Tag: Backup solution

ECQ Success Stories: CT Link Managed Services restores Client’s Web Services from Failed Physical Server

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ECQ Success Stories: CT Link Managed Services restores Client’s Web Services from Failed Physical Server

Disruption to your business can happen without any notice. This was felt by everyone when the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) was suddenly implemented last March 2020. Companies were forced to adopt a Work From Home program where servers are expected to be always available even when unattended.

Client Challenge

A couple of days into the ECQ, one of CT Link’s customer’s web server became inaccessible. The server hosts the web portal of the company, which runs on a physical server. They have an appliance deployed on-site to back up some of the customer’s servers which are replicated to a private cloud to serve as a Disaster Recovery (DR) site. However, despite no one is in their Data Center, they must bring the web portal back up running as soon as possible, without anyone going on-site.

Our Solution: CT Link’s Managed DR as a Service

With a subscription to CT Link’s Managed DR as a Service, a teleworking CT Link Engineer was assigned to the case after the customer contacted CT Link Customer Service. By accessing the BCDR Orchestrator, a working backup from the previous night was identified. However, with the physical server not accessible remotely, how can the back-up be restored to the original server?

CT Link’s Managed DR as a Service used a two-part solution:

Restore Even Before Repairing via Local Virtualization

The on-prem appliance being used for CT Link’s Managed DR as a Service has a capability called local virtualization which allows the appliance to host virtual machines restored from the backups. This feature was used to restore the most recent backup of the web portal into the appliance. This enabled the web portal to be accessible to users once again. The web portal was hosted on the backup appliance for 4 weeks until the systems administrator was able to visit the Data Center.

Easily Move Over to a New Physical Server via Bare Metal Restoration (BMR)

Once the systems administrator was able to replace the physical server, the web portal had to be moved back from the backup appliance into the physical server. Manually reinstalling the operating system, installing the web server software and patching and hardening the server would take a couple of days.

Instead of reinstalling the operating environment, CT Link engineer used the Bare Metal Restoration technique to quickly restore from the backup appliance into the new server. Bare Metal Restoration removes the need to reinstall the OS or applications prior to restoration, making the transition smooth and easy.

Commendation

Customer sent a commendation to the engineer assigned to their case, for having their web portal back up running and accessible in just two hours after contact. Having seen the benefits of CT Link’s Managed DR as a Service, the customer is now considering enrolling more servers into this service.

Keeping BCDR in mind

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans are investments into keeping your operations running. Our client experienced this first hand, having faced two disruptions simultaneously from the ECQ and having their server go down when no one could service it physically. However, they came out of this ordeal with minimal downtime, reaping the benefits of their investments.

If you are interested in learning more about CT Link Managed Services, you may email us at sales@www.ctlink.com.ph / marketing@www.ctlink.com.ph.

Images were provided by Vecteezy and Freepik

Five Data Protection Requirements in Healthcare that Unitrends can Help you Solve

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Five Data Protection Requirements in Healthcare that Unitrends can Help you Solve

When it comes to business continuity, the healthcare industry faces many unique requirements and challenges.  With the need of 24 hours, 7 days a week and 365 days availability, and the need to safeguard the content of their electronic health records (EHRs), it can be a hard task to fulfill while still keeping within a reasonable budget.

This is where Unitrends can help.  Below are a few unique requirements that the healthcare industry faces and how the Unitrends solution meets to solve them.

  1. Uptime Requirements

When it comes to recovery time objectives (RTO), most industries have them in hours as they have more time to work with.  This doesn’t follow for the healthcare industry as they need their RTOs in a matter of seconds or minutes.

Unitrends Instant Recovery can failover applications in literally seconds. Unitrends Recovery Assurance delivers automated recovery testing, site and application failover, ransomware detection, and disaster recovery compliance, both locally and in the Unitrends Cloud.

  1. Highly Targeted by Ransomware

Due to the nature of healthcare, data of patients are critical for the business to function.  Ransomware criminals are aware of this and that is why the industry is a prime target.

Unitrends products can do security scans against your production applications – but using your backup data instead. It can spin up your applications in a specific order, isolate them from production, execute security tests, and automate reports and alerts immediately upon detection of ransomware

  1. Highly Regulated

For companies that need to work with the Protected Health Information (PHI) must ensure that all the required physical, network, and process security measures are in place, well documented and strictly followed.  This is required by HIPAA.

Unitrends offers a portfolio of 15 all-in-one enterprise physical appliances that are pre-loaded and pre-tuned with powerful software that not only covers on-premises backup but also long-term retention and disaster recovery in the HIPAA compliant Unitrends Cloud.

  1. Must Control Highly Proprietary Data

Healthcare IT must know where their physical data is located at all times of the lifecycle as well as control who can access it.

Unitrends Recovery Series and Unitrends Backup software can replicate data locally, to a remote site or to the HIPAA-compliant Unitrends Cloud. From any of those locations data can be stored for long term retention and / or used for disaster recovery purposes.

  1. Support Large Numbers of Non-computer Savvy Users

Usually, the general staff of healthcare are considered to be beginners or illiterate when it comes to new IT related technologies that have come out in the recent years.  This makes them very prone to mistakes which in turn can keep their IT counterparts quite busy.

With a common and intuitive user interface across all products, even untrained IT staff can easily find individual files in backups. A few clicks and the entire recovery process, from login to file restoration usually takes less than 5 minutes.

To learn more about Unitrends, you may contact us at 8893-9515 and we would be happy to help you!

Unitrends backup and recovery products is a “game changer” against Ransomware

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Unitrends backup and recovery products is a “game changer” against Ransomware

With the threat of ransomware on the rise, organizations have been further increasing their IT security to makes sure that they are prepared for it. However, no matter how well you prepare you can never guarantee that no threats will ever pass through. This is where backup solutions such as Unitrends come in. Updates such as ransomware detection for both Unitrends Recovery Series physical appliances and Unitrends Backup virtual appliances can help determine the probability that ransomware is operating within your server workstation or desktop. They even alert you when it does detect ransomware so you may immediately restore your files from your last legitimate recovery point.

The Unitrends backup ‘game changer’

Richard Malewicz, CIO of Livingston County, Mich., has been a user of Unitrends Recovery RC936S and Unitrends Cloud since January 2016, and he called the ransomware detection a “game changer.”

“[Unitrends has] brought forth a functionality and capability to the data backup market in such a particular way where it did not exist previously,” Malewicz wrote in an email interview.

“It’s often said that a data backup system is the last line of defense in a ransomware attack, but in actuality, a traditional backup system isn’t defensive at all. When you restore data from a backup system after a ransomware attack, it’s an indication the enterprise’s cyberdefenses have failed. It is merely a risk management contingency operation at that point.”

An estimation of around 4,000 ransomware attacks on average per day in 2016 (by the U.S. government), a big jump from 2015 where 1,000 attacks per day were estimated on average.

“[Ransomware detection] will be a feature that continues to evolve and improve with the product,” Brady said.

To learn more about Unitrends, visit our product page Here!