Will 2013 Be Your Year of the Cloud?

Cloud computing has been the hot topic of 2012. There are more vendors with more solutions than ever before. You no longer need the power of a super computer to justify using cloud services. The evolution of the cloud has progressed to the point where even commonly used resources may make more sense hosted remotely than in-house. So, is 2013 the year that you make the move to the cloud?

For many companies, that answer will be a resounding “Yes.” It’s a matter of economics, support and access. Doing everything yourself has the lure of being totally in control of your destiny. In return, you have to come up with the capital investment in new equipment, the staff to run everything and the ongoing cost of maintenance. Often, that means giving up the ability to respond quickly to a changing business environment. It’s just too expensive to have personnel and equipment on standby, “just in case.”

Another strong selling point of many cloud providers is that they can afford to keep with the very latest technology trends. You may have to wait until your equipment is fully depreciated or until you can come up with the funding in order to get all the latest features available on the newest models of equipment. Hotly competing cloud companies have no choice but to stay at the cutting edge of technology or risk being put out of business by other more nimble providers.

Disaster recovery can be much easier with a cloud-based system. The cloud operator builds in the necessary redundancies, including geographical diversity so that no single event can knock out the whole system. All you need is access. That’s a lot easier to come by than having to reorder an entire data center’s worth of equipment and software and getting it up and running. Even with remote or cloud backup, it can take days or weeks to fully download and restore your business database. With everything in the cloud, the data is online at all times and unaffected by situations that cut off your connectivity or destroy your local offices.

Some companies have unusually high bandwidth requirements. Content providers who stream video over the Internet or provide programming to Internet Service Providers require massive amounts of bandwidth. It’s not uncommon to need 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 40 Gbps to support live streaming of multiple HD video programs. That kind of bandwidth is readily available in cloud data centers, but might not be available locally. You may be faced with moving your operation in order to get the fiber optic connections you need to conduct business. If your servers are in the cloud with high speed connections it takes the pressure off the line speed requirements from your office to the cloud.

What’s available now in the cloud? It’s pretty much everything you need to run a small, medium or large scale business. Virtual servers with virtual storage give you all the computing power and disk space that you’ll ever need. You can ramp these resources up and down using a desktop control panel in real time. This is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Along with the infrastructure, you are going to need software. Software as a Service (SaaS) complements IaaS so that you pay by the month by usage for all your software and hardware. A related component, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the cloud version of a development system where you get things customized and working. You only buy this as you need to do development. Security as a Service is a add-on feature that protects your network from intrusion. Once again, it is running from within the cloud.

Even the telephone system has a cloud equivalent. This is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. The switching system and connection to the public telephone network is all done by the cloud service provider. You install SIP telephones that connect to your network and use a special line called a SIP trunk to connect with the provider. You no longer need to buy and maintain an in-house PBX. Some vendors will even include free SIP phones with your service.

Have you been watching cloud developments but hesitant to get involved? This is a great time to get competitive prices and features on cloud computing and communications appropriate for your size business. If you like the answers, you can easily sign up for service and enjoy the new features and cost savings for all of 2013.

Cloud Computing Appropriate For Small Business

Cloud computing is all the rage among medium and larger enterprises. You might say that there is a veritable stampede from local data centers to cloud based services. Small businesses may be left scratching their heads trying to figure out if the cloud makes any sense for them or if it is simply overkill for their size organizations.

In reality, cloud computing may make even more sense for smaller companies that it does for large ones. Why? It’s because major corporations have major budgets for large IT staffs and in-house data centers. The idea is that if you integrate everything under your control, you’ll logically have the lowest costs, greatest security and fastest response times.

There are many cloud examples that prove this is obsolete reasoning. Hiring a specialist service, the cloud, can actually lower your costs, improve security and allow you to react to changes in business conditions much faster than doing it all yourself.

For smaller businesses, the cloud may well become your IT department or an adjunct to a consultant that works on a less than full time basis. Cloud service providers have the expertise in-house that you can’t really afford. This means that you can get top-notch support by people who are trained in the state of the art included as part of your monthly fee.

Let’s take a look at typical cloud computing solutions that are appropriate for small businesses. One service that nearly every business, including SOHO (Small Office, Home Office), is embracing is cloud backup storage. The value in remote backups is that even if your local office is wiped out by fire, flood or tornado, your business records remain safely intact. Storage tends to be very affordable and more cost effective than buying more and more stand alone disk drives. The beauty of the cloud is that you don’t have to worry about filling up the next disk drive. Storage is virtualized and nearly unlimited.

An extension of online storage is backup and disaster recovery. These systems give you an easy to use control panel so that you can figure out what files to bring back down when needed. One thing to remember about online backup is that the limiting factor to how fast you can upload and download is the speed of your bandwidth connection. It’s not much of a problem on upload because files are being transmitted in the background as you work. Only a little bit of data needs to be sent to the cloud every hour.

The real limitation is when your entire office or local file storage is wiped out. You’ll be glad you have backup storage in the cloud so you can stay in business, but it can take days or weeks to bring everything back down. You’ll need to pick and choose which files are most important to continuing business and get those back first. The rest can be restored as a background activity.

Some cloud solutions get around this by having mirrored storage in both the cloud and in a secure appliance located in your office. This makes it really easy and fast to get a file you may have accidentally deleted and fast to restore an entire system because so much of the data is local. Of course, if the disaster is extensive and all of your on-site equipment is destroyed, you’ll still need to get everything back from the cloud.

By the way, a big advantage of cloud solutions is that you can be quickly back in business at another location. This is especially true if some or all of your connectivity is via the Internet. Set up shop at home, a temporary rental office or at the local coffee shop. As long as you have bandwidth, you’re in business.

Web servers are another technology that makes sense in the cloud. Many companies already rent shared or dedicated server space from companies that specialize in selling these plans. There is no need for anything more sophisticated unless you have the type of business with such variations traffic that you wind up paying to support the maximum number of visitors possible. Cloud servers can be scaled up and down almost instantly. You pay only for what you need right now and add more capacity during the holiday season or other high traffic times.

