Managed service providers (MSPs) are playing an increasingly critical role in helping businesses of all sizes realize their digital transformation aspirations. The extensive offerings made available to businesses continue to allow them to shift day-to-day management onto you, the MSP, while allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. One of the most notable services being backup and recovery.
We introduced Veeam Availability Console in November 2017, a FREE, cloud-enabled management platform built specifically for service providers. Through this console, service providers can remotely manage and monitor the Availability of their customer’s virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads protected by Veeam solutions with ease. And, in just a few short months, we’ve seen incredible adoption across our global Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner base, with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Today, I’m happy to announce the General Availability (GA) of Veeam Availability Console U1, bringing with it some of the most hotly requested features to help further address the needs of your service provider business.
Enhanced Veeam Agent support
The initial release of Veeam Availability Console was capable of monitoring Veeam Agents deployed and managed by the service provider through Veeam Availability Console. New to U1 is the ability to achieve greater insights into your customer environments with new support that extends to monitoring and alarms for Veeam Agents that are managed by Veeam Backup & Replication. With this new capability, we’re enabling you to extend your monitoring services to even more Veeam customers that purchase their own Veeam Agents, but still want the expertise that you can bring to their business. And yes, this even includes monitoring support for Veeam Agent for Linux instances that are managed by Veeam Backup & Replication.
New user security group
VCSP partners wanting to delegate Veeam Availability Console access without granting complete control (like local administrator privileges) can now take advantage of the new operator role. This role permits access to everything within Veeam Availability Console essential to the remote monitoring and management of customer environments (you can even assign access to your employees on a company-by-company basis), but excludes access to Veeam Availability Console server configuration settings. Now you can assign access to Veeam Availability Console to your staff without exposing settings of the Veeam Availability Console server.
ConnectWise Manage integration
We’re introducing native integration with ConnectWise Manage. Through this new, seamless integration (available in the plugins library tab), the management, monitoring and billing of Veeam Availability Console-powered cloud backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can now be consolidated with your other managed service offerings into the single pane of glass that is ConnectWise Manage. This integration makes it easier and more efficient to expand your services portfolio while making administration of multiple, differing managed services much more efficient.
Matt Baldwin, President of Vertisys said, “This integration is exactly what my business needs to streamline our managed backup and DRaaS offering. The interface is clean and intuitive with just the right number of features. We project a yearly savings of 50 to 60 hours.”
Let’s take a closer look at some of the integration points between Veeam Availability Console and ConnectWise Manage.
Mapping companies
Firstly, the integration will help avoid a lot of manually intensive work by automatically synchronizing and mapping companies present in ConnectWise Manage with those in Veeam Availability Console. Automatic mapping is achieved through the company name. Before mapping is fully-complete, Veeam Availability Console allows you to check over what it’s automatically mapped before committing to the synchronization. If no match is found, mapping can be completed manually to an existing company or through the creation of a new company, with the option to send login credentials for the self-service customer portal, too.
Ticket creation
The integration also enables you to more quickly resolve issues before they impact your customers’ business through automatic ticket creation within ConnectWise Manage from Veeam Availability Console alarms. You can specify from the list of available alarms within Veeam Availability Console all those that are capable of triggering a ticket (e.g. failed backup, exceeding quota, etc.), and to which service board within ConnectWise Manage the ticket is posted. We’ve also enabled you with the capability to set delays (e.g. 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, etc.) between the alarm occurring and the ticket posting, so issues like a temporary connectivity loss that self-resolves doesn’t trigger a ticket immediately. Every ticket created in ConnectWise Manage is automatically bundled with the corresponding configuration, such as representing a computer managed by Veeam Availability Console. This makes it incredibly easy for support engineers to find which component failed and where to go fix it. The integration also works in reverse, so that when tickets are closed within ConnectWise Manage, the corresponding alarm in Veeam Availability Console will be resolved.
Billing
The final part of the integration extends to billing, reducing complexities for you and your customers by consolidating invoices for all the managed services in your portfolio connected to ConnectWise Manage into a single bill. Not only this, but the integration allows for the automatic creation of new products in ConnectWise Manage, or mapping to existing ones. Service providers can select which agreement Veeam Availability Console-powered services should be added to on a per-customer basis, with agreements updated automatically based on activity, quota usage, etc.
