Tag: backup | Page 4

On World Backup Day, Tesserent CIO Michael McKinnon explores cybersecurity in 2022 and beyond

May 5, 2022/in Video

Hammers sign Acronis as backup and security in one

April 19, 2022/in Computer Security

West Ham United Football Club is deploying Acronis Cyber Protect in a move that will see it replace a number of backup and security products and provide a single platform for backup, data protection, and file sync and share, including with third parties.

West Ham runs Nutanix hyperconverged nodes across several locations, including the London Stadium, academy and training ground sites, and community outreach projects. It also runs a number of HPE physical servers as domain controllers and for CCTV, for example.

Most day-to-day staff work is done on Microsoft Office 365, with accounting on Sage and Adobe graphics for marketing. Football analytics uses Catapult and Game-On video tracking.

Backup has mostly been done via Veeam, but there is also endpoint security from CrowdStrike and network security monitoring from Darktrace. Meanwhile, file sharing has been via Microsoft OneDrive.

The key limitation of the existing setup has been that managing security and data protection has been spread across this wide variety of products, said network security manager Lee Cummings.

“There are lots of systems to focus on and learn, and having everything on a platform that’s familiar, with increased control and the ability to manage and gather information, was attractive,” said Cummings.

“Having everything in one place fits with our ideas,” he added. “Veeam keeps everything together and has cloud options, but we also have endpoint security, file sync and share, etc.”

West Ham is currently implementing Acronis Cyber Protect, which integrates backup with anti-virus and cyber-protection, plus file sync and share functionality. Backup targets will be on-site and in the cloud, with the ability to spin up servers in the cloud if the need arises.

Cummings’ team also protects data on Nutanix via built-in snapshots. Critical data is snapshotted every 30 minutes, with less important data updated once an hour. Snapshots are retained for at least six months. A hoped-for benefit of moving to Acronis will be to lessen reliance on snapshots, said Cummings.

Because West Ham is currently in the process of deploying Acronis, Cummings is unable to talk about benefits…

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You’ve got backup – but how safe are you?

February 28, 2022/in Computer Security

Most businesses have backup facilities in place to help them in the event of a data breach or physical disaster that renders their offices or data unusable

But how many know that they can retrieve that data and have their business up and running again in minutes?

Server room floods, ransomware, fires – however your data is damaged, lost or digitally encrypted – do you know how quickly you can retrieve it or even if you can? iland found in a recent survey that just 50% of businesses are testing their disaster recovery (DR) plans only annually or at less frequent intervals, while seven percent did not test their DR at all. Of the organisations testing less frequently, half said their disaster recovery plan may be inadequate based on their most recent DR test, while 12% encountered issues that would result in sustained downtime. Zero respondents said that their DR test was completely or moderately successful. Everyone reported experiencing issues.

So, with most companies remaining badly behind the curve, what steps are needed to ensure that you can retrieve your data after a data breach or disaster?

Understanding your data

The datasets of organisations are huge, but the ability to retrieve 100s of terabytes in minutes is like having a spare car in your garage just in case your main one doesn’t work – it’s expensive to have it all waiting on the off chance you need it. And the faster you need it back, the more it costs.

Therefore, a core aspect of a DR strategy is to prioritise the data that is most critical to the business and focus your efforts around protecting that data first. To understand your data, look at your entire estate and define what’s critical to your business operations. Prioritise it in order of how it would impact customer delivery most if lost. It will give you a focus, and in turn, you can develop measures to minimise data loss in the event of a cyber-attack or disaster. You can also catalogue it by how much data can be lost by invoking a recovery (RPO) and its priority for recovery (RTO).

Obviously, there is a cost implication for any backup and with datasets increasing, it can be very expensive to store all…

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