MSPNetworks Blog

Unfortunately, the more people lean on technology, the more data breaches there are. The correlation makes sense, but with so much innovation in data security and data systems, it’s a shame more can’t be done to keep businesses and individuals from losing data to opportunists and scammers. That’s why knowing how to circumvent these forces is essential to keep your data safe. Let’s take a look at how the people that are best at it keep their data secure. 

Best Practices Keep It Simple

To avoid negative data situations like this you will want to ensure that your best practices are being followed. In this particular case, they aren’t very complex. They include:

• Keeping data (particularly sensitive data) organized in secure locations
• Keeping data on a need-to-know basis via access controls

That’s the list. It’s not a lot to consider on the surface, but let’s unpack them a bit. By keeping data in a secure location, it makes it easier for the professionals that manage your data and infrastructure to respond to a breach; and, by controlling who can access what, they can easily identify where the problem comes from and work to remedy it. 

Detecting When You’ve Been Breached

Obviously, to remedy against data breaches, you actually have to know that you’ve been breached. Unfortunately, attackers are using more sophisticated methods than ever to hack into your network, making evasion a priority. This means that the speed in which you identify a data breach is taking place is one of the most important factors. 

Businesses today are using smart technology to consistently monitor and automate a response. A Netwrix 2020 Data Breach and Security report suggests that organizations using automation were better able to detect data breaches in minutes rather than hours or days. Comparatively, most of those without (56 percent) measured their detection time in days.

Respond Confidently

It can be quite off putting to consider that people are trying to break into your network. This is why you have all those procedures in place, after all. For those that haven’t gotten around to concocting a cyber threat response strategy for their team, it’s important that it is standardized and consistent; it makes it easier to follow should you have to deal with it. 

Your business will definitely have to train its staff on what to do if they are confronted with a cyber threat. Training your staff on phishing, password hygiene, and more will put your workforce in a position to help you sustain a record of security, not hinder it. On top of testing, you should consider evaluating each worker individually to better understand who needs more training and who is competent to effectively respond against these threats.

Staying On Your Toes

Having the tools to recover from a data breach is almost as important as thwarting one. Your business may be on solid footing today, but one scam, hack, or situation brought on by outside forces can floor your business. Not only do you need to have the infrastructure and the support team in place to deal with a potential data breach, you have to know that your business can recover from one. This is why you need a business continuity plan with a full data backup and recovery strategy in place. Additionally, the exploit you have dealt with could have come from a vulnerability on your network (not a human). You will need to ensure that your team’s access credentials are updated and all software patched to their most current versions.

This is not a situation you have to handle alone. Call the IT professionals at MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001 to learn about how we can help you protect your business against cyber threats, and provide you with the tools and support to handle any situation that comes your way.

Your data is vital for your organization’s continuity. Your data consists of everything from your company documents, accounting records, client contact information, prospects and leads, procedures, and everything else needed for you to keep operations running smoothly. That’s why all businesses need a solid backup solution that is monitored and tested regularly.

Why Should I Test My Backup?

As with anything, your backup solution isn’t infallible. A lot can go wrong when your backup is running, for example:

• Hardware/media failure
• Software failure
• Compatibility issues
• Network connectivity issues
• User error
• Task scheduling issues
• Files-in-use issues (especially for older backup solutions)

...and more!

Many backup solutions have a verification process to attempt to verify that a backup was taken properly and spit back any errors in the backup software if anything was found. Even the old, slow tape backup systems from a decade ago often had features like this. The problem is that sometimes with tape, the tape could be degraded to the point that it passes the verification test but ends up being partially or fully unreadable when it comes time to pull the data.

If you can’t tell, we don't prefer tape backup. It’s slow, arduous, and not very reliable, and the restoration process takes an incredibly long time compared to more modern methods.

Hard drive-based backup, including NAS (Network Attached Storage) and BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) solutions are much more reliable from a technical standpoint, but could still suffer issues if not configured properly or if they run into roadblocks like network connectivity issues.

Testing your backup could also reveal files, applications, or databases that aren’t getting backed up properly. It’s easy to configure your backup, and then install some new software later down the road and forget to make sure the data is getting backed up.

You want your data to be backed up and complete so in the event you need it, you can restore everything and be up and running quickly.

How to Test Your Backup

Essentially, you’ll want to deploy your backup in a virtual environment and run off of it. This simulates a catastrophic data loss event and lets you and your staff see if they can get by based on the data stored in the backup.

Not all backup solutions allow you to do this. Tape backups, for example, can’t be run or accessed off of the tape, so you would actually need to extract the archived data from the tape and redeploy it on a secondary or virtualized server. This could take several hours or even days to do, and by then the backup won’t be up-to-date.

