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By the DynaSis Team

Availability has become a pervasive buzzword regarding technology, but what does it really mean? More importantly, is it as vital to your operation as IT providers would have you believe?

In the technology world, availability is used as a formal term for uptime—the amount of time, over a year, that a computing system's resources are available. As we discussed in our recent article, "Moving Your Business to the Cloud: Three Top Reasons Why the Time Is Now," system availability is generally measured in "nines." Best practices availability for corporate efficiency is 99.99%. At that level, an organization can expect to suffer less than an hour of downtime per year (52 minutes and 35.7 seconds, to be exact).

On a more general basis, "availability" is a characteristic that enables a resource to be usable, on demand, to perform its designated or required function. From this perspective, businesses measure availability for many resources beyond computer systems. Companies often track availability of portable IT assets such as laptops and tablets; they also track the availability of personnel, conference rooms and more.

For businesses, availability is an irreplaceable driver of productivity. The more resources of all types that are available to a company and its employees, the more the organization can accomplish. Nowhere is this truer than with IT availability. At 99% availability—a mere percentage point from the 99.99% level we mention above, a firm can expect to experience three days, 15 hours, 39 minutes and 29.5 seconds of availability, each year.

Downtime may not be a big deal if it happens when the offices are closed, but if outages occur during the working day, they can be deeply disruptive. Additionally, if downtime occurs during important, off-hour operations such as system backups, it can cause major headaches and potentially data loss. For firms that sell or service customers online, downtime of any amount and at any time can lead to lost sales and reduced customer loyalty.

For this reason, we believe that availability is one of the most—if not the most—important corporate assets. Security and mobility are also pivotal to business success, but unless resources of all types are readily available for personnel and processes to use, an operation will literally be unable to function.

Availability is not automatic. Businesses employ scheduling solutions to ensure availability of people and physical resources. For computing systems, IT providers go even further, using specialized techniques, such as hardware redundancy, load balancing and proactive system monitoring, to sharply curtail the likelihood of downtime. They also maintain and manage the cloud environments that help businesses enjoy the highest possible availability of digital resources, as well.

All of these efforts become woven into the fabric of daily operations—unnoticed until they break down. Prudent business owners do everything they can to ensure that never happens.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

As a company that helps small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) adopt technology as a true enabler of their success, we frequently answer the question, “How, exactly, does technology drive my business forward?” Many business leaders see technology as a requisite support system for conducting their operations, but not as a performance enhancer.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, numerous recent studies and surveys indicate that modern technology not only can enhance business performance; it can fundamentally reconfigure a business for success in the digital era. Implemented intelligently, technology both drives innovation and expands potential.

To help business owners and executives explore this innate value of technology—and align it as effectively as possible with their own business strategies—DynaSis President Dave Moorman is penning a series of targeted, quick-read articles. Ranging from cloud technology to risk mitigation; from security to mobility; he’ll cover every facet of how technology can propel SMB success in an era when ignoring it can mean business failure.

We invite you to read our first article, “Moving Your Business to the Cloud: Three Top Reasons Why the Time Is Now.” It’s filled with insightful commentary and powerful supportive statistics that validate our belief that the Cloud is a key enabler of SMB growth and competitive advantage, moving forward. We think you’ll enjoy it.

We’ll be announcing each article that debuts in our blog, but if you would like us to send you a copy as soon as it’s ready, please email chas.arnold@dynasis.com. We promise you, this is a series you won’t want to miss!

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and mid-sized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

Does your company have a business continuity plan? If so, do you test it? If you answered "Yes" to the first question and "No" to the second, you are in good company. A recent survey of mid-sized business owners and C-level executives, conducted by The Hartford financial services company, found that 59 percent of mid-sized businesses had formal, documented business continuity plans, but only 19 percent of them had tested those plans. Among the remainder, 33 percent had an informal, verbal plan and eight percent had no plan at all.

