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Secure Online Backup for Windows 7

Aidan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:45:03 +0000

C Infinity is happy to announce support for our Connected secure online backup service on Windows 7.

Windows 7 has been a massive success as a desktop operating system at home, in the small business and in the enterprise. Early adoption rates have been high and more widespread than expected. It features solutions that make it a great desktop and branch office platform. And it’s those very scenarios that our Connected backup service targets.

Roaming laptops rarely have access to an infrastructure that allows them to back up the valuable business data that is stored on them. Very often they are in remote locations, used by sales representatives or customer service agents who rarely get back to the office. The data on the machines cannot be lost but how can that data be backed up?

Windows 7 features technology that allows companies to remove servers from the branch office. That reduces costs but also means that there can very well be data stored on those desktop or laptop computers in that office. It won’t necessarily get backed up by internal systems.

With C Infinity’s Connected backup service you can securely back up those machines over the Internet. Connected identifies the blocks within files that have been changed and targets them to be backed up. Before that happens, duplicate blocks are tracked and wasted effort is eliminated. That duplication isn’t sent over the wire. Some files, Outlook PST files for example, are further optimised. The remaining data is compressed and then encrypted using AES. At this point the data is uploaded to the redundant data stores in C Infinity. Your data stays encrypted until you recover it. That means only you can access your data. It never leaves the jurisdiction of Ireland and our data protection laws because we are an Irish company, using a physically secure Irish data centre located in Dublin.

How well does it all perform? I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. When we completed the upgrade of our service I installed the agent from the web site. It is a simple next-next-next installation. The agent scans the file system. Policies can be set up to target particular files and folders from the administrators online web console. Users can target files. My PC is backing up My Documents, my Internet favourites, my Outlook data and a few other bits and pieces. It ran away and backed up everything. I was curious to see what would happen on subsequent backups.

As I expected, my machine automatically runs backup jobs in a pre-defined time window every day. I powered up my machine this morning and was greeted by a status update not long afterwards.

487.4MB of files had changes. However, once the optimisations were done there were only 3.5MB of changed file system blocks that were not duplicated. These were compressed down to 1.2MB. This was encrypted using AES and then sent up to our redundant and replicating stores in the data centre.

Now I can recover any file I want within my retention window. Sure, I might have Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) running locally or even use Windows Backup and Restore to back up the laptop to a USB disk. USB disks aren’t necessarily the most reliable solution and that requires manual work for me to (a) to remember to do it and (b) do it. VSS is great to recover a file that might have changed on the laptop recently. But Connected gives me a secure central store. If I lose my laptop or it breaks then I can restore my data onto another machine without any delay.

Check out our secure Connected online backup service for desktops and laptop as well as our Livevault service for servers and contact us if you have any questions.

How much bandwidth does our server backup use?

Gavin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:28:20 +0000

Whenever a new customer tests our server backup service we are often asked how the service affects their internet connection and how much bandwidth the service will use.

The majority of SME’s we deal with don’t have their server hosted at a data centre so they use a standard broadband connection that is fed into their office.

I know only too well what it’s like to download/upload data on a standard broadband connection as I process a lot of data on a daily basis. When it comes to using a remote server backup service its more of a concern due to the amount of data that needs to be backed up, usually +10GB on a daily basis.

How does our online server backup deal with bandwidth when performing backups? The last thing we want to do is slow down a customer’s network so the answer is easy, by throttling bandwidth so the backup service is restricted to a specific speed.

Every customer who uses our remote server backup service has the option to throttle bandwidth and configuring the option is really easy. Within the account management website the properties of the server can be configured to throttle bandwidth of the backup service. See below screenshot:

We are faced with a number of options when it comes to throttling bandwidth which are:

Backup (uplink) – this determines how much bandwidth should be used to upload data from the server onto our backup vaults. You can set it with No limit, Always limit to specific amount or limit using a schedule.

In the above screenshot I have set the bandwidth throttle by using a schedule. I can now set which times on which days I would like to throttle the bandwidth. Here I have selected Mon – Fri, 9am – 5pm (normal office hours for most SME’s).

