BDR Archives - NuTech Services LLC

Dec, 2020

Improving Your Backup Strategy Doesn’t Have to Hurt the Bottom Line

If you are a regular visitor to our blog, you know just how important we think data backup is for any business that relies on data. If your business stores and creates data, you need to have a backup strategy in place. It’s that simple. Today, we want to discuss how to improve your data backup strategies with a BDR.

Why Do You Need Data Backup?

This is pretty self-explanatory. Your business is constantly under threat. You may not realize it because you’ve been fortunate enough not to have any threat be bad enough where your operational and financial data is actively at risk. That may not always be the case, however. Consider how important your data is and think about all the things that could happen where you would have to deal with data loss. Situations that stem from natural disasters, scams and hackers, hardware failure, and human error can all trigger data loss. That’s a lot of variables to cover to keep hoping that nothing will happen.

The health of your business depends on that data. There is employee data, financial data, vendor and customer data, and most importantly operational data that needs protection. At NuTech Services, we have seen a lot of different solutions to the data redundancy problem. We’ve seen people use tape backups, we’ve seen people back their data up to a network attached hard drive, we’ve even seen businesses neglect the process altogether. Today, there is a better way.

Get BDR From NuTech Services

We take data backup extremely seriously because it makes protecting our clients’ digital assets that much easier. It’s good for us, but it’s really great for our clients. The Backup and Disaster Recovery service we provide works several ways to protect a business’ digital assets. They include:

Complete customization of backup – A company has full control over their backed up data. They can choose what data they need to protect and our technicians will build a solution to those standards. This allows businesses to keep costs low if they only have certain data to back up and also allows them to backup everything if they so choose.
Following best practices – In the IT support industry there is something called the 3-2-1 rule. It is considered a best practice because it protects an organization’s data in multiple ways. With our BDR service, we follow this best practice. It means that we keep at least three copies of your data, with two being stored onsite, and one offsite. This means that if your business is hit by a disaster your organization will still have a working copy of your data that you can restore from the cloud, but if you just have to restore data because someone accidentally deleted something that you needed, you can restore it from your network-attached device.
Incremental updates – One of the best features of our BDR service is that you don’t have to run your backups after work hours. Once your data is uploaded to the BDR and the cloud, it then can incrementally back up data frequently. This provides an organization the ability to lose less data if something were to go wrong.
Professional support – As with any of our services, the solutions are tested, maintained, and managed consistently to provide the best possible situation for your business. Our expert technicians know that investing in technology can sometimes be a hard decision, but with the BDR, it is an extremely safe investment.

If you would like to learn more about data backup, data recovery or how it fits into your disaster recovery and business continuity plans, call our knowledgeable consultants today at 810.230.9455.

Mar, 2020

You Need to Backup Your Data

When we start working with a new client, we’re often left surprised at their data backup and recovery strategy. It’s not always that they don’t really have a strategy for it (although this happens more than we’d like to admit), it’s just how sure many of them are that they don’t need to spend a lot of time and effort on it. This ambivalence is a major mistake that often leads to hardship. Today, we will talk a little bit about why backup is such a big deal.

Data Is a Big Deal

Your company’s data is one of its major assets, and you take quite a bit of effort to protect it. You deploy antivirus, firewalls, intrusion detection, and other security tools designed to mitigate exposure to malware, hackers, and other deplorable situations like:

Human error (negligence and mistakes)
Sabotage and theft
Hardware malfunction
Power surges
Software corruption

The minute something gets through your network’s defenses, you are in deep trouble. If disaster hits your business and you don’t have a reliable backup, you could not only lose continuity, you could lose it all. This wouldn’t be so dire if you have a comprehensive business continuity strategy in place. Business continuity plans are just potential solutions to problems that threaten to take the business down.

There are hundreds of different situations that could result in substantial data loss, but irregardless of the situation your business is in, having a strong backup and recovery plan lets you be prepared for any eventuality.

Today, there are a lot of different ways that you can back up your data and applications, but there really is only one that offers onsite and offsite backup, incremental backups, and the ability to recover data on demand. This solution is what we call a BDR. Short for backup and disaster recovery, our backup service allows you to configure the backup solution to fit your company’s demands, while also providing all the high-end redundancy features that any business could need.

If your business is looking to protect its data from the litany of ways it can be corrupted or lost, the BDR is right for you. Call NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455 for more information.

Nov, 2019

Which Backup Strategy is Best?

It has reached the point that, if you have a business, you had better have a backup prepared. Otherwise, the digital data that modern businesses like yours rely on is vulnerable to loss. Of course, depending on the age of your business, you may have data that no longer applies to your operations. That’s why we’re going over how to select the data you should continue to back up.

Keeping Your Strategy Simple

One basic strategy to sorting out your data is to backup the files that you can’t feasibly replace otherwise. This simple, yet effective approach could easily save your business… but, why go through the effort of sorting through your data at all?

Seeing as your data is one of – if not the – most important resources that your business has, why not just back up all of it?

