Is Backup Killing Your Free Time?

This is a guest post by Daniel Kuperman and the team at Axcient.

There are three moments in an IT person’s work life that they typically dread.

• Setting up backup
• Testing the backup
• Restoring from backup

In each of those moments there is more at stake than you think.

If backup jobs are not setup correctly, the whole backup chain can break and all your efforts would have been for nothing. Testing a backup is not particularly a joyful activity because it requires a lot of time and effort to make sure that a) you had indeed setup backup jobs correctly, and that b) you can actually restore files if needed. And, of course, when disaster strikes, you always hope that you can actually restore files as your testing results implied.

Where Does Your Time Go?

When considering how much effort backup takes, we typically underestimate the task. The problem is, most backup products that come from the legacy of tape backup, have kept complex interfaces and not very user-friendly options. The result is hours spent configuring backup jobs, schedules, and alerts for each device you want protected.

Learn More About Data Backup

Schedule a 1:1 consultation with Newmind Group and learn how we can help with:

• Reduced Downtime & Data Loss During a Disaster
• Data protection for multiple platforms and devices
• Application Aware backups

Schedule

In some cases, you even have to be careful not to schedule the start of a backup job too close to the next, or make sure that all options available for backing up your data are correctly set for each type of job.

When monitoring your backups, is it easy to spot which jobs completed successfully or do you have to dig through log files to decipher if there were any errors you should be worried about? Time spent looking for error messages is time that you could be using for something more productive.

When it comes time for testing your disaster recovery plan, being able to easily restore backups is essential and having to go through product documentation or spending time trying to understand how to actually do a restore without messing up other backup jobs that are running can be frustrating.

Finally, if you actually have to go through a full restore process after an event like fire, flood, or a natural disaster you can’t afford being lost on endless product menus, having to go to ‘help files’ or being on-hold with tech support.

How User Experience Influences Productivity

Now imagine that when you setup a backup job, instead of having to navigate through multiple screens containing dozens of check-boxes, you could have all the necessary info in a single screen. That instead of having to manually add different devices you want to protect, the system could auto-detect network devices and make the process of protecting them easier.

What if instead of navigating through logs, you could just login to one screen that would show you at the top all the critical messages so that you could take care of those issues more quickly? And how about the ability to test your DR plan by simply clicking a button?

These and more are part of what Axcient has themed Next-Generation Cloud Continuity and is part of our philosophy of using ‘exception-based management’ to make the job of creating, monitoring, testing, and actually recovering backups much easier.

The point is, when looking at how much time you or your staff spends on routine backup or DR tasks, it is worth considering how much of that time is because of the product and the actual product screens. Its like comparing MS Word with Google Docs, or even different TV remote controls. When something was created to make the user’s life easier, it is easy to spot.

Daniel Kuperman, Senior Manager of Product Marketing, Axcient

Daniel leads product marketing efforts at Axcient, working closely with product development, sales, marketing and the partner channel. He has over 10 years of experience in the technology industry and especially with B2B software companies. He holds an MBA and a PMP certification by the Project Management Institute.

Top Sources of Business Data Loss - No One Is Safe

Not too long ago we were contacted by the Macomb County Clerks office due to a fire that shut down the building for months, to help them get their operations up and running again as quickly as possible. The wiring, which connected the county network to the data was burned and the building sustained damaged. Since the fire, users had to do their best to carry on with paper documents, a frantic return to carbon copies and limited phone service.

When your entire staff works out of a single office and all of your data is stored on PCs, laptops, or a server housed in that office how do you carry on after a disaster? Are you able to return to paper documents? Will you be able to provide that same level of service and keep your clients and customers?

Data Loss a Foregone Conclusion

Disasters are always looming, but believe it or not they are not the top cause of data loss. Earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, power outages, the chances may be better in some areas than others, but at most will happen 1-2x per year. How many times do you drop your phone? Maybe twice per day. Delete the wrong file? Maybe a few times a week. Run out of battery? Maybe once a month.

Learn More About Data Backup

Schedule a 1:1 consultation with Newmind Group and learn how we can help with:

• Reduced Downtime & Data Loss During a Disaster
• Data protection for multiple platforms and devices
• Application Aware backups

Schedule

Sources of Data Loss

Believe it or not, human error is the number one cause to data loss, responsible for 75% percent of all data loss occurrences. Just recently, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada announced the loss of financial information for 52,000 brokerage firm clients, due to the loss of a mobile device.

