Thanks to Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Hurricanes in Vermont. Earthquakes in Washington, D.C. Tornados in Missouri. Natural disasters seem to be all over the news lately. Would your firm be able to recover in a reasonable amount of time and resume operations?

Many risks exist – even for firms far away from earthquake fault lines, tornado alleys and hurricane zones. Consider the risk of water damage. Every law firm is at risk from broken pipes, too much rain or even a sink overflowing on the floor above you. There’s nothing to stop a flood. As some experts point out, “Water always wins.”

Most law firms understand the importance of such a plan, but actually implementing one can be extremely challenging. Cost and logistics have been major barriers for many firms. Firms need to rent space at an off-site data center to secure data. They must purchase servers for the off-site location and pay someone to manage them. They need to develop procedures and policies to ensure that data is backed up regularly and securely transmitted to the DR site.

In some cases, law firms with multiple offices use a secondary office as a makeshift DR data center. This can work, but satellite offices typically aren’t designed to serve as data centers and can’t handle the amount of data traffic that’s generated when you are replicating all your servers to that satellite office.

When firms adopt either of these approaches, they are essentially rolling the dice that their internal DR solution will be ready and capable to support them in a disaster situation. The good news is you don’t need to spend a lot of money or roll the dice anymore. There are cost-effective and reliable online backup and DR solutions, thanks to new hybrid cloud approaches.

These solutions provide:

• Affordability
• Remote data backup – without tapes
• A local hardware appliance, which is essential for fast recovery of a folder or documents or a failed server
• Secure, controlled data transfers to the cloud

Every good plan should include both DR and online backup. This ensures your clients’ data is safe and your lawyers can continue to service your clients, no matter what happens.

While online backup and DR solutions have a lot in common, you should think about what your firm needs in each area.

Disaster Recovery Considerations

DR has always been a daunting task. The headaches and expense of internally built DR sites made that an unappealing option,. At the same time, many firms are leery of the security and accessibility of cloud solutions.

Hybrid solutions, such as nScaled, address many of these issues. As a cloud environment, all the purchase, installation and maintenance of DR hardware/software are offloaded. Ongoing, the cloud expands automatically as your firm grows.

These new hybrid cloud DR solutions have resulted in a dramatic cost decrease, to about one-third of a traditional data center-based DR solution. How? You avoid paying for disk storage that may remain empty for years. You also only pay for the DR servers (admittedly at a premium) when you need them in a DR incident. Meanwhile, your data stays safely tucked away in a secure cloud data center until needed.

This type of solution addresses more than major disasters. It can also be used as your backup solution, providing significant advantages over traditional backup tapes. If you need to recover files spanning multiple days or weeks, the data is all in one online location. Your IT team doesn’t need to dig through and restore multiple tapes.

A cloud solution can also back up once an hour throughout the day, rather than end of day like most tape systems do. Consider this familiar scenario — you begin a brief at 8:00 am and work on it all day. Near the end of the day, your file becomes corrupted. With this solution, you can retrieve the copy that was last backed up an hour ago. Better yet – it will only take about 15 minutes for your IT department to recover. Instead of losing an entire day’s work, you lose an hour.

Online Backup Solutions

There are also cost effective cloud based online backup solutions such as Barracuda Networks. Like the DR options mentioned above, they provide both a remote backup as well as a local copy of data on an appliance in your office. With the local copy, you can quickly restore one document, one folder, or an entire server. This helps ensure you can be up and running within hours of a disaster, instead of days.

In the cloud, Barracuda and similar systems use de-duplication and compression to minimize the amount and cost of data stored in the cloud. That data is also encrypted for your protection.

Just like a hybrid cloud DR solution, you only pay for the data as you use it. You don’t need to purchase a large amount of storage space that you may or may not use sometime in the future.

No one is immune from disasters. Fortunately, we can help you recover fast if one strikes. If you are interested in finding out more about Disaster Recovery or Online Backup solutions, contact me at jkozie@kenokozie.com.

Jay Kozie is a Principal with Keno Kozie Associates, an IT consulting firm and a member of Law Firm Consultants Network of Chicago (LFCN). LCFN is a diverse group of senior-level professionals with expertise serving the legal community. The group’s sole focus is to be a resource to law firms and the professionals servicing law firms by providing the highest level of professional service and coordinating these services when it is of benefit to our clients. Contact Jay at jkozie@kenokozie.com

The post For Law Firms: Online Backup and Disaster Recovery Made Simple appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

Now is the time to review and adjust your current technology budget, to make room for investing in new services and new technology. It’s also the time of year when you’ll want to spend any remaining 2012 budget. Failing to do so may result in your budget getting reallocated in 2013. The clock is ticking, so make the most of your 2012 budget in the last quarter. Learn some best practices for technology budgeting:

Download the Q4 Budget Flush Solution Brief

The post Make the Most of Your IT Budget in Q4 appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is to assume that your staff will be available during a disaster. Because of the interdependence on skillsets that DIY disaster recovery demands, it is virtually impossible to guarantee that your entire team will be available to work during a medium to large scale incident. In a massive geographic disaster, the priorities of your top IT employees will be on personal needs, like the safety and well-being of their families.

If you work for a large enough organization, you can mitigate this risk by leveraging skillsets across a variety of offices. If you don’t have this luxury, you should reduce your risk by keeping a consultant or team of consultants on retainer (you’ll need to keep these consultants up to speed as your environment evolves). This is just another example of the unplanned expense of DIY disaster recovery.

