Blog

By: Andrea Bridges-Smith, Content Marketing Manager, Spanning

At Spanning, we’re always looking for ways to improve our client’s experience. We do this in a variety of ways – through careful attention to UX and design, through constant product improvements and by publishing new resources for our clients regularly. But perhaps the biggest part of our client’s experience with us goes through Support.

This is Byron and he’s awesome.

Our Support team currently consists of one man – Byron Shaheen. Byron somehow manages to provide prompt service to thousands of clients worldwide in such a way that they consistently rave about him. If you’ll permit us, we’d like to rave about him too.

Byron saw that clients were coming to the site looking for answers to their support issues and weren’t able to find them, which is when he would get an email. And while he was always happy to help, sometimes you just need a quick answer to something so you can move on with your day. This is why Byron took it upon himself to create the Knowledge Base for Spanning Backup.

The Knowledge Base is great because you can search for an answer to a specific question or look at the various topics in that area to see if your question is covered there. There’s also links to email support, all of our social media (where you can always ask us questions) and a Spanning Backup forum in Google Groups.

In addition to these methods of supporting our clients, we also have a YouTube channel where you can check out our video tutorials. We also have an FAQ and How-To section that walks you through the ins and outs of Spanning Backup.

The Knowledge Base will be continuously updated and maintained. And if there’s another method of support that you’d like that we haven’t thought of yet, just ask! We want to make your experience with us the best it can possibly be.

And finally, thanks to Byron for all his hard work!

By: Andrea Bridges-Smith, Content Marketing Manager, Spanning

“The enrollment process was so absurdly easy that I kept logging in, in disbelief that it was working correctly. It really does not get any easier than this.”

This is a quote from one of our wonderful clients about how easy it is to get up and running with Spanning Backup. We thought we’d show you exactly how easy it is to install and configure. Check out the following video:

At Spanning, our entire philosophy revolves around making life easier for our clients. We have a UX department devoted to improving the user’s experience in Spanning Backup. We’ve designed it so that anyone can use it themselves without having to submit a ticket to IT.  We’ve made it simple to install, we’ve provided training videos to show how it works, and we’ve got support ready to assist you if any problems arise. Best of all, once you install Spanning Backup, you get email updates at whatever frequency you prefer letting you know how your backups are going. Ideally, the only time you should have to use Spanning Backup is to recover a piece of data, and being able to quickly recover lost data will definitely make your life easier.

Let us help. Start a free trial of Spanning Backup to see if it’s right for you – you’ll be up and running in no time!

By: Andrea Bridges-Smith, Content Marketing Manager, Spanning

Our own Founder & CEO, Charlie Wood has an article in the June issue of CIO Review magazine about IT’s responsibility in the cloud. In it, he calls for IT departments to avoid the potential for data loss in cloud computing by implementing a new set of data protection best practices that include backup and recovery solutions.

Responsibility is a big deal for us here at Spanning. Just as our clients trust us to protect their data, organizations trust their IT departments to do the same. We often hear from IT professionals that have rushed into the cloud without the consideration of data protection and now realize they need a backup and recovery solution after the experience of losing something important.

“But it’s in the cloud!” says the cloud-enthusiast IT pro.

Yes, and the cloud is a good thing. But the cloud does not equal data protection just by association. It’s an IT professional’s responsibility to make sure that the data they’ve been entrusted with is stored safely, encrypted properly and is always ready for the worst case through a simple backup and recovery process.

Charlie started Spanning with a clear understanding of how important data protection, backup and recovery is to every organization. Start your 14-day free trial of Spanning Backup today.

By: Andrea Bridges-Smith, Content Marketing Manager, Spanning

In response to the ever-increasing threat of hacking, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property (The IP Commission) released a report recently that made a surprising suggestion – that allowing hacking victims to “hack back” might help deter the initial hacks and improve data security.

“These attacks would raise the cost to IP thieves of their actions, potentially deterring them from undertaking these activities in the first place,” the report said. “Only when the danger of hacking into a company’s network and exfiltrating trade secrets exceeds the rewards will such theft be reduced from a threat to a nuisance.”

It’s an interesting idea, but whether or not so-called “hackbacks” are a viable solution, the fact that it’s even being discussed says some interesting things:

Hacking isn’t going away. It’s changing, it’s evolving, it’s becoming more accessible to everyday people. We’ve even seen hackers achieve celebrity, as with the group Anonymous. Hackers are constantly learning new techniques and anyone interested in data security is constantly trying to thwart the latest type of attack. Both sides are catching up to each other in a shorter cycle now.