The old fashioned way to get the computer tools you need for your business is to buy software packages and then spend some time maintaining and upgrading them over the years. The new approach is called SaaS or Software as a Service. The actual software resides on a cloud computing platform remotely. You use the office systems or specialized software by connecting to the cloud. The cloud provider takes care of patching and upgrading the system so you have no maintenance headaches and no need to invest in expensive software. Once again, you pay for how much you use by the month.

Security is now moving to the cloud. The truth is that few businesses have security experts on staff and the attacks are getting bolder and more sophisticated. A simple anti-virus program may no longer be enough to prevent an intrusion or shutdown of your business. The way to have the latest network security is to buy a cloud based solution that acts as a firewall between your business and any potential trouble makers. Like software, security as a service is maintained by experts who have nothing else to do but stay on top of threats.

Finally, even your telephone service may make more sense in the cloud. Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP systems move all the call switching to a cloud service provider that also makes the connection to the public phone system. All you have at your location is IP telephones and perhaps a specialized gateway device. You pay by the phone by the month and some providers even include new business phones as part of the deal at no extra cost.

Is it time to reconsider the costs and performance of the IT systems used in your small business? There are great deals to be had that can help you avoid investments, lower expenses and keep up with the latest technology. Get competitive quotes from cloud computing providers and see what works best for your company.

Cloud Server vs Cloud Backup

Cloud backup services have become popular with both consumers and businesses. Most of us have at least some files stored online for sharing and mobile access, above and beyond encrypted backups. All together, there is a stampede of data moving toward the cloud.

We’ve gotten comfortable with online file storage. How about cloud computing? There is a definite trend in this direction, but it hasn’t taken off yet the way cloud storage has. There are strong indications that cloud computing will be just as popular as cloud storage in a few years.

Why is that? Some of the motivation to adopt cloud servers are the same as for cloud storage. The server in the sky is accessible from anywhere on any device. That’s a lot different from the legacy practice of going to where the computer is when you want to use it. Today we want our applications and our data available on desktops, laptops, notebooks, tablets and smartphones. The common denominators are the web browser and a wired or wireless broadband connection. Thanks to the proliferation of WiFi hotspots, it’s pretty easy to get connected away from the office even if you don’t have 3G or 4G capability on your device.

When it comes to backups, there’s another factor to consider that isn’t getting much attention yet. That is the speed of restoration when you lose your files. This factor could become the tipping point that moves everything to the cloud.

The problem becomes apparent when a local disaster completely destroys your facilities. This could be a tornado, hurricane, earthquake, wildfire, flood or something else that comes out of nowhere to engulf your business. If all you have is local computing and storage, you could be in a world of hurt for years. it’s not uncommon for businesses to fold once they realize that all their customer records, inventory, accounting and other files are unrecoverable. If you’ve been smart enough to add a remote backup service for your computer files, your electronic files will still be available. That’s the good news. The bad news is how long it takes to get them back.

One reason that moving files to the cloud is fast and easy is because we do it one or a few files at a time. Think about updating a website design or posting a YouTube video. These transfers go pretty fast. Your automatic backups are no annoyance, either. Most automated systems only transfer the files that have changed recently and they do it in the background. You may not even know a backup is going on. Corporate backup processes to remote data centers tend to run late at night when nobody is around.

Going up to the cloud is fast and easy. Coming back down may be easy but it is rarely fast. Let’s say that your old offices have been wiped off the face of the Earth. You set up new offices, buy some new computers get everything warmed up and ready to go. The only thing you need now is your original files so you can pick up where you left off. You log into your cloud backup service and start the recovery process. Have a cup of coffee while you wait. It could take a little while.

Two large cans of coffee and a week later, your files are still downloading. What? How can it possibly take so long? You’ve checked your T1 line and it is running at full speed like it always does. How can it take weeks to download a few electronic files?

Well, it’s not slow servers at the other end. It’s not your T1 line. It’s not your new computers. Everything is working just the way it should. What’s wrong is that your collection of files in the cloud is far, far larger than you ever thought possible. The files may upload in dribs and drabs, but they all have to come back at once. Those dribs and drabs happened every day over the course of a year or two, maybe many years. You’ve got Gigabytes, Terabytes, maybe Petabytes spinning on drives in the cloud data center.

Meanwhile, your T1 is downloading them at 1.5 Megabits per second. At 8 bits per byte, that’s a bit under 200 KB per second. It will be a week or two before you get the first hard drive’s worth of data back. It might be smarter to just pull down the files you need one at a time, as you need them, and let the full restore process run over night... for month or so.

Would a faster connection help? You bet it would. A 15 Mbps Ethernet over Copper line will move things along 10x as fast. A OC-3 fiber optic line at 155 Mbps would boost the file transfers another order of magnitude. Clearly, if you want fast transfers to and from the cloud, you are going to need a fiber optic link and the faster, the better.

Here’s another approach. You set up that new office, boot your brand new computers and log into your cloud service provider via your favorite web browser. You won’t even be able to lift that coffee cup to your lips before your entire software suite and all files are available. Oh, look. There’s your old desktop just as you left it when you ran for the tornado shelter.

How is this possible? It’s because you are running your business on virtual servers in the same cloud where your files are stored. Your local computers are only needed for access. In a pinch, you could take your laptop or tablet to a coffee shop or hotel and work out of there until you have new a new office. You don’t need massive bandwidth because all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. You just need enough speed to access the system and get data in and out as needed.

OK. You’re probably wondering what happens if disaster strikes the cloud, right? That’s certainly possible. It will take a bigger disaster to wipe out the cloud because those data centers are built with redundancies on top of redundancies. The best way to protect against this is to have your data backed up in a different data center than where it normally resides. Some cloud providers can set this up for you. The backup and recovery process will be a lot speedier than downloading to your office because the data centers are tied together with very high speed fiber optic line services.

