data backup | NEC Today

In May 2019, a ransomware attack held the city of Baltimore’s computers hostage, preventing its citizens from paying water bills or parking tickets. City leaders say that fully restoring systems takes months and even then, data may be corrupted or unusable. In efforts to employ more technology in city infrastructure, cyberhackers are infiltrating city operations more than ever before.
If you’re reading this, chances are highly likely that you’re unsatisfied with your current backup solution. According to CommVault, the statistics around backups and data restores reveal:
• Only 57% of IT managers have a backup solution in place, of which 75% were not able to restore their data.
• 81% of ransomware victims felt confident in their ability to restore completely from backups, but only 42% could restore their data fully.
• Sixty percent of organizations shut down after a data loss disaster and the average cost of downtime is $250,000 per hour.
Perhaps you’re all too familiar with these statistics and are wondering how to implement a quality backup solution that works for your budget and environment.
Answer these questions and read on to determine the best backup solution for your environment.

How Much Am I Really Paying for Protection?
Consider the true cost of backups and disaster recovery for your organization. You may be paying for hardware and software licensing, network hardware infrastructure, management costs, disaster recovery location, environment management and more. How much are you paying in staff to manage everything and training on the skills required for equipment maintenance? Are you paying for full-time use of expertise or technology that you only use part of the time? Can you put a cost on unreliable backups, slow backups and restores, low service levels, downtime or noncompliance?

NEC Solution Simplifies Backup Complexity – NEC/B&A Case Study:

UNIVERGE BLUE Backup as a Service Case Study: B & A from InteractiveNEC

How Complex is My Environment?

If your IT environment keeps changing, includes multiple applications, legacy systems or other complex infrastructure, you’re already familiar with the cost of owning several different software and hardware licenses. Changes in public policy may require technology updates or backup reliability to maintain compliance with new regulations. Data loss, intrusion and cyber threats add another layer of complexity requiring continual management, monitoring and updates. You may also manage this environment on your own, in reactive mode and in silos, increasing the cost and inefficiency of your IT staff.

NEC Backup as a Service Reduces Administrative Tasks, Helping IT Departments Help Their Organizations

What’s Your Data Worth? from InteractiveNEC

The Benefits of Backup as a Service (BaaS)

While considering the cost of adding a full-service disaster recovery solution, consider how Backup as a Service creates a better IT employee experience. By implementing a fully-managed and hosted system, NEC manages all the data, licensing, network and infrastructure, mitigating the risk of data loss and increasing your IT staff’s efficiency.

BaaS also adds to a better customer experience. Complex environments may require maintenance to ensure a fully compliant data center. With NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BaaS solution, your employees have data when they need it, without fail, in fully regulated data centers with fully compliant software.

Why Choose NEC for BaaS?

Regardless of your business size or the complexity of your data and storage environment, NEC has a solution for you. NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BaaS is a full-service backup infrastructure, fully managed and at a lower cost of ownership. In fact, your organization will no longer be responsible for maintaining the infrastructure or backups unless you choose to do so. UNIVERGE BLUE BaaS also incorporates the cost of disaster recovery, creating a cost-effective, secure solution. When your business needs a data restore, NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BaaS is available at a moment’s notice:

Built and optimized on NEC Storage infrastructure
Reliable, managed backup and recovery available anytime
Fully staffed network operations center to manage the process
Daily or monthly performance and status reports
AEC 128-bit encryption for virtual servers, physical servers or database applications
Personalized retention and recovery time objectives

NEC will also offer a personal consultation with your organization to accurately assess your current backup solution and determine if a new one is needed.

NEC’s UNIVEGRE BLUE BaaS Deployment Options

With NEC, BaaS is available from self-service to fully managed backup and disaster recovery services:

NEC appliance in your local data center (on and off premise and fully managed): Your servers will be backed up to the appliance and then sent to the off premises NEC cloud. Your organization pays for the appliance and it can be self-managed or fully managed by NEC.
Backup to the NEC cloud (fully hosted): Your existing servers are directed to backup to NEC’s cloud over a secure link. Your organization only pays for the space and services you need.

In a fully hosted system, NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BaaS solution delivers security and performance and is powered by industry-leading CommVault® backup software. The infrastructure is placed in highly secure and compliant IronMountain® data centers offering fully automated, cost-effective and easily scalable backup solutions. Network operations and restores are available 7x24x365. The system integrates with multiple applications and legacy systems including SAP, CRM systems and more. This scenario is best for complex storage and data environments such as healthcare, hospitality and education.

The on-premises appliance is built using the optimal NEC infrastructure platform to meet the requirement. This includes NEC’s HYDRAstor Physical and Virtual appliances, as well as NEC’s Storage Rich Servers configured with the appropriate software to easily handle the needs of SMB to enterprise businesses.

Is Your Backup Solution Slow or Outdated?

To protect your data, ensure a positive customer experience and create a more efficient employee experience, it may be time to consider a better backup solution. With enormous amounts of data that are changing at rapid speed, tape backups could be outdated as quickly as a backup is finished. Migrations, maintenance and unplanned downtime can disrupt production and reduce the efficiency of your IT staff. Inconsistent and often incomplete backups can cost your organization, including hurting the bottom line dramatically.

NEC’s HYDRAstor, recognized as 2015’s Best of Interop in Storage and with a Network Products Guide Gold Award in Storage Solutions, is widely regarded as the most scalable and fastest dedupe appliance. NEC’s powerful award-winning infrastructure and technology is available and customizable for your IT environment.

