Basically, the cloud is a platform that delivers IT resources to consumers in a fundamentally different way than ever before. Programs, services and infrastructure are provided on an as needed basis, allowing organizations to use and pay for technology when you need it, as you would for gas or electricity. One of the most frequent questions we hear is “Where is the cloud actually located, is it hovering somewhere?” Although this whole technological revolution is termed “the cloud”, the data itself resides and has to be processed in a physical location. Here at Datotel, our secure cloud platform is located in our data center, a 30,000 square foot monitored, highly reliable and accessible data center. According to Ameren UE, the power feeding our facility (located in the historic St. Louis Globe Democrat building), has not had an outage in over 17 years.

So now that you’re seeing the possibilities of paying for technology as you need it, how can you make this work for your business? To start, you won’t have to worry about your technology; industry experts can now manage that infrastructure for you 24/7/365. Second, you’ve lowered your risk exposure and finally, the big benefit; you’ve lowered your total cost of IT ownership. This shift to the cloud allows you to focus on your business vs. the operational elements of IT. Think about it like this, in the 1800s, factories had their own, individual power plants to produce power to run the plant. Then, in the late 1800’s, Edison opened a commercially available power plant and invented the national grid system. Gradually, factories moved away from their individual power sources and converted to the commercially available system. The cloud revolution is very similar to this scenario that took place over 200 years ago.

VMware statistics show that average physical server utilization is less than 6 percent, in other words, most companies are leaving the vast majority of their assets unused. Now add up the additional expense of maintenance, power usage, people and replacing out-of-date technology every 36 months; paying for only what you use starts to make a lot of sense. The pay as you go model allows you to have scalable expenses for technology that match your revenue and growth streams.

Consider wanting to add on 50 new employees. Do you have enough storage, processing power, installation and maintenance capabilities to do all this in house? You would if you were working in the cloud. In minutes you would be able to add the emails for the additional users. No waiting, scheduling, appointments or service time needed.

So you’re ready to move to a pay for what you need, cloud solution- likely your next question is about security of your data and information. You’re not alone; a 2011 LinkedIn survey showed that 56% of business owners had concerns about the security of the cloud. Common concerns about the cloud involve the concept of a third party storing your critical data. It’s important to remember that regardless of where it’s stored, it’s your data. At Datotel, we work hand-in-hand with our customers to make sure that the appropriate levels of security are in place. In fact, we have a team devoted to compliance, governance and security protocol. But you don’t just have to take our word for it; we are also continually audited and verified by 3^rd parties and are governed by SSAE 16 and other compliance regulations.

Whether your goals are to free up resources, improve redundancy, lower risk, become more flexible or lower costs; the bottom line is that moving to the cloud is the next big thing and it’s already changing the way our customers do business.

Ready to move your company to the cloud? Request a one-to-one information session or schedule a tour of our Downtown St. Louis data center —we look forward to hearing from you.

According to TechCrunch, this year’s Cyber Monday sales hit a record 1.25 Billion, up 20% over 2010 spending. Based on reports, 10 million people made online purchases that day and of those individuals, nearly 11% did so using a mobile device, a significant increase from the 3.9% in 2010. As mobile usage continues to rise at a rapid pace, the question becomes: will Cyber Monday be renamed Mobile Monday at some point?

Additionally, 50% of this year’s online purchases were made from work computers. Speaking of which, we spotted this infographic on the topic of Cyber Monday in the Workplace.

Locally, for the third year in a row, Datotel President David Brown gave several interviews on best practices for online safety and security:

• KSDK.com: Safety Tips for Deal Seekers on Cyber Monday, Part 1
• KSDK.com: Safety Tips for Deal Seekers on Cyber Monday, Part 2
• Fox2Now.com Cyber Monday Shopping
• Fox2Now.com: Cyber Monday Security
• St. Louis Business Journal: Cyber Monday: St. Louis web traffic spikes, especially over lunch

Lastly, since it’s still a *relatively* recent event, here’s a look back:
The History of Cyber Monday [Infographic]

Enjoy!
@datotel

Working in the backup, recovery and restore industry, I’ve come to the sad realization that many organizations, both big or small, feel adequately secure having any sort of backup solution on hand – then something happens and they try and restore their data.

In the last little while, I’ve come across several business owners who thought that they had a great backup and recovery process in place for their organization – that in the event of a data loss, they could easily and seamlessly restore their data. I use the word “thought” as they recently found out that although they did indeed have a backup process in place, the backups were either 1) failing 2) not providing sufficient protection for all their data or 3) they simply couldn’t restore the data they needed.

Despite what these owners thought, their backup and recovery process wasn’t protecting them. Unfortunately, they found out the hard way that it is not about the backup – it’s all about the recovery. Although painful, this did identify a need for a better data protection strategy and created an opportunity for Datotel to speak with them about a cloud backup and recovery solution with the proven ability to recover. This kind of data loss event didn’t happen again. They now realize that it isn’t about the backup…it’s about the ability to recover that’s vital!