Rounding out the top 3 common causes of data loss, after user error, include:

violations of policy (can still be considered user error)
Internet-based threats, attacks and hacks

Here’s another eye opening stat, 90% of businesses lose sensitive data 3+ times each year, according to study by ITPolicyCompliance.com (ITPC). That includes customer data, financial data, corporate data, employee data and even IT security data. If you’re lucky to be in the 10% that only experience 2 losses a year you have multiple IT backup solutions, redundancies, and security protocols racking up enormous costs.

What to Plan For

What we’ve learned from experience and the news, is not to worry about a natural disaster, but to plan for human error. Just like having an effective mobile policy is good and may prevent a future loss of data via mobile devices, implementing a backup and disaster recovery strategy is even better, because you ensure the access to and integrity of your business critical data, keeping operations up-and-running.

Daniel Proczko has been working with organizations and individuals to build & grow the entrepreneur community of Kalamazoo, MI. From organizing TEDx events, hack-a-thons, and documentary screenings to engaging with business leaders, Dan strives to inspire individuals with new ideas and better thinking.

Having always been interested in tech and understanding the value of innovation through IT, communicating the importance of strategic IT thinking is one of Dan's primary goals within Newmind Group.

Integrating Technology with the Classroom

It’s good to understand that the key to education is keeping the student on task and involved in your program. In today’s digitized culture incorporating technology can help teachers and educational organizations connect with today’s students, but in order to make integrating technology into education work seamlessly, you need to start with a good class website. The website will serve as a hub for all of your links, apps, blogs pdf’s, presentations, social media, videos and every other cool new teaching tool that comes down the road.

Within 5 years, just about every student is going to have smart technology in their pocket via some mobile device. Providing exposure to tech and web in a learning environment will not only teach students to respect the devices and personal information, but also empower them to use them for good and learning.

The first step is to understand your goals and relate them to the 2 aspects of technology in the classroom - hardware & software:

• Are you looking to make learning easier more accessible?
• Are you trying to integrate all aspects of learning/administration together?
• Are you trying to relate to the students on a more cultural level?

Looking at hardware, its important to find a device that is customizable and configurable.
Newmind Group has not only helped thousands of schools acquire Chromebooks devices, but we’ve also helped them configure and manage to provide tailored environments based on teaching and organizational frameworks, even 1-to-1 learning.

As to software, I like to separate it into admin and learning. On the admin side, Chromebooks provide the flexibility to control the apps/content students see/interact with, via personalized app stores, proxy configurations, and content-filtering software.

The powerful management console available for Chromebooks allows education administrators to:

• Provide a private & personalized app store for their school
• Track Assets & get device usage reports
• Customize features & user access
• Configure network access to ensure proxy usage

Using some very clean and easy to use software, like Securly, you can enhance content-filtering.

Important to note, Chromebooks operate online, therefore the school needs to be ready for a web-centric curriculum. Which leads into the learning software, available through the Chrome Web Store. This can be accomplished in two ways:

• Grade-level application packs are groups of Chrome Web Store apps that integrate tightly with Google’s suite of Apps for Education, divided by grade levels to meet different classroom needs. These packs are installable from the Chromebook management console. Many of them are free and we’ve worked with the app makers to offer discounts for bulk purchases.
• Organization-specific web app collections in the Chrome Web Store give administrators the ability to recommend apps to students, teachers and staff. The collection is visible only to the school, and admins can curate apps from the Chrome Web Store, application packs and web apps purchased elsewhere or private apps developed by the school. (This feature is also available to Chromebooks for Business customers from the control panel.)

A great place to start is with organizations that have already made the leap. Reach out to local schools and universities and see if any have implemented new technology. You can even reach out to us and we’ll help get you in touch.

Technology can be an asset for education when ensuring its implementation matches organizational and student goals. What technologies have you adopted and what goals are you trying to meet?

Protect Students With Web Filtering

Securly protects students on computers throughout the school while giving them safe access to 21st century learning tools like YouTube, Google and Wikipedia.

• Safe Search
• Safe Social Media
• YouTube for Schools
• and more...

Learn More

Daniel Proczko has been working with organizations and individuals to build & grow the entrepreneur community of Kalamazoo, MI. From organizing TEDx events, hack-a-thons, and documentary screenings to engaging with business leaders, Dan strives to inspire individuals with new ideas and better thinking.

Having always been interested in tech and understanding the value of innovation through IT, communicating the importance of strategic IT thinking is one of Dan's primary goals within Newmind Group.