If you're one of those with an untested plan, don't think you're in much better shape than your less-prepared competitors. A separate study by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council also found that the majority of businesses (of all sizes) fail to test their continuity plans. Of even greater concern, the DRP found, among those who do test their plans, most plans fail.

Failure during testing is unfortunate, but it's far better than the alternative. Many things can—and do—go wrong when continuity plans are finally put into action. Some breakdowns are unpredictable, but many are fully within the control of the business owner and his or her chief executives. Reasons for plan breakdowns include:

• The plan is based on invalidated assumptions about processes, people and technology.
• The plan is built on an inflexible scenario (e.g. No Access to Office). Disasters rarely follow an orderly flow.
• The plan hasn't been adequately shared with personnel that have decision-making authority.
• The plan is no longer current with the business model, organizational structure or other important aspect of business operations. Continuity plans should be updated yearly, at the minimum.
• The "plan" is a borrowed document with a "Who to Call" list. It's amazing how many business owners adopt business continuity or disaster recovery plan "templates" with few to no changes, add their contact lists on top, and stow them in a drawer or on a shelf. That's a recipe for certain failure.
• The plan has never been tested. As we mentioned earlier, the only way to determine whether or not a plan is functional is to test it. Testing explores the merits of the "how"—whether or not a document that appears sufficient is going to prove its mettle in action.

We understand that small and mid-sized businesses often operate in near "fire drill" mode, with something more important than continuity planning always on the horizon. Humans can do this because we innately have a high degree of risk tolerance, especially for threats we haven't experienced yet. That's what allowed us to seek out and settle new lands and create new civilizations. It's also what allows us to get into airplanes that rocket along at 600 miles an hour, miles off the ground.

However, the odds of crashing in an airplane are infinitesimal compared to those of experiencing a business disruption. Running a business without a well-documented, tested continuity plan is a risk no business owner should take.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and mid-sized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

In a follow up to last week’s article about cloud adoption, we wanted to take a closer look at private clouds and the issues surrounding them. To date, per a recent “State of the Cloud” study, public cloud deployment far outpaces that of private cloud—88% of enterprises are using public cloud while 63 percent are using private cloud. However, as we mentioned last week, research firm Gartner expects private cloud deployment to grow at nearly twice the rate of public clouds (46 percent versus 24 percent) over the next two years.

To clarify for the purposes of our discussion, a public cloud is any hosted cloud environment where resources are shared among many customers. This can be a grouping of large data center servers divided into small virtual servers to serve multiple customers (called “multi-tenancy”). Or, it can be a collection of servers hosted by a software developer who leases SaaS (software as a service), for which all customer files and data reside in common storage at the data center of the host. (Google Drive and Dropbox are two examples of SaaS with a public cloud model.)

A private cloud, on the other hand, is a cloud environment hosted either at the premises of the company that owns the data or on a dedicated server—one that is not virtualized and shared with other companies—at a provider’s data center.

Provided they are hosted and managed by a reputable, experienced provider with a strict security profile, public clouds are perfectly safe. However, for resources subject to regulatory scrutiny, private clouds are often a better option than public ones. Firms whose management isn’t comfortable with public cloud “togetherness” may also opt for a private cloud—or a hybrid model, where resources are divided between a public cloud and a private cloud, usually based on security criteria.

Unfortunately, we have seen many SMB decision makers avoid the cloud altogether because they have heard private clouds are expensive or complicated. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a business owner has a compelling reason not to use a public cloud, or he/she sleeps better at night knowing that corporate resources are safely locked up in a server cabinet at his office, there is now a straightforward, affordable way to host an internal private cloud.

Advanced technology allows companies such as DynaSis to install a small, no-load software “agent” on an organization’s physical file server and then make the resources available to remote personnel and other authorized individuals over a secure Internet connection. In the best of these scenarios, the IT provider manages and secures not only the cloud environment but also all devices (e.g. PCs; smartphones; tablets) accessing the resource as well as the networks on which the corporate information travels.