Should you consider running your businesses processes on cloud servers or at least doing remote backups to the cloud? If you are at all concerned about business continuity, it makes a lot of sense. Get competitive quotes for cloud computing and storage solutions and see how affordable this might be for your size business.

Cloud IT Online Backup For Business

Backups in the cloud are becoming popular for personal files. Some of this is for protection against losing important photos and other files in case of accidental erasure or hard drive failure. Even more attractive is the ideal of keeping everything in the cloud so it can be accessed anywhere from any device. How about for business? Are cloud IT online backup services worthwhile for business users?

Independent professionals, such as consultants and sales people, may easily get by with something like Apple’s iCloud or other backup and storage services targeted to consumers. Businesses with multiple employees and perhaps multiple locations may do better with cloud services designed specifically for businesses. This is especially true if they are part of a managed solution that includes other IT services.

There are two approaches to cloud based file backup. One is to use the cloud as a separate repository for maintaining copies of important business files. The other is to take advantage of the inherent self-healing properties of the cloud itself.

“Cloud” is a moniker that is slapped onto just about any remote data center facility. The cloud is somewhere, out there. It may be as simple as a rack full of disk drives that you write to remotely. The real cloud model, though, is based on virtualization. A virtualized environment separates functionality from specific hardware. All the hardware is pooled and allotted on an as-needed basis. Cloud providers ensure that there is sufficient real hardware to not only meet any anticipated needs, but also to handle any equipment failures. If something should go awry, it is the cloud system’s job to make equipment reassignments invisible to the user.

This argues for running everything in the cloud. If your servers, storage and applications are all run out of the cloud, you don’t have to worry about how you are going to run backups. That’s all taken care of automatically. You also have access to the cloud anywhere you have connectivity. With a virtualized desktop you can even use various devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, from office or field locations to get files and run applications.

A good example of such cloud solutions is the service provided by NewCloud Networks. One of the options you can specify is to have every file you upload to your cloud server mirrored 1:1 elsewhere in the cloud. If the hardware fails, your data is still available right there in the cloud. No need to upload everything again. You can also specify snapshot backups of your entire server and automatic hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backups.

Their virtual servers have self-healing architectures. If any node fails, cloud servers running resources on that node will be re-provisioned to alternative hardware automatically. Failover can be engineered to be instantaneous for applications with critical requirements.

The virtualized environment is all contained within a SAS-70 Data center with 100 Gbps on connectivity provided by four separate fiber strands from two different providers. Two power feeds come in from two separate entrances. There are multiple air conditioning units, redundant power supplies on each physical server, redundant routing and switching and backup power from UPS battery backup and redundant diesel generators.

The alternative approach is to keep all of your IT assets local and use the cloud for backups and disaster recovery. This has the advantage of causing the least upset in your current way of doing business while offering the protection of offsite backup to prevent data loss from local fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and the like.

Perhaps the biggest limitation to simple remote backup and recovery is the capacity of the link to your service provider. This is no problem for individual file access but can be a bottleneck for recovery operations. Electronic data today piles up in Gigabytes and Terabytes. Larger organizations can be generating this much data per employee. It may all be safely stored as created and modified, but how long will it take to get back. If all you have for connectivity is a T1 line, it’s going to be a long, long time. Even with faster Ethernet over Copper or fiber optic services, you could be in for a long download process to restore everything after a major disaster. For servers in the cloud, backup data is right next door and can be accessed immediately.

What works best for your business? File backup to the cloud or computing and storage within the cloud? Compare cloud IT online backup services for business to find the optimum price/performance solution for your company.

Internet Service Without The Outages

The Internet is an amazing place for finding out just about anything related to anything. The sum total of human knowledge is migrating online. Even old books and papers are being scanned and loaded onto webpages and data bases. Combine that with real-time access to shopping, financial services, music and video and you are pretty much attached to the Internet at the hip... or at least the brain. The one major aggravation of Internet everything is when you just can’t get to it.

Internet outages are almost always local events now. The network is so large and so robust that the entire Internet just doesn’t go down. It only seems that way. Perhaps it’s your favorite site or application that is temporarily offline. Perhaps you just can’t get to anything at all.

I’ve felt this pain to varying degrees over the years. As a night owl, I know that the wee hours are the time that network administrators target to do their maintenance. That means my ISP can go offline for an hour or two without warning. It also means that any given online service my be down for maintenance with little or no notice.

Then there are the unplanned and uncontrolled outages. Construction work is famous for taking down telecom services. It’s so prevalent it has a name. They call it “backhoe fade.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like. Someone with a backhoe digs in the wrong place and chops through a wire. A year or two ago, they chopped through a fiber optic cable. There were over 100 strands in that cable and my service was on one of the last to be fused back together. No Internet for two days.

Well, not exactly. The cable modem was dead for two days. I was getting things done at any restaurant where they had free WiFi that wasn’t affected. Inconvenient? Yes, but it got me through.

I’m tied to the Internet for my livelihood, but a local outage isn’t the kiss of death. It’s just a major inconvenience. The reason for this is that all of my hosting, dozens of domains worth, is done elsewhere. In fact, I insist on having multiple hosting services located in different data centers in different cities. That way a local disaster won’t take everything down at once. This happened about 8 years back. Remember the 4 hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004? One of them flooded the building my web host was in. Even though they were on a higher floor, the communications lines were affected so no data was going in or out.

This hints at the first thing you can do to protect your business from Internet outages. Don’t put all of your eggs or servers in one basket. You have more protection when the services you use are divvied out geographically. Disasters rarely affect more than a limited area. This is true for cloud services too. Your cloud provider needs to have diverse backup solutions or you need more than one cloud. Nowadays, that also means you need more than one way to get to the cloud.

