Craig Blessing, our VP of Sales, recently took a family vacation to a horse ranch in New Mexico. Craig is always thinking about protecting business data and ended up having a work-related conversation on his first ride of the day.  One of the members of his group owns and operates a real estate office in the remote corner of the state.  Catron County, New Mexico is as remote as you can get. It has 6,923 beautiful square miles with only a half a person per square mile. For perspective, our fair city of Seattle has 7,250 people per square mile.

Because they were concerned about the impact of losing confidential data, the office had selected a consumer laptop backup product for their handful of machines which protected their data off-site. The bad news is that as a result of their remote location, it was taking DAYS to recover data from one of the machines that had crashed.

As Murphy’s Law dictates the laptop that died had all the critical day to day information on it and the business had come to a grinding halt waiting for the data to be restored from their online backup provider.

The Ponemon Institute estimates it takes users 9 days to get fully up to speed again after a laptop is lost or stolen.  When you are on historic Route 66, miles from the nearest city, that time can be dramatically enhanced.  As Craig and his new friend rode over the mesas, they had time to discuss how they could avoid losing productivity for days next time a laptop needed to be recovered, and the myths surrounding what their online backup provider had told them.

Myth #1 – Online Backup Providers assume high speed access

The engineer at the consumer laptop backup company estimated that it would take a few hours to download their data to a new laptop.  This is easy to say when you are in a big city, however when the Pony Express is faster than your internet connection, it will be far longer than a few hours.  According to Calix, the typical rural internet user has far less bandwidth available than their big city brethren. According to the report, 71% of rural subscribers received a downstream broadband speed that was slower than the target for the Connect America Fund (CAF) of 4 Mbps, and approximately 90% fell below the CAF upstream target of 1 Mbps.

Datacastle realizes that your business data is critical regardless of where you live. Speed up your data access by installing a QuickCache that makes your data available locally fast in addition to safely protecting it off-site to a world-class data center like Microsoft’s Windows Azure.  QuickCaches install in minutes and can use a Network Attached Storage device like a LaCie Big5 Office to ensure rapid recoveries no matter how slow your wide area network connection might be.

Myth #2 – Online Backup Providers assume all data is of equal value.

Craig’s riding companion was particularly upset that after four days they had downloaded only pictures from past vacations and none of their critical business data.  While the software had backed up all the data on the laptop, they didn’t know where all the critical contracts and legal documents that they had been working on were located on the dead laptop, so when performing the download to their new Surface Pro, they simply selected everything which started with vacation photos.

Datacastle RED’s priority restore enables users to get back the most recently modified documents first.  During a recovery, you will get the key documents back first and can begin working on them while the rest of the legacy files download in the background.  With priority restore, the office would have ha access to all their critical documents which would have allowed them to start selling properties again in a couple of hours even while being in a rural location with poor connectivity.

Myth 3 -  Online Backup Providers assume connectivity is available

Everyone faces occasional downtime for their home or business. However, this can be more pronounced in rural geographies.  Frequently customers are on expensive satellite networks where even a cloudy day can make Internet access a spotty proposition.  According to reports, rural users typically pay more than their big city counterparts for less reliable slower connections.

Datacastle RED provides both a local cache and a QuickCache that allow for rapid backups even when the wide area network (WAN) is down.

If you are running an office in an area with poor connectivity, you can rely on Datacastle to get you back up and running in no time.

To learn more about how Datacastle RED supports remote and branch office users with limited or unreliable connectivity, go to www.datacastlered.com or www.quickcache.com .

A key element to any cloud based endpoint backup and protection service is the actual cloud provider.  At first this sounds obvious, however most companies that investigate enterprise solutions in our space never ask key questions regarding the data centers that are responsible for storing and recovering their data.

Datacastle decided early in our process to select Microsoft’s Windows Azure as our primary cloud vendor and have been amazed with the results.  We had three key elements that we looked at when making our selection.

Investing and Committed to their Data Centers

Microsoft has spent over 15 billion dollars on their global data center business with over a dozen facilities spanning the globe according to Wired Magazine.  The investment is not only in the facilities, but in the constant improvement of the infrastructure and latest design.