Enhanced scalability
Finally, we’ve enhanced the scalability potential of Veeam Availability Console, enabling you to deliver your services to even more customers. The scalability improvements specifically align to the supported number of managed Veeam Backup & Replication servers, and this is especially useful when paired with the enhanced Veeam Agent support discussed earlier. This ensures optimal operation and performance when managing up to 10,000 Veeam Agents and up to 600 Veeam Backup & Replication servers, protecting 150-200 VMs and Veeam Agents each.
This article was provided by our service partner : veeam.com
Tips to backup & restore your SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is often one of the most critical applications in an organization, with too many uses to count. Due to its criticality, your SQL Server and its data should be thoroughly protected. Business operations rely on a core component like Microsoft SQL Server to manage databases and data. The importance of backing up this server and ensuring you have a recovery plan in place is tangible. People want consistent Availability of data. Any loss of critical application Availability can result in decreased productivity, lost sales, lost customer confidence and potentially loss of customers. Does your company have a recovery plan in place to protect its Microsoft SQL Server application Availability? Has this plan been thoroughly tested?
Microsoft SQL Server works on the backend of your critical applications, making it imperative to have a strategy set in place in case something happens to your server. Veeam specifically has tools to back up your SQL Server and restore it when needed. Veeam’s intuitive tool, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server, is easy to use and doesn’t require you to be a database expert to quickly restore the database. This blog post aims to discuss using these tools and what Veeam can offer to help ensure your SQL Server databases are well protected and always available to your business.
The Basics
There are some things you should take note of when using Veeam to back up your Microsoft SQL Server. An important aspect and easy way to ensure your backup is consistent is to check that application-aware processing is enabled for the backup job. Application aware processing is Veeam’s proprietary technology based on Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service. This technology quiescences the applications running on the virtual machine to create a consistent view of data. This is done so there are no unfinished database transactions when a backup is performed. This technology creates a transactionally consistent backup of a running VM minimizing the potential for data loss.
Enabling Application Aware processing is just the first step, you must also consider how you want to handle the transaction logs. Veeam has different options available to help process the transaction logs. The options available are truncate logs, do not truncate logs, or backup logs periodically.
Figure 1: SQL Server Transaction logs Options
Figure 1 shows the Backup logs periodically option is selected in this scenario. This option supports any database restore operation offered through Veeam Backup & Replication. In this case, Veeam periodically will transfer transaction logs to the backup repository and store them with the SQL server VM backup, truncating logs on the original VM. Make sure you have set the recovery model for the required SQL Server database to full or bulk-logged.
If you decide you do not want to truncate logs, Veeam will preserve the logs. This option puts the control into the database administrator’s hands, allowing them to take care of the database logs. The other alternative is to truncate logs, this selection allows Veeam to perform a database restore to the state of the latest restore point. To read more about backing up transaction logs check out this blog post.
Data recovery
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server delivers consistent application Availability through the different restore options it offers to you. These include the ability to restore a database to a specific point in time, restore a database to the same or different server, restore it back to its original location or export to a specified location. Other options include performing restores of multiple databases at once, the ability to perform a table-level recovery or running transaction log replay to perform quick point-in-time restores.
Figure 2: Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server
Recovery is the most important aspect of data Availability. SQL Transaction log backup allows you to back up your transaction logs on a regular basis meeting recovery point objectives (RPOs). This provides not only database recovery options, but also point-in-time database recovery. Transaction-level recovery saves you from a bad transaction such as a table drop, or a mass delete of records. This functionality allows you to do a restore to a point in time right before the bad transaction had occurred, for minimal data loss.
And it is available for FREE!
Veeam offers a variety of free products and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server is one that is included in that bunch. If you are using Veeam Backup Free Edition already, you currently have this Explorer available to you. The free version allows you to view database information, export a database and export a database schema or data. If you’re interested in learning more about what you get with Veeam Backup Free Edition, be sure to download this HitchHikers Guide.
This article was provided by our service partner : veeam.com
Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 3a is now available!
Platform support is a priority at Veeam. Whether that is the latest operating systems, new storage systems or updated hypervisors, we take platform support seriously. Since Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 has been released, a number of ecosystem changes have warranted an update ahead of the upcoming set of Veeam capabilities (due later this year) showcased at VeeamON. A larger update is coming soon, which is why we are referring to this release as Update 3a opposed to Update 4 (which is planned for later in the year). The main capabilities in this release are the new platforms supported as well as over 20 minor enhancements detailed in the KB article.
