Thanks to Hybrid Cloud Solutions Hurricanes in Vermont. Earthquakes in Washington, D.C. Tornados in Missouri. Natural disasters seem to be all over the news lately. Would your firm be able to recover in a reasonable amount of time and resume operations? Many risks exist – even for firms far away from earthquake fault lines, tornado alleys and hurricane zones. Consider the risk of water damage. Every law firm is at risk from broken pipes, too much rain or even a sink overflowing on the floor above you. There’s nothing to stop a flood. As some experts point out, “Water always wins.” Most law firms understand the importance of such a plan, but actually implementing one can be extremely challenging. Cost and logistics have been major barriers for many firms. Firms need to rent space at an off-site data center to secure data. They must purchase servers for the off-site location and pay someone to manage them. They need to develop procedures and policies to ensure that data is backed up regularly and securely transmitted to the DR site. In some cases, law firms with multiple offices use a secondary office as a makeshift DR data center. This can work, but satellite offices typically aren’t designed to serve as data centers and can’t handle the amount of data traffic that’s generated when you are replicating all your servers to that satellite office. When firms adopt either of these approaches, they are essentially rolling the dice that their internal DR solution will be ready and capable to support them in a disaster situation. The good news is you don’t need to spend a lot of money or roll the dice anymore. There are cost-effective and reliable online backup and DR solutions, thanks to new hybrid cloud approaches. These solutions provide: Affordability Remote data backup – without tapes A local hardware appliance, which is essential for fast recovery of a folder or documents or a failed server Secure, controlled data transfers to the cloud Every good plan should include both DR and online backup. This ensures your clients’ data is safe and your lawyers can continue to service your clients, no matter what happens. While online backup and DR solutions have a lot in common, you should think about what your firm needs in each area. Disaster Recovery Considerations DR has always been a daunting task. The headaches and expense of internally built DR sites made that an unappealing option,. At the same time, many firms are leery of the security and accessibility of cloud solutions. Hybrid solutions, such as nScaled, address many of these issues. As a cloud environment, all the purchase, installation and maintenance of DR hardware/software are offloaded. Ongoing, the cloud expands automatically as your firm grows. These new hybrid cloud DR solutions have resulted in a dramatic cost decrease, to about one-third of a traditional data center-based DR solution. How? You avoid paying for disk storage that may remain empty for years. You also only pay for the DR servers (admittedly at a premium) when you need them in a DR incident. Meanwhile, your data stays safely tucked away in a secure cloud data center until needed. This type of solution addresses more than major disasters. It can also be used as your backup solution, providing significant advantages over traditional backup tapes. If you need to recover files spanning multiple days or weeks, the data is all in one online location. Your IT team doesn’t need to dig through and restore multiple tapes. A cloud solution can also back up once an hour throughout the day, rather than end of day like most tape systems do. Consider this familiar scenario — you begin a brief at 8:00 am and work on it all day. Near the end of the day, your file becomes corrupted. With this solution, you can retrieve the copy that was last backed up an hour ago. Better yet – it will only take about 15 minutes for your IT department to recover. Instead of losing an entire day’s work, you lose an hour. Online Backup Solutions There are also cost effective cloud based online backup solutions such as Barracuda Networks. Like the DR options mentioned above, they provide both a remote backup as well as a local copy of data on an appliance in your office. With the local copy, you can quickly restore one document, one folder, or an entire server. This helps ensure you can be up and running within hours of a disaster, instead of days. In the cloud, Barracuda and similar systems use de-duplication and compression to minimize the amount and cost of data stored in the cloud. That data is also encrypted for your protection. Just like a hybrid cloud DR solution, you only pay for the data as you use it. You don’t need to purchase a large amount of storage space that you may or may not use sometime in the future. No one is immune from disasters. Fortunately, we can help you recover fast if one strikes. If you are interested in finding out more about Disaster Recovery or Online Backup solutions, contact me at jkozie@kenokozie.com. Jay Kozie is a Principal with Keno Kozie Associates, an IT consulting firm and a member of Law Firm Consultants Network of Chicago (LFCN). LCFN is a diverse group of senior-level professionals with expertise serving the legal community. The group’s sole focus is to be a resource to law firms and the professionals servicing law firms by providing the highest level of professional service and coordinating these services when it is of benefit to our clients. Contact Jay at jkozie@kenokozie.com

The idea of a “backup” has been in place since man first started cherishing things that they valued. A smart caveman that loved a certain spear probably made an attempt to reproduce that in case it was to break. Since then we have changed a little, and there have been carbon copies, punch card backups, tape backups, etc. And for as long as electronic backups have been around, there have been relatively few major revolutions. Okay, sure, you can argue tapes, replication, virtualization, cloud and Big Data have all made people think about how they will back up the hybrid technologies. And every time a Sandy-like storm or major incident occurs, there’s always a sense of heightened awareness around backups and business continuity. But awareness doesn’t restore the data. I always love to hear about the people (and subsequent companies) that know that if they suffer a major data loss, they would be dead in the water, but still don’t change their habits after close calls.

Public cloud storage spending is accelerating in the U.S. and Asia, but European businesses still hesitate moving their data in the global providers’ clouds because of data protection regulations. Software-defined storage technology can help European IT companies put their customers’ data into smaller local clouds while delivering the cost efficiency and reliability available only to global players.

I recently caught this InfoWorld article on Macs in the enterprise. The article actually mentions Acronis’ newest offering to provide backup of Macs, but the broader point is about the increasing acceptance of Macs in the workplace. We have been involved in the Mac market (through our acquisition of GroupLogic) for over 10 years. Our ExtremeZ-IP® product is the premiere solution for providing seamless integration for Macs into enterprise server environments. Said more simply, Macs and Windows don’t always play nicely together when it comes to Macs accessing files on corporate file servers; we make all those problems disappear. And there are some very interesting trends happening in the enterprise Mac market.