Backhoe fade is a fact of Internet access, although there are more and less risky solutions. All in all, you are better off with dedicated Internet access that has an SLA or Service Level Agreement. The really cheap Internet services, DSL and Cable, are shared and not dedicated to you alone. They are also treated as “information services” not telecom services, meaning that the providers don’t jump nearly as high or as fast when something goes wrong. T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber and SONET perform better, have faster mean times to repair and cost more... as you would expect.

It’s good to have diversity in your connectivity. Two T1 lines are better than one. Ethernet over Copper using multiple pairs is more reliable than anything coming in on a single pair. Even better is copper backup for fiber services, even thought it may be slower. There is no one cable that has both the copper wires and fiber strands in it. A cable broadband service can be an inexpensive backup service to your dedicated lines since it doesn’t use telco wiring. Wireless broadband is an excellent backup that also doesn’t have to be that costly. Your smartphone gives you a level of redundancy when your desktop PC goes down. There are fixed wireless services designed for business backup running on 3G and 4G cellular networks. You can set these up for automatic failover so that service won’t be interrupted if you lose a landline.

How much you need to concern yourself with redundancy and disaster recovery depends on what happens when you lose your connection to the Internet. Is it a minor inconvenience or does everything come to a screeching halt? If that’s the case, make sure you have at least two ways of connecting and getting your work done. They don’t have to be the same bandwidth or guaranteed availability. Just make sure that there is no single point of failure that will knock them both out at the same time. There are lots of different services available. Check prices and features so you can get the best mix of business bandwidth services available for your particular location.

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.

Hosted Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is getting a lot of interest today for good reason. As stagnated economic conditions become the new normal, the attractiveness of pay as you go computing becomes more compelling. Combine that with near instant scalability and you have a computing environment that has a cost related to your level of business activity, with little or no need for planned investments. There are other advantages, too. These have to do with disaster recovery and business telephone infrastructure.

Let’s take disaster recovery. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and fires are real threats to company data centers. What happens if you get wiped out? You can rebuild, of course. But how long is that going to take and how do you do business in the meantime?

Cloud computing can come to the rescue. The infrastructure is already in place. All you need to do is sign up for service and upload your software and data files. You DO have backups stored remotely, right? Perhaps that’s another good argument for having at least some computing or storage in the cloud. A local disaster probably won’t affect a remote data center.

Company telephone systems are also local infrastructure intensive. They require investment, maintenance, repaid and eventual replacement. Once again, if a local disaster strikes your phones can be down for the long haul. A Hosted PBX system is the voice equivalent of cloud computing. You pay by the seat by the month for switching services and a rich feature set. The provider takes care of all equipment, sometimes including the actual phones in the monthly service fee.

Cloud services comprise a wide diversity in types of services available and in the mix of private vs public clouds. Yes, you can own and run your own cloud. If your company is large enough to justify the investment and expense and you want total control, it is certainly feasible to set up your data centers under a cloud model. What this involves is redundancy in hardware and extensive virtualization. You need enough resources on standby to ensure that you can accommodate failures plus any swing in workload demand. If you run out of resources, it’s not much of a cloud.

The other extreme is to outsource everything to a public cloud. You wind up with no servers or storage and only need to bring your applications software and a high bandwidth, low latency connection. The cloud provider ensures there is sufficient capacity in the system to serve all users. That includes being able to scale to meet increasing demand and bursting to handle short term peaks.

A full public cloud makes companies with large and critical needs a bit nervous. Murphy’s Law has been known to strike everywhere, including Amazon’s massive cloud structure. There’s also anxiety over security. Determined hackers seem to find their way into anything where there’s even the slightest opportunity. You can claim military grade encryption all you want, but it’s tough to prove that break-ins are impossible and will always be impossible.

For those reasons, large operations are leaning to the hybrid cloud model with some resources local and others off in the cloud. There are a couple of other approaches to keeping everything with your own walls. One is to have someone else build and operate a private cloud for you. That’s a cloud-modeled computing environment but dedicated to your exclusive use. The private cloud can be hosted in a secure colocation facility close to high bandwidth providers. You not only offload the cost of ownership and maintenance, but can probably save on bandwidth costs too.

The other hosted solution is to create your own cloud, but do within the colo center using rented equipment. In this case, you are still responsible for the design and resource allocation of the hosted cloud, but it’s all done on a pay by the month basis rather than capital investment.

Are you interested in giving cloud computing a role in your business strategy? If so, compare features and costs for cloud hosted voice and data services to meet your business needs.

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.

Online Backup For Disaster Recovery

In computing, disaster is always just around the corner. There are so many potential points of failure. Disks can crash at any time. Data can be accidentally erased. Both equipment and data can be stolen or destroyed by fire, storm or flood. So, why are we so convinced that it just isn’t going to happen?


The problem with computer disasters is that you may never get a warning. One minute everything is humming along nicely. The next minute, it’s all gone. That scares most of us just enough that we occasionally copy important files to other computers, alternative hard drives, thumb drives, CD ROMs or DVD ROMs. It’s a lot better than nothing, but the hit and miss nature of these backups means that there are long periods when data is changing but only in one place.

The other weakness of our ad-hoc personal backup systems is that they only protect from certain types of losses. A CD ROM backup protects against a hard disk failure. It doesn’t protect from natural disasters that wipe out the entire office, not merely a few computers or one hard drive. Just what would a tornado, hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake do to your facility? Think your backup disks would still be in good condition? Maybe. Maybe not. Can you really take that chance?

The traditional solution for robust backups is to send copies of your files to a remote location, such as a separate data center across town. Smaller companies store CD ROM backups in bank vaults away from the company facilities. Today’s solution is online backup. Everybody has a broadband connection and there are companies that specialize in being that secure data center that you can’t afford.

One of the best online backup companies is SOS Online Backup. They’ve been around since 2001 and have won numerous industry awards.