Update 3a will bring support for the latest VMware and Microsoft platforms that organizations need from Veeam. The list of new platforms supported by Veeam Backup & Replication are:
There are supplemental platforms also supported in this update:
This update is important as it means Veeam Backup & Replication will do the following:
One different notation is the “Preliminary” support for VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 2. Those of you who have been following the weekly forum digest emails have additional insights to the many milestones that had to be achieved to get to this point. This is very important as with a product providing backup in the data center, we cannot take any risk of a false sense of security. These emails are also where you can get the latest from R&D on all the catch points that may arise; namely what we are seeing with vSphere 6.5 Update 2. Support for this release will likely come in an update to 6.5 Update 2 itself. The support statement is clarified well in this forum post, basically stating as it is there is a known issue a critical API for our use failing under load.
To remain on the cutting edge, many organizations like to maintain aggressive policies on upgrading to the latest vSphere, vCloud Director, Windows 10 and Windows Server releases; and ensuring that these platforms are supported for backup should be an important consideration. This is yet another reason why Veeam continues to work hard to deliver updated platform support as soon as possible. As you plan your next moves for your business, you can know that the platform support needed to keep those applications, systems and data available will be there with Veeam.
This article was provided by our service partner : veeam.com
Social Media Malware is Deviant, Destructive
We’ve seen some tricky techniques used by cybercriminals to distribute malware through social media. One common threat begins with a previously compromised Facebook account sending deceptive messages that contain SVG image attachments via Facebook Messenger. (The SVG extention is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation.)
Cybercriminals prefer this XML-based image as it allows dynamic content. This enables the criminals to add malicious JavaScript code right inside the photo itself—in this case, linking to an external site. Users who click on the image find themselves on a website posing as YouTube that pushes a popup to install a browser extension or add-on or to view a video. There are plenty of red flags here like the URL clearly not being YouTube.com, as well as the fact that YouTube does not require any extensions to view videos.
Facebook messenger spreading an SVG image containing a harmful script
An example of a fake YouTube page with malicious browser extension popup
Worm-like propagation
If a you were to install this extension, it will take advantage of your browser access to your Facebook account to secretly mass-message your friends with the same SVG image file—like a worm, this is how it spreads. Victims don’t need to have very many friends for this tactic to be successful at propagating. For instance, if you have over 100 friends, then you only need less than 1% of your friends to fall for this for the scam for it to continue to propagate.
To make matters worse, the extension also downloads Nemucod, a generic malware downloader generally used to download and install a variety of other threats. Usually the go-to threat is ransomware given it’s proven business model for criminals.
Social media managers at risk
Those who manage social media accounts on behalf of businesses are particularly at risk of advanced malware and other cyberattacks. Earlier this spring, a new Windows trojan dubbed Stresspaint was found hidden inside a fake stress-relief app and likely spread through email and Facebook spam campaigns to infect 35,000 users, according to researchers at Radware who discovered the malware.
Stresspaint was rather deviant in the way it stole Facebook account credentials and logged into accounts looking specifically for data such as “each user’s number of friends, whether the account manages a Facebook Page or not, and if the account has a payment method saved in its settings,” according to Bleeping Computer.
Allowing cybercriminals to gain control of brand social media accounts can carry grave consequences such as reputation damage, loss of confidential information, and deeper access into an organization’s network. Last year, HBO was humiliated on their social profiles when the notorious hacker group OurMine breached several the network’s accounts and posted messages before the company finally regained control of their logins.
Crypto users targeted
Following the recent trend in malware, sophisticated variants of existing strains are now aimed at cryptocurrency users. A malicious Google Chrome extension called FacexWorm, which spreads through Facebook Messenger, was found to have morphed with a new ability to hijack cryptocurrency transactions made on a host of popular online exchanges, according to Coindesk. This further underlines the importance of exercising caution with the information you share on social media to avoid being a target, particularly if you are a user of cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency scams are another common threat that spreads throughout social media. Twitter is particularly notorious an outbreak of crypto scam bots that pose as high-profile tech leaders and industry influencers. Learn more about this type scam in my previous post.
Don’t let your guard down
Given the nature of social networks, many are likely to consider themselves to be in the company of friends on sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, this assumption can be dangerous when you begin to trust links on social sites more than you would in your email inbox or other websites. For instance, a simple bot-spam message on Twitter was able to grant a hacker access to a Pentagon official’s computer, according to a New York Times report published last year.