Power Outages & Brownouts Secretly Hurting the Bottom Line

Consumer's Energy Outage Map of
Kalamazoo for July 23rd, 2013

Consumer's Energy Outage Map of
Downtown Kalamazoo for May 29th, 2013

A power outage today, July 23rd, has left 4500+ without power!(Another on the east side of downtown Kalamazoo, on May 30th resulted in almost 1000 Consumers Energy customers out of power for the majority of the afternoon.) The outage left many Kalamazoo businesses unable to process transactions.

Of course, we're writing about this outage because it affected out direct surroundings, but that's what power outages do. And they do not ask if it is convenient to occur, nor are they predictable, yet they cost businesses millions every year.

Here are the hard facts. The US Department of Labor estimates that power outages cost $80 billion per year and that 73%, or $57 billion, of those losses come from the business sector and 25%, or $20 billion, come from the industrial sector. A typical convenience store/gas station, for example, can lose about $445 per hour in revenue.

But lost revenue alone does not tell the whole story.

Power Outage Effects

Power outages not only affect sales, they can also affect the technology systems, data and hardware businesses use in their day-to-day operations. They cause electrical surges damaging or even destroying hardware, both servers and workstations. The costs of acquiring new hardware and hiring qualified personnel to install and configure that hardware can easily run into the thousands of dollars for small businesses and tens-of-thousands for medium- to large-businesses.

New hardware, servers, computers and other devices, can be purchased, but recovering data from the damaged devices can take several weeks and in worse case scenarios may not even be possible. Any data not properly backed up can be lost for good costing much more than a few thousand dollars in hardware.

Hidden cost of Power Outages

I took some time to talk with fellow Newminder Matt Vollmar, whose had years of experience delivering managed IT services and he said, “Business data is the real lifeblood, including, customer/client information, financial records, HR & employee information, etc. Losing business data can put a business in a position where it cannot continue to operate.  What’s more, a data loss can significantly damage the reputation of a business.”

Exactly how costly is a power outage? I had to do some digging, so get ready for more facts.

Learn More About Data Backup

Schedule a 1:1 consultation with Newmind Group and learn how we can help with:

• Reduced Downtime & Data Loss During a Disaster
• Data protection for multiple platforms and devices
• Application Aware backups

Schedule

According to the United Kingdom’s Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), 70% of businesses that experience a major data loss will go out of business. A Pepperdine University study found that each data loss instance can cost about $4,000 for small- to medium-sized businesses(SMB). Larger businesses may be able to weather these costs, but as power outages are common occurrences, if you're a small- to -medium-sized business you may find yourself in deep water.

How to combat Power Outages

We recommend implementing the following disaster recovery & business continuity solutions to help combat data loss from power outages, hardware failure, and natural disasters:

• Regular data backups
  
  Its important to backup your data frequently. A lot can happen in a month and if you’re only backing up monthly you may lose so much data you will not be able to stay in business.
• Redundant Backup
  
  Hardware is not infallible and will fail eventually. Maintaining multiple backups will ensure that you will have a source to restore servers and business-critical data.
• Storing Backups off-site
  
  Storing a backup 20 miles or farther from your day-to-day operations can help to protect it from being damaged by the power outage.

Power outages are common occurrences and can have a damaging effect on a business. Implementing a disaster recovery and business continuity plan now can save your business thousands of dollars and mean the difference between staying in business or closing your doors for good.

Daniel Proczko has been working with organizations and individuals to build & grow the entrepreneur community of Kalamazoo, MI. From organizing TEDx events, hack-a-thons, and documentary screenings to engaging with business leaders, Dan strives to inspire individuals with new ideas and better thinking.

Having always been interested in tech and understanding the value of innovation through IT, communicating the importance of strategic IT thinking is one of Dan's primary goals within Newmind Group.

Building fire knocks out network, Chromebooks help county clerk restore service

The phone call came on a Thursday afternoon and Friday morning I was in my car on my way to downtown Mount Clemens to deliver several Chromebooks to Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds Carmella Sabaugh, and her employees to help get them through this crisis...

The Fire

On Wednesday, April 17th, 2013, the Macomb County Building in downtown Mount Clemens, Michigan, had an electrical fire that destroyed the fiber, network and phone connections to the county’s data center, displacing 200 employees and several departments. See, “State of Emergency: Hackel says County Building shut down for months following fire,” Macomb Daily, April 19, 2013.


Thankfully no one was hurt.


