Disaster Recovery

Host-IT keeps the wheels turning at logistics software firm

Host-IT has announced its Birmingham colocation data centre has been selected by Tamworth based, tmWare, for hosting its Disaster Recovery (DR) systems. This follows a review by the warehouse management and transportation logistics solutions specialist of its current and future IT needs. The migration of tmWare’s DR backup systems from its in-house location to a more secure and modern data centre environment was seen as a major priority. Host-IT’s Birmingham-based data centre will now support tmWare’s main IT stack, which has been located at Host-IT’s Milton Keynes colocation facility since 2016.  “Previously we’ve always hosted our DR in-house but based on our positive experience with Host-IT in Milton Keynes, the relocating of our eight DR server systems and back UPS to their Birmingham facility made a potentially hard decision a lot easier,” says Kieron Coughlin, Technical Director, tmWare. “Our DR equipment at Host-IT Birmingham will be connected by a high-speed fibre network to our Tamworth office and their Milton Keynes data centre.”       With thousands of pounds of business at stake with every order fulfilment and delivery, tmWare is mission critical to the performance of its logistics customers. These are reassured by tmWare’s strategic investment in the services of professionally run, highly resilient and secure colocation data centres. “In the seven years since entrusting tmWare to Host-IT, we have enjoyed a highly professional and personalised service as well as an excellent uptime record,” says tmWare’s Managing Director, Lyndsey Phillips. “Their consistently excellent service and ability to support our current and future needs in a timely manner gives us every confidence as we look to expand our customer base. Equally, in ensuring the high levels of trusted IT delivery we provide to our existing valued customers.”          Host-IT’s secure ISO 27001, Tier 3 Birmingham facility is centrally located close to the major fibre networks traversing the UK and various regional fibre providers. There is currently 6MW of IT power available to site with the potential to increase this to 12MW.

BlueHat Cyber improves data centres with Tintri solutions

Tintri has announced that BlueHat Cyber has implemented Tintri’s VMstore solutions as the backbone of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) business. Its technology allows BlueHat Cyber to offload time-consuming administrative storage tasks and replicate across data centres, so it can focus on providing its clients with premium service. BlueHat Cyber offers a cyber security portfolio and assists in planning, design, integration, operation, and optimisation of organisations’ IT security requirements. It needed a solution to simplify storage management, improve I/O and replicate workloads across multiple data centres, and chose Tintri VMstore as the solution for its benefits with fast asynchronous replication, increased uptime and performance, and ‘set it and forget it’ operations. Now, BlueHat Cyber’s US Virtual Data Centre is running on 100% Tintri VM-aware technology because it is a purpose-built solution to store and manage virtualised workloads in enterprise data centres. “We went from spending eight to 10 hours a week managing storage to maybe taking a glance at it once in a blue moon. We basically set it and forget it. When looking at a new client proposal, we consider if we have the capacity to take it on, but we never have to think about I/O performance, regardless of how intense the workload,” says Tim Averill, CTO, BlueHat Cyber. “The key to a simple and successful hybrid cloud deployment is the use of best-of-breed technologies and industry best practices along with the support from an experienced MSP partner who can make the most cost-effective and future-proof recommendations, allowing your infrastructure to grow with your business,” says Brock Mowry, CTO, Tintri. “We are proud to see Tintri VMstore deliver on simplified and worry-free data management as it has proven to do for BlueHat Cyber.”