People are getting desperate to achieve data security. The threat of data loss is making people really start to take cybercrime seriously, and that’s a good thing. Vigilance and caution on the part of everyone using the Internet to create, store or share information means that the good guys stand a better chance of staying safe.

Hackers will face an uphill battle. As more and more people become aware of the threats out there and what to look out for, it will be harder to socially engineer a hack. And hackers will have to find new ways to hack passwords once everyone changes them from “password” and “1234567.” (And if you’ve not done that yet, seriously. Come on.) We’re towards the end of the pendulum swing in favor of the hackers, and now it’s going to start swinging back the other direction as people seek greater data security.

But once people wise up, they implement the measures needed and then pat themselves on the back and stop worrying until the next time something bad happens. Returning to a lack of awareness about the problem is not a good way to stay out of trouble. The first step in data security is protecting yourself, which everyone is starting to get. The next step is to keep up with new threats when they come out. But what are the best ways to do that?

1. Enable two-factor authentication on anything you can. It’s not enough to just have a tough-to-crack password; couple that with the capabilities of your mobile device and make your defenses more impenetrable.

2. Keep up with cyberthreats in the news. It may sound like a lot of technical mumbo jumbo sometimes, but when a new kind of attack comes out, some kind soul almost always publishes a step-by-step guide to what you need to enable/disable in order to keep yourself safe. And any time a new hack is announced, go ahead and change your passwords in whatever password management system you’re using (which you definitely are using, right?).

3. Check the status of your backups. Backup is key for data security, but if your files are not recoverable before you get hacked, they won’t be recoverable afterwards either.

4. Schedule regular data security tests. Make sure all of your data is hard to get into from the outside, make sure it’s backed up, make sure it’s properly encrypted and make sure it’s easily recoverable. And then test all of that on a regular basis. Nuke something important and make sure you can get it back. Make sure nothing has changed that you’re not aware of. (Except for your passwords. You are changing those on a regular basis, right?)

Until “hackbacks” become acceptable practice, we’re left trying to prevent attacks as best we can. But the fact that we’re becoming increasingly prepared for the worst means that we’re reducing the likelihood of it happening. It may not seem like it, but that’s actually good news.

By: Andrea Bridges-Smith, Content Marketing Manager, Spanning

If you’ve been reading any technology news lately, you’ve seen that it’s a rough time out there for data protection. Ars Technica recently conducted an experiment where they handed 3 password crackers a list of 16,449 passwords. 62% of them were cracked in an hour by one of the crackers. Another spent 20 hours and got up to 90%.

In other news, China is continuing to sharpen their hacking skills by throwing a hackathon for the People’s Liberation Army. This is just the latest in a string of news involving China and hacks. Even the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the US is not immune; their chairman’s personal email account just got hacked, resulting in the publication of email exchanges with 9/11 Commission members as well as documents covering the latest Obama administration’s transition earlier this year.

With the increased presence of hacking in the news, you may be starting to feel like your data isn’t safe anywhere. And that’s certainly understandable; you worked hard to create all of those files and the thought of them getting seen by prying eyes or leaked to the media is unsettling.

But the real problem to think about is data loss. If someone gets a hold of your credit card number, these days most banks will take care of the problem before you’ve even realized it happened. Data leaks like the one that just happened to the NIC chairman or the one that affected a diverse group of the rich and powerful last month are more often than not an inconvenience, albeit a major one. The media gets a hold of it, apologies are made, damage control is done, maybe a few customers decide to take their business elsewhere.

If data is lost, many companies won’t survive it. A Gartner study found that 90 percent of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years. If you enjoy having a steady job or owning a business, that should terrify you.

So what can you do in the face of all of these threats? Well first of all, make sure you’re taking whatever steps you can on the front end to prevent data loss; just because data protection is getting more difficult doesn’t mean you should leave the door open. Make sure everyone in your organization is using some kind of password management system that generates hard-to-crack passwords.

Also, make sure your data is easily recoverable in the event of loss. This means backing it up to a safe, secure, encrypted location that is easily accessible if data is lost in the original storage location. If you can get your data back quickly, you’ll be in a much better position to not become one of the 90% who lose their job after losing their data. Any test of a backup solution should include a stopwatch measurement of how quickly data can be recovered.

Organizations that pay attention to the potential threat of data breach or loss are more likely to prevent it from happening and survive it if it does happen. In other words, don’t be scared; be ready. If you’re a Google Apps user, click here to start a free trial of Spanning Backup.