Coleman Technologies Blog

Today, many of the largest and most lucrative companies in the world, Google, Apple, AT&T, Amazon, Verizon, Facebook and Microsoft are all, more than manufacturers of computer-based goods and services, data brokers. These data brokers create services that they then sell to advertisers that allow them to target you based on the information these companies have of you, which can accurately tell how and what to sell you.

Since nearly everyone has a near-ubiquitously-connected experience there is a lot of data collected, bought, and sold every year and it’s big business. Facebook, a company whose main revenue stream is from selling advertising, made a net profit of nearly $16 billion in 2017. This tells us that if you have people’s data, you have people’s hopes, fears, and dreams, which means you can pretty easily get someone to pay you for access to that information.

For small businesses it’s much less lucrative. In fact, all the data your organization needs to keep, is probably necessary to simply do business, not to sell to advertisers. Facebook voluntarily gets a lot of personal information from every one of their users, as where the typical small business often has to strategize to just get a name and a phone number. The information that is sensitive (mostly customer information that you collect) has a lot of value to the people looking to steal it. So while you aren’t making billions of dollars selling consumer profiles, it is still a mightily important part of doing business, and needs to be secured.

Is Data a Commodity?
Technically speaking, it isn’t. Since a commodity’s value is based namely on its scarcity and the amount of capital that needs to be put up to create it, in both resources and labor, the data that is being purchased isn’t really a commodity. In lieu of the dissolution of the U.S. Net Neutrality laws, this has created the argument in the U.S. that since now it’s up to the telecommunication companies how they want to manage (or more accurately bill) data consumption, that they would throttle and tier service, something that isn’t possible with a true commodity, where there are laws prohibiting those types of practices.

On the other hand, Internet access is something that a majority of the commerce requires, and delivering data is in itself an expensive endeavor (infrastructure spending, development, utility costs, etc.) so telecoms, who are seeing their would-be profits syphoned by over-the-top content providers, and publicly demonized as a result of a very public lobbying effort to gain control of the ability to implement some sort of prioritization strategy, have to find a strategy to sustain their ability to get a workable return on their investments.

Securing Your Organization’s Data
Regardless of what your view of data is, it’s an important resource for your organization, and as mentioned above, it needs to be secured. For one of your company’s most important resources, data can be lost relatively easily, so there needs to be a concerted effort to keep your network and infrastructure free from the threats that could put your data at risk. At Coleman Technologies, that’s what we do. We ensure organizations like yours get the professional IT expertise you need to work efficiently, effectively, and securely in what is the most turbulent time in computing history. With the litany of threats your business faces everyday, you need experts that have your back. We offer:

• Backup and disaster recovery: With a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery system in place, all of your organization’s data is safe, redundant, and able to be restored on demand.
• Proactive monitoring and management: By keeping a dedicated eye on your network and infrastructure, our technicians can be proactive.
• Patch management: By keeping all of your organization’s software up to date with the latest threat definitions, you can ensure that your software isn’t going to be a problem.
• Access control and threat detection: By having full control over who can access what, and a complete view of the entire network, we can keep people who aren’t supposed to see certain information from accessing it.
• Training: Most times, your own staff is responsible for data breaches and malware. We can train you all on what to look for to ensure that you are doing your best to keep your network and infrastructure free from threats.
• Around the clock support: If three out of every four businesses deal with phishing emails, and over 95 percent of all phishing emails deliver ransomware, chances are that if a mistake were to be made, you will need immediate IT support. Our support and help desk can remediate a lot of your security issues to keep downtime to a minimum.

With data such a major part of doing business today, ensuring you have the right solutions and support in place to be confident that any situation you face will be managed before it becomes a problem is in itself a benefit. Call Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428 for more information.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much you have to lose from a data loss incident. Your business depends on its data, and if it suddenly loses access to it, you could be in a position where downtime significantly impacts your bottom line. In situations like this, you have no time to waste. You have to get back in the game as soon as possible or you risk losing so much traction that it could be hard to keep the doors open.

