the clock. This level of service is fundamental as it means that issues are instantly identified and resolved to ensure that all backup activities complete.

The integration of both organisation’s has already been completed to ensure a consistent customer experience, and clients in the US are already benefiting from being able to utilise the organization’s bespoke monitoring portal which was developed in the UK.

Backup Technology and Terian Solutions Merge is a post from Backup Technology's Blog. Contact us today for further information on our Online Backup and Business Continuity services.