It’s wise to be wary of clicking on all links, even those sent by friends, family or professional connections, as compromised social media accounts are often used to spread scams, phishing, and other types of cyberattacks. After all, just one wrong click can lead to an avalanche of cyber woes, such as identity theft, data loss, and damaged devices.
This article was provided by our service partner : webroot.com
Veeam Availability Console U1 is now available
Managed service providers (MSPs) are playing an increasingly critical role in helping businesses of all sizes realize their digital transformation aspirations. The extensive offerings made available to businesses continue to allow them to shift day-to-day management onto you, the MSP, while allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. One of the most notable services being backup and recovery.
We introduced Veeam Availability Console in November 2017, a FREE, cloud-enabled management platform built specifically for service providers. Through this console, service providers can remotely manage and monitor the Availability of their customer’s virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads protected by Veeam solutions with ease. And, in just a few short months, we’ve seen incredible adoption across our global Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner base, with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Today, I’m happy to announce the General Availability (GA) of Veeam Availability Console U1, bringing with it some of the most hotly requested features to help further address the needs of your service provider business.
Enhanced Veeam Agent support
The initial release of Veeam Availability Console was capable of monitoring Veeam Agents deployed and managed by the service provider through Veeam Availability Console. New to U1 is the ability to achieve greater insights into your customer environments with new support that extends to monitoring and alarms for Veeam Agents that are managed by Veeam Backup & Replication. With this new capability, we’re enabling you to extend your monitoring services to even more Veeam customers that purchase their own Veeam Agents, but still want the expertise that you can bring to their business. And yes, this even includes monitoring support for Veeam Agent for Linux instances that are managed by Veeam Backup & Replication.
New user security group
VCSP partners wanting to delegate Veeam Availability Console access without granting complete control (like local administrator privileges) can now take advantage of the new operator role. This role permits access to everything within Veeam Availability Console essential to the remote monitoring and management of customer environments (you can even assign access to your employees on a company-by-company basis), but excludes access to Veeam Availability Console server configuration settings. Now you can assign access to Veeam Availability Console to your staff without exposing settings of the Veeam Availability Console server.
ConnectWise Manage integration
We’re introducing native integration with ConnectWise Manage. Through this new, seamless integration (available in the plugins library tab), the management, monitoring and billing of Veeam Availability Console-powered cloud backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can now be consolidated with your other managed service offerings into the single pane of glass that is ConnectWise Manage. This integration makes it easier and more efficient to expand your services portfolio while making administration of multiple, differing managed services much more efficient.
Matt Baldwin, President of Vertisys said, “This integration is exactly what my business needs to streamline our managed backup and DRaaS offering. The interface is clean and intuitive with just the right number of features. We project a yearly savings of 50 to 60 hours.”
Let’s take a closer look at some of the integration points between Veeam Availability Console and ConnectWise Manage.
Mapping companies
Firstly, the integration will help avoid a lot of manually intensive work by automatically synchronizing and mapping companies present in ConnectWise Manage with those in Veeam Availability Console. Automatic mapping is achieved through the company name. Before mapping is fully-complete, Veeam Availability Console allows you to check over what it’s automatically mapped before committing to the synchronization. If no match is found, mapping can be completed manually to an existing company or through the creation of a new company, with the option to send login credentials for the self-service customer portal, too.
Ticket creation
The integration also enables you to more quickly resolve issues before they impact your customers’ business through automatic ticket creation within ConnectWise Manage from Veeam Availability Console alarms. You can specify from the list of available alarms within Veeam Availability Console all those that are capable of triggering a ticket (e.g. failed backup, exceeding quota, etc.), and to which service board within ConnectWise Manage the ticket is posted. We’ve also enabled you with the capability to set delays (e.g. 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, etc.) between the alarm occurring and the ticket posting, so issues like a temporary connectivity loss that self-resolves doesn’t trigger a ticket immediately. Every ticket created in ConnectWise Manage is automatically bundled with the corresponding configuration, such as representing a computer managed by Veeam Availability Console. This makes it incredibly easy for support engineers to find which component failed and where to go fix it. The integration also works in reverse, so that when tickets are closed within ConnectWise Manage, the corresponding alarm in Veeam Availability Console will be resolved.
Billing
The final part of the integration extends to billing, reducing complexities for you and your customers by consolidating invoices for all the managed services in your portfolio connected to ConnectWise Manage into a single bill. Not only this, but the integration allows for the automatic creation of new products in ConnectWise Manage, or mapping to existing ones. Service providers can select which agreement Veeam Availability Console-powered services should be added to on a per-customer basis, with agreements updated automatically based on activity, quota usage, etc.
