3 Tips to Improve Data Protection for a Solo/Small Business

 

Running a business either by yourself or with only a small team can be tough! There is already a lot on your plate on a regular basis. The last thing you want to be dealing with is a massive data loss.

Maybe a hard drive breaks, or your laptop dies. The wrong file could be accidentally deleted.

All these things have the possibility of causing huge delays to your workflow, not to mention can impact your clients as well.

The saying goes: “prevention is better than cure”. This is certainly the case for Data Loss – it is much easier to prevent it from happening than it is to restore data or even recreate it.

 

Here are a few easy-to-implement tips that can massively improve the security of your business’ data.

 

3 Copies of Your Data

This simply refers to storing copies of your data in 3 different places at the same time. Statistically, the risk of losing all 3 different copies of your data is a lot lower than losing 2 or 1. For example, if your main work laptop dies, you would still have all your data and files on a separate machine or hard drive – therefore allowing you to still access what you need and perform your services for clients.

An example of 3 different places you could store your data could be:

• Your main work pc/laptop
• An external hard drive
• Cloud storage (such as Sharepoint or Google Drive)

 

Secure Remote Backup

Just as the name implies, this is about having an offsite copy of your data you can use to backup from. The reason why this is so good is that if anything ever happened on-site (fire, flood, theft, etc) and all your copies of your data on-site were destroyed, you would still have a fall-back to use and recover from.

These days there are many cloud backup providers out there. Often these can be easy to use, store data on and restore from. Many of which will have automated backup schedules you can make – meaning you don’t even have to remember to backup yourself. These services are actually very accessible with their prices now.

 

Accurate Backup Monitoring & Reporting

Okay, so you have a backup in place – good! However, like with all technology, things can go wrong or fail sometimes. How do you find out this has happened? The worst-case scenario would be when you desperately need to restore from your backup in a time of urgency. It would be devastating if then you found that the last non-failed backup was from weeks ago.

This is where accurate monitoring and reports come in.

 

If you are using a good cloud backup service, it SHOULD have this built into it already. It should be able to tell you if a backup has failed and why. These checks should be happening at least on a daily basis – if not several times a day. Like what was mentioned earlier, backup software is fairly cheap these days and is definitely worth investing in.

An alternative would be to have someone perform a managed backup service for you. This is where you will pay a provider to manage your backup for you. They’ll do all the monitoring and reporting for you, and give you a heads up when something goes wrong or if you need to take action at any point.

Typically this is more expensive but means your data is not only protected via backups, but also by the skills of experts.

 

Want More Tips and Actions to Improve Your Data Security?

For more tips about how you can better protect your business from data loss, we have created a FREE resource. It acts as a checklist and can inform you about what you have in place and what you can do to improve. Click here to sign up for it.

Always Looking to Improve

In our last blog post, we mentioned encouraging our team members to pursue training to help develop their skills – benefiting both them as an individual and HA Hosting as a business (and hopefully a knock-on effect to our customers).

Carrying on from that we wanted to highlight some of the training one of our Tech Team, Marc, has completed recently.

 

Developing as a Network Specialist

Marc’s training was centered around developing as a Network Security Specialist. A course that Marc originally found during lockdown last year. Obviously we thought it was a good idea considering the nature of what we do here at HA Hosting. Nice find Marc!

The course basically consisted of network security content. Ranging from firewall configuration to the appropriate standards that surround network security.

 

“It was a self-paced course, so ultimately went as well as it did. Didn’t really do much of it at work; most was done at home in my spare time. The rate was about a module a week, not including time spent not doing it!”

 

How This Will Help in the Future

With its focus on network security, it’ll help by allowing Marc to look at things like our firewall config with a wider vision. So instead of “what can we do to get this working now”, he can look at it from “what can we do to get it working now, and keep it secure without needing to come back to it in the future?”. Obviously, this is a very useful skill to have for the long-term health of HA’s infrastructure and means Marc can discuss problems and solutions with the Tech Team at a higher level than before.

“Alongside this, I’ll be able to bring other aspects that I’ve learned into my day-to-day work.”

Always Trying to Improve

One thing we always try to do here at HA Hosting is to keep improving in all aspects that we can.

This could be technology, processes, skills, etc. Included in this is Staff training – and not just in learning more IT-Based skills. We try and help develop our Team in various aspects so that they can achieve their own personal goals.