One of the leading mistakes an organization makes is considering recovery as part of their backup plan. This type of thinking is backwards. Backup should actually be treated as part of a bigger disaster recovery plan.

The most granular way to describe data recovery is the process of retrieving lost data from damaged, failed, corrupted or inaccessible secondary storage media when, for some reason, it cannot be accessed in the conventional way. Fortunately, thanks to data recovery technology, in most instances, data loss can be recovered… with the right tools.

There are many technical solutions from tape to cloud-based backup with pros and cons to each; but any backup and recovery solution is no good if it isn’t adequately maintained or checked on a regular basis. Organizations change over time, and whether you’re conducting backup and recovery yourself, or relying on an outside resource, the backup and recovery process needs to adapt to meet those changing needs. Data backup is an insurance plan, and with any insurance plan, you are looking to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. But it isn’t enough to just have an insurance plan; you need a recovery plan as well. Unfortunately, many people are not that concerned about the recovery plan until it is too late. The focus has always been on data backup instead of on the reason WHY to backup data – to recover and restore the data when needed.

Without ensuring you can successfully restore your data with your current backup solution, you are essentially ignoring the risks involved with data loss, instead of mitigating it. Organizations that play with fire eventually get burned. According to IDC, 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year. That translates to 4.6 million data loss episodes. Don’t be one of the ones that can’t recover. To ensure you can recover, ask yourself the following:

- Can you ensure data integrity by checking for corrupt data?
- Can you run a restore simulation to ensure data restorability?
- When was the last time you verified that all aspects of your data protection are in place and being met?

If it has been a while, maybe today would be a good day to try a restore, before you find yourself in a tight spot.

Thanks for reading,
David

@ddbrown

In speaking with other CEOs about data management issues, many of them had received new storage requests from their IT team in recent weeks. In several cases, the IT Director made the request without first doing a discovery on the data and answering some basis questions, such as:

• What is the current rate of the data growth?
• What is the age of the data?
• Are there older segments of data that can be archived to less expensive storage platforms?
• Have the files being stored been de-duplicated?
• Are there files that no longer need to be stored at all? i.e., images and music.
• What is the cost of storing the files?

When the data has been thoroughly examined and questions answered, a real cost can be attributed to the organizations data; the resulting effect is better information and more informed purchasing decisions.

At Datotel, we use the Asigra LAN Storage Discovery tool to locate areas of data growth and find ways to help our clients optimize data, both before and after the software is used. LAN Discovery helps enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs, such as Datotel) categorize and assess the storage cost of each piece of data prior to either long-term archive or storage. Since all data does not carry equal value in the eyes of the customer, this assessment capability allows us to balance the value of our customers’ data to the cost of storing and protecting it. We can then use alternative storage platforms or backup and recovery methods to best meet the clients goals. LAN Discovery can also be run at intervals to gauge data growth or shrinkage within the entire customer environment. These reports can be used as metrics to better understand the end user environment for backup and planning purposes.

When trying to determine a cost for storing the data, it’s important to note that this kind of activity should be a part of a larger data storage and archival strategy, involving not only the types of data, but also the volume and age of the data as well as the removal of data that has aged.

Until next time,
- David
@ddbrown

ST. LOUIS, AUGUST 23, 2011 – St. Louis-based Datotel, LLC, a state-of-the-art cloud computing and colocation provider, is being named today to the Inc. 5000 exclusive ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. Datotel was recognized by the magazine, along with other independent companies, for achieving outstanding business growth over the previous three years.

“We are honored to be included on this year’s Inc. 5000 list and are thankful for the dedication and hard work of our employees in growing Datotel as well as the continued commitment and support of our clients,” said David Brown, CEO of Datotel. “In 2004, we started with the dream of being the leading IT services provider for businesses and organizations in St. Louis, and continue to strive for that mission every day.”
Datotel continues its growth plans in 2011 with the recent opening of a second location in Chicago to join its present headquarters in downtown St. Louis. The decision to expand regionally was made to further meet the needs of clients seeking disaster recovery (DR) solutions, including backup services for cloud computing applications.

“We understand that disaster recovery solutions are critically important to many of our clients, from small- and medium-sized businesses to enterprise-level firms,” said Brown. “As cloud environments continue to grow and evolve, we are able to help our clients fully realize the productivity and efficiency of cloud computing while maintaining security and on-demand accessibility.”

Datotel ranked 2,209 on the fifth annual Inc. 5000 for 2011 with a three-year growth trend of 113 percent, closing 2010 with revenue exceeding $6 million. Client acquisitions in health care, financial services and nonprofit organizations have driven the majority of growth over the last year. Read the Inc. 5000 Datotel Profile here.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/5000.