Enhanced scalability
Finally, we’ve enhanced the scalability potential of Veeam Availability Console, enabling you to deliver your services to even more customers. The scalability improvements specifically align to the supported number of managed Veeam Backup & Replication servers, and this is especially useful when paired with the enhanced Veeam Agent support discussed earlier. This ensures optimal operation and performance when managing up to 10,000 Veeam Agents and up to 600 Veeam Backup & Replication servers, protecting 150-200 VMs and Veeam Agents each.
This article was provided by our service partner : veeam.com
3 MSP Best Practices for Protecting Users
Cyberattacks are on the rise, with UK firms being hit, on average, by over 230,000 attacks in 2017. Managed service providers (MSPs) need to make security a priority in 2018, or they will risk souring their relationships with clients. By following 3 simple MSP best practices consisting of user education, backup and recovery, and patch management, your MSP can enhance security, mitigate overall client risk, and grow revenue.
User Education
An effective anti-virus is essential to keeping businesses safe; however, It isn’t enough anymore. Educating end users through security awareness training can reduce the cost and impact of user-generated infections and breaches, while also helping clients meet the EU’s new GDPR compliance requirements. Cybercriminals’ tactics are evolving and increasingly relying on user error to circumvent security protocols. Targeting businesses through end users via social engineering is a rising favorite among new methods of attack.
Common social engineering attacks include:
Highly topical, relevant, and timely real-life educational content can minimize the impact of security breaches caused by user error. By training clients on social engineering and other topics including ransomware, email, passwords, and data protection, you can help foster a culture of security while adding serious value for your clients.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans
It’s important for your MSP to stress the importance of backups. If hit with ransomware without a secure backup, clients face the unsavory options of either paying up or losing important data. Offering clients automated, cloud-based backup makes it virtually impossible to infect backup data and provides additional benefits, like a simplified backup process, offsite data storage, and anytime/anywhere access. In the case of a disaster, there should be a recovery plan in place. Even the most secure systems can be infiltrated. Build your plan around business-critical data, a disaster recovery timeline, and protocol for disaster communications.
Things to consider for your disaster communications
Once a plan is in place, it is important to monitor and test that it has been implemented effectively. A common failure with a company’s backup strategy occurs when companies fail to test their backups. Then, disaster strikes and only then do they discover they cannot restore their data. A disaster recovery plan should be tested regularly and updated as needed. Once a plan is developed, it doesn’t mean that it’s effective or set in stone.
Patch Management
Consider it an iron law; patch and update everything immediately following a release. As soon as patches/updates are released and tested, they should be applied for maximum protection. The vast majority of updates are security related and need to be kept up-to-date. Outdated technology–especially an operating system (OS)–is one of the most common weaknesses exploited in a cyberattack. Without updates, you leave browsers and other software open to ransomware and exploit kits. By staying on top of OS updates, you can prevent extremely costly cyberattacks. For example, in 2017 Windows 10 saw only 15% of total files deemed to be malware, while Windows 7 saw 63%. These figures and more can be found in Webroot’s 2018 Threat Report.
Patching Process
Patching is a never-ending cycle, and it’s good practice to audit your existing environment by creating a complete inventory of all production systems used. Remember to standardize systems to use the same operating systems and application software. This makes the patching process easier. Additionally, assess vulnerabilities against inventory/control lists by separating the vulnerabilities that affect your systems from those that don’t. This will make it easier for your business to classify and prioritize vulnerabilities, as each risk should be assessed by the likelihood of the threat occurring, the level of vulnerability, and the cost of recovery. Once it’s determined which vulnerabilities are of the highest importance, develop and test the patch. The patch should then deploy without disrupting uptime—an automated patch system can help with the process.
Follow these best practices and your MSP can go a lot further toward delivering the security that your customers increasingly need and demand. Not only you improve customer relationships, but you’ll also position your MSP as a higher-value player in the market, ultimately fueling growth. Security is truly an investment MSPs with an eye toward growth can’t afford to ignore.
This article was provided by our service partner : Webroot
How to build a disaster recovery plan with Veeam
Here’s a true story from one of our customers. A gas explosion resulted in a major power failure downtown, which in turn left the company’s primary data center offline for a week. This is a classic example of an IT Disaster – unexpected and unpredictable, disrupting business continuity and affecting Always-On operations. We can only imagine how much it could cost that company to stay offline for a week (as much as losing their business, I’d say), if they didn’t have a reliable disaster recovery plan and an Availability solution to execute this plan.