 

Blake’s Recent Training

A recent example of that is with some training that Blake did in Team Leading & some other areas of general business.

“I felt it went well, I had to do things I’ve never done before giving me a new insight.

It helped me to pinpoint areas where we can improve as a business or introduce things we don’t currently have in place.
I gained new knowledge in businesses and how they operate as well as gaining leadership skills I didn’t have previously.

It’s also helped me to boost my confidence and learn how to better word things to ensure everyone has an understanding.”

 

Developing for the Future

Not only has this training helped Blake as an individual to develop, but also through his new skills and understanding, will help to push and improve aspects of HA Hosting in the future.

The obvious impact you will see from this, from a client perspective, is a slow increase in the levels of service quality and professionalism across the business – especially as we encourage more of our Team to keep learning and developing!

 

Good job completing the training, Blake!

Veeam Cloud Connect – What Is It?

In our last blog post, we spoke about how HA Hosting is partnering up with Veeam. And how this would let us provide more and better backup solutions for you to use. As stated in that blog post, we’re now talking about Veeam Cloud Connect.

 

What is Veeam Cloud Connect?

Veeam Cloud Connect is a solution that makes it easy to get backups and replicas off-site to a Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider without the cost and complexity of managing a second infrastructure.

Basically, if you have an existing Veeam backup, Cloud Connect allows you to “link” that to our Data Centre easily. From here you can use the off-site replica to backup and restore from as normal.

It’s as easy as selecting a service provider from our global network of partners and pointing backup or replica jobs to the cloud with a few simple clicks. There’s no separate console, and data is fully encrypted at every step. Backups are as safe and confidential as they would be in a dedicated off-site repository so that data of ALL types are completely protected and easy to recover.

 

Why Use Veeam Cloud Connect?

If you’re familiar with the 3-2-1 rule for data security you probably know why off-site backup is so key.

For those who aren’t here is a quick summary:

• 3 – Have 3 copies of your data (Live data, a local copy & an off-site copy)
• 2 – Store your data on 2 different types of media (e.g. an external and internal hard drive)
• 1 – 1 copy of your data needs to be stored off-site for extra added protection

This ‘rule’ is basically a standard within the IT world to ensure Data security. Cloud Connect works within this because it lets you have off-site backup easily. So using Cloud Connect makes following this 3-2-1 practice easy, thanks to how their systems integrate your existing backup to an off-site location.

Once you have Cloud Connect set up, you would ideally:

• Use a local backup copy to restore from quickly
• Use your off-site backup copy to restore from when the local copy is compromised

Using both of these allows you to keep hitting your RTO/RPO goals.

 

If you want to find out more about Veeam Cloud Connect, you can visit our webpage or Veeam’s own page.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us.

We’re Partnering Up with Veeam

 

If you read our last blog post about the new types of backup services we’re developing this will be less of a surprise.

For those who haven’t read that blog, we encourage reading before this. This will make a lot more sense after.

But to cut a long story short; we’re becoming a Veeam Partner and will be offering some of their services.

 

Who is Veeam?

To use their own words: “Veeam is the leader in backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management“.

They are known for making backup easy and accessible. They provide a single platform for backup, accelerating hybrid cloud and securing data. This platform can be used with pretty much any backup storage you may already have too.

You may be thinking “if they’re so great, why wouldn’t we just buy backup from them?”. There is a simple answer.

They sell to direct customers. They prefer to work with IT companies. What they do is provide the platform and the resources for Resellers, who can then go on to help their own customers.

 

Veeam & HA Hosting

As we said earlier, we are partnering up with Veeam via their partner program. Put simply, this gives us the ability to resell their services and use their resources.

As a result of this, it means we can offer a robust and intuitive portal to interact with your backups but also use the storage we have at the Sheffield Data Centre.

For now, the first backup services we will be releasing is Veeam Cloud Connect. This allows you to connect any existing Veeam Backup you may have to our storage. We’ll have more on Veeam Cloud Connect in our next blog.

 

What Can You Expect

In the near future, you can expect to see Veeam Cloud Connect as a ready to use service. Beyond that, possibly more as time goes on.

This partnership means we’ll have support and resources we didn’t previously. Meaning we should be able to keep improving our backup services to make sure you have a great experience, should you ever decide to trust us with backing up and protecting your business.