Our BDR solution, however, allows us to virtualize your server and spin everything up. The process looks something like this:

1. Temporarily disable/disconnect your server from the network, simulating a hardware failure.
2. Spin up the backed up virtual copy of your server on the BDR.
3. Have the BDR take over all of the roles and responsibilities of your server.
4. Your network should be back up and running at this point, and all data should be fully accessible by your staff.

If it were a real hardware disaster, your BDR could serve as kind of a spare tire for your network, taking over for the server that had the issue. Things might be a little slower until the downed server is repaired or replaced, but at least operations can still run.

If you’ve been backing up your data (and you absolutely, definitely, positively, without-a-doubt NEED to), you should also be testing the consistency of your backup. Let’s take a look at your backup and run a test to see if everything is actually getting backed up so you aren’t surprised when you actually need it.

Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to get started.

Microsoft has a well-developed reputation for creating software that enables users to achieve their work objectives, especially in the business setting. Here, we’re diving into a few capabilities of one such software title, OneDrive, to review some of the features that a user might want to take advantage of.

If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft OneDrive, you should know that it is a cloud storage platform that is known for its utility to a business of any size. The need for organization doesn’t discriminate between large and small operations.

In light of this, let’s begin by reviewing how OneDrive can make file organization even more convenient.

Files On-Demand

This capability allows your users to link their computers’ File Explorer to OneDrive. This gives them the ability to work with files stored in OneDrive without having to download them. This both saves room in the device’s onboard storage, and allows offline work if the right settings are enabled.

Outlook Integration

One of the biggest drawbacks to collaborating on Office documents by sharing them through email is that doing so creates a duplicate file to send over. Therefore, different copies will contain different edits, adding to overall confusion. OneDrive removes that confusion by sharing access to a document when shared through Microsoft Outlook, giving the recipient permission to edit the original file. As a result, true collaboration is actually achieved.

Known Folder Move

While we aren’t suggesting that this should replace a comprehensive data backup, OneDrive does feature a very simple backup-adjacent feature. Known Folder Move will synchronize certain folders to OneDrive automatically, giving users a second copy of their contents. You have the option to enable this when first setting up OneDrive, as well as any time afterwards.

Have you used OneDrive before? Did you know about these features? Share your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to reach out to us with any of your IT-related questions!

With data looked on as more of an asset than ever organizations are finding that their data backup and recovery system needs to be comprehensive. By knowing more about backup and recovery, you stand to be able to plan the solution to meet your company’s needs. Today, we will look at the different types of data backup and introduce you to four terms you need to understand.

The Types of Backup
There are various types of backup that anyone looking to come up with a backup strategy should know. They include:

• Full backup - A method of backup where all selected files are backed up in their entirety. Typically, the first backup taken for any backup solution. Since it is a comprehensive backup of all selected files, it will take more time than other types of backup. If a full backup is the method of backup your organization chooses, backups will typically be done after business hours as long wait times will likely cause downtime.
• Differential backup - A method of backup that just backs up the changes made to data. While this allows for significantly faster backups, it makes for slower restores.
• Incremental backup - A method of backup that is much like the differential backup. The main difference is that the incremental backup backs up data regardless if the previous backup was a full backup or an incremental backup.
• Mirror backup - A method of backup that is a real-time duplicate of the source being backed up. In essence, total redundancy. One problem with a mirror backup is that if material is deleted by mistake, it will be deleted on the mirror backup as well. For this reason, many professional IT technicians do not consider the mirror backup to be a viable backup solution at all.

Now that you understand the types of backup, here are some other backup-related terms that you should know:

• Business continuity - As the name suggests, it is a plan that is put together by a business that will allow them to continue effective operations if hit with any number of unfortunate situations. Normally focusing on a business’ critical business functions, business continuity should be a strategy that every business prioritizes.
• Disaster recovery - As with any other security process, disaster recovery is a dedicated plan to protect your business in case of some significant data-based disaster. Anything from cyberattacks, to sabotage, to mistakes can cause major problems for your business.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - As a part of a dedicated disaster recovery system, RPO is a benchmark indicating which data must be recovered for your business to resume normal business operations.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - Also as a part of a disaster recovery system, RTO is the time your business needs to have its data back before the business becomes untenable. The lower the number, the faster you will need a full restore.

At MSPNetworks, we offer a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery that can keep you in the game even after the most devastating data loss incident. For more information about disaster recovery, business continuity, and data backup call our professional technicians at (516) 403-9001.