As any IT professional can imagine, this was a major event, critically disrupting technology service across departments. The wiring, which connected the county network to the data was burned. Since the fire, users had to do their best to carry on with paper documents, a frantic return to carbon copies and limited phone service.

What about the data?! How much did Macomb County lose? How much work will it require to reconstitute the data?

The Silver Lining

Macomb County recently switched to Google Apps for Government, including secure Gmail services for most employees, which means their email is hosted in Google’s secure data centers and is accessible from any device with an Internet connection, anywhere.

This is disaster business continuity redefined and is a huge life-saver for Google Apps users, including Macomb County employees. None of their email data was lost. Although the network was disrupted, email remained accessible from cell phones and other Internet devices. Fortunately, thanks to heroic efforts by the county’s IT Department, no other data was lost, either.

Prior to the switch to Google Apps this may not have been the case, to put it simply.

“I am even more pleased with our County Executive’s decision to ‘go Google.’ Our staff maintained Gmail communication throughout the emergency. We only needed an Internet connection after the fire to start quickly restoring some services,” said Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds Carmella Sabaugh.

Chromebooks being delivered to Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds Carmella Sabaugh and Administrative Assistant Crystal Brenner by Michael Jefferies.

How does Newmind fit into this story?

Signaled by the Bat Light. Newmind Brought out the Bat Mobile

Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds Carmella Sabaugh and her department integrated their workflow with Google Apps for Government and developed a solid relationship with Google in order to share their experiences with other organizations considering moving their email services to Google. When the fire struck, Carmella’s staff contacted Google to see if there was anyway to get a few Chromebooks to use for displaced workers due to the fire.

Who did Google call? Their trusty, go-to partner Newmind Group.

Here’s where that phone call comes into play, and I got in my car and drove to Mount Clemens to drop off several Chromebooks.

“We were thrilled when Newmind stepped forward to provide Chromebooks for use on the Macomb County Circuit Court Building’s wireless Internet network. Even though the county’s servers were down, our email, calendars and documents were accessible with the Chromebooks,” said Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds Carmella Sabaugh.

“We are using the Chromebooks to provide public service at our temporary public real estate records search area for our Register of Deeds counter. We are also using Chromebooks to access our email, calendars, and documents and to track security paper.”

Having never used a Chromebook before, and having no IT background, Macomb County Register of Deeds employee Traci Thompson became the department’s Chromebook administrator after a 15-minute crash-course on connecting to the wireless network. This photo shows Chromebooks provided by Newmind at the temporary Register of Deeds public search counter in the Court Building.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

It was very motivating to see in practice how cloud-based technologies, like Google Apps, can ensure that data isn’t lost, service isn’t interrupted, and even when bad stuff happens, the right technology can reduce and even eliminate damages. All I could think about was the other organizations across the country who have not yet made the transition to the next generation of backup, redundancy and disaster recovery tools?

If we can help them make the transition to these tools then we can help them avoid scenarios like the one Macomb is facing now. Our disaster recovery solutions allow servers to be spun up virtually in the cloud within 5 minutes of failure. In Macomb’s case, that would have meant that only minutes after the fire, all data, not just Google Apps, would have been accessible via the cloud.

Learn More About Data Backup

Schedule a 1:1 consultation with Newmind Group and learn how we can help with:

• Reduced Downtime & Data Loss During a Disaster
• Data protection for multiple platforms and devices
• Application Aware backups

Schedule

Michael Jefferies' is happiest when problems are being solved and life is becoming more awesome.

At Newmind, Michael consults with clients to discover their organizational objectives and works alongside them to identify, analyze, and implement technologies that can help take them there. He believes that technology is not merely a part of business, but in fact provides endless opportunities to increase fun, efficiency and profitability.

June 2013 Data Backup Survey

Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete our survey. We are surveying businesses gather their feedback about trends in data backup. This survey should take you approximately 5 minutes to complete.

The information you provide can be accessed only by our internal research team, and reported in aggregate. If you would like to be notified of the published results of this survey, you will be able to enter your email address at the end of the survey.

This survey will be available for submission until June 18, 2013. Should you have any technical problems, please contact Daniel Proczko at DanielP@NewmindGroup.com or 269-271-2688.

Build IT Together 2013 [Live Blog]

The official live blog of Build IT Together!

8:00 - We're at the Radisson setting up. Just unpacked the brand new Google Pixel and Google Glass. I'm sure you can't wait to try them on!

8:30 - First attendees are just showing up


Welcome Address

9:00 - We played a sweet movie about our experiences with IT, old tech to new tech. (I'll post it here after we upload it.)