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board takes its disaster recovery to pastures new

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has planted an advanced and robust IT disaster recovery (DR) systems in its Warwickshire headquarters, after appointing virtualDCS to design, implement and manage the solution. The innovative system has been named the Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Project of the Year at the 2022 Storage, Digitalisation and Cloud (SDC) Awards. The AHDB is a statutory levy board, funded by farmers, growers, and others in the food supply chain to help the industry succeed in a rapidly changing world. The organisation’s aim is to create a world-class food and farming industry in the UK. Jamie Blakeman, IT Support Manager at AHDB, explains, “When it came to procuring a new disaster recovery solution, we knew we wanted a robust DR plan, with a system that would offer minimal recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), as well as using some of the best technology available. Ultimately, being able to access our data quickly and easily, and under any circumstances, was a key requirement. “Potential suppliers were sought through G-Cloud, which is the government framework that enables the public sector to procure IT services via the Digital Marketplace. virtualDCS was selected because the company could provide a robust DR solution, with very low RPOs, through its single CloudCover service. “The new system was up and running in a matter of weeks. After the hardware racking was completed and software was installed, most of the installation and configuration was done remotely and the longest part was synchronising the data. “Our old solution was a dated product as well as being difficult and complicated to use. Now we know that data, files and systems can be quickly restored.” Kerri Milburn, Project Delivery Specialist at virtualDCS, says, “To win an award for this bespoke and innovative solution is a huge coup for everyone involved, as well as reinforcing to AHDB how robust the system is. “The challenge of protecting data has never been greater, with it held in local sites, on public clouds and SaaS solutions. This project was novel as AHDB wanted to protect backup data and provide DR for these scenarios, but they didn’t want their protection on the public cloud. “In addition, it needed to be a secure and disaster proof backup and recovery system that offered native, near-time replication, as well as being easy to use, meaning in the event of an incident, they have the freedom and autonomy to immediately invoke it themselves. “Our CloudCover solution allows them to protect and replicate their data from on-premise and Azure servers, as well as Microsoft 365. It offers full backups and near real-time failover of their systems, as well as protecting against ransomware and other cyber nasties. “By bringing top-tier applications together, we can provide fast and reliable offsite protection. The solution protects both the onsite and public cloud workloads to the DR site in question, across different locations with ease, as well as providing the desired RPOs and RTOs. This gives AHDB peace of mind that they can failover to replica virtual machines on our platform with minimal user interruption.”

World Backup Day is here again – but why are we still celebrating it?

By Chris Addis, Vice President of Sales in the UK and EMEA at Nasuni. The days of traditional file backup will soon be long gone; that is why we called for an end to World Back Up Day 10 years ago. Should we also be celebrating other archaic technologies on “World Floppy Disk Day” or ‘‘World Fax Day’’? A ‘realistic’ celebration party for backup would probably entail starting a few hours or days later than planned, and the cake would have a few slices missing! The vast majority of IT professionals we talk to want to get rid of backup and its associated headaches and challenges.  Even in the age of cloud, cyber security threats associated with data such as ransomware are becoming more severe and frequent (one happening every 11 seconds), forcing businesses to think differently about their data infrastructure and give more consideration to disaster recovery plans. Traditional backup technology is evolving, but even cloud solutions have major flaws. The challenges don’t end there. While centralised enterprise backup systems can ingest unstructured data from dozens or hundreds of sites, they typically utilise central media servers that dedupe and compress the data. When a single site goes down, that backup server can restore the data and access within a business day or so. But if an event impact’s multiple locations, the central backup server can only manage a couple location restores at a time, meaning that time to recover (RTO) can easily increase from a few hours to multiple days, even weeks.  That’s why we’ve created a cost-efficient cloud replacement for traditional network attached storage (NAS) and file server silos, consolidating file data in easily expandable cloud object storage. This way, enterprises can restore millions of lost files or folders in under a minute. Many of our customers across industries end up coming to us simply because they’re fed up with their backup and the ‘unglamourous’ work that is required for it – by leveraging file data services they can eliminate the need for complex legacy file backup and disaster recovery infrastructure.