Methodology
The 2011 Inc. 500 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2007 to 2010. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2007. Additionally, they had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2010. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2007 is $100,000; the minimum for 2010 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at www.inc.com/500.

About Inc. Magazine
Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. (www.inc.com) is the only major business magazine dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies that delivers real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. With a total paid circulation of 710,106, Inc. provides hands-on tools and market-tested strategies for managing people, finances, sales, marketing, and technology. Visit us online at www.inc.com.

About Datotel, LLC
St. Louis-based Datotel is a provider of cloud computing environments and colocation services from its carrier-class data center facility, complemented by a full suite of IT services to manage technology systems. Datotel has a $10 million state-of-the-art colocation facility managed and designed to provide IT infrastructures and systems a secure, stable and highly available environment. Datotel does regular work for organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to not-for-profits. The company can be reached at 1-877-241-9101 or www.datotel.com.

Many of us in the IT world have been there before: we see the shiniest, newest, glitziest piece of technological wizardry and we MUST have it. We figure out a way to finagle it into the budget, network infrastructure and justify it to ourselves that this shiny, new toy will have a positive ROI very soon.

Then, reality sets in; management asks for reasoning behind the expenses and your explanation doesn’t fly. You’ve succumbed to the technology monster! You’re a technology addict and you may have just put your job at risk because of it.

Our staff has seen first-hand that the technology monster is alive and well out there – in small businesses, medium-sized firms and large corporations. Recently, we worked with a non-for-profit organization with these needs: internal networking, email, file storage, light databases, mobile workforce nothing unusual in that list. However, once our solutions team took a closer look at the environment, well — that’s when we recognized that the technology monster had been at work.

Their environment consisted of: 30+ vm servers in the VMWare environment, latest version of VMWare, clustered Exchange environment with 2 CAS and 2 DAG servers for under 100 users. Server 2008 R2 datacenter with Exchange server 2010 Enterprise, 3 physical server cluster, multi-terabyte SAN, 2 external low-terabyte NAS, BES Enterprise latest version (of course) and BB units all serviced in-house (batteries, spare parts, etc.).
The organization’s workstations used to be old Dells with Windows 2k/256 or 512 MB of RAM. But, that hardware was left behind in favor of new Intel i7 laptops with separate 1 GB video memory graphics cards, 128 or 256 GB SSDs and 8 GB of memory, which is like going from driving a Model A to a Porsche! A technology upgrade was warranted, but jumping up that many levels and going all out with the new laptops wasn’t necessary.

Why do I bring up this story? In my career that started shortly before IBM’s PC was introduced (the good old days!), the most common refrain heard from my fellow IT colleagues was “if I could get rid of the end users, my job would be perfect”. Well, that may have been the sentiment, but the reality was that without those end users, there was little need for IT support. Unfortunately, this was simply the prevailing mood at the time: technology was deployed in a vacuum and for its own sake, without a sound business case and very little input from end users.

I believe that this thinking contributed to the tech bubble in the late 1990’s, and it was a painful experience when it finally burst. However, we can look back on that time now and see that the rise and fall was necessary to bring about a significant change in IT philosophy. The result has been good for the industry; businesses and end-users now demand real benefits from their technology and expect accountability from their technology providers.

It’s obvious to say that data centers don’t manage themselves — it takes a combination of staff, processes and technology to ensure that the systems and process run smoothly and efficiently.

The primary objective of service management is to ensure that the IT services are aligned to the
corporate business need as well as those of customers. Last year, our team implemented the ITIL v3 (IT Infrastructure Library) processes Incident Management and Problem Management. What is ITIL then? It’s a public framework and best practices guide, focusing on continual measurement and improvement in the quality of IT services that are delivered, from both business and customer perspectives.

The service lifecycle is made up of five parts: strategy, design, transition, operation and continual service improvement.

1. The Service Strategy involves deciding the types of services that should be offered and target audience for those services. In addition, the strategy describes how the value of the services will be perceived by that audience and the method for measuring that value.

2. Service Design is the documented policies and procedures that are needed to meet current and future agreed business requirements. The five aspects of service design are new or changed service solutions, service management systems and tools, technology architectures and management systems, processes roles and capabilities, and measurement methods and metrics. Effectively designed services are based upon four key principles: People, Products, Processes and Partners.

3. Service Transition is the delivery of services that are required by the business into operational use: taking it from design into execution through a series of strategic, tactical and operation steps. The process starts with transition planning and support, then managing the deployment, validating the service and finally, testing and evaluating the result.

4. Service Operation revolves around the delivery of the agreed upon service levels customers and management of the applications, technology and infrastructure that support delivery of the services. The operational activities are: Event Management, Incident Management, Request Fulfillment, Access Management Process and Problem Management Process.

