If you’re like many companies we talk to, you don’t have enterprise-level resources dedicated to your DR plan. And it keeps you up at night. That’s why we’re here to help. Watch our on-demand webinar focused on helping you get prepared for when data disasters strike.
Enterprises around the world continue to move key applications to the cloud. But the speed and scope of migration presenting new challenges regarding data protection, service delivery, and compliance.
While most organizations have developed robust on-premises backup solutions, the failure to protect cloud data and ensure the availability of key services is widespread and incredibly alarming.
Contrary to popular belief, Office 365 and other software as a service (SaaS) models provide no real internal backup solutions.
While Microsoft has sound internal security and is capable of managing Office 365 infrastructure, third-party services are needed to ensure comprehensive data protection and compliance. Let’s take a look at 5 key reasons why you need a dedicated backup service when you’re using Office 365.
Regardless of how careful you are with your data, accidents can and do happen. Whether it’s the accidental deletion of a user, the incorrect merging of fields, or the failure of a key service, accidental deletion can be replicated across an entire network and lead to serious problems.
Simple accidents have been responsible for serious damage over the last few years, with an outage on Amazon Web Services costing up to $150 million dollars in 2017.
A backup service can restore data and services quickly and with minimum disruption, either to the on-premise Exchange or the Office 365 cloud network. In addition, dedicated backup services can protect you against internal security threats and manage the risk of malicious data loss or destruction.
Along with internal security threats, many businesses have experienced a rise in malware, viruses, data theft and other security threats from the outside.
Kaspersky blocked almost 800 million attacks from online resources across the globe in the first quarter of 2018 alone.
While Microsoft 365 and other cloud suites do have some security controls, they’re not robust or reliable enough to handle every case scenario. Having access to a high-grade, third-party backup service is the best way to reduce your exposure and manage the risks associated with data loss and destruction.
Cloud-based services are popular for many reasons, with Office 365 and other solutions featuring better integration between applications, more efficient data exchange and delivery, and the ability to utilize transparent services regardless of location.
Many of these benefits come at a cost, however, with enterprises losing control over data retention and recovery.
While Office 365 does have its own retention policies, they are ever-changing and difficult to manage. In fact, confusing and inaccessible data retention is one of the reasons why so many businesses refuse to move to the cloud.
You can have the best of both worlds with backup solutions that provide you with complete control over data retention and recovery management.
In addition to running a business and ensuring access to key data and services, organizations have a responsibility to meet certain legal and compliance obligations.
A cloud backup service allows you to retrieve important data instantly and with minimal disruption to critical business systems.
Whether it’s retrieving user data for law enforcement, accessing your mailbox during a legal action, or meeting regulatory compliance standards, dedicated cloud backup makes it easier to meet your responsibilities.
With more businesses moving to the cloud all the time, the migration process is often presented as a seamless and natural transition.
While the benefits of SaaS are valid and well-known, managing hybrid email deployments and other critical services during migration can be more challenging than Microsoft would have you believe.
Whether you want a dedicated cloud solution or a mix of Office 365 and on-premises services, backup solutions like Veeam (our recommended solution) allow you to protect and manage your data during and after the transition in a way that makes the source location irrelevant.
The post 5 reasons why you need a backup service, even if you’re using Office 365 appeared first on ISG Technologies.
Source: my isg
Industry: Food & Beverage
Client: Freddy’s Frozen Custard
In Partnership with
Enlisted by Freddy’s, ISG was tasked with transitioning the client’s infrastructure to a more secure and flexible system. The initial findings highlighted a few opportunities:
Freddy’s is now ready for tremendous future growth with the flexibility and security of ISG’s cloud solution with our straightforward approach to implementation and willingness to execute outside of business hours, ensuring both client satisfaction and business success.
It’s no secret that the economy has transformed faster than most businesses can keep up. The digital economy makes it easier for smaller, agile companies to quickly spin up applications and compete with established companies that rely on traditional IT infrastructures.
To compete, companies must respond quickly to customer and market needs. However, traditional IT infrastructures hamper this goal. Ongoing IT operations can be cumbersome and complex, and siloed infrastructure means lots of moving parts, many of which don’t talk to each other.
Additionally, the process of provisioning compute, storage, and networking resources to support new business applications or seasonal capacity requirements can be slow and painstaking.