This endeavor becomes much easier with the Backup and Disaster Recovery appliance that we offer, as it can easily map out and replicate your data stores. Now, it must be said that not every business generates enough vital data to justify a large investment into a data backup. However, as we mentioned above, today’s threat landscape means that what data you do have needs to be protected.

Your Backup Options

There are several different varieties of data backup for you to consider, keeping in mind what it is you are backing up and when you need those backups to be ready. These backups include:

Full Backups

As you may have gathered, a full backup copies all of your data and configurations and saves them to a single platform, whether that be a NAS (network attached storage) device, a cloud backup, or tape (pro tip: don’t use tape backup).

This has the benefits of offering a comprehensive backup that you need, with quick restoration times for single files or folders. A full restore takes a much longer period of time to complete, and full backups are more expensive due to the greater need of storage space. Any backup strategy will typically start off with a full backup.

Incremental Backups

This kind of backup keeps track of any changes that are made to data, which allows it to be used for data that is continuously updated. The costs of an incremental backup are quite reasonable, making it a good choice (despite not being totally comprehensive) for a business that generates large amounts of data.

Differential Backups

Similarly to incremental backups, a differential backup keeps track of changes that are made between the times that a full backup is run, keeping their backups more up to date.

Mirror Backup

This kind of backup is best for redundancy, as it creates a mirror image of the system that is being backed up. While these backups are the fastest to restore, they also take up the most storage space.

Depending on your business’ particular needs, a backup can be run weekly, daily, or even as frequently as every 15 minutes.

Following the 3-2-1 Rule

The 3-2-1 Rule is a simple way to remember what you need to maintain if you want to keep your data protected enough. Here’s how it breaks down:

3 copies of your data
2 stored on different media types
1 copy offsite

This strategy makes it so your data is both secure, and convenient to you.

To learn more about data backups and best practices concerning them, reach out to NuTech Services at 810.230.9455.

Nov, 2018

8 Data Backup Terms You Should Know

Data is an asset, there’s no getting around this fact. Therefore, your business needs to consider it important enough to protect with a data backup and disaster recovery solution, as even something unlikely, like a natural disaster or hacking attack, could place your organization in peril. We’re going to take a look at some of the different kinds of data backup and disaster recovery you can expect to see, as well as four terms that you should understand.

The Types of Backup
Here are four of the most common types of backup that you can expect to see in an office environment:

Full backup: This type of backup makes a copy of all selected files in their entirety. Most backup solutions will have to initially go through this process, and since this is such an intensive process, it will take longer than other data backup types. If this is your preferred method of backup, it will likely have to be done after-hours, as it takes a long time and could tie up processes that are needed during the workday.
Differential backup: This type of backup only backs up changes made to the data. This allows for faster backups, but the process of recovery is much slower.
Incremental backup: This type of backup is much like a differential backup, with the main difference being that an incremental backup will always back up the data regardless of if a full backup was completed or not.
Mirror backup: A mirror backup makes a real-time duplicate of the source and backs it up. This creates complete redundancy, but it also comes with various issues. For example, if the material is deleted by mistake, the mirror will also be deleted. This reason alone dissuades IT technicians from using mirror backups as a viable solution for their backup needs.

Now that the types of data backup have been explained, we’ll go over some of the backup-related terms you might want to know.

Business continuity: A business continuity plan is designed to help your business get back in proper functioning order if you’re ever hit by an unfortunate situation. All organizations need to have a business continuity plan in place.
Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery is specifically there in the event your business suffers from a disaster involving data loss. This includes cyberattacks, sabotage, user error, and even weather-based disasters that destroy infrastructure.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO is a benchmark that represents which data will be recovered by your business if it wants to get back to normal business operations following a disaster.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO is a benchmark that represents the time needed for your business’ data to be restored. Minimizing this number is critical to keep downtime as low as possible.

NuTech Services can help your business by equipping it with a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery system. To learn more, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Jul, 2018

How a Data Backup Can Be Used, No Disaster Necessary

Data backup may not directly help you boost your productivity, but it is a core component of any responsible business’ continuity plan. Each year, thousands of businesses that don’t take threats into account are forced to close their doors because they didn’t have a contingency plan in place. For every business that plans for the worst there are two that don’t, either because they see the strategy as too cost prohibitive, or because they just don’t understand the amount of threats that could put their business in the position where they would need to close.

There are several aspects of a backup and recovery strategy that business owners (who do see reason to implement one) have to square away. By breaking the strategy into three core parts, your organization can secure a positive ROI from a backup and recovery system that, with any luck, you’ll never have to use.

Data Backup
Deciding on a backup platform is obviously the first step in the process. There are several strategies a small business can use to cover its assets. They could use cloud storage, network attached storage facilities that use hard disk drives or tape backup drives, or even a manual system where people protect the data by backing it up to a hard drive and then take a copy with them when they leave. No matter what platform you choose to utilize, you have to understand that if you look at your data as an asset, it stands to reason that you would want to protect as much data as you can. At NuTech Services, we offer a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery service that utilizes network attached storage that pushes copies to the cloud in real-time. This not only provides the kind of data redundancy every organization needs, it allows our clients to thoroughly plan their data recovery strategies.