A solid disaster recovery plan makes your company resilient to IT disruptions and able to restore your services in case of disaster with minimal to no impact on users and business operations. It’s not just making regular backups, but a complex IT infrastructure assessment and documenting (including hardware, software, networks, power and facilities), business impact analysis of applications and workloads and planning on staff, roles and risk assessment. And above all, there’s an essential testing and exercising of your disaster recovery plan. If you don’t test, how would you know that it works as expected?
Unlike physical infrastructures with all their complexity, virtualization gives more flexibility in management and processes allowing you to do more with less. For virtualized data centers, Veeam delivers joint capabilities of enabling data Availability and infrastructure management. By using Veeam Availability Suite, you cover multiple points in your DR plan at once and get:
These also address compliance audit needs by providing you with up-to-date information on backed-up workloads, backups reliability and actual data recovery time versus your SLAs. If staying compliant and ready for audits is important for you, I recommend you read the new white paper by Hannes Kasparick, Mastering compliance, audits and disaster recovery planning with Veeam.
Replication as a core disaster recovery technology
DR planning includes defining the lowest possible RTO to minimize the disruption of business operations. In terms of ability to restore failed operations in minutes, replication mechanism wins the game allowing you to instantly switch the failed workload to its ready-to-use “clone” to get the lowest-possible RTO. For DR purposes, standby replicas of production VMs are stored on a remote secondary site or in the cloud. Even if the production site goes down, like in my example with a major power failure, a remote site remains unaffected by the disaster and can take the load.
Test your disaster recovery plan!
All data security and management standards (ISO family is not an exception) imply DR plan testing as a mandatory exercise. You can never know if everything will work as expected in cases of real disasters until you try it and run the planned procedures in advance. DR simulation will also allow you to ensure that your personnel are well-prepared for extreme IT situations and everyone mentioned in your DR plan is aware of the activities they need to perform. If you discover any drawbacks during DR testing – either human or software-related – you’ll have a good chance to fix your DR plan accordingly and thus potentially avoid serious disruptions in your business continuity.
Automated recovery verification for backups and replica restore points built in Veeam Backup & Replication (for no additional fees!) will save you much time and additional resources for testing. SureReplica allows to boot replicated VMs (VMware only for v9) to the necessary restore point in an isolated Virtual Lab and automatically perform heartbeat, ping and application tests against them. Also, you have an option to run your own customized tests – all without any impact on your production.
Final word
Disaster recovery planning is not just another bureaucracy, but a set of measures to maintain an organization’s business continuity. Built in compliance with international regulations and standards, a DR plan gives your customers a high level of confidence in your non-stop services, data security and Availability. Veeam helps you to stay compliant with both internal and external IT regulations, be ready for audit and be able to restore any system or data in minutes.
This article was provided by our service partner : veeam.com
Defining the Value of Technology Teams
Technology Teams are made up of a lot more than just the service technicians working with your customers. Every Technology Team is made up of a combination of people that account for every step of the Customer Journey. Sales, finance, even marketing…they’re all a part of your Technology Teams and enable you to reach your clients, making their jobs and lives a little easier and helping you stay ahead of technology.
Technology Teams are formed to deliver a unique set of solutions and services. Within one company, multiple Technology Teams can combine to form a resilient Technology Organization. ConnectWise provides a tailored experience to fit the customer journey by turning the ConnectWise suite into a platform of microservices. Building on the foundation of the Solutions Menu, we will focus on Technology Workers.
Building Value
As a business with your sights set on current and future success, you have to find ways to build resiliency into your business. A key way to do this is by building out multiple Technology Teams to continuously increase and diversify the value you offer to your clients. The more you can do to cover their needs, now and into the future, the more you’ll be able to serve the needs of your current customers and attract new ones.
Get Specialized
So why not just have one big team in your company, with every resource managing all of the information they need for each customer’s needs? Every Technology Team is going to have a unique approach to solving customer problems, whether in sales, services or billing, and you’ll want to have people dedicated to making sure those unique approaches are supported. Instead of overwhelming your team with the heavy load of understanding everything about every one of your customers.
No one can be a master of everything, so allow your Technology Teams to focus only on expertise in their specific area. By dividing your business efforts to focus on each specific Technology Team, you’ll be more efficient, your team will feel more in control, and your customers will feel like you really understand their needs.