To simplify operations, achieve higher performance, speed up provisioning, and keep costs in line, many organizations are looking to the cloud to supplement their on-premises infrastructures. However, for companies that want or need to keep their core applications and sensitive data in-house, a cloud-only approach isn’t feasible.
Using hyperconvergence, IT can now cost-effectively deploy their business applications in a virtualized environment while achieving cloud-like performance. Hyper converged solutions such as the Hewlett Packard Enterprise SimpliVity 380, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, deliver a revolutionary IT infrastructure that delivers lower-cost, high-performance data efficiency, and built-in data protection, all within an integrated modular package.
HPE SimpliVity: Purpose-Built for Performance, Scalability, and Operational Efficiency
The powerful HPE SimpliVity 380, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, gives IT the lower-cost, easier-to-manage option they need to future-proof their data center, manage capacity, and build a flexible virtual infrastructure. This translates to several benefits for virtual infrastructure initiatives:
Resource silos across business units dissolve, providing fluid resource pools that any group can access. These are all steps in the process to transform IT into a strategic value creator and broker of resources whenever they are needed.
To learn more about HPE SimpliVity and if it’s right for you, contact us. As an HPE Platinum Partner with deep technology and industry expertise, we are committed to helping you find the right solution for your business, from among a broad array of high-quality options from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The school year is underway, and Backup School with ISG is back! Join ISG and Veeam as we educate our clients and their organizations about how they can keep their business up and running and eliminate downtime – even when the unexpected happens.
Is downtime simply an unacceptable thing in your mind? Then this webinar is for you. Go beyond backup to better understand business continuity.
The school year is underway, and Backup School is back! Together, ISG and Veeam focus on educating our clients and their organizations about how they can keep their business up and running and eliminate downtime – even when the unexpected happens.
Office 365 is a powerful suite of products – but it lacks a comprehensive backup of some of your most critical data. Learn how to protect yourself in this webinar.
The digital revolution has brought a host of new opportunity and challenges for enterprises in every sector of business. While some organizations have embraced the wave of change and made efforts to be at its forefront, others have held back. These institutions may not have sufficient staff to implement the changes or may be waiting for a proven added-value proposition.
In other words: No technology upgrades until the innovation is proven useful. There is some wisdom in this caution. Several reports have noticed that productivity and efficiency are not rising at expected levels alongside this technology boom. However, as Project Syndicate noted, this lag may be a case of outgrowing the traditional productivity model, meaning that not every employee action is measured in the old system.
However, there is another reason to explain why more technology does not automatically equal greater efficiency and higher profits. If a company buys some new software, it will see a minor boost. However, it will reap the full rewards only if staff properly learn to use said platforms.
Part of this problem stems from the misunderstanding that technology can only improve current work processes. This is not true. When looking at a basic enterprise operation like data visualization, technology has created an entirely new workflow.
Examining the traditional business model
In the traditional business model, all data visualization was manual. Employees would gather data from various endpoints and then input it into a visual model. Common examples of this process included pie charts and bar graphs. The employee would then present the data to the executive, who would use it to make information-based decisions.
While acceptable, this process is far from optimized. Most data had to be generated in spreadsheets before it was collected, using formulas made by staff. Collecting and framing the information is a time-consuming process that will absorb at least one individual. As employees are involved at every step of this workflow, there is a potential for human error.
The time involved prevented companies from acting on real time information. In the interim, intuition and "gut feeling" were used as substitutes for data-backed decisions. The people involved raised the level of risk that the data in question may be inaccurate or misleading.
Unlocking data analytics
Of course, with the arrival of the internet of things, companies have a lot more data collection at their disposal. Connected devices have provided a whole new network of information. This gold mine, also known as big data, has one downside: There is too much of it. A human cannot hope to categorize and analyze the information in any acceptable timeframe.
Enter data analytics. Using advanced technology like machine learning, companies can create and implement this software to study their data, creating automatic visualizations based on trends and prevalent patterns. According to Fingent, these software solutions employ mining algorithms to filter out irrelevant information, focusing instead on only what is important.
However, companies cannot simply go from a traditional system to a fully fledged data analytics solution for one reason: data segmentation. Many enterprises divide their information based on different departments and specializations. Each group works internally, communicating primarily with itself. While this method is helpful for organization, it greatly impedes data analytics potential.