A really important feature that SOS offers is called Engage Live Protect. It detects whenever a file has been changed and immediately backs up that file. This certainly takes the weak link of remembering what to backup out of the loop. With file backups happening as needed, there is also no long time lag to the next scheduled backup during which something can go wrong.

Another nice feature of this service is that you can access your files on the Web from any computer with a web browser. You don’t have to use the computer that the file came from, which helps if that machine smokes. You can even share files by using an email address. SOS lets you backup to five computers with one simple account. There are enterprise level services available for larger organizations with many employees.

Have you integrated iPhones or iPads into your organization? SOS iPhone App lets you access all of your files anytime, anywhere from your iOS mobile device.

The big hesitation many people have with online backup systems is security. How can you be sure the bad guys won’t steal your data right out from under you? SOS protects you with a three-tiered encryption system that offers military grade security. The data to be backed up is first encrypted right on your computer using 256 bit AES encryption. While in-transit, 128 bit SSL is employed to secure the link. Finally, the data is stored using 1024 bit AES encryption.

Are you feeling a bit squeamish about all those files on your computer that could go “poof” at any time? How much would that hurt? Don’t let it happen. Get SOS Online Backup now and rest easy that your important files are stored away securely in the cloud, ready to retrieve at any time.

Build Your Own Private Cloud Storage

Many small and medium businesses are doing at least some storage in the public cloud, especially with disaster recovery in mind. But you still need at least some storage locally. You can go with a SAN (Storage Attached Network) that is expensive and complicated or you can consider something much easier and simpler.

That something is a Drobo storage system. Drobo, which sounds like a good name for a robot, is a deceptively advanced hard disk storage solution that uses standard 3.5” SATA disk drives of pretty much any capacity. The deceptive part is that this appears to be just some simple multi-bay drive case. You can plug in more drives at any time. You can pull drives out at any time. You can even pull out a 1 TB drive and replace it with a 2 TB drive at any time.

Sounds convenient, but what kind of administrative nightmare lies behind swapping all those drives in and out. None at all. It’s truly plug and play... or I should say plug and store. You don’t have to log into any admin panel and start typing arcane command lines to make things work. All of that is automated and invisible to you, the user.

You are, indeed, building your own private storage cloud and it stays on your premises. There’s no worry about having sufficient bandwidth to access data in real-time because this unit sits on a desk or mounts in a rack and connects to your local network.

You are no doubt familiar with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), a technique of interconnecting multiple hard drives so that the failure of one drive will not cause you to lose data. Drobo’s system goes even farther. They call it BeyondRAID. The difference is that with Drobo you can use drives of any size and they don’t have to be the same. Grab half a dozen SATA drives at random and plug them into the Drobo box. The system automatically sets them up for redundant storage with the combined capacity being your storage pool. It’s not a matter of the smallest disk defining the storage pool or virtual hot spare.

You can see how this is similar to the cloud philosophy in that you don’t need to be concerned about the mechanics of how to get all those disparate disk drives to work in harmony. That’s built into the operating system. If you start to run out of room, just plug another drive into an empty bay. Oh, your bays are all full? OK. Just yank out the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one. The system will automatically accommodate the drive change, give you the extra capacity and not lose any information in the process.

You can even upgrade the drive system at will. Move up from a 9 bay system to a 12 bay system for up to 24 TB of local storage. Pull your drive out of the old case and plug them into the new one. Oh, oh. You forgot which drive was in which slot? No problem. Just plug them into any open slot, include any new ones wherever there is room and you are good to go. The status lights will all light green when the system has sorted things out and is ready to use.

Does this sound a bit too simple to be true? Well, you’ll just have to read the material and watch the demonstration videos to see for yourself. Drobo units start at just 4 bays for small office use (with however many drives you care to plug in) and go up from there.

Note: Photo of open hard disk drive courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth For Remote Backup

Most companies have or should have a plan for protecting their valuable data against disaster. Simple disk and tape backups may protect against a crashed PC or server, but offer little or no protection when you get hit with fire, flood, tornado, hurricane or earthquake. For this reason, offsite is the way to go for data backup.

The question become how far away is safe and what do you need to efficiently transfer data. The data center across town will save you if your building catches fire, but won’t do much when an F5 tornado levels the entire town or the levee breaks and everything submerges. You need to get to a different geographical area where the threats are different than where you are now. Tornados aren’t likely to hit Denver and Biloxi at the same time. A big earthquake may shake San Francisco, but it’s not likely to be shaking Chicago at the same time.

Corporations with regional offices are well situated to back each other up. You may want to consider having each office back up data for a couple of other offices hundreds or thousands of miles away. It’s a lot of data flowing, but if one office gets taken out, you’ve got the data in at least two other places.

Having geographically diverse locations back up each other’s data fits well with the network topology you need anyway. Certainly, you want all of your locations to be able to communicate. Some companies do this through a private star network centered on their headquarters location. Others use a mesh network based on MPLS with each location connecting to the nearest POP in their city. That’s more robust because there is no single point of failure like you have with HQ coordinating all the traffic.

What you need for data backup is bandwidth and lots of it. With dedicated line services you are paying for the full capacity even though the lines mostly sit idle after hours. Those are the traditional times that IT departments do data backups anyway. You can load your lines to the max to transfer data files without affecting other business operations if you do this in the wee hours.

Other companies like the idea of data mirroring. This is a real time process that keeps two or more copies of a data set completely synchronized at different locations. The advantage is that you can recover almost instantly when you lose a facility. The tradeoff is that you’ll need much higher bandwidth levels than for backup file transfers that can take their time overnight.

What type of bandwidth is available to support your backup or mirroring needs? Most likely you’ll want fiber optic connections, although smaller organizations may get by with 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper where it is available. Otherwise you’re looking at traditional SONET services that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.49 Gbps or OC-1921 at 9.95 Gbps. A good alternative is Carrier Ethernet service that is highly scalable and includes popular speeds such as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10,000 Mbps 10 Gigabit Ethernet ( 10 GigE).