With this in mind, you can’t possibly achieve this goal without data backup. You have to think of it in terms of a potential loss incident--essentially it is professional risk management. While it’s true you don’t want to make decisions based solely on the what-ifs, it’s hard not to justify it in this case. What it boils down to is this: if you don’t have data backup and suffer from a disaster, your business will, more likely than not, fail. Therefore, the best way to ensure the possibility of success is to implement data backup and prevent a potential loss incident from surfacing in the first place.

Basically, the sheer fact that you know you need to back up your data is enough to justify having a solid backup solution.

The point that we are trying to make is that we shouldn’t have to convince you to go all-in on your business’ data backup and disaster recovery solution. It should be common sense. After all, you’re trying to preserve your business and its future against the possibility that a disaster scenario cuts its life short. You have no reason not to invest in something that could potentially save your business. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from a natural disaster, user error, or hardware failure--there is always the chance that an unforeseen event could spell the end of your organization.

The right data backup solution can go a long way toward keeping your business afloat, even in a worst-case scenario. To find out more about BDR, reach out to Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428.

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.

Coleman Technologies can help your business by equipping it with a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery system. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

What Makes a Good Backup Strategy?
It’s easy to underestimate just how valuable data is for a business, especially in today’s modern office environment. Protecting your data by any means necessary is critical to your continued success. The best way to do this is by using a comprehensive data backup solution that also has a disaster recovery component. While it might be tempting to back up all data on your network, it’s worth remembering that some data isn’t as valuable as other data. You’ll have to decide which data is worth more and design a strategy around making sure this is always available.

Resolutions for 2019
You should always strive for excellence in everything your business does, and data backup is one way your organization can improve itself for 2019. If you’re not sure how you can improve data backup and disaster recovery for your business, try following some of these guidelines:

• Implement a backup platform that lets you back up the data necessary to the operations of your business, minimizing downtime to keep costs low.
• Work with your IT administrator to plan your data backup solution based around specific factors like your recovery point objective and recovery time objective.
• Test your backups regularly to ensure that they work as intended. This means that any time you have to actually deploy a backup, you can know with certainty that they will work.

If you don’t have an IT administrator available who can help you with the process of implementing a data backup and disaster recovery solution, reach out to Coleman Technologies. Our professionals have seen their fair share of nasty situations that have led to the demise of unprepared business, like natural disasters, hacking attacks, and even user error; we don’t want it to happen to you as well.

We can help your business minimize downtime and expedite the restoration process with a data backup and disaster recovery solution from Coleman Technologies. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Statistic #1: 75% of Small Businesses Don’t Have a Continuity Policy
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run. It could be a small mom-and-pop shop or a large business, the importance of continuity is still the same. Ultimately, it comes down to the possibility of a major setback. If you don’t have continuity, you might have to close down for a few days until conditions have improved (if they improve).

Imagine the following scenarios:

• Let’s say you run a deli or other similar small business. The hardware on your payment card system crashes and you lose your customers’ financial information. How do you think they would react to this? It might not be stolen, but the situation doesn’t help anyone.
• You run a small retail business with several employees. What if one of them checks their email and clicks on a link, installing malware on the computer in the process? Something simple like this can be devastating for a business.

A comprehensive data backup strategy can help you combat threats to your business’ continuity. Everything from hardware failure to employee sabotage should be considered for this plan. In other words, you’re preparing for a worst-case scenario, and no stone should be left unturned.

Statistic #2: Over Half of Companies Have Experienced Downtime Lasting Longer Than a Full Work Day in the Last Five Years
Downtime can end even the strongest business. If you experience operational downtime on a regular basis, you’re not producing anything during that time. This also means that nobody is making sales, and you’re paying people to do nothing. From the perspective of data recovery, if you don’t have your data backed up and ready to be restored, downtime is a business killer. If you don’t have data, you can’t get much done.