The dark blue colour denotes an active period (office hours for this example) and during this period it has been limited to 200 Kbps. The setting of 200 Kbps is minimum recommended but this can be lowered or set higher to meet customer’s specific requirements. I have tested with 56 Kbps on my home server (with a 2MB broadband connection) and have still been able to perform daily backups of 10GB.

The light blue colour denotes an inactive period. Again this period can be set to specific times or days and also set to a specific limit. Not many of customers require this option so they have it set to no limit. If a customer requires as much bandwidth as possible during the night, for whatever reason, then we can still go ahead and restrict how much bandwidth the backup service uses. In most cases we have never needed to use the bandwidth restriction outside of our customer’s office hours.

Restore (downlink) – You can also restrict the bandwidth for Restore (downlink) but as the majority of our customers require restored files as quickly as possible we simply advise leaving this option with no limit (default).

Concerned about bandwidth usage?

If you are concerned about using online backup for a server because of bandwidth usage then I highly recommend ensuring the service gives you the option to throttle the bandwidth. The more you can configure the bandwidth of your backups the less hassle you’ll have with network speeds.

With our backup service it’s a matter of selecting a few options (as shown above) and the bandwidth restriction is activated as soon as you save the options and you’ll notice the difference right away.

How long does it take to perform a backup?

I’ve previously discussed this under how long does a livevault offsite backup take and when you throttle bandwidth for the service the backup will take longer. Thankfully though we can perform incremental backups which again can lower the time it will take to lift a daily backup, only the changes to your data are uploaded to the backup vaults.

I have found that using bandwidth throttle is essential for a lot of customers, mostly those who run their office server on a standard broadband connection. Without being able to throttle bandwidth our customers would be faced with serious lag on the internet connection which will affect their employee’s productivity.

If you want to learn more about how we throttle bandwidth or would like to test the service don’t hesitate to contact us.

Information Is Everything

Aidan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:30:27 +0000

Some of the things Software-as-a-Service developers are rightly worried about are uptime and performance. “How will my system perform when I deploy it?” “What will happen during peak periods?” “How will my system scale?”

Without the right tools we cannot manage performance or uptime. We need information to make the right decisions and then to check if those decisions were indeed right after all.

That’s why we have employed the best tools to manage the C Infinity private cloud. Let’s start with our virtualisation platform. If your virtual machine suddenly requires more resources then our monitoring system will detect this within 180 seconds. It is integrated with our virtualisation management system. That will be informed of the issue and immediately initiate a move of the machine to another piece of hardware that is more suited for hosting your virtual machine. There is no downtime and no manual intervention required. Any alert that was raised will automatically be resolved.

What about performance issues caused by growth? This normally requires labour intensive baseline charts to be captured and compared with other reports over periods of time. It’s a slow and time consuming process that usually isn’t done. Then when a system grows and suddenly performs slowly we don’t know exactly why. Some guesswork is done to add resources to the system until it suddenly performs well. This is both expensive and too late. The system has been slow for the end users who may have become alienated and sent their business elsewhere.

The C Infinity monitoring system not only monitors health but also monitors performance information. This is all stored in a reporting database where just over 1 year of data is retained. That allows us to run reports based on how a system is behaving now with X users versus how it was performing a year ago with Y users.

In fact, we’ve just run a series of reports for all of our hosting customers who are using our monitoring system. Here’s the CPU utilisation of one web hosting company:

Click for full image.

In the report you can see the average CPU utilisation from January 1st until December 15th. There are spikes to high utilisation rates but the standard deviation clearly shows that those spikes are very brief. That’s quite acceptable.
We also ran a report on available memory (RAM). This report is also from that web hosting company’s server and shows the available megabytes over the year:

Click for full image.

This machine has 2GB of RAM and hosts a good number of web sites. As you can see they’ve averaged around 80% utilisation. They’ve had a big of a drop lately but that’s because December is a busy time for them.

Armed with this information both we and this customer can accurately predict what their resource requirements will be going into the future.