Both SONET and Ethernet are widely available for long haul connections through competitive fiber optic carriers, plus last mile connections to high bandwidth MPLS networks with a regional or nationwide service footprint. Which topology you pick depends on how many locations you want to interconnect and how the pricing works out. Ethernet tends to be less expensive than SONET in most situations and MPLS networks have the advantage of offering more bandwidth at lower costs than most dedicated lines.

Fiber optic connections are also valuable if you are getting your storage in the cloud, as many companies are now doing. The advantage of cloud storage is that it gives you the geographical diversity you require, the security of a major data center and nearly unlimited resources as your data storage needs change. You’ll also avoid the capital expense and staffing required to run your own data centers.

Are you in need of robust high bandwidth connections to support your data backup and mirroring needs? If so, get pricing and availability of SONET and Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth services now. You may also wish to explore cloud storage options as another approach to disaster protection and recovery.



Note: Data center photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Why Managed IT Services Are So Popular

There’s been a profound shift in the way information technology services are implemented. What’s happened recently is that service providers have entered the realm of managed iT services en masse. Some of this has been a direct result of the rise of cloud computing. Other offerings have been a recognition that both staffing and capital are much more restricted than ever before.

Call it the business environment wrought by the Great Recession or call it a paradigm shift in technology. The upshot is that companies are taking a much closer look at procuring more and more of their IT services through colocation, cloud computing, or managed network services.

Just what makes managed IT services so attractive? To some, it’s a way to put the monkey on somebody else’s back. To others, outsourcing wins the make versus buy cost tradeoff. For many other business, there is so much volatility in the economy that it just makes sense to pay as you go.

Cloud computing fits the pay as you go model perfectly. You know that running your own data center involves buying lots of equipment, installing it in racks located within an environmentally controlled room, and then managing a continuous stream of patches, upgrades and trouble tickets. It’s also a balancing act. If you buy too little in the way of processing or bandwidth, you run the risk of being unable to serve an unexpected surge of customer orders. Buy too much and it sits there unused, but costing just the same.

When you “rent” in the cloud, you have an almost unlimited pool of processing power, storage and customer bandwidth to draw from. There is an expert staff that keeps everything running smoothly 24/7 without your involvement at all. Best of all, you pay for what you need while you need it. Scaling up or down can be done rapidly. There’s less pressure to correctly predict short term business activity when you can adjust on the fly as needed.

Hosted business telephone is another huge growth area for managed IT services. It’s come about for the same reasons that pushed cloud computing in to the limelight. Any business that needs more than a few handsets and outside lines finds itself becoming a small independent phone company. The cost of a PBX system to manage all the in-house and outside connections can run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. You traditionally connect it to all those desk phones through its own network and then have staff to manage the moves, adds and changes.

Once enterprise VoIP became feasible using converged voice and data networks, the dedicated phone network was no longer needed. The IT staff could manage the phone equipment too. But why pay for equipment at all? Just extend your LAN with a SIP trunk to a managed service provider and that expensive central switch, the staff needed to keep it running and all the outside phone trunks become something you can rent by the month.

Do you have a dedicated remote data center for backup storage and disaster recovery? It’s a form of expensive insurance you can’t do without unless there’s an equivalent alternative. That alternative is encrypted cloud storage. You have the protection against outages without having to buy and maintain the asset that gives you that protection.

IT departments have also been expected to manage WAN bandwidth, even to the extent of creating their own MAN and WAN networks using dedicated point to point lines. All that grief goes away when you use managed Ethernet and MPLS network services. The service provider has the responsibility of keeping the packets flowing, even in the middle of the night.

Is your company ready to consider managed IT services as an alternative to doing it all yourself? Perhaps you just want to shop for the best deals on these managed services. Either way, get availability and pricing for competitive Managed IT Services now and see how much you can save.

Low Cost Cloud Backup For Business

Many companies are taking a hard look at what cloud services have to offer. Not all businesses have their own data centers or on-site public-facing web servers. But all businesses generate important data that they can’t afford to lose. Think about what would happen if a tornado, flood or fire came sweeping through and destroyed all the paper and computer files in your office. How badly would that hurt you? What if your hard drive simply crashed? They do that, you know.


Fortunately there is an easy way to protect yourself without getting into a costly outsourcing contract. Simply backup your important business files to a secure location quickly and cheaply. The service you are looking for is called MozyPro.

Mozy is a cloud services company that specializes in low cost online backup solutions for both individuals and businesses of all size. Their business product is called MozyPro. It’s used by over 70,000 businesses right now. Why? Because it’s an affordable pay-as-you-go solution with no setup fees, no hardware to buy and very little in the way of management needed.

Compare that to remembering, or trying to remember, to backup your hard disk drives. You know you’re going to forget occasionally. Even if you don’t, will all of your files be backed up when disaster strikes or will it have been too long since the last backup? By the way, where are you going to store those backup disks or tapes? In an office safe? In a file drawer? Bad idea. For disaster recovery, you want copies of your files as far away from your business location as possible. It’s unlikely that disaster will strike two geographically unrelated areas at exactly the same time.

Here’s how MozyPro works. You get a Web-based administrative console and software for each Windows or Mac user, or server that you want to backup. These simple tools allow you to select folders and files to backup to the secure Mozy data center. You can also set automatic or scheduled backups and restore files and folders as you wish. The simplest approach is to tell MozyPro to automatically backup files while your computer is not in use. That way you’ll be sure backups are up to date.

But how secure is this process? Mozy is part of EMC Corporation, the largest provider of data storage platforms in the world. Their servers are located in world-class data centers located around the world. They are all SAS70 or ISO 27001 certified and, where applicable, adhere to European Union Safe HArbor Privacy Principles. Prior to transfer, your data is encrypted with military-grade data encryption and then sent to the data centers via 128-bit SSL connection. You can choose a managed encryption key or a personal key for added security.

