Hurricanes, floods, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, even ransomware — these devastating events can strike almost without warning. Does your business have a plan to not only safeguard sensitive data but contingencies for recovery should a catastrophe occur?
Management should acknowledge their company’s potential exposure to disasters, natural and otherwise. These events can endanger the accessibility and support of an organization’s IT systems and networks.
It’s trite but true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So how does a business protect the integrity of its IT processes before cataclysm strikes? An effective option is to collaborate with a reputable data center, one with the resources to protect valuable data while keeping it secure and accessible.
Now that you recognize the utility of a data center, what should you look for? Below is a laundry list of essentials your DR service should provide.
An effective disaster recovery plan starts long before storm clouds gather. You want your IT partner to customize a comprehensive and ordered strategy that maintains and monitors network infrastructure and ongoing processes. Too, your employees should be trained and evaluated on how to reduce or avert system downtime.
Proactive planning also encompasses preventive maintenance. Your DR provider should regularly schedule tests of fire detection/extinguishing systems, power supplies/generators and HVAC systems.
How do fiber optic networks provide such outstanding redundancy and protection? In large part, due to bidirectional line-switched architecture. This means that in the event of network element failure, optical signals can be rerouted, either with “protection” spare fibers or by backhauling.
You want the same from your DR provider. Does it offer alternative facilities should its primary data center be offline? Are their data centers sited to prevent damage from floods, fires, winds or earthquakes?
Power failures and loss of environmental cooling can wreak havoc on vulnerable infrastructure elements. Look for facilities with redundant uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), supported by generators that switch seamlessly online if utility power fails. Seek the same redundancy within the data center’s HVAC configurations.
Redundancy also includes instantaneous access to multiple “core” or “Tier 1” long-haul networks should the primary carrier interrupt service.
Is the DR provider’s data center monitored at all times? Are employees required to wear visible ID whenever onsite? Nowadays, constant surveillance of network assets is a must to maintain network integrity and data security.
Your DR provider should have a cross-trained and experienced emergency ops team in place, ready at a moment’s notice to restore operational functionality to networks and systems in case of a disaster. They are the “cavalry” riding to the rescue, freeing local employees to see after their families and homes.
Now that you know, consider Aperio IT as your partner in disaster recovery planning. We provide cloud hosting and backup services to small and mid-sized businesses like yours. It’s never too early to prepare before catastrophe strikes.
Contact us to learn more about planning your Disaster Recovery Plan with Aperio IT.
As many of us are now used to working from anywhere from our preferred device, information protection controls need to evolve to protect data at the individual, file and service levels. The shift to mobility and personally-owned devices also means that the threat landscape is shifting with more individually targeted attacks that work across platforms. On this show, we take an early look at new controls for compliance, security and organizational search with next-generation information protection tools.
This week, Rudra Mitra, engineering lead for the Office 365 information protection team, takes a look at the core themes driving information protection investments and to give us an early look at what’s coming. Rudra describes the approach his teams are taking as they build new controls to be pervasive, transparent and people-centric.
Rudra highlight the new tools for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) coming to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, as well as Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) in Exchange Online to show how they’ve evolved to provide pervasive, platform-agnostic protection. These tools also provide new audit capabilities to show things like URL traces when people follow embedded hyperlinks in email and actions taken against centrally-stored files, plus new APIs available to query activity—all in the name of transparency. Transparency extends to organizational search with new eDiscovery analysis capabilities coming in Equivio Zoom.
The controls cannot just exist in isolation from users and core to Office 365 is the inclusion of people in the compliance solution. DLP policy tips are presented to users within email, file sharing experiences and even coming to Office desktop apps. User education of policy along with options to help people securely work on their device and apps of choice are all part of being people-centric.
On the show, Rudra demonstrates all of this and more to give an early look at what’s coming in information protection and as we think about integration with other cloud services. He also provides insights into things to come. Watch the show to learn more and see you next week!
If you are still running Exchange Server 2003, then you need to fast track your Office 365 migration, because Exchange 2003 stopped being supported by Microsoft in 2014. What’s more, most Exchange Server 2003 systems are running on Windows Server 2003 and this will also no longer be supported by Microsoft after June 2015. These two events mean your system will be increasingly open to external hacker attacks as security breaches are no longer being fixed by Windows updates.
In addition, unless you have moved your server to a virtual environment sometime over the last few years, it is very likely that your physical file server is also out of warranty, running slowly, nearing its disk capacity and beginning to suffer reliability issues.
Migration from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 can still be safely done, however there is often an extra problem to be overcome concerning Microsoft Outlook. Many organizations that are running Exchange 2003 are also running Office 2003. The good news is that moving to Office 365 presents a great opportunity to also replace Office 2003 by choosing an Office 365 plan that includes Office 2013 – for example the Office 365 Business Premium plan.
The bad news is you have a chicken and egg situation because Office 2003 in general – and Outlook 2003 in particular – does not work with Office 365. This means that during the migration process you have to decide between upgrading your email system first, and then not being able to access it until you’ve updated all the computers to a later version of Office (at least office 2007). Or, you upgrade all the computers to a newer version of Office first, and then do the migration of Exchange Server to Office 365.
Whichever method you choose, there will be a period of time when users are stuck in no man’s land – they won’t be able to access their email server from their version of Outlook. So a decision need to be made – is it best to upgrade Office first, or is it best to upgrade the email server first? Real world experience shows that it is best in every situation to upgrade to Office 365 first and then upgrade Office 2003 users to Office 2013. Here’s two hypothetical examples to prove this point:
Company A has 20 staff with 19 users running Outlook 2010 on their computers and with only one user running Outlook 2003. It would be best to migrate the email server to Office 365 first, because only the one user won’t be able to access the new email server until their version of Office gets upgraded. And it should take only an hour or so to get that user’s computer upgraded to Office 2013.
Company B also has 20 staff, but in their case 19 users are on Office 2003 and only one is on say Office 2010. At first glance this seems like a problem – if the Exchange 2003 Server is migrated to Office 365 first then the 19 staff won’t be able to access their emails until the computers have Office 2013 installed. And conversely, if the 19 computers are updated to Office 2013 first, they won’t be able to access their emails until the Office 365 migration process has been completed. Fortunately, in this case there is a very good interim solution – users can make use of OWA (Outlook Web Access) to access their emails via the browser until their computers are updated to Office 2013. Indeed, it will also be possible for them to now have access to Office 365 email on a range of smartphones and tablets they may already have like iPhones, iPads, Windows mobile devices and Android devices.
Performing migrations to Office 365 from later versions of Exchange are a lot easier to action, but with a well-designed scoping plan that considers the implications of old versions of Office, the Exchange 2003 migration process can still be performed in a timely and cost-effective fashion.
It may well be that the best way to assure your organization of a successful Office 365 migration from Exchange 2003 is to use the services of a Microsoft Partner that has Office 365 certifications and real-world experience in performing Office 365 migrations.
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