Take the Lead
Once your Technology Teams are leading the way in meeting your customers’ varied—and growing—needs, they’ll be responsible for guiding your customers through every part of the customer journey.
Mastering each step of the customer journey for each Technology Team enables them to provide excellent customer service, laying the groundwork for long-term relationships that keep your customers happy and loyal.
Where to Start
Fortunately, you’re probably already doing this without realizing it. Do you have a list of services you offer? Those probably line up pretty nicely to some of the Technology Teams already. Now you’ll just need to conduct a gap analysis to find out what you’ve got covered and what still needs to have resources put toward it.
A gap analysis looks at your current performance to help you pinpoint the difference between your current and ideal states of business. Get started by answering these three deceptively simple questions with input from your team:
Keep working toward full coverage for every Technology Team your customers are looking for, and seeing every client through the steps of the customer journey and before long, you’ll be meeting and exceeding your business goals.
This article was provided by our service partner : Connectwise
Automating Employee Onboarding in Active Directory
Employee onboarding is a task that is ripe for automation. Spend any time in the tech industry and you know that Active Directory (AD) helps improve workflow and operational services. In other words, it’s critical to an IT organization. When hired, every employee should be given an Active Directory user account, an email mailbox, access to various operating systems, a home folder with specific permissions available only to them, and so on.
However, AD is a big part of employee onboarding that many organizations are still doing manually. In many companies, the helpdesk is still manually opening Active Directory Users & Computers, creating a new user, and adding that user to a specific set of groups. This ultimately increases the risk of messing up that person’s other responsibilities within their account. Again, this is something automation can alleviate! And this is where Kennected comes in. Because staff onboarding is one of those tasks that’s performed hundreds of times and rarely changes, it’s a perfect candidate for automation even used for dbs check.
So, how do you go about automating onboarding in AD?
One of the easiest ways to automate AD tasks is with PowerShell – an automating management structure. By using a freely available PowerShell module, you can create scripts to do just about anything with AD.
For our purposes, we need to create a script to make a new user account for an employee and potentially add it to a few common groups. To do this, download a copy of Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) which will give you the Active Directory PowerShell module. Once you do this, ensure you’re on a company domain-joined computer and that you have the appropriate rights to create new users.
In the Active Directory PowerShell module, there is a command called “New-AdUser.” There are lots of ways to use this command but below is one of the most common ways. In this PowerShell code, we’ll generate a random password and then use it along with a first name, last name and username to create a new AD user.
Here’s an example of what this code looks like:
That’s it! No mouse clicking involved.
Once the above actions have been completed, we can move on to another useful AD onboarding command called “Add-AdGroupMember.” This will add the user that was just created to a few groups in a single line:
One of the great things about automating employee onboarding with PowerShell is that once the code is built, it can be used for one – or even one hundred – employees with no extra effort.
For example, perhaps you have a ton of new employees you need provision for in AD. By using the “Import-CSV” command, you can read each row in that CSV file and run the code we just went over.
This example assumes you have a CSV with the columns “FirstName” and “LastName.”
Here it is exemplified below:
These are only a few of the many user onboarding tools available when you automate employee onboarding in Active Directory. If your organization has a predefined process with specific rules that must be followed, this could be just the beginning of a much larger employee onboarding process that can be 100% automated.
This article was provided by our service partner Connectwise.
GDPR
As the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) edges closer, we’re looking back on the five most significant stories during the lead up to its implementation. Read about GDPR’s impact on data security and find out how to get prepared with five steps to compliance.
What aspect of GDPR will have the biggest impact on you or your business? Let us know in the comments below!
GDPR Myths
On April 14, 2016, the EU received its final legislative approval for GDPR, making the changes official as of May 25, 2018. Many myths surround the legislation, stirring confusion among those affected. One major myth is that GDPR compliance is focused on a fixed point in time, similar to the Y2K bug. However, GDPR will be an ongoing journey that requires a complete change to many company procedures. The regulation will begin in May 2018, so businesses may not be pleased to discover they are currently in the “grace period,” and there will not be another one after the implementation date.
