7 Easy Tips to Have a Secure Backup

A comprehensive data backup strategy requires great efforts on your end. It is vital for data security and an excellent way to guard against any disaster (man-made or natural). A good backup also provides full protection against virus attacks, deteriorating HDD/SSDs and human errors. After deciding on what items to backup, next step is how exactly to perform it.

Given below are seven easy tips essential for a backup system to prevent data being lost in case a disaster hits your office:

Blueprint the Plan

Think about the variety of disasters that might occur in your locality such as earthquake, fire or flood. Don't store backup in basements if your locality lies in commonly flood hit areas. Give a due thought about how sprinklers can affect the storage devices during a fire incidence.

Decide Backup routine

Make a normal schedule for implementing backups daily on small storage devices. Take weekly or monthly backups of all your data in server machines usually located offsite.

Understand Backups

Tailor your needs and choose only what suits you the best. For example routine full backup is not an option if your data changes weekly. In such scenarios, incremental backups can prove beneficial.

Test Backups Periodically

It is important to test whether backups performed in the last days are doing their job (stored in order as expected) effectively or not.

Decide Alternate Locations

Get services from online backup companies so that the data is still accessible if your organizational network goes down.

DVD’s and BlueRay Disks

It is appropriate to store all your data in DVD’s as if a DVD gets corrupt only handful of data is lost and rest stays in your archival.

Deploy RAID Servers

RAID server is an affordable method of securing backups without investing too much in technology.

Top Benefits of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for IT Consulting

Do you know about some of the tools available at low budget for tuning applications? As an IT consultant, most of us are unaware of advance applications available under the SaaS platform. 

IT consulting contractors in Singapore are hugely benefited by the well-defined scope and low cost module services of SaaS. For delivering high performance services and deploying servers, SMBs are feeling the need to migrate towards cloud infrastructure. 

SaaS is one of the components of cloud model, which offers easy-to-use tools for generating business reports, gathering intelligent data and applications to troubleshoot systems during peak-hours.

So, let us know more about the top three advantages for IT consultancy firms:

Saves Time and Money 

Instead of keeping your own servers and purchasing software licenses at heavy prices, SaaS provides pay-per-use model to IT consultants for using any hardware or software resources. Ready to use services translates into maximizing ROI as well as saving both time and cost involved in maintaining systems at your office.

Value and Variety

IT consulting companies work on the part of trend analysis, which involves advising clients on deploying efficient systems yet remaining cost-efficient. Under SaaS, wide range of tools and applications necessary for performing better system analysis help to expand the portfolio of IT consulting companies.

Robust Services

Cloud environment host all SaaS solutions, which guarantee 99.95% uptime and seamless service integration. A great amount of flexibility offers painless upgrades for fully optimizing the system capacity.

Top Challenges Faced by Cloud Security

In the computing world, cloud security is a sub-domain of Information security. Cloud model is a type of distributed computing which includes services such as IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service), SaaS (Software-as-a-service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-service). As the cloud structure is still not fully standardized, it contains much inherent vulnerabilities. This paves the way for network intruders to get access of customer credentials. 

Here is the list containing some of the security challenges commonly found under a cloud environment.

Data Vulnerability

Most cloud platform vendor’s trumpet about the robustness of their services, often claiming 100% data security of the enterprise data. The fact was boasted on the basis of encryption services provided to customer data before actually storing it on server space. Still the data can be accessible to third party organizations (Cloud vendors) because of access to decryption methods. Data vulnerability can only be prevented if a customer encrypts the whole information at his end before finally transmitting data through the channel.   

Service Hijacking

The multi-tenant architecture of cloud is a real threat for providing safe services to all customers. For example, if a hijacker gains access to your account credentials, he can easily intercept, forge or act on your behalf. Such distorted information can be used to redirect users to malicious websites making them a victim of phishing attacks. To prevent service traffic hijacking instances, organizations should deploy authentication controls over their login credentials, in order to reduce the risk of data loss.  A two-way authentication reduces the chances of snooping in cloud systems.