If you tour an older Microsoft data center you will see the evolution of the data center right before your eyes from 1^st generation of co-location through the current 4^th generation Modular data center.  The Modular design has dramatic improvements to power consumption, density, and other key performance metrics.  This transformation in the data center is happening every couple of years and you should ask what investments your endpoint provider is making in their data centers to stay current.

Microsoft is so committed to driving excellence from their facilities that they literally won’t waste a thing in the pursuit of excellence.  A recent Fast Company article explains how they are even using our sewage for powering the next facility!

Service Availability and Error Percentage

The cloud is only as reliable as the up-time and reliability of your cloud provider.  Day in and day out Microsoft Azure has the highest reliability of any cloud provider in the world as was confirmed again by the latest Nasuni study.   Windows Azure ranked first in Availability while having the lowest Error rating by having a zero read and write errors!

Achieving the highest marks for availability and error percentage is a great achievement made all the more impressive by the scale of the operations.  Windows Azure supports Datacastle RED and the billions of daily transactions from Office 365, Bing, Windows Live ID, Hosted Exchange Services, and Xbox Live.  With Windows Azure behind Datacastle RED it is easy to see how we can easily support the largest of enterprise customers seamlessly.

True Disaster Recovery Functionality with Required Certifications

As an backup service our offering must keep your data is safe no matter what disaster may strike.  Windows Azure is so advanced that ahead of events like Hurricane Sandy they are able to move services from one data center to another with zero impact to us as a vendor or to our clients.  Many competitors in the space backup to a single data center and simply hope nothing bad will ever happen to their facility.

Windows Azure provides Datacastle RED with geo-redundancy for all our clients and has data centers across the globe to support our customers in Asia Pacific and Europe.

Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services provides great insight into depth of their security and certifications.  Make sure when you are making a final decision on a endpoint protection vendor that they meet your regulatory needs like FISMA, HIPAA, SAS 70, ISO 27001, and SSAE 16.  You shouldn’t be surprised if a vendor is missing key certifications as that is part of the on-going investment that many cloud providers can’t make.

When it is time to make a selection in endpoint protection remember to thoroughly vet if the data centers and vendors you are trusting with your data  That the cloud powering your service is the right fit for your business today, and that they are investing for tomorrow.

For a 60 second overview of our service running on Windows Azure:  http://www.datacastlered.com/site/datacastle-red/ and to read about the continued latest data center activities from Microsoft http://www.globalfoundationservices.com/blog.aspx

As you begin your endpoint protection solution search, it is important to keep in mind that there are a number of common pitfalls to avoid. All solutions are not created equal and you will want to choose the best one to implement at your company.

Pitfall #1:  It takes a massive amount of time and network resources to seed data for the first time

If your employees are spread out across a number of branch offices – some of which may have limited connectivity to the Internet – getting all their data to the central vault can be quite painful.  For example, you have 10 users in a small office in Iowa and each of them has 10GBs of data on their laptops. If all of these employees start backing up their laptop data or new Surface Pro at the same time, you will have 100GBs of data travelling across your WAN from that office to the central vault. The net effect will be that it will take days for the laptops to be protected and the local network will be severely taxed resulting in impacts on employee productivity.

The Datacastle Solution:

With Datacastle RED you can avoid this pitfall by placing a QuickCache running on Windows Storage Server at each of your remote locations. Employees backup their data to their local QuickCache extremely fast using the LAN and the QuickCache sends the backed up data to the central vault via the WAN at off-peak hours when network resources are more available.

Pitfall #2: Is your cloud-based backup service geo-replicating your data

Clearly, if you are going to back up your company’s data to the cloud, it is critical that it is stored redundantly. Unfortunately, not all backup service providers do this in order to cut costs and they don’t disclose this unless you ask. The key question you should be asking is how your data is being geo-replicated and who is paying for it. The cost of sending a duplicate copy of your backups to a second data center can be significant after the fact.

The Datacastle Solution

The majority of our customers host their central Datacastle RED vault on Windows Azure. In addition to gaining scalability and flexibility, your data is automatically replicated to a second data center by Microsoft as part of the service. This means you have the peace of mind of knowing that your data is secure and always available.