Before we go into recovery, we’d be remiss not to mention that some data simply isn’t important. Small businesses often have a lot of data they collect but don’t do anything with, so it just sits on their infrastructure taking up space. Some businesses look to data analytics to cut down on dark data, but for the small business that doesn’t have a backup strategy, it might just be putting the cart before the horse.

Data Recovery
If you are looking for a positive ROI, this is where it begins. A business needs to establish acceptable parameters for the recovery of their data. To do this, an organization is going to have to establish what are known as their recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Before we elaborate, we should say that if you are in a position where you need to restore a large portion of your data–whether it be because of malware, natural disaster, sabotage, or blatant negligence–you absolutely have to have these plans made (and tested).

The recovery point objective defines how much data your business could reasonably afford to lose in order to be able to sustain operational effectiveness. Recovery time objective is the maximum time you believe you can go without your data before your business fails. Each figure isn’t static throughout your business. Some of your data is more important than other data, of course, and has to be weighted this way. Therefore, some systems that hold more crucial data will have different RPOs and RTOs than less critical systems.

How the System Provides a Calculable ROI
This is where you can put it all together. How do you calculate the return on investment on systems that you hope you will never ever use?

Establish your organization’s hourly realized revenue. To do this you take the amount of revenue your organization has taken in over the past year and divide it by the total working hours you and your staff have logged for that time.
Figure out how much you would stand to lose both with and without a backup and recovery system in place.
Multiply the hourly realized revenue with both scenario-specific figures you’ve calculated in step 2 and take the difference. This number represents the total avoided loss, in dollars.
Finally, plug that figure into this formula to measure your backup system’s ROI:

ROI = (Avoided loss – Cost of backup and recovery system x 100%)

Without a disaster hitting your business, you may think that backup and recovery strategies are a waste of time and resources, but the ROI is clear.

If your business is looking for a backup and disaster recovery solution that can seriously save your business in the event of a disaster–something no ROI calculator will ever tell you–call the IT professionals at NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Dec, 2017

BDR Needs to Be a Business Priority

Of any of your business implementations, a data backup and disaster recovery system is a serious contender for the most important. However, many neglect to prepare for a data loss event or disaster, which means they leave their business vulnerable to the ill effects of both. Protecting your business begins with a data backup and disaster recovery solution that prepares you for a worst-case scenario.

For a long time, tape backup was the preeminent form of data backup for business purposes. This process, storing a copy of your data on magnetic tape, is no longer sufficient for the modern business due to shortcomings that would only slow down your recovery efforts after a data loss event.

First of all, backing up on tape isn’t an automated process, so it falls to an employee to initiate the backup process when the workday is over. How likely is it that one of your employees will be focused on running a data backup at the end of a particularly long and stressful day? In addition to this, restoring from a tape is also a manual process. All it would take is a slight mistake, and poof–there goes your data.

Secondly, a tape backup doesn’t keep a full backup of your data in the first place, only saving changes that have taken place over the previous 24 hour period, technically even less. Tape backup is a resource-intensive process, and so can only be run once each day, typically after-hours. Therefore, you could lose a full day’s worth of data to a disaster.

Finally, the third reason that tape is considered outdated is the amount of time it takes to restore your backed-up data. If you needed to restore your data, the process could easily take hours–and that’s assuming that whatever event caused you to need to restore from your backup didn’t also damage your internal hardware infrastructure. This downtime will undoubtedly have a negative impact on your business, and can be avoided.

Instead of relying on tape, companies today leverage enterprise-level Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solutions from providers like NuTech Services. Utilizing the cloud, BDR takes data backups that are more complete and can be restored much more quickly, leading to decreased downtime. This is accomplished through ‘snapshot’ data backups, which updates any changes as often as every fifteen minutes. This means that any data that may be lost is minimized, offering your business improved protection from threats to your data.

If BDR sounds like the right choice for your business, reach out to NuTech Services at 810.230.9455.

Mar, 2017

Do the Right Thing This World Backup Day and Back it Up Right

In today’s business world, having a reliable way to access your data is key to your company’s success. Everything you do depends on the data you have at your disposal–so what would you do if that data was no longer available to you?

This is a far too common circumstance that creates problems for many businesses. It doesn’t help matters that so many factors can lead to data loss. Malicious programs, hardware failure, even a “whoops” moment from a user, can put your data in peril.

Even worse, events like these have a way of causing businesses to fail, as they no longer have the tools they need for success. However, there are methods to protecting your business from these issues.

One such method is to maintain a comprehensive backup to ensure that, regardless of what may happen, your critical data will be safe. With a solution that takes a snapshot of your data every 15 minutes, you can keep your losses to a minimum should something go down.

Today is World Backup Day. At NuTech Services, we dedicate a lot of time and effort to implementing and managing comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery solutions for Michigan businesses. To that end, we have the solution your business needs to protect and preserve your information, and we can equip you with a backup plan that specializes in your company’s unique data needs.

NuTech Services has the experience you’ll want in a provider of such an important consideration. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to hear what we can offer you in defense of your data.