Data Protection & Security in Cloud Backup for Business

Druva inSync now available for iPads and iPhones

Published February 14, 2011 | by Jaspreet | in Data Protection, Druva inSync, News & Events

I have a confession. I admit I’m a former Windows user turned Mac Geek (no, I don’t have a black turtleneck, you have to draw the line somewhere). Of course, being an avid Mac user I spend a lot of time on my iPad, checking email, reading blogs, reviewing documents, checking designs, surfing the web, downloading apps etc.

Druva inSync Login on iPad

Seems like I continuously have my head in my iPhone these days too, mostly for work (though I have been known to play the odd game or three of Fruit Ninja – highest score so far is 645).

Up to now, if I ever needed a file urgently, say a PowerPoint deck or a PDF, I would either pull that from my laptop, or have to dig it out of email.

With the recent release of inSync 4.1 support for iPhone & iPad, now all of the files that are on my laptop I can access via backups on my iPhone or iPad using the inSync remote client.

The inSync client installs just like any other app. Once installed it’s very easy to use, you configure it to point to your inSync server, add your username and password and voila, you now have access to all of your backed up data over time. Simple.

The 4.1 release of inSync Enterprise also included some important and exciting additions, such as HyperCache, multi-admin support, and Active Directory integration, making it extremely easy to import and maintain users. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, already we have plans for additional development to add more functionality and extend our protection beyond the laptop to iPads, iPhones and more. Exciting times ahead…

Oops, I Lost My Laptop !

Published November 18, 2009 | by Jaspreet | in Case Studies, Data Protection

According to the recent study by Ponemon Institute, “Airport Insecurity: The Case of Lost Laptops”, sponsored by Dell, business travellers lose more than 12,000 laptops per week in U.S. airports.

According to the same study, which examined losses at 106 of the U.S.’s largest airports, the top 36 “Class B” airports averaged 286 lost laptops per month, which is about one laptop lost every 2.6 hours at these airports. The study also found that only 66% of the lost laptops were never recovered and about a third of those recovered were reclaimed.

Enterprise data is more dispersed and diverse than ever. And with over 30% corporate data sitting on PCs, administrators can no longer hold the end user responsible for protection of this critical corporate data.

The the above statistics clearly states the need for the following two solution on every single corporate PC -

Data Protection Solution – Designed for laptops, keeping in mind the mobile workforce
Disk Encryption and Data Leakage Prevention Solution

Shameless Plug: Druvaa inSync is a simple, fast scalable and solution especially designed for mobile workforce. Learn more here – http://www.druvaa.com/insync/laptop-backup

Why so much delay in inSync 3.1 and Phoenix ??

Published November 9, 2009 | by Jaspreet | in Data Protection, Technology & Innovation

Well, first let me confess that inSync v3.1 took much more time than we planned. Time We had initially planned to release inSync by July 09 and Phoenix public beta by Sep 09.

In Short -
We are working on a new storage engine codename Blackbird (based on the SR-71 legend). The new engine will use application specific deduplication technology to improve performance and bandwidth/storage savings.

Initially planned for inSync v3.1 and Phoenix v1.0 , this now will be available in next major releases.

The longer version -
For the past two years, we have been doing experiments on various different algorithms for global source based data deduplication. While releasing inSync v2.0 we finalized on chunk based or variable-block based data deduplication, because of the simple fact that it was tough to find similar data blocks at natural block boundaries across different users. We also worked on the performance which gradually improved over time.

While the approach was reasonably accurate, there was a scope of significant improvement. We realized that 90% of the backup data on customer PCs comes from the documents and PST files, hence something totally focussed on PST files can dramatically improve the deduplication performance.

Also, while working on Phoenix, we came across a bigger challenge of finding duplicates across different data sources within the enterprise. We soon realized that simple block based approach will not take us too far. We also realized that most of the vendors use fixed and variable block/chunk based hashing techniques. This works well for them, because they have been treating backups as “byte streams”, and the only way to remove duplicates is fixed or variable size data deduplication.

Looking at various data types and possible ways improve, we could clearly see two fundamental changes in our approach which could bring paradigm shift in data deduplication -

For accuracy – Application aware data deduplication
For performance – Hierarchical block based deduplication

Application aware deduplication, can actually pin point duplicates across PST file attachments and normal office documents.

On the PC side, majority of the data is office documents and Email files. This makes it simpler to introduce the new approach, but still a lot of work needs to be done to productise it. For Phoenix, the problem is much bigger and would take some more time to solve.

The new engine should be ready soon. It would be shipped first in inSync v4.0 early next year and then in Phoenix v2.0 . In the next few posts, I will try and get some benchmark data.

The Dark Side of The Cloud

Published February 11, 2009 | by Jaspreet | in Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Technology & Innovation

We all pay our monthly electricity bills. I am sure no one wants to own a power plant But, on the contrary most of us own cars and very few rent it for daily use.

The two most important factors which decide how we want to use these two services are -

The cost of ownership
The cost and effort in maintenance

Cloud computing today promises benefits (which are similar to using electricity) for computing, hosted application and storage. Although the offer is very lucrative, but their is a dark side to this as well.

The post just tries to some aspects which you must keep in mind before making the plunge.

The Dark Side of the Cloud

Application Integration

Most of the services like SimpleDB, EBS, SQS still needs a lot of application integration and porting. And that’s something enterprises hate. It’s one of the primary reasons the X86 architecture and IPV4 are so widely used. Even if someone ports the application to these services, he is guaranteed to be locked with it for the rest of his life

Services like salesforce.com don’t need any porting, but there have been cases of access to data being refused customers who wish to change the vendor.

Uptime and QoS Guarantees

Most of these services including Amazon and Salesforce do not give uptime and QoS guarantees. The billing and EULA are free from any such clauses.

And when there is a downtime, you can’t do much than start calling the support center to play the blame-game. And its funny when see the the cloud provider talking the same language to its service provider

It’s No Way Even Close to Perfect

Take a recent unfortunate situation for Ylastic, a company that provides a single front-end to manage Amazon Web Services, who was recently an unwillingly participant in one of these cloud bursts. Ylastic noticed something strange occurring with one of the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Elastic Block Stores (EBS).

But something wasn’t quite right. And over the course of a few hours the story played out via Twitter as Ylastic noticed issues with its EBS instances. When the problem was finally identified, Ylastic discovered that the data could not be recovered. They were forced to recover from an earlier snapshot, that contained only a subset of the data.

Finally, after recovering what data they could, Ylastic had to go to its customers with the unfortunate message:

“AWS has finally terminated the frozen instances. But the EBS volume is still detaching and has been for hours. It doesn’t seem like we will be able to get into it at this point. Some time in the last month or so, our EBS snapshotting of this stuck volume seems to have stopped working correctly…. We have gone back and run through all the snapshots, and the last good snapshot that we have is from October 1.”

Who was at fault? Amazon? Ylastic? Truly, no one. It was simply a combination of issues. A perfect storm in the cloud, as it were. And that perfect storm resulted in data loss for Ylastic and its customer base.

Control

Take for example the case when you take up a cheap hosted website plan on a shared server. You can still negotiate uptime and QoS guarantees. But, what you just can’t control is a SPAM King sharing the same server and IP address with you

Most likely you will face two problems -

A slow response on the website- the SPAM King has taken up the computing
Public mail servers will mark the mail traffic from you as spam

Plus, there been many stories around salesforce (read this and this) and twitter getting hacked.

ROI

Cost of ownership for a power plant is so damn high, that you just can’t afford one even if you are not happy with your power company. That exactly has to be the case for the cloud. No one would think of hosting his own solution when the cloud offers the same peanuts.