Pitfall #3: Time to protection and time to recovery can be slow for cloud-only solutions

Consider what happens when an employee in a remote office with poor WAN connectivity needs to restore their data. First, let’s assume that the employee has accidentally deleted a PowerPoint presentation from their hard drive that they need to present to a customer. Is the employee able to access this file locally? Secondly, what happens when that employee has lost the laptop and needs to restore all 10GBs of their data? How long does it take for the data to be available and what is the impact on the already limited network resources in the remote office?  The Ponemon Institute estimates it costs companies on average $49,000 for each data breach and that it takes 9 days to get an employee back up and running after a  laptop has been lost or stolen or a hard disk drive has crashed. In addition, according to a study by ESG Research, 18% of companies  are skeptical about using the cloud for backup because they are concerned about long recovery times.

The Datacastle Solution

Because Datacastle RED first caches the user’s data locally on the laptop, the employee is easily able to restore the lost PowerPoint file.

The employee with a new laptop is able to recover all of their lost data from their local QuickCache extremely fast. This is because the data is travelling from the QuickCache to the laptop over the LAN.

To learn more about Datacastle RED and QuickCache, contact us at www.datacastlered.com.

Joe McKendrick published an insightful article recently on ZDNet about a commonly known issue in IT circles that is not regularly brought out into the open. Namely, that the top executives in companies are often the worst offenders of the company’s IT data security policies. The combination of the sensitive information carried by executives with increasingly mobile computing devices is leading to data breach and loss disasters. Executives who have been at the forefront of the BYOD trend often lose their laptops during travel at a significant rate. Executives’ laptops have more sensitive information on them than the average employee’s laptop.

The best way to get compliance with your data security policies is to put in place systems that do not require any action by the end user. Datacastle RED is that solution providing:

• Automatic continuous backup and recovery
• Mobile file retrieval from any mobile device, any time, anywhere
• Remote data delete
• Encryption for data at rest
• Device trace

Datacastle has started off the year running a promotion (in conjunction with many of our partners) to cover your company’s executive suite for free for a year for mid-sized to large companies. If you are interested in silently protecting the data on your executive team’s laptops and next generation tablets, contact us at sales@datacastlered.com to learn more and see if you qualify.

InformationWeek’s Mike Healey recently published his Outlook 2013 report. The report outlines the top three IT initiatives for 2013. The highest priority initiatives are:

1) Improve information security

2) Upgrade network infrastructure

3) Upgrade storage infrastructure

An endpoint data protection initiative with Datacastle RED and QuickCache hit on all three of these IT priorities. First, one of the most vulnerable parts of a company’s data management infrastructure is the unstructured data residing on laptops and new classes of tablets such as Microsoft’s new Surface Pro. This is especially the case in remote offices and on BYOD devices. Datacastle RED provides a friction-free way to simply and silently protect the data by policy without requiring end user participation or compliance.

When it comes to upgrading network infrastructure, one element in any strategy is to optimize the amount of data traffic traveling on your network or time-shift the traffic to off-peak times of the day. QuickCache enables IT professionals to improve their time to protection for laptops, desktops, and tablets while not impacting the all-important Internet gateway traffic for the company.

Finally, for many companies, upgrading their storage infrastructure includes adding cloud storage or hybrid cloud storage into the mix. Datacastle RED, coupled with QuickCache, can store encrypted and deduped data in hybrid cloud, private cloud, or public cloud configurations. In particular, you should ask us about how companies are taking advantage of our partnership with Microsoft Azure for protecting critical endpoint business data.

Enjoy the report and if you share these priorities and want to learn more about Datacastle RED and QuickCache, just go to http://www.datacastlered.com.

On October 29th, Hurricane Sandy hit one of the most populous regions of the United States. The storm inflicted a huge amount of destruction to property and people’s lives. The Mid-Atlantic and New England regions have a heavy concentration of Financial Services, Healthcare, and Retail customers for ourselves and our partners. These are all customers where their endpoint data needs to be protected from data breach and data loss. It is at these trying times that you get to see if your disaster recovery and data protection systems can deliver on their promise.

We appreciate that whether it is a large disaster or a personal emergency, our software needs to be there for you. We are proud to report that Datacastle RED was there for our customers and partners in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. We have experienced a wave of backup restores since Hurricane Sandy hit (sadly, as we have also seen after other regional disasters) and we have not had a single report of an end user or customer being unable to restore their protected data.