UK government’s CyDR team award Asite with top security accreditation

Asite has become one of the only software platforms to achieve a prestigious accreditation issued by the Cyber Defence and Risk (CyDR) team. The accreditation enables Ministry of Defence (MoD) data at the ‘Official Tier’ to be stored and processed with an acceptable level of risk, providing organisations in the construction industry with the highest level of security for their data. This includes Laing O'Rourke, Transport for London, Environment Agency, and Berkeley Homes - to name a few. In 2017, an industry security notice was released detailing security accreditation requirements that shall always be applied for every industry-owned Information and Communications Technology (ICT) system that stores, processes, or generates MOD data. CyDR is the sponsor of the accreditation process for MOD, providing support and advice and overseeing accreditation activity across defence. All requests to accredit ICT are processed through the Defence Assurance Risk Tool (DART), which was introduced to provide the MOD with a mature understanding of the ICT security risks across the department and its industry partners through the information input onto DART by companies and organisations. Following a detailed review by the CyDR team, Asite has satisfied all security requirements to store and process MoD data. This includes: Annual IT health check, which includes internal and external skilled 3rd party penetration testingAlignment with current National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cloud Principles. The 14 principles have been made to align ISO 27017 to ensure protection to cloud customersAnnual review, including verification that all the conditions of the accreditation continue to be met. Speaking on the announcement, Chris Cannings, Chief Information Security Officer at Asite says: “This accreditation is another string in the bow of Asite. It demonstrates our cyber security maturity as an organisation and our commitment to protecting our customer’s data. As Asite continues to grow and develop its capabilities, we intend to keep leading the way in our approach to protecting our customers and our platform.” The accreditation enables Asite to manage MOD data through its cloud platform, including the handling of data at ‘Official Tier’. The Asite platform provides customers with a robust cloud system for document management that features top-level security functions, including comprehensive access controls and full audit logging. Customers can control access to certain documentation by assigning user roles and privileges. In addition, the platform showcases an extensive audit trail; a record of all documents created or modified by different users is maintained on the system, ensuring Information is safe from accidental deletion.