For us techies, those are nice reports. What about something the business owner cares about? Uptime is the big thing there. Our monitoring has that covered too. Consider a website. What is website uptime? Is it that the services are running? Is it that the operating system is healthy? No; website uptime is that the web is available and running correctly for the end users. There is no way to monitor this on the server itself. This requires a view from somewhere else. Our monitoring system checks websites on a regular basis from a different location. This ensures that they are up and running.

Click for full image.

Above is a report on a monitored website. This website has had some “downtime”. Some of it was planned maintenance, e.g. security patching, application maintenance by developers, etc, and some of it was genuine downtime. For whatever reason, the website stopped working but the services were healthy. Our advanced techniques alerted both we and the SAAS company in question and an immediate response was initiated. In this case, the website has a near perfect uptime over the course of the year.

Floods In Ireland Puts Business At Risk

Gavin — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:55:32 +0000

Over the past number of days Ireland has been expericing heavy rain fall with many areas being hit with major flooding, such as Cork City. In the West the river Shannon was under alert as more rainfall was due and more flooding expected.

Thankfully in Ireland we don’t have many natural disasters such as earthquakes or fires but this is no reason not to prepare for a disaster (such as flooding) that can easily wipe out a business.

Some friendly backup advice

When dealing with computer data in a business it is always advisable to create daily backups and store them offsite. If you use tape backups then these tapes should be stored in a safe and secure location outside of your office so if anything happens to your building you at least have a safe copy of your backups. When transferring tape media offsite be aware that risks are involved in losing the tape backups.

I won’t say do not use tape backups because let’s face it, tape backups are being used all over the country and they are here to stay. Even our own customers who use our online backup solution also use tape backups, just as a precaution which is good but it’s important to note the following:

Many businesses these days create a tape backup and the media is usually left in the office, sometimes beside the office server. People simply tend to think what will happen if my server crashes? They never think of the bigger problem i.e. what will happen if my office floods or is burnt to the ground? ALWAYS think of the worst case scenario when dealing with business data, it can help save your business if disaster ever strikes.

Our online backup solution was specifically designed to be implemented as part of a disaster recovery process. Customer backups are offsite and stored in a safe and secure data centre environment located in Dublin allowing each customer easy and fast restoration of their data that may be lost due to server/computer failure.

I have been speaking to a number of our customers who have been badly affected by the flooding but as they use an offsite backup solution they have one less thing to worry about, getting their data back.

If your business has been affected by the flooding we at C Infinity wish for a fast and speedy recovery of your business operations and hopefully your data loss is at a minimum.

The Staggering Costs Of Lost Laptops And What To Do About It

Caitriona — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:45:48 +0000

I recently read the results of a Ponemon Institute study which indicated that the average cost of a lost laptop was almost $50,000.

The cost was broken down into seven main drivers:

Laptop replacement cost including purchase price and related overheads
Detection and escalation cost from searching and reporting to requisitioning a new machine
Lost productivity cost of employee being unable to work as planned.
Forensics and investigation cost of tracing laptop to figuring out what data was lost.
Data breach cost: This is really expensive. According to Ponemon, it costs about $ 200 to remedy the loss of a single customer record. An average laptop may contain 200 customer records, giving a total of $40,000 per laptop. The worst cited in the Penemon survey was about 6,200 records, resulting in data breach costs of almost $ 1 million. Typically there won’t be a large volume of customer data on laptops, but just a few records could make a single laptop loss very expensive.
Intellectual property loss: Especially for firms in technology, healthcare, and communications businesses, the potential cost is incalculable.
Other legal or regulatory costs: Legal fees can be expensive, particularly in cases of data breach or intellectual property theft.

Ponemon did note that the cost does vary by industry with the top four industries with the highest average cost of a lost laptop being services, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceutical.

Of note was the cost is lower the sooner the breadth is discovered. A same-day discovery may cost $8950, while one not discovered for a week may cost $115,000.

With tools such as C Infinity Connected online backup for PCs and C Infinity Data Defense encryption management service, the loss can be mitigated. C Infinity Data Defense can wipe the data or delete the encryption key as well as help track the PC. C Infinity Connected online backup and restore can recover the data securely.