Our hearts and thoughts go out to the victims of the hurricane and hope for a speedy recovery. If you wish to donate to help those trying to recover, we encourage you to go to www.redcross.org to make a donation today.

We recently announced the availability of QuickCache. When you combine QuickCache with Datacastle RED, you get the best of both (on-premise and cloud) worlds for endpoint data protection. You get the performance and control associated with on-premise backup and recovery. In fact, your time to protection can be ten times faster with a QuickCache than traditional online backup. At the same time, you get the off-site disaster recovery (DR) and centralized administration benefits of a cloud-based online backup solution.

Why did Datacastle build QuickCache? Because companies like you asked for it. Customers let us know that they didn’t like some of the drawbacks of online-only backup solutions. They found the initial time to protection (first backups) were taking too long and they didn’t like the “seeding” options being pushed on them by other companies. They liked the notion of offsite DR, but felt that recovery over the Internet could take too long . At the same time, we were being told that they didn’t like some of the traditional disk to disk to cloud (DDC) architectures because of the single point of failure and administrative overhead associated with managing remote backup appliances. QuickCache is a fresh new approach where IT can get the performance and control of on-premise backup and recovery solution with the offsite DR and centralized administration benefits of cloud-based online backup.

What is QuickCache? QuickCache is software that runs on a Windows Storage Server Network Attached Storage (NAS) device or a Windows Server that can easily be deployed on your corporate LAN, remote office, or home office. QuickCaches are centrally managed from the Datacastle RED vault and thus are excellent for “set it and forget it” operations in remote locations. Datacastle RED agents on your endpoints will automatically back up and recover from the QuickCache if on the local area network (LAN). Protected data will then travel from the QuickCache to your Datacastle RED vault based on your policies for peak and off-peak hours to minimize network impact. When your endpoints aren’t on the QuickCache’s LAN, you are still protected as the Datacastle RED agent on your endpoint will roam onto your Datacastle RED vault in the cloud. With QuickCache, you get efficient and comprehensive endpoint data protection at all times for the mobile workforce.

Who should consider QuickCache? If your organization requires rapid recovery, fast time to protection for endpoint devices and have employees in multiple locations then you should evaluate QuickCache.

To learn more about QuickCache, please go to QuickCache.com .

Microsoft is about to formally release Windows 8 to the world within a month. Intel just announced a wave of new tablets based on their Atom processor and Windows 8. These tablets are being launched by partners such as Lenovo, Samsung, Dell, and HP. It is important to realize that these tablets will be full blown PC’s. While Ultrabooks are taking an evolutionary approach to the changing PC/laptop form-factor,  these Windows 8 tablets will be a more radical change. In a single device, you will have the continuity of your current laptop environment with the added mobility and convenience that iPad users experience. With such a change comes great opportunity as well as new data protection challenges.

These Windows 8 tablets may be more attractive to corporate IT than their iOS and Android cousins because of application compatibility and Active Directory support. Tablets are more mobile and can be used in more casual settings than laptops and desktops. While this enables greater round-the-clock productivity, it also results in a greater likelihood of theft or loss just as is experienced with smart phones. Protecting the data on these new Windows 8 tablets will be critical for IT and Datacastle RED is ready on day one.

So what should IT professionals be thinking about when protecting these new Windows 8 tablets? Here are a few thoughts:

• The business files on these tablets need to be backed up and protected continuously with no end user friction
• The backup and recovery solution should be sensitive to the different networks used by these devices
• Data should be encrypted at rest on Windows 8 tablets
• Data should be able to be remotely destroyed if the tablet is lost or stolen
• Data protected on the tablet should be securely accessible (and audited) from users’ other smart phones, laptops, or desktops PC’s
• You should be able to trace a lost or stolen Windows 8 tablet

If you would like to learn more about how to best protect data on your new Windows 8 tablets and get ahead of the data protection curve, feel free to contact us at www.datacastlered.com.

One of the themes of InformationWeek’s 2012 Cloud Security Report is “Don’t trust, just verify”. At Datacastle, we couldn’t agree more. According to the annual survey, 72% of all respondents currently use, plan to use, or are considering the use of public cloud services such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure. These companies clearly see the advantages of flexibility, scalability, reliability, and cost savings that public cloud services can provide over traditional approaches.

