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!

The post The Spanning Backup Knowledge Base Is Live! appeared first on 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!

The post How To Install Spanning Backup in Less Than a Minute appeared first on 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.

The post Charlie Wood in CIO Review: Data Protection in the Cloud Is About Responsibility appeared first on 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.

The post Until Hackbacks Are Legal, Here’s 4 Ways to Get Data Security appeared first on 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.

The post Data Loss Threats Multiply: What Can We Do? appeared first on Spanning.

Getting people to think about backup is often tricky because people think it’s…well, boring. And we understand how people could get that impression, we really do! It’s much more convenient to “set it and forget it” or to never get around to setting it at all. But we think the world of backup is fascinating, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t share the magic with you so that you can be fascinated too. Here’s a few reasons why backup gets our blood pumping:

1. Data Loss : The Horror!

Ever had a moment where you lost an important piece of data? Your pulse starts to race, your stomach drops, your adrenaline surges and your mouth forms an O shape as you gasp. Wes Craven wishes he could scare people this bad.

2. Really Big Data

See how much data storage space you have available today. Then see how much you have free tomorrow. Multiply the difference by 365 to approximate how much data you’re generating in a year. Then multiply that by the number of people in your office. Or multiply it by the number of people in your state or country or in the world. It’s kind of fascinating to think about how much data we generate, isn’t it? And doesn’t it make you wonder, “Where does it all GO?” And for that matter, “What would we do without it?”

3. Mastering Recovery

Have you ever recovered lost data? It’s so exciting! Knowing that you have complete control over your data at all times and that none of it can ever be taken away from you gives you this “I am the master of my own destiny, mwahahaha” kind of feeling that is just awesome.

By now, your pulse should be pounding! OK, maybe it’s not exactly like going on an upside-down roller coaster, but now you know why thinking about backup doesn’t need to be a snoozefest! It’s actually quite fascinating when you get down to it. And now you know why we get out of bed in the morning and think about backup all day!

The post 3 Fascinating Reasons Why Backup Is NOT Boring appeared first on Spanning.

The modern classroom is quite a bit different than the classroom of ten or even five years ago. Students are signing up for their classes online. Educators are more readily available to their students at all times of the day through email, social media and video chat programs such as Google Hangouts. More of the class work is taking place online and being turned in electronically thanks to platforms like Google Apps for Education. All of this is becoming the norm, the new way we do things in education.

And while more education in the cloud is a good thing, it requires us to be aware of things that we may not have been before, like backing up class work in the cloud. Here are a few ways that Google Apps backup can provide real benefits to the everyday lives of students and educators:

1. On the first day of class, a teacher can send their students email links to the syllabus, class info, readings, et cetera that are stored in Google Drive, which they can refer to throughout the semester. However, if a student’s Gmail account gets hacked, they might suddenly find themselves without all of this important information. If they have backup in place, they can restore their hacked/deleted emails once their password has been sorted out and get back to work.

2. A student is more likely these days to turn in an assignment online by emailing a link to a Google Drive document. But let’s say that when their teacher opens the file to grade it, they find a blank document because the assignment hasn’t synced properly. In that case, the student can use backup to retrieve an uncorrupted version of the file and submit it, and both the student and the teacher are saved from having to do extra work and get IT or administration involved.

3. Teachers these days often grade and store their grades in a spreadsheet on Google Drive. If the spreadsheet of everyone’s grades for the semester were to get accidentally deleted, the teacher would likely be preparing to regrade an awful lot of material while seriously reconsidering their career choice. But if backup is in place, the teacher can easily retrieve the grades, saving themselves a massive headache.

4. Group projects have long been a part of education, but with the ability to see changes and chat in real time inside a Google Doc, it’s easier than ever to do it right. Students can collaborate on a document, but if someone makes a change that the group decides to throw out, they can use backup to retrieve an earlier version and move forward with that one instead.

5. Turning in an essay online via Google Drive sharing is great for students because it’s more convenient than bringing it to class, and it’s great for teachers because they can use online tools to immediately check for plagiarism. Google Apps backup adds another layer of benefits; if a student tries to make changes to their assignment after the deadline, the teacher can use backup to retrieve the earlier version and makes sure they’re only grading what was turned in on time.

As we transition to a more cloud-based classroom, we must prepare for the inevitable pitfalls that accompany any new way of doing things. The benefits of having the cloud in the classroom – the convenience, the collaboration and the communication – far outweigh the risks, and as long as you plan ahead for what might go wrong, you can clear the hurdles and get back to what matters.

The post 5 Ways Google Apps Backup Can Help the Modern Classroom appeared first on Spanning.