Here’s something else you might like. Windows user can use a feature called Mozy 2xProtect to backup locally to a USB or external drive in addition to online. You’ll have a copy of your files nearby in case of an oops, but also a remote secure copy in case of a major disaster.

How much does all of this cost? You buy licenses for your computers and servers and pay by the month. Desktop licenses are $3.95 a month plus $0.50/GB per month for each user. Server licenses are just $6.95 per month plus $0.50/GB per month for each server. You’ll get a special deal if you sign up for an annual or biennial subscription rather than just paying by the month.

Have you had that uncomfortable feeling that you aren’t as well protected as you should be? Mozy offers pretty cheap insurance to help your business keep running no matter what. Learn more and sign up for MozyPro Online Backup For Business now. You’ll sleep a lot easier.

Cloud Computing and WAN Bandwidth

Cloud computing has become a major trend in IT services. It sometimes seems like there is a wild stampede to anything and everything in the cloud. What may get lost in the details is just how you actually get to the cloud. That mechanism is WAN bandwidth.

The WAN, or Wide Area Network, is often used to describe any connection beyond the boundary of the business office or corporate campus. Locations in town may be served by a MAN, or Metropolitan Area Network, that is limited to a small geographical area. Beyond that, you need WAN bandwidth to reach other locations or networks.

So, why is WAN bandwidth so important? It all has to do with traffic levels and where that traffic goes on the network. When data centers were all local, network traffic primarily stayed on the LAN. Once remote data centers were implemented for backup and disaster recovery, MAN or WAN bandwidth increased to accommodate the extra resource needs. Now that the server racks and disks have been replaced by cloud services, the lion’s share of network traffic goes to and from the cloud.

Where is the cloud? One of the most popular depictions of the cloud is the Internet. You don’t need to be formally involved with cloud computing to be using the Internet. Most everyone does. The reason that the cloud symbol is used for the Internet is that, as users, we don’t have to be concerned with the details of what all is on the Internet nor how it all interconnects. All we need to know is that we connect using a broadband Internet access service and use certain resources available through the Internet.

Now the term “cloud” is used to describe other services that may or may not have anything to do with the Internet. In may cases, it’s only the network that changes. The idea of having servers running applications and using storage owned by a service provider at some distant location isn’t unique to the Internet. What’s different about today’s cloud is that your connection is likely a private point to point data line that is used only to connect your business to the cloud services you require. With the Internet, many, many services and many, many users all share the same network.

This is where WAN bandwidth comes in. If you happen to be using cloud services on the Internet, you’ll be wanting a dedicated broadband Internet connection with enough bandwidth to ensure that your link is never congested. For non-Intenet services, you’ll want private line services with similarly adequate bandwidth. In some cases, latency and class of service are also critically important to your needs. That’s especially true for high performance applications such as financial trading or real time services such as enterprise VoIP, content delivery or telepresence.

Some clouds are private clouds in that they are owned by a particular organization for its own needs. The idea of having your own cloud is a way to share computing, applications, and storage among multiple company locations. The need for adequate WAN bandwidth still applies. You need to ensure that the traffic displaced from the LAN to the WAN still has a large enough pipe to flow through unobstructed.

Are you involved with private or public cloud computing as a user or supplier? You may have more bandwidth options that you realize. Find out by checking prices and availability of WAN bandwidth services for your business locations.



Note: Cloud networking diagram courtesy of Guivaloz on Wikimedia Commons.

New Data Center Networking Solutions

Data management and storage requirements for enterprise level organizations continue to increase. In addition, a majority of enterprise IT departments now replicate data between data centers. This has created a need for new and more cost effective bandwidth services, especially at 10 Gbps and above. Level 3 is addressing these needs with an enhancement of its existing data center networking solutions.

What’s different about data center connectivity compared to other business requirements? Data centers are far more concentrated than other computing resources. This is especially true for storage, a prime driver for offsite data centers in the first place. What this does is increase the need for high bandwidth connections between the concentration of storage and the concentration of users. It also influences the connectivity required.

What you need for last mile connections to an MPLS network or private lines to link business locations can usually be handled by T-Carrier, SONET/SDH or Carrier Ethernet line services. Data centers need higher bandwidth connections, but may also need special SAN protocols including Fibre Channel, Infiniband, ESCON and FICON.

SAN stands for Storage Area Networks. These are large collections of disk drives that connect directly to the application servers. SAN networks have traditionally been very localized, with the disk arrays physically near the servers. But what do you do when you need to duplicate data between data centers?

Many companies operate two or more data centers, sometimes a half-dozen or more. Some of this is due to mergers and acquisitions of formerly independent organizations with their own IT infrastructures. Much is driven by a need for disaster protection and recovery. When your business is critically dependent on its electronic data, normal backup processes aren’t adequate. You can have multiple copies of your files locked up locally and still be put out of business by a fire, tornado, flood, earthquake, hurricane or other disaster that destroys whole buildings and everything in them.

This means that you want to have copies of your critical data dispersed geographically. Establishing independent data centers in two or more cities far apart means than a disaster that takes out one center probably won’t knock out everything. There’s also an advantage to content providers in having the servers and data content located close to the customers. Latency is reduced and performance is increased due to less network congestion. A challenge is how to make sure the data is replicated exactly at all locations.

This is where long distance SAN networking comes into play. You need high levels of bandwidth but also support for SAN protocols to keep everything synchronized. FCoE or Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a popular protocol for transmitting Fibre Channel frames over 10 Gbps Ethernet connections. WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing avoids having to layer protocols to connect facilities. Each wavelength in a fiber optic link can be assigned its own protocol, regardless of what is running on other wavelengths in the same beam.

Level 3 Communications has expanded its data center networking portfolio to include SAN fiber channel protocol, dark fiber and managed fiber solutions. This is in addition to dedicated bandwidth services from 1 Gbps to more than 40 Gbps, including 10 Gbps EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service. They offer low latency route guarantees and an international service footprint, including a presence at key public exchange facilities.

