Backup Your Gmail and Google Apps While You Can

More and more of us are using Gmail and other Google applications for business. It’s an easy entree into the cloud and the price is right. But what happens when something goes horribly, horribly wrong? Oops! You’re out of luck.

Oh, what can go wrong? I’ll tell you what can go wrong real easy. You’re cleaning up your email and just start deleting them as fast as you can. Oh, no, there was some valuable contact information in some of those. Now they’re gone for good, aren’t they?

Not necessarily. Not if you have your Gmail backed up. You do know how to backup your Gmail, don’t you? You just... Oh, wait. Google doesn’t give you that feature. You need a special service like Backupify to backup your Google Mail data.

What services are backed up? They include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Google Sites. What this service does is create automated daily backups with one-click restore. The account administrator can also initiate a backup at any time. What’s more, an admin can also export all the data in a user’s account. That’s handy when employees are leaving and you want to keep the data but not the Google Apps account itself. You may also just want to bring your cloud data in locally to work on it or have a “belt and suspenders” approach to maintaining backup copies.

How long is your data retained? Indefinitely, by default. You do have the option to set a retention period to match company policy.

You’re probably wondering just how secure this third-party backup system really is. All communications are over encrypted channels, typically 256 bit SSL. The data in the archives is encrypted at AES-256 or higher using a randomly generated AES256 bit key unique to each user. All the user AES keys are also encrypted with a master RSA-2048 private key.

Your data isn’t just being backed up to any old data center, either. This service uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon offers an enormous and proven set of cloud computing services. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Amazon S3 is used as a cloud to backup the cloud. Amazon S3 is ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1 certified.

Do you really like the way Google applications work but are a bit uncomfortable not having an independent backup for your business needs? Now you can have just that with ample storage and a very modest monthly cost per user per month. Best of all, there’s a 15 day free trial available so you can see if this service is right for you before you make it a part of your business routine.

Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Backup and Recovery For All Businesses

Let’s face it, businesses are vulnerable. Not just to the vagaries of the economy or whims of the environment. Your greatest vulnerability may be sitting on your desk or mounted in the racks of your data center. Without backup and recovery, you are one violation of Murphy’s Law away from major headaches.

What is most at risk? Your data. At one time, all business records were on paper and the big risk was fire. Today, most business records are electronic and the big risk is corruption or erasure. One thing that can go wrong is that somebody accidentally changes or deletes something important and there is no copy. Another is that an entire day’s, week’s or longer data set is wiped out by a disk crash. Once again, no copies means you have to start all over to recreate what was lost.

Don’t depend on backup CD ROMs or DVDs written whenever somebody remembers to create them or has some free time. You expect the rest of your business processes to be more robust. Give serious consideration to doing the same for your valuable electronic data files.

Acronis specializes in backup and recovery for all size businesses from home offices right on up to major corporations. They offer backup and recovery across the network and for standalone Windows servers, Linux servers, workstations, and online backup. Other solutions include server disk management, server system deployment, recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Exchange SBS, recovery for MS SQL Server and workstation system deployment.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is based on a unified platform consisting of a suite of modules that work together to support disaster recovery, data protection and migration. Together they perform single-pass backup and de-duplication for all your files, folders, applications and operating systems. This includes coverage of disks, files, virtual machines, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Backups can be targeted to tape, disk storage or the cloud.

The latest migration, of course, is to the cloud. Acronis Backup and Recovery Online gives you secure and cost effective offsite data protection. Why offsite? While local storage protects you against disk failure or accidental file deletion, it won’t help if a flood or tornado comes roaring through town. Your precious backup tapes and disks can easily be smashed all over the countryside along with your other computing assets. That’s why you should consider offsite storage.

In fact, the most efficient and robust solution can easily be a combination of onsite and offsite backup. Why? While offsite backup gives you protection against complete loss of your local facilities, you are dependent on a bandwidth link to get to your data. Most companies have far more LAN bandwidth than they do WAN bandwidth or Internet connection bandwidth. In-house bandwidth is relatively cheap and 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps can be had for commodity prices. Once you leave the building and depend on a third party provider to connect you across town or across the country, the cost of bandwidth gets pricey fast.

What this means in practical terms is that you can get your files back a lot faster over your own network than you can bringing them back on the cloud. For a single small file, this is no big deal. But if you lose a Terabyte disk, it can be awhile before you have it restored through your telecom link.

Acronis addresses this security vs accessibility conundrum by offering an integrated solution that combines their Backup & Recovery 11 software with their online cloud product. Most backup solutions do one or the other, not both. This integration means that your administration efforts are made easy, while you enjoy the benefits of convenience and protection.

Are you a bit squeamish about what could happen to your business if technical or other disaster strikes unexpectedly? Sleep better knowing your data is protected. Check out Acronis Backup and Recovery Solutions now.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

TelePacific Takes Business Continuity Seriously

TelePacific Communications, a competitive telecommunications carrier serving customers in California and Nevada, is taking a comprehensive approach to disaster planning and the need for business continuity that follows disasters natural and man-made.

Their Business Continuity Services are focused on maintaining your ability to use voice and data services in the event you lose a trunk line or even your entire facility. But how just how can you do that?

