News
The Cohesity Connect Global User Conference starts next week, October 19-21! This is a virtual conference open to everyone around the globe. Their main focus this year is on cyber resilience. Being in the cybersecurity space myself, this is one of the most important things you need to plan for. You need to have your data and your company protected from ransomware attacks so you don’t have to pay out to get your servers back up. With many sessions to choose from and even some free professional certifications, why would you not attend? Check out the info below for more information on the conference.
Cohesity Connect Global User Conference Starts Next Week
Conference to Spotlight the Benefits of Next-Gen Data Management Going Beyond Zero Trust to Combat the Threat of Ransomware
Cohesity is pleased to host its inaugural user conference Cohesity Connect, a global, virtual event running between 19-21 October that gives attendees from around the world the opportunity to hear about the latest trends and innovations in next-gen data management.
A key focus of the event this year will be cyber resilience. Attendees can learn about next-gen technologies that can protect their data and businesses from sophisticated ransomware attacks — and save them from having to pay costly ransoms.
The event unites technology innovators and forward-thinking organisations around critical business issues including cyber resilience, hybrid cloud strategies, data protection, unstructured data management, automated disaster recovery, and more.
With more than 30 dynamic sessions and breakout discussions, Cohesity Connect will bring together industry experts, business and IT leaders, and data management professionals to share insights on the most pressing data challenges facing organizations today, from the growing threat of ransomware attacks and disaster recovery to optimizing operations with SaaS and hybrid cloud deployments.
Cohesity leaders will also highlight the latest updates to the Cohesity Helios next-gen data management platform and unveil new products that help keep customers a step ahead of bad actors, harness the power of AI and ML to identify threats that are beyond the scope of manual intervention, further simplify data management, and enable customers to do more with data.
The event will feature a variety of high-caliber speakers, including:
- Mohit Aron, CEO and founder, Cohesity
- Kevin Miller, vice president and general manager, S3, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- John Kindervag, creator of the Zero Trust security framework and senior vice president, ON2IT Cybersecurity
- Nick Warner, chief operating officer, SentinelOne
- Marianne Bailey, former senior cybersecurity executive, National Security Agency (NSA) and partner at Guidehouse
- Bill Graff, senior vice president and chief information officer, Cerner Corporation
- Bill Schlough, senior vice president and chief information officer, San Francisco Giants
Attendees can also obtain free professional certifications in data protection, file and object services, and multicloud solutions during half-day Cohesity Academy sessions.
The event will conclude with an inspiring address from Peggy Whitson, a former NASA chief astronaut, who shattered numerous spaceflight records over the course of her decorated career.
To learn more about Cohesity Connect and register for the event, please visit cohesity.com/connect.
HPE introduced a new line of storage products, branded Alletra, this week during an online event. The new arrays shares DNA of their predecessors, but introduce a common API across two classes of storage that enable customers to consume the on-prem arrays in a cloud-native method.
Can I tell you a secret? I was underwhelmed at the announcement. But I also began to think more about what HPE is doing and why and I do believe this is a much bigger deal that I initially thought.
The new Alletra arrays come in two classes – the 6000 series and the 9000 series. The 6000 series is based on the Nimble DNA and the 9000 series is based on the Primera DNA, according to HPE. This means they are an iteration of the same or similar hardware platforms. Alletra is all NVMe. Alletra 9000 scales up to 4 controllers, the Alletra 6000 is a dual controller array. Beyond those basic facts, the underlying technical details weren’t discussed during the keynote – instead much of the focus is on operational style and business outcomes.
Cloud Operated
What differentiates the Alletra arrays from the previous HPE offerings is a centralized cloud management console that exposes the arrays for control and consumption by multiple levels of employee. The Data Services Cloud Console is the central point of control for the new storage arrays. It directs much of the operations, including decisions around placement and location of data – simplifying and abstracting it away from the user.
HPE had plenty of lofty ideas around exposing the Data Service Cloud Console directly to data users, enabling developers and data scientists direct access to request storage and deploy their data applications. To be clear, the keynote focused on outcomes and enablement – topics that resonate with IT managers. While this may all be true, there is certainly more orchestration required to integrate DSCC into a company’s overall strategy and delivery for data services.
The DSCC is built on Aruba Central DNA – a somewhat logical, if not unexpected platform. Aruba Central is HPE’s answer to easy configuration and deployment in the network world. That capability now comes to the Alletra arrays, promising quicker and more efficient configuration and setup.
Common and consistent API is a big win across the storage arrays. From a technology perspective, this offers IT administrators parity between the Alletra 6000 (based on Nimble DNA) and the Alletra 9000 (based on Primera/3PAR DNA). And while API’s don’t make for flashy keynotes, this is a key area of progress across HPE’s storage arrays.
This strategy has play with HPE’s Greenlake consumption model, operationalizing the costs of on-prem IT. 3PAR and Nimble offerings within Greenlake did not have a cloud control console where users could seamlessly manage their Greenlake arrays. The previous generation required storage administrators to carry out the wishes of customers. Data Services Cloud Console equalizes that and exposes the control directly to customers – so whether you’re buying CapEx or Greenlake, you get the same cloud enabled experience.
Built on solid foundations
For HPE, it marks a departure from its prior BIG storage news. The biggest announcements in HPE’s storage portfolio in the last 12 years have really been around acquisition. In 2010, HP outbid rivals to secure 3PAR and, frankly, a place at the table as a serious storage contender. 7 years later, HP purchased Nimble to focus and have additional internal offerings in the mid-range. Rounding out the portfolio, HPE continues to have the MSA product line, which is a private label arrangement with a third party, and its high-end XP product line which is co-branded with Hitachi. Besides some DAS offerings, these have been the mainstays of their portfolio for the last 5-ish years.