This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing some of our core engineering practices.  In the first, I laid out what our core practices are, in the second, I talked about releasing early and often, and in the third, I talked a bit about how we have adapted some Agile practices. In this post, I will discuss our general approach to “process” and how we use hackathons as a tool to determine how much process we need.

Just as we strive to release the minimum viable product, we also want to adopt as little process as required. Obviously as our team grows, we need to change how much process we adopt.  There are a couple of components to our core engineering process that we put into place on day one:

• Code reviews are required for anything that will end up on our production servers.

• All commits need to be associated with a ticket in our issue management system.

• Any feature starts with a one-page wiki that describes the customer use case(s) and the proposed features to meet the use case(s).

Many engineering teams consider code reviews to be a luxury.  We consider them to be the vanguard of our quality approach.  If you have too much code for a reviewer to grok, it is unlikely that you’ve properly broken down the problem you are trying to solve.  If you believe that you are too busy to spend time reviewing other team member’s code, you have missed the point that this is a team sport, not an individual exercise.  The simple act of walking through our code reminds us over and over that a second set of eyes on a problem uncovers the edge cases that we glossed over on first implementation.

Our issue management system allows us to ensure that we have a good first pass decomposition of the problem we are working to solve.  It is also an easy way to make sure that we are all working from a common priority list.  And finally, it allows us to keep track of all the things that we will forget later.  We chose a super lightweight tool so that we do not need to fight over priority versus severity or epic/story/task decomposition.

We have run multiple hackathons both at the individual level and at the team level.  The team hacks have been the most eye-opening because we run with zero process and let the team figure out how they need to collaborate.  The only thing we all decided to keep at first was source control, but we did not use our issue management system.  This works for about 2 days, but after that we start to really miss a familiar way to keep track of things.

These hackathons also give us a way to try out new technology in a low risk environment.  Several of our core features were directly influenced from our hackathons, such as:

• New charting libraries for JavaScript

• Several different NoSQL style databases

• Native versus HTML5-based mobile apps

• Behavior Driven Development language extensions

• Several different master/slave worker models

The key point that I’d like to make here is that you need to be just as careful with your process adoption as you are with your customer-facing feature selection.  Start with what is the minimum viable process model that works for who you are today. Constantly re-evaluate your approach as your team grows and bring in new practices as needed, but not too early or too late.  And use some type of forcing function to test when you need to make those process leaps.

I hope that this series has offered a small view into Spanning’s engineering approach.  While it is far from perfect, it is working well for us.  What have you found that works for you?

The post Inside Spanning Engineering Part IV: Process appeared first on Spanning.

This is the third in a series of posts discussing some of our core engineering practices.  In the first, I laid out what our core practices are, and in the second, I talked about releasing early and often.  In this post, I will discuss how we use some Agile practices. You will see that they both support and make possible our “release early and often” approach. I’m not going to talk about estimation specifically in this series (that topic could fill a whole new series).  Instead, I’ll just hand-wave and say that we constantly estimate work effort in terms of our delivery milestones.

From an Agile perspective we do not pay any attention to story points, burndown, velocity or any of those other standard Agile metrics.  It is not that we do not understand them. To the contrary, we have deep experience with formal Agile practices and understand how much value they have brought to software engineering.  But, I consider those Agile metrics as first derivatives of real work rather than a direct measure of real work. Ultimately we focus on the most important thing: how often do we actually ship features to our customers?

Our weekly iteration is not a pure Agile sprint.  We do commit (oops, that implies estimation) to what we will get done, but the objective is to force us – engineers, product owners, everyone – to think about features in terms of demonstrating something more than we did last time, and most importantly, demonstrating it from the customers’ point of view.  We try very hard to avoid building horizontal layers of architecture (persistence, then service, then API, then UI in the last few moments of the release).  Instead, we build vertical slices of a feature and then refactor relentlessly as we learn a little more.  This allows us to commit code to our SCM frequently and to get other engineers consuming that code almost immediately. This is the same way that we approach external releases.  From a feature perspective, we are willing to push ourselves to the point of being uncomfortable with the minimum feature set for a first release.  Over and over we are reminded that all the things that we think are must-have issues for our customers turn out to not really matter when customers vote with their dollars.

We played around with our daily standups in terms of when we held them, what we talked about, how much time we spent on issues, and found that the one thing that significantly improved our standup effectiveness was the actual act of standing up and getting away from our keyboards.  For our team, we don’t wait for the standup to collaborate.  We collaborate all day every day.  Instead, the standup allows us to step back a bit and look at the larger picture of how each person’s work contributes immediately to the whole team moving forward.