Let’s take a look at telephone first. Most medium and large size businesses, and some smaller businesses that are heavy users of telephone communications, are using digital trunk lines. T1 PRI and SIP Trunks provide one to two dozen outside lines for management by an in-house PBX system. That trunk line offers a considerable cost savings over multiple individual phone lines, but does represent a single point failure risk. With that in mind, you can backup your primary trunk line with a few individual analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines. The key is to have the phone system programmed to automatically switch over to the backup lines when the trunk goes down. Another approach offered by TelePacific is to have your incoming calls automatically forwarded to the backup lines.

Even smaller businesses using IP PBX systems or Analog Telephone Adaptors may keep one analog telephone line in service as an emergency backup. The idea is that a fault that takes out your digital data line may not affect the analog lines. In many cases, that’s true. But what happens if a construction accident cuts all the underground lines in an area or the ground opens up in an earthquake and breaks every wire in the area?

If all your telecom connections are out, you may have also lost power. In that case, TelePacific has the ability to forward your incoming calls to a number at another business location. You could also choose to have your most important numbers, such as your main phone line and FAX number, forward to a mobile phone or even a residence. If there are too many incoming calls for you to answer immediately, the overflow can be answered by voicemail at the carrier’s facility. You then have the option to listen to and return those calls from another location when time permits.

Data lines, such as Dedicated Internet Access, are subject to the same disasters that befall telephone lines. T1 lines are the most popular connections for business users. If all you have is a single T1 line and it goes down, your connection is broken until it is fixed. But bonded T1 lines can be set up so that if you lose one, the secondary or other T1 lines will keep running. Your bandwidth will be temporarily reduced, but you’ll still have broadband connectivity.

Of course, if all lines are cut you will lose data service coming in and going out of your business location. If you have a second business location you can set up a private IP VPN arrangement so that all traffic can be routed to the secondary location. If you have only a single facility or all of your offices are located so closely together that they might all lose power or communications in the same event, you probably want to think about using a colocation service. A carrier colocation facility is probably more robust than your onside data center. The facilities are built with extensive physical security, fire and flood control, and both battery and generator backup. They also have multiple incoming and outgoing trunk lines going in different geographical directions.

TelePacific offers colocation facilities as do other providers around the country. You can house your application servers there and have an email backup server in case your primary email server fails. Remote data storage is a necessity these days since the most important business documents are now electronic documents.

Do you feel a bit uncomfortable with your ability to conduct business in the event of a fire, flood, tornado, earthquake or other unforeseen disaster? If not, it’s worth your time and peace of mind to talk with an expert consultant who can recommend the most cost effective ways to ensure your business continuity. Find out now what TelePacific and other competitive carriers can do to ensure your voice and data reliability with a toll free call or online inquiry about business continuity options.

Drobo Mr. Storage Roboto

What gets sucked up faster than excess bandwidth? Disk drive space, that's what. If all you did was word processing and spreadsheets, one of those 150 GB drives would last forever. But with digital cameras saving multi-Megabits per picture and videos making still photos look puny, there's no such thing as too much disk.

Replacing a disk drive with a bigger one or even adding more drives has its own challenges. The more Gigabytes you have, the more you have to backup or risk losing it all to a fatal head crash. If graphic design or video production is your occupation, you can spend substantial amounts of time protecting your work from untimely loss. What you need is an assistant to take of that. if fact, what you could really use is a personal robot.

Well, here's your robot. It's called Drobo, the "world's first storage robot." Drobo is a self-contained black cube of electronics with 4 open slots for SATA drives. You plug 'em in and Drobo takes care of disk management.

It almost looks like a hard drive juke box. But Drobo is a lot more sophisticated than that. It not only combines storage capacity from multiple drives, it secures your data from hardware failure. How does it do that?

At this point, I can imagine a legion of terrified insects all screaming "RAID". Funny, but not it. RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive or Independent Disks, is a technique of spreading data across several disk drives instead of concentrating it on a single drive. Files are not only spread over several disks, but redundant information is also written so that the file can be recovered if one of the drives crashes.

Drobo does something similar called SAFE for Secure, Automated, Flexible, Expandable. An advantage over RAID systems is that you can mix drives of various capacities and Drobo doesn't care. It works with whatever capacities you plug in. Like RAID, if a drive "goes south" you don't lose your data. A red light comes on and you pull out the bad drive and plug in a new one. You don't even have to fill the four slots. Start out with one or two drives and add more as you need them. Blue lights on the box tell you how much capacity you've used up.

Like any redundant storage system, Drobo uses substantial amounts of your disk drives for redundant data protection. A combination of drives that add up to 1.5 TB give you 929 GB of actual storage. That could easily be worth it as the robot does all the work.

Data Robotics put a lot of effort into making Drobo behave as much like an independent robot as possible. You don't have to worry about configuring anything or managing the processes. You plug it in, connect to a USB port, add some drives and away you go. When the drives are ready, Drobo lights green indicators next to them. Somewhere in its robotic brain, Drobo is keeping track of drive health and making sure that you don't lose anything. If you notice a flashing red light, replace that drive. It's a goner.

Drobo works with PCs and MACs through a USB port, or you can buy the optional Droboshare accessory that turns it into networked storage over a 10/100/1000 Ethernet connection. Find out more about the Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 and read the user reviews to see if this product is right for you.