To be the most valuable and comprehensive, these solutions should offer file storage, sharing, synchronization and backup, enabling remote workers to collaborate and share assets securely with each other and authorized clients and vendors. It’s private cloud computing at its finest, and it is available and reasonably priced, now.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud-computing provider for small and mid-sized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

Two cloud-specific reports have confirmed each other's conclusions—that a larger percentage of organizations now trust cloud solutions for mission-critical activities and workloads. The reports also offer strong evidence that supports the Cloud's value proposition as more than a cost-cutting strategy, an assertion that we at DynaSis have been making for years.

The 2015 "State of the Cloud" survey found that IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in particular is seeing a large uptick in adoption, with 70% of companies that use cloud solutions deploying IaaS. With IaaS, organizations migrate some or all of their workloads to servers hosted and managed at a data center by a third-party vendor such as a managed services provider (MSP). The vendor is responsible for maintaining security, maintenance and repair, technology upgrades and all other aspects of hardware operation. Many MSPs also include support for the contents of the hosted servers, such as application support, in their monthly fee, as well.

Within a few months of State of the Cloud, Gartner released a survey regarding corporate cloud adoption plans through 2017 that echoed the State of the Cloud findings. The Gartner report clearly indicated that enterprises are running mission-critical and production grade projects in the cloud, as opposed to the "pilot projects" often cited in prior surveys. "This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation (SFA) and email," said Gartner Research VP Joanne Correia in response to the findings.

Gartner also found that although cost reduction continues to dominate as the main reason for cloud investment (44 percent of respondents), participants in CIO and IT director roles rated three non-financial drivers—"cloud is a modern approach," "innovation" and "operational agility"—as more important than cost. Senior IT leaders also rated "business advantage" as a top driver.

For SaaS (Software as a Service, where application suites like Microsoft Office 365 are hosted in the cloud by a third-party), respondents felt the key driver was the elimination of IT management resource and expense, with the corresponding redirection of limited in-house staff to other responsibilities. Other top benefits of SaaS included rapid deployment, faster access to innovation and the lower upfront costs associated with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

The survey also found that many organizations are addressing privacy and security concerns (as well as fears about government spying) by moving away from public, heterogeneous cloud models such as DropBox. In their place, Gartner says, firms are and will continue adopting private cloud models that include not only in-house managed clouds but also cloud environments hosted securely by third parties such as MSPs. This trend was seen as so strong, based upon survey results, that Gartner expects private cloud deployment to grow at nearly twice the rate of public clouds (46 percent versus 24 percent) over the next two years.

In the report, Gartner concluded that CIOs are focusing on the cloud "to establish a modern, innovative IT environment with operational agility and business advantage as key outcomes." This is precisely the reason DynaSis has long promoted the cloud as the "must have" solution for modern businesses, now and in the future.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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Last week, we offered some insights into the current state of enterprise mobility and made several recommendations business leaders could implement to keep their mobile strategy updated. This week, we'll offer a list of "mobility "must haves"—features that any mobility platform should offer to ensure optimal worker productivity and security.

As it becomes increasingly ubiquitous and integrated into our lives, mobility brings greater complexity and risk for the organization. It also blurs the lines been roles and responsibilities of both employees and the company itself (or more accurately, the IT team). A well-designed, expertly implemented and managed mobile device solution is critical to realizing full value from mobility while protecting the company from unnecessary exposure. Following are the functions we believe to be absolute requirements for any platform.