9:05 - Daniel Jefferies reminisces about past IT practices and timelines the progressions of IT.

9:11 - Daniel Jefferies "How many people are excited about riding in self-driving car?" Only about 4 people raised their hands.

9:14 - "All that computing power is on your desk, now. All these tool were born during the personal productivity era, but it's changed again. The era we're in now. we've got all that computing, that used to be on our desks, is now in our pocket." - Daniel Jefferies

9:18 - "Many of our tools are built for me doing my own work, but most of our work, is make the team productive. Make the stuff work together." - Daniel Jefferies

9:21 - Sharing the pains of scaling and "technical debt". Technical Debt, the investment in technology and processes that makes it hard to move to new and better tech. "There is a great deal of pain moving to a new system." - Daniel Jefferies

9:25 - Attendees are being encouraged to reach out to businesses of different sizes to exchange experience and collaborate together, to better understand the pains we all face in IT.

Let's get to know each other - Activity

Congratulations to Ed Freed of the City of Kalamazoo,
who won a Samsung Chromebook!

9:26 - Attendees are working together on a peer evaluation survey. Matt Vollmar & Michael Jefferies are leading attendees through the survey.

All of the attendees are working on Chromebooks!

Questions range from IT outsourcing, to backup & recovery, networking, file sharing, to content filtering and device management. This survey will allow attendees to see real time results and compare their current systems with others at the event.

9:40 - Connecting about the pains of not having IT personnel at every business location and how working remotely has changed.

9:42 - Survey results are showing that there are many companies that have a lot of locations, yet very few IT personnel. This is very common in Government and Education industries.

9:43 - Combination of outsourced IT and in-house IT provides internal staff the ability to work on high value projects instead of projects that just "keep the lights on," like anti-virus.

9:46 - Mobility and access to files across multiple devices and platforms is difficult and can be a major pain among IT departments.

9:47 - Face-to-face video collaboration helps bring the workforce closer together.

9:49 - Question "Why would a company want to keep 10gb of email? There is a legal issue with hall that information."

"If we provide everyone with that much storage or more, images, and files are replicated multiple times, and backed up multiple times versus a file sharing program where a single file is shared to multiple people."

"A good practice may be to implement a and archiving policy and enforce it."

"As to employees using email as file storage, it may be a symptom of the email system, and file storage system being difficult to use."

Productivity sins: Inbox as to-do list, Using email as a memory vault

"Culture shift for people is the hardest part. You can give them a Ferrari, they still drive it 20mph." Meaning, you can give tools, but cultivating better use of those tools is the hardest part.

10:00 - Reporting and real-time data is very important for organizations to find their pulse or rhythm.

10:02 - Diagnosing a problem is a must, but if a problem occurs, how quickly can you diagnose and give an answer as to what the problem is?

Answers are ranging from minutes, to seconds, to the ever popular "We'll look into it and let you know shortly."

One of our attendees organizations has built a troubleshooting tool that can help employees reach a diagnoses in minutes.

"The answer and diagnosing is becoming even more difficult with the advent of multiple platforms, technologies, software, etc..."

10:06 - "The pain we see all over the place. People like us are on Facebook, email, etc, we don't know the tools to know when or how much, but to be able to go to your leadership and say, 'Let me look it up...oh, well, Johnny is on YouTube, using 20% of our bandwidth' So you can walk right over to his desk."

10:07 - Debate over open policies of network usage and differentiating between useful use and non-useful use.

Bandwidth cost is the question at hand, but the cost of bandwidth is falling fast.

10:09 - Promoting a productive culture that empowers and encourages employees to provide results of their position can help alleviate improper use of resources. Collaboration helps each employee keep each other accountable as well.

Locking employees out does not stop employees form trying to get around. So, its more important to create a cultural shift.

10:13 - Challenge: Move away from normal work-week. Let them work when they are most productive.

10:30 - Attendees have split into their respective breakout sessions.

10:39 - 6.1% of business data is lost and not recoverable, according to the IDC. Unfortunately this data cannot be picked or chosen and includes financials, confidential emails, memos, business plans, personnel data, etc.

10:45 - Both early sessions "Backup & Disaster Recovery" & "Mobility" are working in groups to identify their own pain points and collectively and collaboratively brainstorm solutions, essentially sharing experience and knowledge.

"I hate being a tape Jockey."

11:15 - Break

11:30 - Starting up sessions on "Helpdesk & Monitoring" and "Network, Mobile Device Management"