Making sure users and remote offices can and will be able to reach the disaster recovery site can be challenging. Even if the process is documented thoroughly, it can be difficult to make sure that a workable plan is in place for the event. Careful documentation and frequent meetings will help ensure that all relevant users have access to your DR site.

Download the White Paper: “5 Things That Can Go Wrong with DIY DR”

The post Never Underestimate Your Resource & Skillset Requirements appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

Designing a DR testing scenario can be a project in itself. Significant capital expense has to be justified for building the DR site and the return on investment cannot be realized until a test has been developed. Most companies will plan scheduled downtime, take production systems offline, and test the DR site with production offline. This typically involves many hours of late night and weekend work for the IT staff and for the application owners.

If the testing is unsuccessful, these complications and costs are multiplied. Get tips for a successful DR test in the nScaled white paper The 5 Things That Can Go Wrong With DIY Disaster Recovery: 5 Things That Can Go Wrong With DIY DR

The post Failed Testing: Another Hidden Hazard of DIY DR appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

There are two main techniques for acquiring hardware for a disaster recovery site, although you may want to use a combination of both. One technique is to replace hardware (i.e. a server) that is no longer covered by warranty with new hardware and use the old hardware for disaster recovery. Another strategy is to buy or lease new equipment to use at the DR site.

Most organizations going the DIY route choose to use old equipment because of the low upfront costs. But the challenge with using old equipment is that the hardware is not exactly like the production hardware. This can cause problems with drivers, CPU capabilities and general hardware maintenance. However, buying or leasing new hardware for the disaster recovery site is expensive and can be difficult to justify. When deciding whether or not to buy new equipment, remember to calculate the extra maintenance costs required to keep the DR site up to date in parallel with the production site.

Depending on the strategy you choose, you will need to keep software licenses, patch levels, and upgrades in sync. This is also true for applications, operating systems, infrastructure (firmware), and hypervisors. Syncing your applications can significantly increase the amount of work required to maintain a disaster recovery site. Learn more about syncing your primary and colocation sites in the nScaled white paper The 5 Things That Can Go Wrong With DIY Disaster Recovery: 5 Things That Can Go Wrong With DIY DR

The post How to Avoid Hardware/ Software Drift appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

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I’ll begin with SAN to SAN replication. Any SAN manufacturer with a clear understanding of storage space has some kind of SAN to SAN replication offer, but not all SAN to SAN replication is alike. When creating an effective DR solution, you have to make several architectural considerations for replicating data between production and DR, including virtualization, application specific agents and snapshot storage requirements.

Once all of these architectural considerations have been addressed, you must bring the copies of each server online. There are several approaches that you can take, depending on the complexity of your servers. This means that thorough documentation must be developed and refined throughout the life and evolution of your DR site. This is an ongoing process and you must also remember to include plenty of time for testing.

Learn more about SAN to SAN replication in nScaled’s white paper The 5 Things That Can Go Wrong With DIY Disaster Recovery: 5 Things That Can Go Wrong With DIY DR

The post The Hidden Hazards of SAN-to-SAN Replication appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

Don’t panic? Really? I think you damn well better panic – about your career. You stashed your backup tapes so close to your primary data center that they got clobbered by the same natural disaster? C’mon man! Better update that resume.

And while we’re at it, why on earth are you still using tape? Iron Mountain, whose business is storing tape, points out just how fragile tape is:

“…if tapes suffer major temperature fluctuations every night, they will weaken and become more likely to snap. When your staff fails to maintain drive heads’ cleanliness, or cleans equipment incorrectly, tapes may be more prone to breaking. To avoid such problems, know the cleaning cycle and storage conditions recommended by your vendor.”

Snapping tapes? Drive head cleaning cycles? Fred Flintstone had to put up with this nonsense, but you do not.

The punch line comes at the end of this litany of All The Things That Can Go Wrong With Tape when IM reminds us that they have a nice, safe cave where you can stash your tapes. A cave? What is this, the Al Qaeda approach to disaster recovery? Do they use mules to get the tapes into the cave?

Look, disk-to-disk backup is mature; backup-to-the-cloud is mature; snapshotting, de-duplication, and virtualization are mature; and recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) is now mature. There is no excuse for backup to tape, and no excuse for sticking your tapes – and your company’s chances of recovery – in a cave.

The post Recovery-in-a-Cave appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

Earlier this week, eVault announced 4-hour recovery times for their mid-size business customers. This is one of those mind boggling announcements that gets a lot of us in the business saying, “Really?”

Because the thing is, in 2012, a 4-hour recovery time is terrible. They never explain if the 4-hour guarantee applies to any single system or an entire data center. In either case, eVault’s claim is just plain archaic.

For the sake of comparison, nScaled offers customers a 15-minute RTO for any single system, and a 2-hour RTO for an entire data center.

And, it turns out, the 4-hour SLA is available for a very limited selection of OSs and applications. I don’t think a single one of our customers has an IT environment simplistic enough to qualify for their 4-hour guarantee, and would be forced to choose the 24- and 48-hour options that eVault offers.

As Disco Stu once said,

“Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues… AAY!”

Really?

The post Really? appeared first on nScaled, Inc..

The power outage affected the Boston office one of our large disaster recovery customers. We protect 70 servers in 11 offices around the US for this customer.

Our support guys were up late last night, getting the customer failed over so they could keep working through the interruption, so I haven’t had a chance to get the detailed story from them. I’ll post again when I have more news.

The post Boston Fire leads to customer failover appeared first on nScaled, Inc..