Redundancy is a key factor for business continuity. A BDR solution provides a network-attached device that can both back up local data and push it to the cloud. This means that it can be found in either location in the event of a disaster, improving the odds of recovering swiftly.

Statistic #3: Nearly 77% of Malware-Compromised Organizations in 2017 Were Hit By “Fileless” Malware
It’s no surprise that the spread of malware has evolved over the past decade, growing more sophisticated and more difficult to handle. There have been times in the past where antivirus solutions and firewalls have failed to handle some of the more recent additions to hackers’ repertoires of threats, resulting in stolen data and corrupted systems.

That being said, fileless attacks aren’t anything new. These types of attacks don’t leave behind executable files, making them more difficult to trace back to their sources and remove. Here are some of the more popular fileless techniques used:

• Registry-resistant: Attackers store malicious scripts in the registry to help them survive system reboots and make it hard to remove.
• In-memory: Attackers utilize exploits and code-injection to load and execute malware straight from a system’s RAM.
• Living off the Land: By injecting malicious code into legitimate admin tools, an attacker can disseminate malware throughout a system without any warning at all.

Regarding data backup, malware attacks can complicate the recovery of your business. If malware manages to infiltrate your network at multiple endpoints, it can be difficult to root out the issue and get it resolved quickly. A data backup and recovery solution can make it much easier to recover, as long as the malware hasn’t managed to corrupt your backups (hence why you store them off-site). You can effectively eliminate downtime and the costs associated with it, since the network-attached device essentially acts as a server until you can get your hardware replaced or repaired.

Coleman Technologies can help prepare you for even the worst scenarios. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

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 Coleman Technologies, 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 Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

Data Value in Business
The first thing that you need to know is that losing data is a very big deal. In fact, there is an entire field of study created to deal with this very issue. Called infonomics, this can put a dollar value on an organization’s data. While some organizations continuously deny that data has a tangible value, it is becoming more evident than ever that those organizations (typically insurance and accounting) have a vested interest in data’s value remaining intangible. Every other business can be sure that their data has monetary value.

With the acknowledgement that the analysis of organizational data can help businesses run a more efficient and profitable business, any standard enacted to properly evaluate this asset would be made to promote a strategy of organization-wide data security. If you need to justify spending capital on a data protection and redundancy strategy, you should be able to ascertain what the actual value your data has to your organization. A few ways you can value data include:

• How much capital would it cost to replace lost data?
• How much revenue is dependent on that data?
• How much money could you make by selling or renting the data you have?
• How much capital will you have to spend to protect this data?

However, you look at your organization’s data, it is an asset, and as those assets are compromised on your network, or removed from your network, you need to have a solution in place to get that data back.

Data Backup
The first step in any data recovery strategy is data backup. At Coleman Technologies, we believe that the best data backup strategy is to promote redundancy. In order to do so we promote a strategy that backs up data locally AND offsite. This presents options to make data recovery more efficient.

Our BDR service initially backs up your entire network. Since backing up an entire network will take a long time, and any downtime is extraordinarily costly, setting up a backup solution that protects the data you need without taking down the network at all, is important. Our BDR keeps data redundant on multiple hard drives and provides an organization with the much-desired data security it is looking for from a comprehensive solution.

Disaster Recovery
The first thing that has to be said is that the best data recovery strategy is one that never has to be used. However, data loss disasters can (and do) happen, leaving your business to pick up the pieces. The best way to do this is to have a dedicated disaster recovery platform in place that takes two crucial factors into account:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The interval of time that might pass during a disruption before the amount of data lost exceeds the maximum threshold that your business can weather.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The duration of time within which data or business process must be restored after a disruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity.

By thoroughly managing your disaster recovery program, your organization is sure to be able to get its data back--and its business’ processes up and running--to ensure that your business is able to sustain operational integrity. For more information about how to get a data backup and disaster recovery working for your business, call Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

The late American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Written in the 20th century, it has been put in practice by 21st century businesses. As the Internet has grown, the amount of companies expanded, and the amount of data that those companies collect has grown exponentially, especially now that there is a market for such data.