Information Technology Navigator

By Bruce Hall, Director of Managed Services

Have you heard about SOC 2 and SOC 3 validation? If you’re storing data in the cloud (or considering it) it’s a business imperative. We’ve recently completed a Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) and Control 3 (SOC 3) validation process. While we’re proud of our achievement, it’s important to explain what this means for our customers. When researching an enterprise cloud or managed service solution, it’s essential to not only check for compliance with SOC 2 and SOC 3, but also to review the actual report. Prospective service providers should be more than willing to share their report. 

By Corey Roberts, Director of Technology

Over the past week I have taken a close look at the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service and I am quite impressed with the new offering.  VMware has done a great job bringing the capabilities of vCloud Director to customers in a pay as you go service offering.  This will enable customers to more seriously consider moving workloads to the cloud by leveraging the skills and knowledge they have already acquired internally.  Certainly utilizing the cloud for enterprise workloads creates many challenges and raises concerns for any IT administrator.  However, the ability to address these challenges and mitigate risk by partnering with VMware could certainly facilitate a more widespread adoption of cloud computing.

By Matthew Brady, Daymark Consultant

How easily can you restore your data from cloud?  What is your provider doing to protect your data once it has been stored in the cloud?  Can you backup or restore your data at any time?  These questions address availability.

As the dust settles from VMworld 2013, more clarity is being provided on VMware’s cloud product strategy regarding vCloud Director and vCloud Automation Center. Here are 2 articles that explain VMware’s roadmap lifecycle for both VMware vCloud Director (vCD) and VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC).

By Sean Gilbride, Director of Professional Services and Matthew Trottier, Virtualization Practice Manager

After spending 3 fun-filled days out in sunny San Francisco at VMworld 2013, we wanted to take some time to share our impressions of this year’s event and the most note-worthy products and announcements.

By Matthew Brady, Daymark Consultant

How do you know the data you backed up is the data that can be restored?  That question is at the heart of integrity as it relates to secure cloud backup.

Ensuring integrity can be a tough task.  It definitely requires a leap of faith as you put your data into the cloud.  The way to transform that leap of faith into a sense of assurance is through logging, restore validations, and continuous corruption detection and repair processes.

Detailed Logging

By Matthew Brady, Daymark Consultant

Ensuring data confidentiality means that only authorized users have access to the data.  Simply put, eyes that should not be viewing the data can’t see it.

On physical media, this can mean several things:  ensuring no physical access to the media, password authentication for disk drives, or encrypting media.  However, cloud backup introduces a major paradigm shift.  There are no doors to lock.  Do passwords mean anything when your data is being transmitted over the Internet? 

By Matthew Brady, Daymark Consultant

With so many pieces of modern business moving to the cloud, sometimes it’s hard to know where to start.  Backup has quickly found its way to the top of the list of processes, and perhaps headaches, that are driving companies to the cloud.  The advantages are vast.  Data is backed up offsite.  Backups are managed and monitored which frees up IT staff to focus on other tasks.  And backup services can be coupled with DR services.  It makes sense.

By Bruce Hall, Director of Managed Services and Senior Consultant

Cloud backup (BaaS) and disaster recovery (DRaaS) seems to be “top of mind” for many organizations these days. Businesses are seeing the cloud as a cost-effective data protection alternative providing secure, off-site storage with built-in disaster recovery and business continuity. Cloud backup can be a good option to protect remote and branch offices, mobile devices as well as enterprise data that resides within the data center. Done right - it can offload IT staff from tedious (and error-prone) backup tasks, reduce costs and, most importantly, ensure fast, complete and accurate restores when needed.

By Ned Fairweather, Senior Consultant/Data Protection Practice Lead

Whether you’re already using Symantec NetBackup or you’re considering it as a backup solution, we think NetBackup 7.5 is worth a close look. Daymark has deployed NetBackup 7.5 in several customer environments. Our technical consultants have found the product to be stable with dramatically increased backup speeds, but that’s not all. Here are 7 feature enhancements we think are worth checking out: