It seems like it’s almost every day that the news reports another major company outage and as a result, the massive operational, financial and reputational consequences experienced, both short- and long-term. Widespread systemic outages first come to mind when considering disasters and threats to business and IT service continuity. But oftentimes, it’s the overlooked, “smaller” threats that regularly occur. Human error, equipment failure, power outages, malicious threats and data corruption can too bring an entire organization to a complete standstill.

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In recent years we have all been hearing about cloud transformation. Many organizations already adopt such a strategy, but we still don’t see the large organizations move to all or full cloud strategies.

For some businesses, cloud is a cost saver when they move or run the workload from the cloud. For many other organizations, especially the large ones, an all-cloud strategy is not the best fit. Many things force them to keep and run most of their workload from an on-premises data center. If we look at today’s data centers, we realize that the data center is mostly running on top of a virtualization layer which introduces the basics of the hybrid cloud.

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One of the most popular choices for backup archival is tape. It is cheap, reliable and offers protection against crypto viruses and hacker attacks. Additionally, it’s offline when not in a tape loader. With Veeam, IT administrators can use flexible options to create copies of backups and store them on a different media, following the 3-2-1 Rule for the backup and disaster recovery. This blog post provides advice and considerations that will help you create a robust tape archival infrastructure. Read more

There’s no end to ransomware in sight. It’s a simple enough attack — install malware, encrypt data/system, and ask for the ransom — so why aren’t we stopping ransomware?  Security vendors are keenly aware of the issue, as well as the attack vectors and methods, but can’t seem to stay a step ahead, causing ransomware to grow from $1 billion in damages in 2016 to an estimated $5 billion in 2017. There are two basic reasons ransomware continues to be a “success” for cyber criminals.

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Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is a great addition to the Windows product set. Out of the box, it’s able to deploy Windows VMs, and with a couple of small tweaks, it’s possible to have WDS build Linux and VMware servers, all from a selectable Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) boot menu. In order for it to deploy Windows and Linux systems it requires some changes which we'll explore in this article. Read more

Networking has always been one of the most complex parts of any IT solution, and whether you are connecting into a remote site, connecting branch offices together or extending on-premises networks to the cloud, there is traditionally a high level of complexity and cost that's involved in establishing a reliable networking solution. When it comes to networking during a disaster, the level of complexity and margin for error is magnified. In relative terms, it has become easy to back up, replicate and then recover workloads, but getting access to those recovered systems remains a cumbersome process.

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Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 brings some MAJOR enhancements to our flagship product, but this milestone also brings updates to both Veeam Agents. In my previous blog post, I introduced you to the #1 feature of Update 3: Centralized Management for the Veeam Agents. If this is the first time you’re hearing about our new agent-based backup solutions, I suggest you peer back through the Veeam Blog to get up to speed. But, if you’re ready to hear about what’s new with the Veeam Agents, you’ve come to the right place.

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I have been asked a lot about how to configure time in your domain when all the Domain Controllers (DCs) are virtual and running on Microsoft Hyper-V. People will say just stick to a physical DC. However, sometimes this is not an option. In this article, I am going to walk you through the best way to set up time synchronization. Read more

Encryption is a great way to keep data secure, but sometimes it can be used against us. Yes, we’re talking about ransomware.

When ransomware enters your systems, usually through a PC, it begins to encrypt your data and can target network-attached storage (NAS), virtualization, online collaboration tools, and even your online backups to render them unusable.

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PowerShell has come a long way from a command line interpreter with support of a few commands, to a fully integrated part of every modern Windows OS. Right now, not only is it a cool thing to, but it is also essential in order to achieve better results in Windows tasks’ management, including virtual machine (VM) backup.

This is a two-part article. In the first part, I’m going to talk about PowerShell in general, when you should consider using it for Hyper-V backup and how to get acquainted with PowerShell basics, PowerShell commands (cmdlets) and syntax.

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