6 Steps to Help Back Up Your Data During Hurricane Season

A couple of weeks ago, we were bracing for Hurricane Florence to hit the Carolinas with massive flooding and wind damage up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States. Right after that, we have Hurricanes Isaac and Helene currently forming in the Atlantic, their direction is still indecisive. It’s hurricane season.

Of course, the first concern is keeping you and your family safe. The Red Cross has excellent resources on Hurricane and Tropical Storm preparedness. You can see those here.

There may come a time when you ask if your business is fully prepared.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

The first question you have to ask yourself is “Do I have a full backup in case my machine is destroyed or damaged?”. This is probably the number one issue that I see in our industry today. Most businesses don’t have good backups that they can rely on.

If you are a regular reader of the iTech newsletter, you have probably heard me stress that you need to test your recovery and that it still holds out.

Take a moment to ask yourself:

• Am I 100% sure of my backups?
• Can I put the pieces of my backups together again?
• Do I know where my tapes are?

If you have to pause a moment when going over those questions, we will go over some steps below to help.[CONTINUE READING]

iAM Security Infographic

Can you say “iAM Secure”?

The onslaught of cyberattacks shows no signs of slowing. From Verizon to Equifax — even the CIA and the Dark Web weren’t immune. Compromised credentials, including weak or stolen passwords, are the #1 cause of breaches.

Too much trust has been placed in a network perimeter that was supposed to separate approved users from unauthorized users. Weak authentication systems and excessive privilege, is to blame.

In the last year, iTech has conducted more than a 100 security vulnerability assessments and in all cases, there are too many user accounts with too much authority.

This continues to be the biggest problem on the IBM i. [SEE FULL INFOGRAPHIC]

Featured Blog: How to Evaluate Your Managed Service Needs

Managed Services can be tailored to fit the needs of your business, which means you need to evaluate where a third party provider can provide you with the most benefits. Identifying where you have vulnerabilities or gaps with your system administration is the easiest place to start.

When building your case for managed services, we recommend you focus on three key areas:

1. Your resources
2. Their available time
3. Skills gaps

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Managed Services vs Self Service

Managing a large and complex server like the IBM i, can be daunting. Add to this the fact that you may have Scaling Up/Down/In/Out, need to control High Availability and Monitoring, Patching, Manage Backups and Restores, you have to ensure the OS is kept up to date. Even the fundamentals such as security and configuration can take significant expertise.

To do this, you need the right skills, operational procedures while maintaining a best practice approach while adhering to stringent Internal/external governance.

Imagine if all you had to do is manage your database, or like many of our customers; they only have to manage Database Clients and Queries, Create Indexes and Maintain referential constraints between tables.

A managed service partner takes care of everything else; this will include:

Managed IBM i High availability using Multi-LPAR topologies, which provides an SLA up-time of 99.95%.

With the Multi-LPAR features enabled on your production server, iTech provides asynchronous “standby” replica of every database and system across multiple systems. Since both the database and its replica are in sync, there is no chance of data loss. iTech manages the whole process, and also offers a fully managed failover service, so even if the master production database goes down, an automatic failover mechanism will change the master DNS to a replica to achieve high availability. [CONTINUE READING]

Release levels and PTFs

People are always asking me how often they should be performing PTF maintenance, and when is the right time to upgrade their operating system. I updated this article from last month with the current levels of PTFs. Let’s look at PTFs. First, PTFs are Program Temporary Fixes that are created by IBM to fix a problem that has occurred or to possibly prevent a problem from occurring. In addition, some times PTFs add new functionality, security, or improve performance. Therefore, I am always dumbfounded as to why customers do not perform PTF maintenance on their machine at least quarterly.

If IBM has come out with a fix for your disk drives, why do you want to wait for your disk drive to fail with that problem, only to be told that there is a fix for that problem, and if you had applied the PTF beforehand, you would have averted the problem. Therefore, I think a quarterly PTF maintenance strategy is a smart move. Many of our customers are on our quarterly PTF maintenance program, and that provides them with the peace of mind of knowing their system is up to date on PTFs. Below is a table of the major group PTFs for the last few releases. This is what we are installing for our customers on iTech Solutions Quarterly Maintenance program.

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