The Agile process is a wonderful framework for software engineering, but it’s important to not get so caught up in the process that you stop paying attention to what’s important: releasing features to your customers. At the end of the day, we focus relentlessly on what our customers want and making sure that the work we’re doing is directly tied to real customer feedback.

Stay tuned – in our next post, we’ll discuss how we use hackathons to guide our overall process.

The post Inside Spanning Engineering Part III: Agile-ish appeared first on Spanning.

AUSTIN, TEXAS, May 16, 2013 – Spanning Cloud Apps, Inc., creators of the powerful, enterprise-class data protection solution Spanning Backup for Google Apps, today announced the launch of the Spanning Authorized Resellers Program.  Through the program, partners can now provide their customers the highest-rated, most complete product for protecting Google Apps data, Spanning Backup. The program has been designed to provide value-added resellers (VARs) and system integrators with outstanding margins and recurring revenues, as well as sophisticated marketing and sales support.

Spanning Backup provides backup and recovery of the complete Google Apps suite: Gmail, Drive, Sites, Calendar and Contacts.  The solution features a secure cloud-to-cloud environment for protecting Google Apps data and SSAE 16 Type II audited processes that ensure its integrity.  Spanning also provides constant monitoring of data backup, allowing administrators to correct issues before they become problems.

“We have designed a program that extends the value of reseller services, and brings together the key support pieces for their ongoing success,” said Jeff Erramouspe, chief revenue officer, Spanning. “We’re excited to already be working with leading VARs and system integrators worldwide and look forward to expanding into new relationships.”

“As enterprises encounter obstacles in moving to the cloud, Spanning Backup provides a unique solution that solves the challenges facing our customers in North America, Europe and Asia,” said Doug Shepard, President of the Google Business Unit for Cloud Sherpas, the world’s largest Cloud Services Brokerage and two-time Google Apps Global Partner of the Year.  “We look forward to a successful partnership with Spanning as we integrate their solution into an overall cloud strategy for our clients.”

Spanning is committed to their Google Apps reseller channel; the new program provides resources to ensure that partners receive technical, marketing and sales support.

Key features of the Spanning Authorized Reseller program include:

• An aggressive discount structure with strong margins that gives reseller partners complete control over end-user pricing and a higher average revenue per user (ARPU); potential for increased ARPU by 60-80 percent over selling Google Apps alone
• Lead referral and distribution of new business opportunities
• A simple contracting process to get resellers into the market quickly and efficiently
• Customized marketing programs for specific territories, market segments and business practices, including email marketing, webinars and other co-marketing activities

“We have found Spanning Backup to be an excellent platform for delivering value added services to our clients,” said Rob Morgan, managing director for PIT Group in Wollongong, Australia. “Managing data protection policies isn’t always easy and many of our customers contract with PIT Group to do that for them. The Spanning program gave us the flexibility to bundle our services with Spanning Backup and deliver them both to our clients in one cost-effective package.”

Spanning has partners reselling Spanning Backup around the globe, including in North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand.

What Partners Say About Spanning

“I worked with Spanning early in the development of their reseller program.  They were responsive, flexible and built specific items into the program to better accommodate our requirements.  With an already expanding user base using Spanning’s products, I am pleased to represent them in Israel and look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with them.”

-        Amit Dunsky, CEO, high-T, Israel

“At CIMA Solutions Group, we believe that data protection is critical for Google Apps applications.  We’ve seen our customers inadvertently delete data in some cases.  Spanning Backup provides backup and recovery services that work.”

-        Todd R. Brown, VP of sales and business development, Cima Solutions Group, Dallas, TX

“Spanning has created a flexible and easy-to-use reseller program. They offer outstanding margins and top-tier marketing and sales support. Spanning Backup will be a key part of our product offering for a long time to come.”

-        Mike Vanderpool, CEO, Valley Apps, Harrisonburg, VA

Share on Twitter: @spanningbackup launches their targeted reseller channel, available internationally with tools to assist with tech, marketing and sales.

About Spanning Cloud Apps, Inc.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Spanning was created with a singular purpose – to help companies protect and manage their information in the cloud.  The company provides powerful, reliable, enterprise-class data protection for all Google Apps: Gmail, Drive, Sites, Calendars and Contacts.\

The top-rated backup solution on the Google Apps Marketplace, Spanning Backup is the most reliable and respected cloud-to-cloud backup solution for IT decision-makers.

Join a great team: http://spanning.com/company/jobs/

Save your data from disaster: http://spanning.com/try-it-now/ or Google Apps Marketplace

Get to know us: http://spanning.com/

Follow us on Twitter: @spanningbackup

Eat our favorite food: http://www.chilantrobbq.com

The post Spanning Cloud Apps Launches Reseller Program appeared first on Spanning.