For more information on how to prevent embarrassing and costly data loss please call us on 353 1 4434666

Are You At Risk From Losing Your Tape Backup?

Gavin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:14:53 +0000

It’s not uncommon for a business in Ireland to use tape backups as a backup solution for their critical data. What is common though is the fear that some business owners have using a tape backup solution.

When I deal with a new customer I often ask them about their current backup solution, if they have one. From what I have seen the majority of them would be using tapes to backup their critical data. When it comes to asking them what issues they face when using tapes and why they are interested in using an online backup solution the answer is usually the same, it’s either because the backups need to be performed manually or for fear of losing the tapes when they are taken offsite.

Recently Zurich UK announced the loss of a data tape in South Africa, they stated:

The back-up tape was lost during a routine transfer within South Africa to a data storage centre in August 2008. The back-up tape also held details of customers and other parties in South Africa and Botswana. Zurich UK’s investigation into the loss of the back-up tape has revealed deficiencies in the management of data tape security procedures in South Africa.

Not only has it taken them over a year to discover the backup tape had been missing but they have also failed to mention if the tape was encrypted. Also, details of 641,000 customers had been contained on the tape, according to theregister.co.uk

This is the worst nightmare for every business owner that uses tape backups is losing the tapes after it gets shipped offsite. Worse yet, for a small business this type of data loss is enough to destroy them.

The lesson to be learned from Zurich UK is to ensure you have security procedures in place when sending your data offsite and review those procedures often.

I will also add if you are using tape backups never ever rely on a member of your staff to take those backups home (it does happen). This is not an offsite backup solution and it’s not fair on your employees or more importantly your customers.

It’s Time To Change Your Passwords To Something More Secure

Gavin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:01:53 +0000

You may have seen the recent news that a large security exploit has hit the web for web based email. Thousands of user’s passwords have been published online for services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and other email providers.

There is plenty of reading material online about where the passwords had been published and how the exploit may have happened. Silicon Republic published Webmail users neglect secure passwords and stated:

“The most popular password found from some of the 10,000 accounts published publicly was ‘123456’. Yes, ‘123456’; 64 people chose this as a password – a way of accessing an online email account containing private information that could be used for identity-theft”.

Surprisingly enough using these types of passwords isn’t something new and has always been a headache for IT admins who allow users select their own passwords.

There is plenty of advice out there on how you select/create your passwords.

One of Ireland’s leading security experts, Brian Honan, states on his blog:

“Make sure you do not use the same password across different systems because if your email password has been compromised then those other systems could be accessed by the criminals”.

Unfortunately it’s common for people to use the same password for everything as it’s easy to remember but as Brian pointed out your other accounts can also be compromised.

Microsoft have a good article on creating strong passwords and Google also provides some advice. The best advice is to stop thinking of them as passwords and start thinking of them as passphrases.

It might be a good time to start changing your online accounts just as a precaution, I know I have.

Watching The Apprentice This Week

Aidan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:14:49 +0000

I was watching this week’s episode of TV’s “The Apprentice” with great interest this week because one of our partners, The Big Red Book, was being featured. In the show, the candidates for the job were split into two teams and asked to develop and propose a press marketing plan for the Big Red Book.

The client made it clear that their product was aimed at the small to medium business who considered traditional accounting to be do difficult, too time consuming and a distraction from their core business. Instead they wanted to be finding new customers, new efficiencies, and new competitive advantages.
That sounded like a familiar theme to me. Let’s think about a hypothetical business that needs to develop a new online presence.

Building an online presence requires money, expertise, time, and all-too-rare-in-this-country connectivity. Just sticking a machine in a rack and plugging it into a firewall doesn’t cut it. That might sound like a typical IT objection to the business but the reality is that it will not be a reliable foundation for the business to build and compete on.

You could go with the typical hosting plan but what do they do? They hand you over a server or a farm of servers and wish you the best. The only time they really want to hear from you is when it’s time to renew your contract.