Datacentres and Disaster Recovery: Tape or Cloud backup?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, hackers and fraudsters have been extremely active. During the first half of 2020, stimulated by the fact that more people began to work remotely from home, Bitdefender's Mid-Year Threat Landscape Report 2020 claims there was a 715% year-on-year increase in detected – and blocked – ransomware attacks. No organisation, no datacentre, or state is immune to the attacks, which are constantly evolving, and for the cyber-criminals that perpetrate them, they can be rewarding. Not quite so perhaps with the recent attacks on the Republic of Ireland’s healthcare system. An Irish minister has described it as being “possibly the most significant cyber-crime attack on the Irish state” to date, and yet, its government is steadfastly standing firm and refusing to pay a ransom after consulting cyber-security experts. Taoiseach (Irish PM) Micheál Martin has also stressed that the country’s health and emergency services remain open. Nevertheless, he admits that it may take some days to fully assess the impact of the ransomware attacks on the HSE, the country’s health service. BBC News reports: “The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said the HSE became aware of a significant ransomware attack on some of its systems in the early hours of Friday morning and the NCSC was informed of the issue and immediately activated its crisis response plan.” The international attack caused widespread disruption in many of the Republic of Ireland’s hospitals, including at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital. It had to cancel outpatient appointments, with the exception of women in their 36th week of pregnancy or later. All other gynaecology clinics were cancelled, but those with urgent concerns were encouraged to attend.  The National Maternity Hospital in Dublin also reported significant disruption to its services on the date of the attack, 14th May 2021. Hospitals, such as St Columcille's Hospital in Dublin, Children's Health Ireland (CHI) at Crumlin Hospital, and the UL Hospitals Group - which consists of six hospital sites in the mid-west – advise their patients of the disruption to even virtual online appointments and any matters related to electronic records. This disruption is causing significant delays in patient-related healthcare services and appointments. HSE chief executive, Paul Reid, says the attack is focused on accessing data stored on central servers. BBC News adds: “Rotunda Hospital Master Professor Fergal Malone said they had discovered during the night that they were victims of the ransomware attack, which is affecting all of its electronic systems and records. Prof Malone said he believed it could also have affected other hospitals, which was why they had shut down all of their computer systems.” Human-operated ransomware ZDNet reports: “The attack was identified as a human-operated ransomware variant known as "Conti", which has been on the rise in recent months.” Daphne Leprince-Ringuet explains in her article for the publication: “Conti operates on the basis of "double extortion" attacks, which means that attackers threaten to release information stolen from the victims if they refuse to pay the ransom. The idea is to push the threat of data exposure to further blackmail victims into meeting hackers' demands.” Rather than give in to the cyber-criminals, the NCSC has decided upon a remediation strategy. This involves isolating the systems that were hacked, perhaps by providing an air gap to ensure that no other systems can be infected with ransomware viruses. They then plan to wipe, rebuild and update all of the infected devices. The HSE will then work with its anti-virus software partners to ensure that their anti-virus solutions are updated and that all infected devices are thoroughly cleaned before they use remote back-ups to restore the systems safely. Leprince-Ringuet adds: “The HSE has confirmed that it is in the process of assessing up to 2,000 patient-facing IT systems, which each include multiple servers and devices, to enable recovery in a controlled way. There are 80,000 HSE devices to be checked before they can be brought back online. Priority is given to key patient care systems, including diagnostic imaging, laboratory systems and radiation oncology, and some systems have already been recovered.” Regulatory compliance There is also a requirement under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to ensure that sensitive personal data is secured. A data leak can lead to severe financial penalties – not just a disruption in service delivery. The precautions taken by the HSE, the NCSC and their partners are therefore sensible, albeit perhaps drastic and highly disruptive. Prevention is often better than a cure, but hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated in how they carry out their attacks. The initial weakest link is often not an organisation’s technology, but their workforce who can unwittingly begin an attack by clicking on, for example, a phishing email link. Jim McGann, VP Marketing & Business Development at Index Engines, offers his thoughts on the regulations: “GDPR puts personal data back in the hands of the citizens. So, if you have a company doing business in the EU, including from the US, you have to comply.” He adds that GDPR raises a key problem that organisations have with data management. Quite often, they find it hard to locate the personal data on their systems or in their paper records. Subsequently, they can’t know whether the data needs to be kept, deleted, modified or rectified. So, with the potentially enormous fines looming over their heads, GDPR will place a new level of responsibility on their shoulders. However, he says there is still a solution: “We provide information management solutions; the ability to apply polices to ensure compliance to data protection regulations. Petabytes of data has been collated, but organisations have no real understanding of what data exists. Index Engines provides the knowledge of this data, by looking at the different sources to understand what can be purged. Many organisations can free up 30% of their data, and this allows them to manage their data more effectively. Once organisations can manage the content - the data - they can then put the policies around it, as most companies know what type of files contain personal data. He then explains: “Much of this is very sensitive and so few companies like to talk on the record about this, but we do a lot of work with legal advisory firms to enable organisations with their compliance.” Index Engines, for example, completed some work with a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer that found that 40% of its