Are you concerned with managing multiple high performance data centers? Would you like to have more options and/or better pricing for all your telecom connectivity needs? If so, get complementary consulting help and pricing and availability for high bandwidth networking services.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

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.

ElephantDrive Never Forgets Your Files

You know what never forgets, don’t you? The elephant. So, what’s the perfect place to store your important files so that they’ll never be lost or destroyed? How about the memory of an elephant? No, not a pachyderm... an elephant drive!

So what kind of a drive is an elephant drive? It’s an online storage service called, appropriately, ElephantDrive. It’s got unlimited capacity, encrypted storage, easy access, and is very affordable for both individuals and business teams.

Try this. Think of an elephant in a cloud. Too silly? Then consider something more concrete, such as cloud based storage. That’s what we’re talking about here. The reason you’d want to store something in a cloud is to make sure there is a copy somewhere well away from where the data is normally kept. Why? Because disaster rarely strikes two unrelated locations simultaneously. Your office may get blown away by the next tornado, along with your computer, paper files and your complete collection of backup CD-ROMs. But out there in the cloud, your data is still spinning on a hard drive far away. As soon as you have a new computer to restore it to, you can have all your data back just like it was. Too bad about all that paper. It’s probably strewn across three states by now, making you look like a litterbug.

Storing files remotely sounds like a wise move, but is it really safe sending sensitive data over the Internet?

ElephantDrive has two mechanisms for ensuring the security of your information. Before transfer, your files are encrypted with the advanced 256 bit AES encryption, the one the U.S. government has approved for Top Secret files. Is what you are doing more sensitive than top secret? Then you better write it on small slips of paper that you can quickly chew up and swallow when threatened. Of course, using ElephantDrive will keep that nasty taste out of your mouth.

During the upload and download phase when the data is actually traversing the Internet, ElephantDrive uses secure 128 bit SSL or Secure Socket Layer encryption. That’s the system used by banks to secure their transactions.

OK, so your data is secure and you know that remote storage gives you disaster recovery should the worst happen. But how much does this cost and what do you get?

ElephantDrive has two categories of users. Home users order the Home Edition. Business users order the Pro Edition. There are also a couple of levels in each edition. Even the most basic Home Edition service for one computer offers unlimited storage and will maintain a 3 version history for 30 days in case something on your computer goes oops and you have to restore to a previous version known to work. Backups can be manual or automatic. The maximum size of individual files is a generous 1 GB. All this for $4.95 a month or $49.95 per year. There’s a 15 day free trial so you can give it a go and see how well the system works for you.

How about the business plans? For $34.95 a month, you can create up to 10 workgroup subaccounts with shared access. This will protect 10 computers with up to 1 TB of total storage. You’ll have access for up to 20 older versions of each file and automatic backups even include open files. Like the individual plan, you can get a 15 day free trial of the Pro Edition.

Still not enough capacity for your larger operation? No problem. ElephantDrive offers special enterprise edition plans for businesses with large volumes of data. Chances are there’s an elephant big enough to remember any size organization’s important data.

Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable that all your precious financial files, photos, music, correspondence, designs, and other computer based files are at risk for theft and disaster with only one copy stored anywhere? You’ll sleep a lot easier when you put an elephant on the job to remember your information and give it back to you when needed. Get the ElephantDrive free trial offer now, while you are thinking of it.

XO Offers Business Continuity Planning Guide

XO Communications, a major provider of competitive telecom services, has a Business Continuity Planning Guide available for your perusal.

What is business continuity and what does it have to do with telecommunications? Here’s a hint. The other name for business continuity is disaster recovery.

Disaster recovery we understand. Every one of us has recovered from many disasters in our lives. Perhaps you’ve had your business robbed and lost everything you were working on when they took your computers. Maybe a flood wiped out all the records in the basement and kept you out of the building for a couple of weeks till the waters receded. Maybe it was something as simple as leaving your smartphone in a taxi, never to be returned.

Business continuity is how you keep going when a natural or man-made disaster strikes. As you might suspect, you’ll have a much easier time of it if you think about what can go wrong and cover yourself before the trouble starts. This can be a casual activity or a very structured methodology.

It stands to reason that the larger the business and the more diverse the activities and relationships, the more important it is to take business continuity planning seriously and devote the time and resources needed to protect the business. The XO guide has a chilling quote: “93% of companies that lose access to the information in their data centers for 10 days or more will file for bankruptcy protection within a year of the loss.”

The same might be said of the small business or independent professional. What if your office caught fire tonight and your computer was destroyed along with every backup CD-ROM melted? All the paper files would be ash, of course. If your laptop and cellphone were on your desk at the time, how would you start over with everything gone?

One answer for every business from large to small is having real backups that can’t be stolen or destroyed in a single event. That includes offsite backup for everything. If your server is located in a colocation center a thousand miles away, the tornado that levels your building won’t destroy your online operation. Redundancy is the key. No files of any importance should be in only one place. They need to be securely located in two or more independent files far away from each other, but still accessible when needed.

A similar principle applies to telecommunications lines. If someone digging down the street cuts the telco trunk lines that serve your building, how long will you be without telephone or Internet service? How much will the lost business and productivity cost? If the answer is more than trivial, think about having redundant services. The backup doesn’t necessarily need to have the same capacity as the main service. But it does need to be enough to support critical business activities.

Have a look at the XO planning guide for other ideas on how you can protect your business interests. As a smaller organization, you can probably assess your situation and put some sensible redundancies into place easily. As a larger organization, you may want to form a dedicated team to assess the risk and come up with solutions or bring in a consultant that specializes in business continuity planning.

For help with your voice and data circuits and hosting options, there are excellent cost effective solutions available from XO and other competitive service providers. Get voice and data service options and cost information quickly and easily through our GeoQuote (tm) online service.