C Infinity is a little different. We partner with our clients so that we become their virtual IT department for running their online presence infrastructure. They can rely on us to keep an eye on things, to advise them and to take care of things when they don’t have the expertise. Here’s something one of our customers said recently about us:

“C Infinity has always been extremely supportive and proactive in helping our company grow while keeping up with change. More than that C Infinity’s managed servers have helped us to sleep better at night!”.

That company relies on us to run their infrastructure. It’s not their core business. They are very good at what they do and they have no interest in becoming an accidental IT infrastructure company. That’s a distraction from their core business and we allow them to concentrate on working with their customers without the worry of servers crashing or hardware being maintained.

Just like the Big Red Book, we aim to make going online easier, less involved and quicker for our clients. We don’t just give you a set of servers and push you out to sea. We stay with you on your journey. We want to see you succeed in your venture. Only by giving you that highly managed infrastructure that is secure, reliable, scalable and gives you that rock that you can depend upon.

Fault Tolerance & Hardware Support In Action

Aidan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:09:49 +0000

When we talk about hardware support contracts with the manufacturer we are being very serious. When we were planning our infrastructure we decided to do something unusual in the server hosting business; we decided to purchase hardware support contracts for all of our hardware to give us 4 hour on site responses by the manufacturer.

It adds some cost so why did we do this? Our customers depend on us. They provide a service to their customers (be they internal or external) and their reputations and ability to continue operating depend on our ability to provide a reliable service. We don’t cut corners. If our infrastructure fails then your customer isn’t going to accept a story like “well, the replacement will be here tomorrow”! We don’t buy support on a couple of bits here and there and avoid the critical components. And we also build in fault tolerance.

Our HP EVA SAN (storage area network) is the heart of the C Infinity private cloud. It’s where all of the data is stored. We use dual path fibre channel HBA’s in the servers, dual switches and dual controllers. The HP blade server chassis has fault tolerant fibre channel and network Interconnects too. The disks have RAID and there’s a hot spare disk. If something does go wrong we “keep on truckin’” and things stay operational at 100% capacity and performance.

I was working late one night last week when I saw an alert on the SAN. After a quick look I saw a disk had failed. Normally RAID would start up with potentially some loss in write performance. However, the disk group had activated the hot spare disk so everything stayed operating at 100%. I immediately logged a call on the HP website. Start the stop watch:

20 minutes later the HP support desk rang me to arrange the engineer visit. I arranged escorted access for the visiting engineer to access the required rack.
In less than an hour DHL had brought a replacement disk to the data centre.
At exactly 2 hours after I opened the call the visiting engineer called me from the rack. He confirmed with me the disk to replace.
At 2 hours and 2 minutes, I had added the replacement disk into the disk group and the SAN had started to spread the data back onto it.

So what was the end result for our customers in the private cloud? They didn’t notice anything. There was no drop in performance. There was certainly no data loss. Thanks to our concentration on doing things the right way our customers got the very best from our architecture and HP support.

Please contact us if you’d like to learn how you can get these levels of fault tolerance and reliability in the C Infinity private cloud

The New Microsoft WebsiteSpark Program

Gavin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:03:22 +0000

We’ve enrolled in the Microsoft WebsiteSpark Program that has just been launched. By partnering with Microsoft we can better assist website developers who run a dedicated server hosting their client’s websites.

The Microsoft WebsiteSpark Program is aimed at website development companies offering members the following for 3 years at no cost:

4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2 to host your websites
4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition to run on your web servers for storing data
DotNetPanel control panel enabling easy remote/hosted management of your websites
3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
2 licenses of Expression Web 3

Once enrolled, you can download and immediately use the above.

WebSiteSpark is available to independent web developers and small web development companies. The only two requirements to join the program are:

Your company builds web sites and web application on behalf of others.
Your company currently has less than 10 employees.

You can read the official announcement of the Microsoft WebsiteSpark Program on the ASP.net website by clicking here and follow their official twitter channel @WebsiteSpark.

C Infinity can enroll you in this program now. Contact us if you would like more information.