Contract Management

In a cloud computing contract, software or hardware resources are leased to customers. Only a single contract is required to acquire software and hardware integration. Cloud contracts are known as service-level agreements (SLAs). SLA generally focuses on the quality of network interaction, but under shared architecture it becomes nearly impossible to deliver the promised quality. Also, relatively low compensation is provided against service breaches.

Lock-in Situations

Customers must be aware of the cost associated with changing a business service from one platform to another. The switching cost must be in your mind before finalizing a deal for cloud services on contract basis. 

Top Online data backup & Synchronization Tools

Many IT companies have been offering online backups as dedicated and supplementary services for years. They offer few GBs worth space for free and require users to pay a subscription price for additional features or more storage space.

The following list contains some of the best online databackup and sync tools currently available:

1. Google Drive: GoogleDrive provides 15 GB of free storage to Gmail account holders. 1TB storage space is available at monthly charge of $9.99.

2. Dropbox: Dropbox keeps all your computer files placed in a safe and easily accessible ‘My Dropbox’ folder, in sync with an online account. Dropbox is a reliable off-site backup option.

3. ADrive: ADrive offers up to 50GB of free space in cloud storage. Most of your files can be stored, edited and shared under the ADrive’s basic plan.

4. Bitcasa Infinite Drive: Bitcasa offers 10 GB worth free space to its users and unlimited storage against a subscription fee of $100 per year. Bitcasa is accessible even through smart phones, encrypting all user information.

5. Carbonite: This service provides exceptionally large backups of more than 200 GB. It offers unlimited storage (after 200GB speed slows down) at $4.58 per month.

6. SugarSync: SugarSync is a classic backup utility with advance plugins; it’s great for storing your email attachments but expensive when compared to other online backup services.

7. OpenDrive: OpenDrive offers 5GB of free storage space to clients. It provides a facility to upload individual files up to 100 MB at once, with a daily bandwidth limit of 1GB.

8. Mozy: Mozy offers 2 GB free space to its account holders. It is an automated backup solution installed at the client end. Mozy charges a fee of $4.95 per month for unlimited storage facility.

9. Microsoft OneDrive: OneDrive service under Azure platform offers 7GB of free online storage. Individual files up to 2GB in size can be uploaded to the cloud via a desktop client app.

10. CrashPlan: CrashPlan can be downloaded freely to run a backup at your standalone PC. This user-friendly software charges 44.50/ month for automating your local backup.

10 Useful Cloud Security Tools

Keeping the cloud data safe can be more challenging than most clients anticipate. Protecting a cloud backup is much different unlike in case of traditional IT environments. 

Below described cloud security tools can help protect data, network & other IT resources:

1. Nessus:  Nessus is a popular network vulnerability assessment tool. It has the capability to control internal and external data scanners operating on a cloud network.

2. Nmap: Nmap is an acronym for ‘Network Mapper’. This tool is exclusively designed for scanning all network activities, even during network congestions.

3. Wireshark: Wireshark can be used as a single entity to manage and troubleshoot network security problems by analyzing packet transmission in the cloud.

4. Metasploit: Metasploit is a streamlined interface that provides additional machine images (Server IP addresses) to a client. It is used as a pen test distribution in cloud for performing network diagnostics.

5. Kismet: This open source tool is capable of scanning your entire cloud infrastructure including private, public or hybrid ones. Kismet leaves no footprint of log scan activity in victim’s machine.

6. Ettercap: Ettercap protects the user from MITM (Man-in-the-middle) attacks. It includes much coveted security features such as IP & Mac-based filtering and ARP-based functionality for network monitoring purpose.

7. Acunetix: Acunetix is used to find network vulnerabilities such as SQL injections and cross site scripts which can be used to penetrate into cloud databases.

8. John the Ripper: This tool is highly popular as a password testing tool; it’s used to test password strength. It uses brute force method to hack passwords and unravel potential security breaches.

9. Aircrack: This tool is widely used to test IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) models. It protects the client data from being exploited by malicious attacks usually originating from virtual machines.

10. Cain & Abel: This tool is used to recover client passwords by decrypting password logs and sniffing throughout networks.