data no longer contained any business value. So, the company decided to purge it from its datacentre. So, there is a need to train staff to prevent ransomware attacks, and to have the ability to back-up or restore and source data quickly. It’s also imperative to air gap sensitive data to ensure service continuity – perhaps to the cloud with backup-as-a-service (BUaaS), or to tape. Most people would be forgiven for thinking that tape is an old and no longer used technology, but it still plays a crucial role in storing and backing up data. After all, cloud systems can themselves be prone to attack, and so it’s sensible to have more than one means of backing up data. Tape back-up Chris Ducker, Head of Product Marketing at Orgvue, and a former head of proposition marketing (Europe) at Sungard Availability Services, commented a couple of years ago: “If you look at on-premise, you have tape back-ups, a large IT infrastructure in place and that would be backed up onto tape or other services in a datacentre. This then gets stored in a safe location and then, when an incident occurs, you have to move it physically and get them to the right location to load them and get them up and running. This is a much slower process than cloud recovery provides. If you have a replicated environment, you can spin up servers more quickly than with traditional back-up.” He says certain environments can be mirrored for business-critical applications using cloud services. However, there will be applications for which it might be more efficient to use traditional tape back-up and so tiering defines the activity that you do. In his view, it’s important to avoid being blinkered by any assumption that cloud recovery is the only option. Cloud recovery and cloud storage more widely is part of a mix of options, and so there is a need to understand the business outcomes an organisation wants to achieve, and why there might be a need for the recovery to ensure that the right solutions are put in place to maintain data security, data integrity, business and service continuity. Where once there used to be the rule that said you need 3 copies to ensure you can guarantee recovery of your data, the industry has now adopted the 3-2-1 rule. Although commonly known in industry, Carbonite advises on its website: 1. Keep at least three copies of your data. That includes the original copy and at least two backups. 2. Keep the backed-up data on two different storage types. The chances of having two failures of the same storage type are much better than for two completely different types of storage. Therefore, if you have data stored on an internal hard drive, make sure you have a secondary storage type, such as external or removable storage, or the cloud. 3. Keep at least one copy of the data offsite. Even if you have two copies on two separate storage types but both are stored onsite, a local disaster could wipe out both of them. Keep a third copy in an offsite location, like the cloud. In response, Trossell comments: “With WAN Acceleration you can have three different copies on two different types of media in two locations. The different media types could be cloud and tape. You can have an onsite copy too, offering better resilience.” Exponential data volumes The trouble is that data volumes are increasing exponentially – and this can become a major issue, whether an organisation is backing up their data, restoring it after a ransomware attack or doing it for indexing purposes to comply with regulations, such as GDPR. There still works as a solution. It’s not WAN Optimisation, which can’t handle encrypted data, and it’s not SD-WANs on their own. Even SD-WANs are boosted with a WAN Acceleration overlay with solutions, such as Bridgeworks PORTrockIT, which using a combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data parallelisation to accelerate data over wide area networks – and it can handle encrypted data to the cloud and for transfer to tape. WAN Acceleration mitigate latency and packet loss, while increasing bandwidth utilisation. Even government agencies need to be able to deliver. As mentioned above, the additional challenge is to meet the increasing number of regulatory requirements, including data protection and data management over a WAN. One such organisation - a US government agency - approached Bridgeworks, in 2017, to undertake a proof of concept (POC) using multiple 10Gb/s WAN connections. This was with the aim of enabling high speed data transfer between its North-West and North-East coast US-based datacentres. With accelerated WAN links, this US government agency hopes to replace its reliance on local tape back-up. The results of the POC eliminated the need for tape back-ups in the North-West datacentre, and brought the potential for significant cost-savings, achieved by gaining ‘almost local area network (LAN) performance’ over 2,500 miles between the two datacentres. This was done leveraging solutions like Commvault, NetApp SnapMirror and cloud-integrated StorageGrid, achieved with PORTrockIT. A senior enterprise engineer at the agency comments: “The networking team were extremely impressed with the ability to throttle bandwidth consumption. We started low and reached our initial target of 600MB/s of throughput on the initial learning process without any impact on other traffic using the same WAN link.” Petabyte scale movements PORTrockIT has now been accelerating the US government agency’s WANs for a few years now, and the final implementation enabled the agency to realise the plan to move away from local tape back-up, resulting in significant cost savings. Data is now moved at a petabyte scale and at great speed. By delivering 90-95% utilisation of the allocated 10Gb/s WAN bandwidth over 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and over the entire course of a year, the agency was also able to gain a significant return on investment on the cost of the WAN links themselves. This was in addition to the massive acceleration of the transferred data. This would be crucial in the event of any recovery from a ransomware attack, and it can accelerate real-time analysis as well as Backup-as-a-Service. While the US agency moved away from its local tape back-ups to the cloud, there is still a role for tape back-ups for disaster recovery and for regulatory compliance. A combination of solutions can be deployed, as suggested by Ducker, to ensure that data is kept secure and readily available for whenever it is needed – even after a ransomware attack. The key is to be ready for any potential eventuality to ensure that, for example, a healthcare system can continue to operate to deliver healthcare services to its patients and to support its staff. By Graham Jarvis, Freelance Business and Technology Journalist