1. Streamlined Access to Mobile Device Management Functions: Administrators must be able to remotely secure and manage any device (e.g. control device features and settings), with a few clicks of the mouse. The interface to access these functions should be user-friendly, with all functions united in a centralized dashboard.
2. All-Inclusive Device Control and Security: Features should include device inventory, password enforcement and remote viewing of statuses as well as all of these remote device functions—PIN reset, total wipe and/or selective data wipe, locking/unlocking, geo tracking and copy/paste restriction.
3. Preconfigured Policy "Templates": The solution should come with preset, centralized policies to facilitate rapid deployment of consistent security and configuration profiles on user devices.
4. Robust Data Management: The firm should be able to segregate personal and company data into containerized, PIN-protected apps to restrict unauthorized access.
5. Strong Encryption: All data in containerized apps should be protected by AES-256 encryption (on top of the Internet's security protocol, SSL) both on the device and in transit over the Internet.
   App-level PIN protects data within the app against unauthorized casual browsing.
6. Device Level App Control: Administrators should be able to remotely monitor, push/update and block all apps installed on devices and otherwise enforce app compliance policies.

Not a requisite for all firms, but an important addition for those that want to let users access third-party applications, is support for marketplaces such as the Apple App Store and Google Play.

If your mobile device management platform doesn't offer all of these features, or if you haven't yet deployed a solution yet, we urge you to do so, quickly. A recent mobile device security study (May 2015) found that 52 percent of mobile users conduct personal business on employer-owned devices and 21 percent have modified the default settings on their company devices. Among Millennials—which will soon compose the majority of the workforce—the numbers are even higher. Sixty-four percent use company devices for personal reasons. Even more disturbing, 25 percent of Millennials believe their device behavior compromises the security of the organization (compared with five percent for Baby Boomers).

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

Although the near-ubiquitous popularity of mobile devices is hard to escape, we are often surprised at how many business decision makers don't recognize how this trend is impacting today's businesses. For firms to thrive, business leaders must understand and adjust for the considerable effect that mobility has on business operations and security.

Furthermore, numerous studies show that with mobile devices, the horse is out of the barn, so to speak. Companies can either harness it and ride it to better ROI or let employees take the reins and potentially be stampeded.

In this article, we'll introduce a few perspectives that may help you ensure your approach to mobility—and your accompanying device strategy—is keeping up with employee behaviors. Next week, we will follow up with a list of "must have" elements for any mobile device management solution.

Device Usage: 88% of workers use smartphones for work on personal time (Symantec)

Smartphones are blurring the line between work and play, and in many ways it is a good thing for businesses. Studies show that employees who perform work on a mobile device outside the office are more productive and work more hours each week, on average, than those who can't. (The jury is still out on whether companies have to reimburse them for that time, but that is a discussion for a different day.)

The reality is that many mobile-savvy workers prefer to check and even respond to email during off time. It clears any backlog that might accumulate after they leave the office and lets them get a jump on the next day's work.

If you are not providing secure access to work email and other data outside the office, your personnel will likely find a way to enable access behind your back, potentially putting your firm at risk.

Business App Usage: 65% of mobile device users download business-specific apps for more convenient access to information. (Salesforce–2014 Mobile Behavior Report)

Adding support for our prior assertion is this statistic from Salesforce, which indicates the majority of workers are downloading and using business-specific apps, which might be used to conduct office business. If your company doesn't have a policy and a plan to approve business-centric apps for workers—and to secure the information being accessed and manipulated by them—you are inadvertently encouraging workers to adopt rogue apps.

In doing so, you are increasing the chance that worker behaviors on mobile devices will pose a threat to your corporate assets.

ROI: For a firm with 20 mobile workers averaging $25 an hour, gaining one hour a week in productivity through device usage results in a net yearly gain of $25,000 to the firm. (Based on a 50-week year).

The time savings for organizations that support a mobile workforce, either through BYOD (bring your own device) or corporate-supplied devices, is proven. Such minor time savers as giving service workers mobile access to routing instructions/maps for their schedules or enabling mobile upload of billable time can aggregate into far more than an hour of productivity increases, each week.

The ROI of mobility is undeniable and outweighs the cost and complexity of pursuing a mobile-centric strategy, especially if a firm has mobile workers.

