As Hurricane Sandy approaches the East Coast and a good portion of us (including myself) have a ton of work to do before month end, I wanted to share some Tips on how to protect your work during a hurricane. The biggest concern is loss of power. Whether working from home or in the office the main cause of lost data and frustration will be loss of power, power surges, etc. here are some suggestions to avoid having to do the same work twice.

Today we will discuss two antivirus services made within the last 5 years that use cloud solutions to constantly update and improve their respective products. Is this the direction that future technology is heading in? It seems as if that is what the tech news outlets believe since both of these programs were featured in the past month.

All of your life you’ve learned that in order to prevent yourself from being hacked, your password should be more than 6 characters long, with at least one number in your password. Along with that, most websites even require a security question to surpass the password when you log in on an unfamiliar computer. You would think that through this process that your account and information would be protected and that you have nothing to worry about. People have believed this for years but now their beliefs have changed thanks to Mat Honan, whose digital life was destroyed by hackers due to Apple and Amazon’s security flaws.

If you thought viruses were scary, wait until you encounter Stuxnet and Flame. Well, let’s hope you don’t encounter them. What is Stuxnet and Flame you might wonder? Stuxnet is a computer worm that originated from the “Olympic Games,” a code name for a series of cyber attacks that were secretly launched on Iranian computers by President Obama. The worm was found traveling from computer to computer in different parts of the world and was powerful enough to take down between 1,000-5,000 centrifuges that Iran was using for its uranium. Stuxnet is the first cyber weapon ever used to cripple another country’s foundation.

Continuous data protection (CDP) differs from traditional backup recovery software in one essential way: whereas backup methods require data to be copied to another entity, such as a tape or a disk, CDP data is copied and then stored on the local storage area network (SAN) or the network-attached storage (NAS) system. CDP works by making frequent, incremental copies of the data itself. Essentially, CDP tracks every change made and captures continuous changes to data. CDP serves as a baseline reference to the original state of the data, it tracks the state of a file when a change occurs and tracks the change in the backup system, and it allows granular recovery for multiple point-in-time states of the data.[1] When an incident occurs and backup recovery is necessary, CDP allows the user to go back and reset a file, dataset, or entire database to the state it was in before. So, should CDP replace traditional backup methods?

Pros

• Using CDP after the initial setup does not require intensive IT training and the backed up files can be easily accessed by the average desktop and/or laptop user.
• CDP integrates into established data protection frameworks very easily and can protect data on other storage tiers.
• CDP preserves a record of every change made to a computer.
• If a system becomes infected with a virus or a while is corrupted and the problem is not discovered until later, it is still possible to recover the most recent clean copy of the affected file.[2]
• Data recovery is possible in a manner of seconds, much less time than with other backup systems. However, this is contingent on file size and network speed.
• Installing CDP hardware does not put existing data at risk. Furthermore, there is no gap in data when a restore occurs.