Zerto continues expansion of data protection and disaster recovery

Zerto has announced positive growth and cloud technology trends among its customer base for the second half of 2020. Across 13 industries, Zerto’s customers continued their expansion of data protection (DP) and disaster recovery (DR)-to-cloud technology with the adoption of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and IBM Cloud.  Global footprint grows  In the global healthcare industry, Zerto expanded its customer base by 100% and doubled its global healthcare business in the second half of 2020. Additionally, Zerto experienced a 100% increase in size of customer project implementation in the global public sector. In EMEA specifically, Zerto experienced a 300% spike in the size of project implementations in the public sector.  Additional key growth highlights include:  New customers in the computers and electronics industry increased by 85%.New customers in the business and consulting industry also increased by 300%. New customers in the federal government, business, and consulting services industries increased by more than 40%.New customers across the manufacturing, software, internet, and telecommunications industries increased by more than 10%.The average project implementation size increased by 200% in the legal industry.  Innovation in the cloud Zerto customers continued to expand their DP and DR-to-cloud adoption with public cloud providers that included AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, and Google Cloud. Zerto announced a key cloud partnership with Google in 2H 2020 and added new cloud advancements such as VMware on public cloud DR and DP for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, and the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Key highlights include: Zerto increased its footprint for DR-to-cloud engagements by nearly 100%.Zerto was also recognised for its innovation in the cloud through numerous accolades that included DCIG’s TOP 5 Azure Backup report, TMCnet’s 2020 Cloud Computing Backup and Disaster Recovery award, CRN’s Coolest Cloud Company for 2021 recognition, as well as being named a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.Zerto published new guidance for customers on how to use Google Cloud VMware Engine for DR and How to Deploy & Configure Zerto Long-term Retention with Amazon S3. Customer successes and wins  In the 2H 2020, Zerto customers continued to build resilience and achieve results across multiple sectors and use cases:  Grey County, which covers nine municipalities in south-eastern Ontario, chose Zerto and Microsoft Azure to ensure continuous availability for critical services like ambulances and long-term care life safety systems even if disaster struck. To learn more, read the Grey County case study here. One of the world’s largest insurance companies chose Zerto to protect its critical workloads in the cloud. To learn more, read the case study here.New North American customers using Zerto include Atlantic Constructors; Boston Medical Center; City of Georgetown, TX; Epiq Global; Fairfax County, VA; and Washington County, TX.New EMEA customers and partners include Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust; Merseyside Police; and SLTN. “Expanding our footprint across these industries speaks to the power and innovation behind the Zerto platform for cloud data management and protection,” says Ziv Kedem, CEO and co-founder, Zerto. “We’re excited to see momentum in the healthcare and public sectors as some of the most respected names around the globe realise that leveraging the cloud for disaster recovery and data protection is critical now more than ever for protecting patients and citizens alike, and it’s simply more efficient.”  “As a leader in long-term healthcare in the South East for more than 50 years, we have extremely high expectations to keep everything available at all times in order to serve our 24,000 patients,” comments Rich Bailey, VP of IT operations, PruittHealth. “After experiencing growth, we determined that a DR-to-cloud strategy with Zerto and Azure would be simpler and more efficient than our previous solution. Since using Zerto, we’ve improved efficiencies that include reducing time required for DR testing and reducing man hours spent on near-daily maintenance and operations.” “Government organisations like ours are often stretched thin, and each agency consists of a lot of small businesses in a sense,” says Evan Davis, technology and infrastructure manager, Grey County. “Zerto and Azure met all of our varied, demanding requirements. They just work together seamlessly for protection.”