At the end of the day, if you don't provide a safe mobile environment, many employees will create a workaround. Not only will you increase corporate risk; you will also lose the ability to extract maximum value by directing the process and outcome.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

For small and midsized businesses (SMBs), the appeal of cloud VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), also called cloud PBX, is undeniable. Call quality has improved dramatically in recent years, and they offer advanced communication features, such as unified calling and messaging, that enable both workers and business leaders to stay in touch, wherever they might be. Furthermore, they require minimal (and sometimes no) hardware investment and generally bring companies a substantial savings over traditional POTS (plain old telephone systems).

Nevertheless, not every organization’s VoIP experience lives up to the promise of the technology. What differentiates the company that thrives with VoIP and the one that never realizes its full potential? Prudent selection of a system and a provider are the keys to success. In this article, we’ll share a few tips to help ensure your VoIP deployment becomes one of the best business decisions you have ever made.

First and foremost, like so many technology innovations, your cloud VoIP solution is only as good as its weakest link. Here’s an example: If your Internet connection isn’t robust, the Ethernet wiring in your office is outdated, the patch to the Internet backbone is poor or improperly configured, or the connection is being managed by a consumer-grade router and not a business-class switch, you and your staff won’t get great call quality. You’ll blame that on the cloud host when in reality, the problem lies with your infrastructure.

That’s why selecting a reputable technology vendor to host your cloud VoIP is so important. By “provider,” we don’t mean the cloud host itself. We are referring to a technology solutions advisor that helps you at a local level to ensure every link in the chain is upgraded (if needed) and working properly. That advisor should also help you identify the cloud host that best meets your needs.

Before you sign with any IT advisor, ask these questions:

• What kind of support do you provide? If they do not respond with “24/7/365,” walk away. They should also have the capacity to have someone onsite within 24 hours or less if a hardware problem occurs.
• How many and what size customers do they service? Finding an IT advisor that works with firms similar in size to yours gives you the best chance of identifying a cloud VoIP solution that is tailored to your level of need.
• What equipment, if any, will I need to upgrade or deploy? Some providers make their living by selling inexpensive packages and then pushing for pricey, post-install upgrades. A reputable IT advisor will evaluate your entire infrastructure up front and give you a reliable estimate of what it will cost to ensure a quality experience for you and your employees.
• Will our soft phones work anywhere? Many business decision makers assume “cloud VoIP” is available anywhere. However, a few providers sell cut-rate services where the soft phones only work in pre-configured locations, such as the “home base” (office). Such a restriction negates much of the value of cloud VoIP.

Finally, ask the advisor about the cloud VoIP solution they are recommending, as well. You should be comfortable with the contract term, cancellation fees/penalties, trial periods/promotional pricing and lock-in pricing, included toll-free minutes and fax pages, and finally, the SLA (service license agreement), which will stipulate important terms such as uptime.

In future articles, we’ll dig into the nuts and bolts of VoIP, such as quality metrics (bandwidth, latency, loss and jitter), wired versus Wi-Fi and hardware considerations for firewalls and other infrastructure elements. This information will help you be an informed customer, which is always a good approach.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

We recently came across an interesting case study of the City of Asheville, which transitioned its disaster recovery solution from being on-site to being hosted in the Cloud. In doing so, the city not only gained redundant failover capabilities, it also reduced its recovery time objective (how long it takes for all data and other technology assets be running and available after an outage) from 12 hours to two. Reading it made us wonder how businesses are faring, in terms of cloud adoption. To our dismay, we realized they are not moving as rapidly is they could.

A 2015 survey by Continuity Central, an international business continuity information portal, found that only 6.2% of respondents are planning to implement disaster recovery, availability or other cloud technologies this year, with the large majority (nearly 85%) making other business continuity changes, instead. When asked what challenges are impacting their ability to make disaster recovery improvements, the number one hindrance (cited by 35.6%) was lack of budget, funds and resources.