5. Continual Service Improvement means maintaining value for customers through the persistent evaluation and improvement of the quality of services as well as assessing the overall maturity of the ITSM service life cycle and underlying processes.

There is a 7-step improvement process that starts with the gathering of pertinent data, dissecting the information for identifiable trends and sharing the information with management in order to draw larger conclusions and needed actions.

Step1 – Define what you should measure
Step 2 – Define what you CAN measure
Step 3 – Gather the data
Step 4 – Process the data
Step 5 – Analyze the data
Step 6 – Present and use the information
Step 7 – Implement corrective action

We’ve seen great response to these new processes not only reflected in our metrics (reduced response and resolution times), our customer service surveys (based on incidents) from our clients, and from our employees because collaboration between the departments has greatly improved.

Later this year, our team will implement the Change, Access, and Configuration Management portion; we’ll be sharing details on that process as well as other ITIL-related information in future posts.

Thanks for reading,
- shelly

@datotel

There are many technical solutions from tape to online backup with pros and cons to each; but any backup and recovery solution is no good if it isn’t adequately maintained or checked on a regular basis. Organizations change over time, and whether you’re conducting backup and recovery yourself, as these businesses were, or relying on an outside resource such as Datotel, the backup and recovery process needs to adapt to meet those changing needs.

When was the last time that you verified that all aspects of your data protection are in place and being met? When was the last time that you performed an actual file level restore and confirmed that your backups are not only running adequately, but the time to restore the data meets current business requirements and expectations?

If it’s been a while, maybe today would be a good day to try it, before you find yourself in a tight spot.

What stories of data loss do you have?

@ddbrown

Out one evening, having dinner with his in-laws who happened to be visiting from out-of-town, Christian needed to access his virtual desktop so that he could perform a continuity check on a client project. In the Datotel office, we pair WYSE terminals (thin clients) and VMware View to enable a virtual desktop environment. Using his smartphone and a secure login, Christian gained access to his fully-enabled desktop as if he were sitting in the office performing the same tasks.

With dinner over, Christian next headed to the grocery store and while waiting in line at the checkout, he continued to troubleshoot and monitor the project and collaborate with other Datotel colleagues – who were also working remotely — on the same solution.

As a result of the access to a virtual desktop, our client didn’t experience any downtime or deterioration in their technology performance and Christian kept his plans with family. Needless to say, having this kind of on-demand, instant access just might be the key to work-life balance for anyone who manages technology for a living !

In other mobile-related news out of last week’s Asigra Partner Summit, the newest release of their cloud storage software (Asigra v11) is a significant leap forward for mobile support. With the dramatic rise of mobile devices in the enterprise, the need to protect these devices and backup the sensitive business information contained on them is more critical than ever.

Asigra v11 rolls out with support for the iOS and Android platforms with Blackberry support to come later this year. The solution provides data protection for the entire digital footprint and is an important upgrade as companies embrace the general untethering of the user experience away from traditional office configurations.

- shelly

@datotel
@shellymurray

Backing up to tape and using a 3^rd party to send those tapes to a secure off site location has historically been the solution to that business problem. Although that was the best solution our industry could deliver for a number of years it has its’ fair share of challenges. In fact, numerous statistics have been cited that restoration of data from tape is far from a foregone conclusion. Online Cloud Backup is not only a viable replacement for the archaic tape process, but it has a significantly higher probability of data restoration and a much improved recovery time.

According to a Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup / Recovery Report, by 2014, at least 30% of organizations will have changed backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability.

Cloud backup solutions typically utilize the internet to securely transmit a backup of your data in an encrypted format to a secure off-site datacenter where your organizations data is stored on large redundant servers and storage arrays. The recovery point and recovery time objectives for the different data sets are typically configured through a client, giving your organization the same flexibility as with a traditional on-site tape solution. Unlike with tape however, no onetime hardware purchases or expensive maintenance contracts are required, rather a monthly fee is charged by the 3^rd party based upon the actual data storage amount your organization has used for that given month.

A number of factors have made online backup a practical possibility; not only has the price of transport, bandwidth and hard disk reduced significantly since we first started using tape, but the large capacities now available have made it very easy to transmit and store the data rather than having to physically transport tape media.  Lastly the management capabilities and level of sophistication provided by the cloud backup software has increased greatly.

DataVaulting, the Datotel Online Cloud Backup platform comprises of an appliance that plugs into your network at each of your locations. After the initial configuration and set up, that backup data is compressed, de-duplicated and transmitted securely on a regular basis to our St Louis datacenter where it can also be replicated to our Chicago facility for increased geographic redundancy. Our platform is hardware independent giving our clients the ability to put in place a data recovery solution designed to protect their entire organization from servers through, laptops and more recently even iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices.

@ddbrown