Taeknizon chooses Neutrality.one to connect Cloud Deployments

Neutrality.one has been selected by Taeknizon to connect its cloud services with software-defined wide-area networking (SDWAN). The solution enables enterprises to enhance their Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) services and evolve towards internet and private cloud architecture. Taeknizon’s customers benefit from greater visibility and control over their operations by gaining the ability to connect to the cloud with secure and high-performance networking. neutrality.one will provide Taeknizon with SDWAN underlay and overlay services to enable an end-to-end experience from the edge to the cloud. The solution supports users as they seamlessly migrate from traditional on premises services or public cloud to private cloud infrastructure. “The rapid adoption of cloud services across Asia-Pac and the Middle East is driving demand for elastic, scalable and secure networking. Enterprises across these regions accelerated cloud adoption in 2020 and in 2021 they’re recognizing the benefits of going beyond MPLS and adopting SDWAN. Our goal is to make that migration as simple and seamless as possible,” comments George Szlosarek, CEO at neutrality.one. “Together with Taeknizon, we’re helping enterprises to maximize the potential of the cloud and remove any limits on their agility and scalability. They benefit from a smooth transition to SDWAN that underpins cloud-first strategies.” Taeknizon is a fast-growing private cloud service company headquartered in Singapore with operations and infrastructure in UAE, Qatar, KSA, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, India and the US. Taeknzion’s Taekni Cloud offers a variety of services via its private cloud offerings such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Security as a Service (SECaaS). In addition, Taeknizon’s services cover cyber security solutions, consultancy and data center solutions. Taeknizon’s zero CAPEX pay as you go modeleliminates the need for CAPEX investments, with a predictable monthly subscription cost to help customers streamline their IT budgets. Taeknizon offers an integrated enterprise-risk management approach, with agile and high-level resiliency, while balancing business service availability requirements and risk tolerance. “Growth in cloud adoption is matched with the need for a new networking model. Our enterprise customers want to connect and get the most out of their cloud deployments and SDWAN can be a big part of that. By working with neutrality.one, we’re expanding the solutions we can offer enterprise customers and offering them a flexible foundation for connecting their applications and services,” says Anithan Chandran, Chief Operating Officer at Taeknizon. “The team at neutrality.one are experts in networking the cloud and understand what it takes to deliver reliable, resilient and secure connectivity. We look forward to growing together and helping more enterprises make the move to the cloud.”    Over the last 12 months, neutrality.one has been building out its global networking capabilities and partnering with world-leading software-defined networking providers. It has established a point of presence in datamena in Dubai and is efficiently scaling its operations locally and globally. It is dedicated to the acceleration of network transformation and maximizing the value of SDWAN for the enterprises in the Middle East and Asia-Pac.