This is unfortunate, because adopting the Cloud for disaster recovery isn’t expensive or complicated, and it requires little to no internal IT resources to setup and manage. Many providers, including DynaSis, offer prepackaged, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions that can be set up quickly and easily, with no disruption and very little expense.

Given the value of cloud computing for business resiliency, we find it inexplicable that all businesses are not leveraging it for basic data backup, at the minimum. After all, the Cloud enables companies to store data in a location that is geographically remote from the business. Depending on the solution, it may also allow an organization’s personnel to access that data from any Internet connection—even from a mobile device with a cellular data plan if traditional computing resources are not available.

Admittedly, the cost of cloud disaster recovery goes up if a company wants its data replicated very frequently (hourly or less), or it needs near-instant availability of its server images. Fortunately, the average company doesn’t need that level of service.

All companies should perform evaluations and determine their “data risk” tolerance—how much data they can afford to lose—and choose a solution based upon that decision. In many cases, companies discover that only one or two departments need backups more than once a day, with the remainder of the firm requiring them less frequently. Cloud storage is so flexible that most providers can set up backup services with varying schedules that accommodate such needs.

At the very minimum, organizations should store their business continuity plans in the Cloud so that key personnel can access them if the physical location of a business is destroyed or inaccessible. After all, a business continuity plan can’t help a company or its personnel if it’s sitting on a shelf the day a disaster hits the business.

Larger enterprises understand this, and their rates of cloud adoption are among the highest within the corporate world. SMBs are taking longer to grasp the value of the Cloud in disaster recovery. That’s ironic, given that the Cloud is the one place where all businesses are equal.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

For as long as man has been able to scratch an image on a wall, people have been saving “data.” From etching on stone tablets to writing on papyrus, humans have always recognized the value of archiving information we consider important. Today, data and data protection are more than a convenience—they are essential to business survival. Yet, we find that many firms still take a lackadaisical approach to data protection.

While the majority of companies backup their data—some through multiple mechanisms—there are many “data protection” strategies that some organizations overlook. Following are some top recommendations for data protection.

1. Storage must be accessible. Many companies have years of data stored on tapes or legacy drives, much of which may have been compressed to save space. Technology changes rapidly, and those firms may no longer have functioning equipment that can read those tapes/drives or decompress that data. In such a situation, if they needed to restore data from an earlier period, their backups might be worthless. Keeping data storage systems up to date and readable is absolutely crucial.

2. Backups must be remote. One of the most foolish and dangerous actions a business can take is to store its data backups onsite. It’s equally hazardous to have a worker tasked with physically transporting backup drives or tapes offsite, every night, and returning them in the morning. The safest way to store backups is to transfer them, via a remote connection, to a highly secure, offsite location.

3. Data must be free from corruption. Even though data breaches make the biggest news, data corruption can be just as damaging—and much more insidious. Opening an infected email or using a thumb drive from an unknown source can introduce malware or viruses that can corrupt files, making it impossible to open them. Furthermore, software bugs and even user error can cause data corruption. If it goes undetected, the backups of those files may be corrupted as well, leaving no useable archive of the data. Regular system scans for malware and other undesirable software are paramount.

4. Systems must be up to date. Out-of-date software, improperly maintained hard drives, and misconfigured or corrupt system files, such as the system registry (a database that stores information about a Windows system and components), can all cause data corruption. Regular system maintenance is vital to protecting data.

5. Data must be secure. Data resources, both primary and backups, must be safe and free from the threat of intrusion or theft. Using a secure operating system that requires user authentication, enabling robust firewall protection and other security measures are essential for data protection and retention.

If your business isn’t achieving all five of these goals, it’s time to revamp your approach. IT providers such as DynaSis can help develop data management and protection strategies, including the use of secure cloud resources, to ensure your data is always accessible when you need it.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.