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What is Geo-Replication, and Why is it Important?

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What would you do if your data center failed and you no longer had access to all of your business data? Though you may not want to think about, it is important to plan for unexpected events, especially when it comes to vital business data that you need in order to run your business successfully on a day-to-day basis.

Geo-replication plays an important role in disaster recovery, or how you respond to unexpected events that impact your business data. Below, we’ll cover what geo-replication is and why it’s important for your business so that you can better understand how to protect your company from unplanned events.

What is Geo-Replication?

Geo-replication is a type of data storage replication. With geo-replication, the same business data is stored on servers in multiple locations. This helps provide redundancy, or a back-up, in case your data center fails or something unexpected happens that compromises the way that your data center functions. On a wide area network, or WAN, geo-replication can also help improve network performance as data is stored across geographically-distributed data networks, allowing users in different locations to access the same data at local-area network (LAN) speeds.

With geo-replication, when you create or update data in the primary storage location, your data is asynchronously copied to a secondary location. This makes it so that the data exists in two locations, allowing you to have back-up data that you can access should something happen to the primary data storage location. These two locations are completely independent of one another, meaning that an unplanned incident impacting one data storage location will not affect the data stored in the second location.

Why Geo-Replication is Important for Businesses

When something unexpected happens, how do you react? Though many successful business owners are skilled at staying calm in challenging situations and adapting well to change, it’s hard to deny that a little preparation can go a long way when responding to unplanned incidents. A disaster recovery plan helps you do just that by providing a documented and structured approach to responding to unexpected events. When it comes to your data, geo-replication is an important part of this disaster recovery. It allows you to store data in two separate locations, giving you access to this data even if one data storage location fails.

Geo-replication is especially important as modern businesses are moving from internal to external data storage. Many business owners are migrating to public and private cloud storage platforms where their data is no longer located on internal servers. In order to address these companies data recovery concerns, many cloud providers like Windows Azure are offering geo-replication in some of their data-storage packages. This helps give businesses the peace of mind in knowing that their data is protected should something unexpected happen to initial storage site.

Protecting Your Business

If you don’t have a dedicated IT department, it can be difficult to ensure that your company’s needs are met when it comes to data storage and backup protection. Universal ComOne Louisiana offers network and computer services for businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT specialist in-house. Call us today for a consultation to find out what you could be doing better: (337) 205-9364.

Understanding Data Breach And It’s Importance

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Data Breach, as the name suggests, can be defined as an incident, in which sensitive, classified and confidential data pertaining to a particular business or any individual, has been accessed by any unauthorized person or body, via any unethical process, with malicious intension or otherwise.

Each and every business is at risk of this phenomenon and can lose considerable amount of data and related financial losses. Hence, it is imperative that each and every business should conduct data breach study, to ensure if there is any such chance of breach of data. If so, you should immediately take steps to plug the breach to limit any further damage.

Data breach study is extremely important in today’s business and there is simply no doubt about it. The market is now agog with fight for supremacy amongst the market players that are rich in work experience and financial health. In a bid to edge past the others, quite a few renowned companies are hiring professionals who are spying into rival companies to siphon off sensitive data. Customer information, pricing information, and even employee data are all information that can be used against you. Thus, there is a considerable amount of risk, when it comes to sharing sensitive data, and a little mistake can cost heavy.

Let us understand this issue in a bit more detail. Prevention of data breach is a very important issue, in this age of data pilferage. The pace of the life has increased and so is the competition in the market place. This is the root cause behind all these. Nevertheless, this phenomenon needs to be stopped once and all, if any business wants to thrive.

If you are a large company with multiple offices, you need to make information available to all employees. The easiest way to do this is to use the Internet and possibly cloud services. The minute you do this, you make yourself susceptible to data breach.

While the advent of the Internet has been a boon in most of the cases, in some cases, it really is a deadly threat. With the help of the Internet and software, it is become easy to siphon off your data. Hence, it is really necessary for these companies to opt for a foolproof system that will prevent data breach.

There are many facets of data breach. It can happen due to a number of reasons and in a number of ways. These methods include accessing control lists, encryption techniques, breaking your firewall, getting hold of various permissions, and a finally peeking into your database of information.

People can hack into the official website of the company and seize all the strategic data from the website and use them in their own projects. Thus, it is imperative that each and every way of data breach needs to be plugged in the most strategic way to limit these incidences. Unless and until there is a better understanding of the methods in which data breaches can take place, or unless and until the reason behind this phenomenon is rightly ascertained, implementation a holistic and successful control mechanism cannot be done. That is where the importance of studying and understanding the methods used for Data Breach is so very important.

Once the true reasons behind a possible data breech is correctly ascertained, it also becomes much easier to plug further loss of data with all the vigor, determination and purpose.

About Universal ComOne

Universal ComOne offers award winning business telephone systems that are right for any business. We can design a solution to fit your needs.

Call 337-205-9364 for all your communication needs.

Tips to Measure Your Data Security

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Small and medium size businesses often suffer huge losses due to data pilferage, unethical hacks and unanticipated destruction of data. Every business holds their data dear and any loss has a direct impact on the business. Thus, data security should be of primary concern for business owners, especially when they store data virtually. Data breaches can be extremely damaging for any company and for this reason, small and medium business owners should consider these tips. Here is a list of some important data security tips that may just save the day:

Stronger Passwords

It is imperative to have strong passwords for every device or virtual service your company uses. This is probably the most basic tip to your secure data in the cloud or any other devices in your company. Try to set a combination of letters, numbers and special characters when creating a strong password. You will also have to keep in mind that passwords are tough to break when they are longer – so try setting passwords that contain at least 8 to 12 characters. It is also extremely important to keep changing your passwords from time to time as that will always keep the hackers or unauthorized users guessing. Never, ever write down your passwords anywhere!

Decent Firewall

Using a decent firewall will help protect your network and keep hackers or illegitimate users from accessing the office network. Firewalls protect the network by controlling the incoming and outgoing traffic on the network. You can choose any firewall suite because the majority of these are extremely effective.

Install Antivirus

Anti-malware and antivirus software are the best tools to keep your data protected during online transactions. These will protect your system even if a virus or malware manage to dodge the firewall.

Update Programs and Applications

You must get your computers properly patched and updated. This is an extremely important step towards data security. If you are not able to maintain the resident programs or software properly by not updating them regularly, then it becomes easier for the hackers.

Secure Your Laptops

It is important that you secure the laptops by providing data encryption software that locks the drives or folders. Laptops are portable in nature; hence, they are vulnerable to unauthorized access. However, if you use data encryption software, then all your data is secure even if the laptops are stolen.

Secure Mobile Phones

With the growing use of smartphones for banking and other official data transactions, it is imperative to secure them as well. There are many people who use their smartphone to store sensitive business data, and anyone who steals the phone can unearth all the personal and professional data. Use data encryption to secure your mobile phones.

Regular Backups

You need to schedule regular backups for all the PCs, laptops and smartphones by regularly downloading data to an external drive or cloud storage. You should also secure these hard drives and/or the cloud storage location by using encrypting software.