RCP prescribes CloudCover 365 to cure backup ailments

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has taken the health and wellbeing of its Microsoft 365 data to the next level by enlisting CloudCover 365 to securely back up and protect its vital Microsoft 365 services across its entire IT system. Founded in 1518 by a Royal Charter from King Henry VIII, the RCP is dedicated to improving the practice of medicine and represents more than 39,000 doctors worldwide, as well as hosting a vast library of medical texts. It is also home to the National Guideline Centre (NGC), which develops guidelines and care standards within the NHS for healthcare professionals, patients and carers. The vast organisation is home to approximately 150 servers, that power more than 650 desktop computers and other devices, across a wide geographical area. The exploration into CloudCover 365 was sparked when the RCP began migrating to Microsoft 365’s mailbox services, which in turn resulted in the increased use of other aspects of Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive. However, as the RCP became more reliant on Microsoft 365, the IT team were increasingly concerned with how the system was being backed up, which resulted in them exploring additional safeguards. They approached Leeds based cloud computing and disaster recovery specialist, virtualDCS, which is a Veeam Gold Partner, and already provides the RCP with its Cloud Connect backup service. It was immediately obvious that virtualDCS’ recently launched CloudCover 365 service, powered by Veeam technology, would be a perfect fit. The product incorporates data storage technology from Zadara and is now the world’s only Veeam powered self-service Microsoft 365 portal, meaning individual end users can view and restore their data, without specialist IT support. Jim Anstiss, IT operations technical manager at the RCP, says: “Over the last 18 months we’ve become increasingly dependent on Microsoft 365 and the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this further as lots of our teams and users started working remotely.   “This meant having a first-rate backup system was more important than ever. We looked at various options and specifically focussed on Veeam based solutions, the gold standard for backup and disaster recovery systems. After trialling CloudCover 365, we were in no doubt it was the right product for us. We particularly liked the straightforward setup and found the interface easy to use.” Virtual DCS.... Photograph by Richard Walker/ImageNorth Jim adds: “It also gives us confidence that CloudCover 365 is produced by virtualDCS. The company also provides our Veeam Cloud Connect solution, which we wouldn’t be without after we saw its intrinsic value when we needed to carry out a major restore, following a scheduled power outage across our entire system one weekend. After carrying out maintenance work, we powered up the system and were alerted to the fact that 70TB of data was no longer accessible, which could have had catastrophic consequences for our organisation. “Their Cloud Connect team worked alongside us overnight on a Sunday and 12 hours later, we had restored 75% of the data in time for Monday morning, with the final parts back up and running by Wednesday, which was a fantastic outcome and this is the level of service and dedication we can expect from all virtualDCS services.” Andrew Low, from virtualDCS, explains: “CloudCover 365 is increasingly being recognised as the go-to backup product for Microsoft 365 and we’re now successfully providing it to a vast range of organisations across the public and private sectors. These include well-known high-street retailers, national charities, further education colleges and oil companies as well as all types of SMEs. “As well as offering a premium product with high levels of functionality that is fully hosted and serviced in the UK, our ability to tailor CloudCover 365 to each individual client, so it specifically meets the requirements of their infrastructure and pain points, gives us a very compelling offering.” CloudCover 365 offers a wealth of additional features on top of the Veeam foundations that it is built on, as well as secure encryption and immutability. The product is also hosted in the UK, G-Cloud accredited and ISO27001 certified.

Gemserv and Trilliant partner to ensure the protection of data

Gemserv has announced a partnership to provide enhanced security assurance for Trilliant Head End Software deployments. With products and service platforms now becoming fully connected, Gemserv has stepped in, in the preparation of security assurance processes and procedures to ensure that all connection points are robust, be they device components, additional enterprise interfaces or third-party systems. “We are delighted to be working with Trilliant to ensure that customers, wherever they are, can reap the benefits of smart grid technology in a secure and integrated way” says Alex Goody, Gemserv Chief Executive.  “From enabling net zero to become a reality, to improving patient care in their own homes and improving the customer experience for all, Gemserv and Trilliant are delivering a smart future”. As customer connected smart devices become increasingly available, the expectation is for interoperability between systems and devices that provide, for example, better energy usage, remote healthcare provision and property monitoring. Ensuring the compatibility of such systems with proven security credentials is becoming a key business driver, although implementation can be complex. This partnership combines Gemserv’s expertise in IoT, smart metering and cyber security with Trilliant’s globally proven communications solution. Together, the organizations will provide a turnkey solution that reduces the pain points of IoT system implementation. “The Trilliant Head End Software is designed to seamlessly connect power grids, distribution networks, smart meters, smart city, and smart home connected devices, often expanding from the initial platform provider to new service providers,” comments Andy White, Chairman and CEO for Trilliant. “We put security and data privacy at the heart of our solution and have developed an ethos throughout our business of putting security first. Trilliant welcomes the partnership with Gemserv to provide enhanced security assurance to our customers.” The agreed partnership between Trilliant and Gemserv covers strategy, planning, system implementation, security assurance for design, build and testing phases, as well as continued implementation throughout the long-term deployment and horizontal expansion into new business sectors.