If companies have siloed their data, the program will have to reach into every source, work with every relevant software and bypass every network design. In short, it will have to work harder to communicate. While modern data analytics solutions are "smart," they cannot navigate barriers like this easily. They are designed to optimally read only the information that is readily available.
For organizations to fully capitalize on the potential of internal data analytics, infrastructure overhaul is needed. Departments – or at least their data – must be able to freely communicate with one another. This process entails implementing a common software solution that is in use across the entire company.
The good news is that many modern solutions fit this need. Solutions like cloud platforms store relevant data in accessible locations and train employees to not segment their work. By creating an infrastructure that is open to the data analytics program, organizations can start to act on information, rather than relying solely on their gut.
Almost everyone, regardless of industry, recognizes the growing importance of cybersecurity. Cyberattacks are on the rise and growing increasingly varied and sophisticated. According to data collected by Cybersecurity Ventures, the annual cost of cybercrime is estimated to reach roughly $6 trillion by 2021. An effective information security policy is, in many cases, the only thing standing between companies and possible financial ruin.
The danger is especially real for small- to medium-sized businesses. Data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission found that only slightly more than a third of SMBs (40 percent) survive for longer than six months after a successful data breach. For these types of organizations, cybersecurity is literally a matter of life and death.
The good news: Many businesses recognize the need for effective cybersecurity strategies and are investing heavily in personnel and software solutions. The bad news: Many of these same companies are only reacting, not thinking about how to best deploy this protective framework. Effective cybersecurity isn’t as simple as applying a bandage to a cut.
It can be better equated to introducing a new nutritional supplement to the diet. The whole procedure is vastly more effective if integrated into every meal. To best use modern cybersecurity practices, businesses must rethink their approaches to corporate data structure. Data analytics is a vital tool in providing the best in information protection.
“Segmenting data spells disaster for an effective cybersecurity policy.”
Siloed data is unread data
As organizations grow, there is a tendency to segment. New branches develop, managers are appointed to oversee departments – in general, these groups tend to work on their projects and trust that other arenas of the company are also doing their jobs. The responsibility is divided and thus, easier to handle.
While this setup may make the day-to-day routine of the business easier on executives, it spells disaster for an effective cybersecurity policy. This division process creates siloed or segmented data pools. While a department may be very aware of what it is doing, it has far less knowledge of other corporate branches.
Many organizations may figure that an in-house IT team or chief information security officer can oversee everything, keeping the company running at full-tilt. However, this assumption is only half-true. While these staff members can and do oversee the vast majority of business operations, they will lack the data to make comprehensive decisions. A report from the Ponemon Institute found that 70 percent of cybersecurity decision-makers felt they couldn’t effectively act because of a surplus of jumbled, incoherent data.
Data analytics, or the study of (typically big) data, provides facts behind reasoning. To gather this information, companies need systems and software that talk to one another. Having the best-rated cybersecurity software won’t make a difference if it can’t easily communicate with the company’s primary OS or reach data from several remote branches.
CISOs or other qualified individuals can make practical, often less-expensive strategies with a clear view of the entire company. Without this type of solution, a business, no matter its resources or personnel, will essentially be operating its cybersecurity strategy through guesswork.
Separated data creates bubbles where information can be misplaced or duplicated, resulting in a slower data analysis process.Centralized businesses may miss real-time updates
Businesses face another challenge as they expand. Data collection has, in the past, slowed with remote locations. Before IoT and Industry 4.0, organizations were bound with paper and email communications. Remote branches typically grouped data reports into weeks or, more likely, months.
This approach meant that the central location effectively made decisions with month-old information. When it comes to minimizing the damage from data breaches, every hour matters. Luckily, many institutions can now provide data streaming in real time. Those that can’t must prioritize improving information flow immediately. Cybercrime looks for the weakest aspect within a company and tries to exploit the deficiency.
For data analytics to work properly, businesses need access to the full breadth of internal data. The more consistent and up to date this information is, the better CISOs and IT departments can make coherent and sensible decisions.
Visibility may not sound like the answer to fighting cyberattacks, but it is a crucial component. Companies need to be able to look within and adapt at a moment’s notice. This strategy requires not just the ability to see but also the power to make quick, actionable adjustments. Those organizations that still segment data will find this procedure difficult and time consuming.
As cybercrime becomes an expected aspect of business operations, those who still think in siloed brackets must change their mindsets or face expensive consequences.