However, for those companies that are reluctant to using public cloud services some of the top reasons given in the report relate to security and in particular access or leak of customer’s or company’s proprietary information. Such concerns are warranted. Consumer-based cloud storage and sync services such as Dropbox are encountering breach issues that are making headlines. Consumer-based cloud storage and sync services also lack the controls that businesses require for audit and regulatory compliance.

At Datacastle we are recognized in the industry as having one of the most secure, enterprise class set of controls for our enterprise customers.

• Datacastle RED always has your data (and its metadata) in an encrypted state and never decrypts it in a public cloud service
• Datacastle RED has one of the most sophisticated, layered encryption key management and escrow infrastructures in the world for endpoint data protection where companies can manage their encryption keys outside of the public cloud service
• Datacastle RED has multi-tenant, multi-tiered administrative roles and permissions that allows only the proper administrators and users to have permission to perform key actions
• Administrator and user actions are audited throughout Datacastle RED
• Our public cloud service partners have key industry standard credentials for physical and operational controls

Many of Datacastle’s clients are in financial services, insurance, healthcare and retail. These companies want to provide the productivity gains for their employees from BYOD mobile data and accessibility. At the same time, they want to do it in a way that meets their data governance standards. Our clients have had Datacastle undergo multiple security audits and Datacastle RED pass them with flying colors.

If your business is considering using public cloud services, Datacastle RED is an ideal solution to provide endpoint data protection and mobile data access with the security and controls InformationWeek’s report recommends. To learn more about Datacastle RED, please go to www.datacastlered.com .

This week Datacastle announced the strengthening of our relationship with Microsoft Windows Azure. While Datacastle RED can be deployed in many different on-premise and cloud-based environments, we wanted to provide a preferred public cloud option for our customers and partners. Why did we decide on Windows Azure?

Here are some of our reasons:

Windows Azure is sensitive to the needs of Datacastle’s customers and partners

Many of Datacastle’s customers and partners are governed by data protection regulations. The Microsoft Windows Azure team gets that. For example, in health care, our customers and partners need to make sure that the environments in which their data is being protected provide HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) guarantees. As recently noted by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley , Microsoft Windows Azure is providing such guarantees.

Windows Azure is truly global

Many of Datacastle’s customers are large, multinational corporations with remote offices and employees traveling all over the world. To service their needs, these customers need to know they can rely on a global public cloud infrastructure that can perform replication across multiple data centers within geography, but not necessarily move the data to a jurisdiction that they don’t desire. Microsoft has been very strategic in selecting their data center sites and map to our business customer and partner’s need.

Windows Azure understands operations communications

Datacastle has used and support multiple cloud infrastructure providers. All cloud infrastructure service providers have issues (and even outages) from time to time. While Datacastle architects our software to be robust in the face of operating infrastructure events, it is still important for us to know that we have an operations partner who will be open, provide timely status when an issue is occurring,  provide estimates for resolution, and provide a root cause analysis after the event and what the plan is to prevent a similar event in the future. We have found Microsoft Windows Azure to be one of the best at providing such communications.

Microsoft Windows Azure has a great partner ecosystem

We recently attended Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. It was truly refreshing to be surrounded by knowledgeable, motivated partners who are looking to solve their business customer’s problems. This partner ecosystem is able to bring the whole solution to their customers and make sure there is high customer satisfaction. This partner ecosystem also possesses specialized knowledge for key industry verticals which insures our customers are going to maximize the value they get from Datacastle RED’s flexible centralized policy management for their industry-specific challenges.

Microsoft is committed to business customers and partners for the long haul

Datacastle’s customers and partners need to know we are relying on an infrastructure provider that is going to be there for the long haul and will advance their platform to meet evolving needs. We find the technology roadmap for Windows Azure to be extremely compelling and in great alignment with the advances we are making in Datacastle RED. We also know that Microsoft is committed for the long haul and provides the financial stability that our largest customers seek.

When you add it all up, Datacastle RED + Windows Azure adds up to a winning combination for our customers and partners.

To learn more about Datacastle RED and how to become a partner at www.datacastlered.com.