Entries by ktrang

Watchdog your entire IT environment with Veeam ONE

With data becoming so valuable these days, organizations can’t afford to have their IT systems unavailable even for minutes. Monitoring your environment plays a key role to ensure Availability. You need to be alerted when things could go wrong and when it’s time to fix issues before they negatively impact your business. Veeam ONE does just that, […]

Re-Thinking ‘Patch and Pray’

When WannaCry ransomware spread throughout the world last year by exploiting vulnerabilities for which there were patches, we security “pundits” stepped up the call to patch, as we always do. In a post on LinkedIn Greg Thompson, Vice President of Global Operational Risk & Governance at Scotiabank expressed his frustration with the status quo. Greg […]

Spectre, Meltdown, & the CLIMB Exploit: A Primer on Vulnerabilities, Exploits, & Payloads

In light of the publicity, panic, and lingering despair around Spectre and Meltdown, I thought this might be a good time to clear up the differences between vulnerabilities, exploits, and malware. Neither Spectre nor Meltdown are exploits or malware. They are vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities don’t hurt people, exploits and malware do. To understand this distinction, witness […]

Veeam – Linux VM: A place to back up MySQL

What does it take to back up MySQL on a Linux VM? This is a riddle we sometimes hear at Veeam: When running on a Linux VM, how does one quiesce MySQL databases? Unfortunately, there are not many new ways to answer this riddle, and the answers we currently have are already tried and tested! The answers […]

Microsoft Releases More Patches for Meltdown & Spectre

Microsoft informed users on Tuesday that it released additional patches for the CPU vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre, and removed antivirus compatibility checks in Windows 10. Meltdown and Spectre allow malicious applications to bypass memory isolation and access sensitive data. Meltdown attacks are possible due to CVE-2017-5754, while Spectre attacks are possible due to […]

Getting started with Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server

Believe it or not, I used to work a lot with Microsoft SQL Server. While I did not call myself a database administrator (DBA), I did know my way around a database or two. Since I’ve been at Veeam, I have always enjoyed telling the Veeam story around using SQL Server as a critical application […]

Best practices from Veeam support on using tape

When speaking about backup storage strategies, Veeam’s recommendation is to keep the initial backup chain short (7 – 14 points) and use general purpose disk that will allow you to recover data in the shortest amount of time. The long-term retention should come from secondary and tertiary storage, which typically boasts a much lower storage […]

Disaster Recovery Planning

It seems like it’s almost every day that the news reports another major company outage and as a result, the massive operational, financial and reputational consequences experienced, both short- and long-term. Widespread systemic outages first come to mind when considering disasters and threats to business and IT service continuity. But oftentimes, it’s the overlooked, “smaller” […]

Meltdown & Spectre: Where Are We at Now?

Meltdown and Spectre still continue to dominate the security news and the more we delve into it, we are starting to understand the depth and breadth of what this now means for the future of the security landscape. Turns out the three variants of side-channel attacks, Meltdown and two different for Spectre, were discovered back […]

Security : 3 Pitfalls Facing Privacy in 2018

Earlier this month, CES attendees got a taste of the future with dazzling displays of toy robots, smart assistants, and various AI/VR/8K gadgetry. But amid all the remarkable tech innovations on the horizon, one thing is left off the menu: user privacy. As we anticipate the rocky road ahead, there are three major pitfalls that […]