Data Breached
We discovered in 2017 that many corporations are far too negligent when it comes to securely storing sensitive consumer data. It seemed like hardly a week passed without another major data breach making headlines. The year saw Equifax fall victim to the largest data breach in corporate history, Uber conceal a breach affecting 57 million users for over a year, and more than a million patients’ records stolen from the NHS’s database, to name just a few high profile cases. GDPR will not stop data breaches entirely, but the introduction of fines as high as €20 million, or 4% of annual turnover, for noncompliance should force companies to take their data responsibilities more serious.
Brexit
Britain’s decision to exit the European Union has added confusion concerning GDPR compliance for companies within the UK. In September, however, the UK updated their data protection legislation, which brings GDPR wholesale into UK law. This confirms that the UK also recognises the importance of data protection and suggests UK companies will need to be at least as careful as their EU peers. Also, any company dealing with EU citizen data (even those located outside of the EU), will be expected to comply with these standards.
Google and the Right to be Forgotten
Google received 2.4 million takedown requests under the EU’s updated ‘right to be forgotten’ laws, which have been in place for search engines since 2014. GDPR will now expand on this right to certain data subjects- giving people more control over deletion of their data once it’s no longer necessary for a company to have. Data subject rights have been enhanced, so companies that process personal data will be expected to have procedures in place to act on requests in the proscribed timeframes.
Facebook
Facebook have been in the news a lot over data rights, most recently for allegedly allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of more than 50 million Facebook users. Previously, the ICO had gotten WhatsApp to sign an undertaking in which it committed publicly to not share personal data with its parent company Facebook until the two services could do it in a GDPR-compliant way. GDPR is clearly bearing down on big companies that have been negligent with customer data previously.
How to get prepared
Are you prepared for GDPR? A company can take the following steps to help become GDPR-ready:
‘Smishing’: SMS and the Emerging Trend of Scamming Mobile Users via Text Messages
Text messages are now a common way for people to engage with brands and services, with many now preferring texts over email using whatsapp and many other apps, if you want to customized your app and get a few extra benefits download whatsapp mods here. But today’s scammers have taken a liking to text messages or smishing, too, and are now targeting victims with text message scams sent via shortcodes instead of traditional email-based phishing attacks.
What do we mean by shortcodes
Businesses typically use shortcodes to send and receive text messages with customers. You’ve probably used them before—for instance, you may have received shipping information from FedEx via the shortcode ‘46339’. Other shortcode uses include airline flight confirmations, identity verification, and routine account alerts. Shortcodes are typically four to six digits in the United States, but different countries have different formats and number designations.
The benefits of shortcodes are fairly obvious. Texts can be more immediate and convenient, making it easier for customers to access links and interact with their favorite brands and services. One major drawback, however, is the potential to be scammed by a SMS-based phishing attack, or ‘Smishing’ attack. (Not surprisingly given the cybersecurity field’s fondness for combining words, smishing is a combination of SMS and phishing.)
All the Dangers of Phishing Attacks, Little of the Awareness
The most obvious example of a smishing attack is a text message containing a link to mobile malware. Mistakenly clicking on this type of link can lead to a malicious app being installed on your smartphone. Once installed, mobile malware can be used to log your keystrokes, steal your identity, or hold your valuable files for ransom. Many of the traditional dangers in opening emails and attachments from unknown senders are the same in smishing attacks, but many people are far less familiar with this type of attack and therefore less likely to be on guard against it.
Smishing for Aid Dollars
Another possible risk in shortcodes is that sending a one-word response can trigger a transaction, allowing a charge to appear on your mobile carrier’s bill. When a natural disaster strikes, it is common for charities to use shortcodes to make it incredibly easy to donate money to support relief efforts. For instance, if you text “PREVENT” to the shortcode 90999, you will donate $10 USD to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
But this also makes it incredibly easy for a scammer to tell you to text “MONSOON” to a shortcode number while posing as a legitimate organization. These types of smishing scams can lead to costly fraudulent charges on your phone bill, not to mention erode aid agencies ability to solicit legitimate donations from a wary public. A good resource for determining the authenticity of a shortcode in the United States is the U.S. Short Code Directory. This site allows you to look up brands and the shortcodes they use, or vice versa.
Protect yourself from Smishing Attacks
While a trusted mobile security app can help you stay protected from a variety of mobile threats, avoiding smishing attacks demands a healthy dose of cyber awareness. Be skeptical of any text messages you receive from unknown senders and assume messages are risky until you are sure you know the sender or are expecting the message. Context is also very important. If a contact’s phone is lost or stolen, that contact can be impersonated. Make sure the message makes sense coming from that contact.
This article was provided by our service partner : webroot.com