Learn more at https://www.necam.com/Cloud/BaaS/ or schedule a no obligation consultation with an NEC backup expert to determine which solution fits your needs and budget. Just fill out the form below, and we will get back to you soon.

With Facebook under scrutiny for sharing users’ data with third-party data brokers, more internet users are questioning the privacy of and access to their personal information. European Union businesses and citizens have been concerned since at least early 2012 when the proposal for General Protection Data Regulation (GDPR) was released. The official GDPR regulation was adopted by all member states and the European Parliament in 2016. Beginning May 25, 2018, any organization that has a presence in an EU country or houses the personal data of EU citizens will have to comply with the GDPR standards.
GDPR also pertains to any businesses that:

Has operations in the EU
Is doing business with an EU company or a US company that has operations in the EU
Has any level of data involvement with EU companies

The penalties for GDPR non-compliance are severe. Should North American or APAC businesses be concerned?

What Lead to the GDPR Proposal?

Until the 2012 proposal, countries in the EU had their own regulations due to each individual nation’s interpretation of the Data Protection Directive from 1995. The patchwork of inconsistent rules caused organizations to rely on additional resources to comply with different national procedures and laws, especially as more data was collected in the decades since.

Although each nation had its own data protection laws, the enforcement of those laws was negligent. EU businesses were given security guidelines to follow and were self-regulating, but PwC’s 2018 Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey states that only 54% of global organizations have conducted a fraud assessment in the past two years. One in ten had not performed any type of risk assessment in the same time frame.

With the implementation of GDPR, the EU market will save an estimated 2.3 billion euros or $2.85 billion every year. However, they are also held liable for data security and fraud protection.

What Does GDPR Require?

GDPR sets minimum standards for data protection for any business that:

Has a presence in any EU country or
Processes personal data of EU citizens

GDPR compliance applies to any business that:

Has 250 or more employees or
Processes sensitive or large amounts of personal data

Personal data is defined as any PII or personally identifiable information such as name, identification number, location data, email address, photographs, social identity, economic status, physical abilities or anything that refers to that individual.

Users have specific rights under the GDPR including:

The right of transparency including clear data consent forms, which data is being collected, access to that data and how it is being used
The right to rectify inaccurate data
The right to be “forgotten” including withdrawing consent and deleting all personal data from a business
The right to object how the data is being used
Data portability to transfer data between companies upon request

Companies must report data breaches within 72 hours and specify the number of exposed records, the types of data breached, what has been done to address the breach and mitigate any adverse effects, and the consequences of the breach.

Companies must also perform assessments to identify and address the risk of fraud or breaches. If the organization meets any of the requirements of 250 or more employees, processes highly sensitive or large amounts of EU citizen data, regularly collects or monitors data subjects or are a public authority, they will need to hire a data protection officer to oversee compliance.

Depending on the type of non-compliance, penalties could be from 2% or 10 million euros up to either 4% of the business’ annual global turnover(based on the previous fiscal year) or 20 million euros.

How Will Companies Comply with GDPR?

The penalties and stringent requirements of GDPR have organizational leaders worried about compliance by the May deadline. Although the regulation was adopted by the EU, global organizations could be at risk for punitive fines. Over 70% of U.S. businesses have begun preparing for GDPR and have spent $ 1 – 10 million to prepare. Some businesses have opted to reduce their EU presence temporarily until they meet GDPR standards.

Companies can prepare for GDPR compliance by:

Documenting what data is collected, who has access, and where it is stored
Creating rules and processes for data access and use
Building security controls for protecting data
Establishing protocol for responding to data breaches
Assessing the risks of data fraud and GDPR non-compliance

How Can NEC Help?

GDPR compliance challenges are prompting business leaders to lean heavily on their technology partners for solutions. A provision within the data protection regulation is “privacy by design” which requires technology solutions to natively build in data security from the onset. The good news is that NEC has a robust data platform that is built to secure data and help make data manageability easier: NEC HYDRAstor.

HYDRAstor offers a scalable and customizable platform for small-to-medium and enterprise businesses, including the ability to upgrade with no disruptions and expand to almost unlimited data growth.

NEC’s erasure-coded resiliency eliminates a single point of failure, keeping data protected and secure on HYDRAstor’s grid architecture. Erasure coding distributes data across the storage grid, so disk or node failures don’t disrupt the availability of data. Data resiliency automatically rebuilds only bad sectors, enabling a faster disk rebuild than traditional RAID.

HYDRAstor’s encryption technology protects data from unauthorized access to lost or stolen disks by encrypting data prior to being written to disk. Data that may need to be classified can exist in the same system as unclassified data due to HYDRAstor’s Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) capability for regulatory compliance.

NEC’s HYDRAstor backup partners such as Veritas, Veeam, Commvault, and more, are also preparing for GDPR compliance, offering simplified management interfaces for data protection managers.

Concerns about data availability, security, and the deletion of user’s personal data can be handled seamlessly with NEC’s HYDRAstor. To learn more about NEC HYDRAstor, visit www.necam.com/HYDRAstor.

In a dynamic and global economy, our experts anticipate that GDPR compliance will be universally adopted in the near future.

If your company has presence in any EU country, please contact us today for a complimentary consultation on your data storage and security requirements.

Free Ebook
5 Critical Features of a Long-Term Data Storage Infrastructure

Managing your large flow of data presents 5 increasingly complex challenges: Scalability, Capacity, Performance… To learn more about these challenges and how to solve them, fill out the form and download the ebook.