3PAR has always had a hardware component in its secret sauce, utilizing its ASIC for a number of acceleration and differentiation characteristics. Nimble is a great product on commodity hardware – a little storage array capable of lots of workloads – however the gem of Nimble was really Infosight, which continues to play a major role in Alletra. Shortly after acquiring Nimble, HPE began to integrate Infosight with its 3PAR arrays, a goal that is fully realized with Alletra. With a single shared API, both the HPE Alletra 6000 and 9000 series arrays gain parity to the AI-ops of Infosight.
DNA
Attendees heard repeatedly about the many pieces of DNA that formed this overall announcement. Each time you hear it, think intellectual property – assets that exist in the company already. This is a strong, intentional messaging. It speaks to the fact that HPE is assimilating its previous acquisitions and looking within to take the key pieces of other successful products and strategies and bring it together in a much bigger picture to solve its customers problems.
The acquisitions of 3PAR and Nimble have generally paid off well for HPE. There is great intellectual property being used across this new solutioning – for a recap:
- DSCC is based on Aruba Central cloud management
- Alletra 6000 series is based on Nimble’s chassis and OS
- Alletra 9000 series is based on Primera’s chassis, OS and scale
- Infosight is a critical component operating these arrays
- 3PAR SSMC was a predecessor simplified management console to abstract the difficulties of storage management
- Peer Motion and data services between the arrays lend themselves to the operational style in DSCC
- Data protection from Recovery Manager Central – with integrated data flows from primary to secondary storage arrays also play a role in the DSCC management
Oversimplified?
A single consistent management experience, that is simplified to an IT generalists’ skillset to manage, with the possibility of extending to more technical business users to consume – that is the messaging for HPE Alletra and its Data Service Cloud Console.
One concern is the over-simplification of the management. With this style of simple management, customization is often killed as a byproduct, meaning less capabilities and use-cases for the customer. While speed, agility and simplification are all great focus areas, there are still some complex data refresh problems, data flow problems and other use cases in this realm that need solutions. For those customers, fortunately the Primera and Nimble arrays are still available with no end in sight.
HPE is clear that Alletra is something new. No end of life dates or timelines were shared for Primera or Nimble going away. HPE has typically been a vendor who favors choice, so these will likely continue development and support far into the future. And choice is good, from a customers’ perspective.
This post is going to focus on IntSights and their Threat Intelligence Platform. Who is IntSights and why would you want to choose them? Here is some info directly from their web site:
IntSights was founded in 2015 by former members of an elite intelligence unit in the Israel Defense Forces. Equipped with a deep understanding of how threat actors think, collaborate, and act, they set out to build a solution that enables companies to use external intelligence to change the way they protect themselves.
The Israel Defense Forces are well known as one of the premier forces in the world, especially their intelligence units. Knowing that IntSights was founded by former members of one of their elite intelligence units gives me confidence in their ability to provide a great Threat Intelligence Platform.
What is the mission of IntSights?
IntSights detects and neutralizes cyberattacks outside the wire. We believe that strong intelligence can shift the paradigm between companies and threat actors, enabling security teams to anticipate instead of react, and outmaneuver instead of recover.
Don’t get caught reacting to new cyber threats. Extend your visibility. Understand your adversaries. Proactively dismantle threats. Defend Forward™.
I truly feel that for a company to be successful in fending off cyberattacks, you need 3rd party vendors to help. A company like IntSights is crucial as they extend your visibility into possible attacks and help you understand who is trying to attack you.
Let’s dig into what their Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) is:
The IntSights TIP delivers the vital functionality that operationalizes the extensive threat intelligence delivered by Threat Command, providing a comprehensive solution.
Replace point solutions with an all-in-one platform to maximize efficiency.
An all-in-one platform is a great idea! One place to manage and maintain threat insight.
Aggregate & Centralize
Automate aggregation and organization of all threat data sources into one easy-to-use dashboard. Single-pane-of-glass visibility and real-time context enable intuitive ranking of investigation and remediation efforts
Connect critical dots for smart prioritization.
The ability to aggregate and organize all your threat sources into one dashboard? Sound good to me. Being able to go to one place for that is very efficient.
Enrich & Visualize
Streamline operations by turning raw indicators into actionable, enriched intelligence. Correlate new IOCs with your unique digital assets to better understand potential impact.
Assess risk to drive action.
Enriching and visualizing your intelligence sources is crucial. Correlating Indicators of Compromise with your unique assets will definitely help understand if there is going to be an impact on your systems.
Analyze & Investigate
Instantly visualize and rapidly analyze how new campaigns connect with known malicious assets. Conduct deep threat investigations.
Leverage the interactive Investigation module.
Using this platform to dig deep into threat investigations. Know how potential threats work and how they could affect your company is very important.
Integrate & Block
Directly manage IOCs and other threats within the TIP. Automatically integrate with existing security systems and devices.
Proactively monitor and block threats.
Integrating the TIP with existing security systems will help you proactively monitor for threats and block them. Being proactive is much better than being reactive. Stop the threat before it happens so you don’t have to clean it up after the fact.
For more information and some use cases on the Investigation API, check out this PDF.
You can learn more about all the products and solutions that IntSights provides at this link.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. IntSights compensated me for my time but any opinions given are my own.
So you’ve built a software and service inventory platform that supports both Windows and Linux endpoints through the use of a lightweight agent, but you want to expand market share for it and seem cool & hip with the micro-segmentation crowd. What are you to do? Well if your name is Cisco and the product is Tetration you add in the ability to orchestrate the host level firewall be it IPTables or Windows Defender Firewall.
Now I hear you saying, “Doesn’t Cisco already have a micro-segmentation offering with ACI?”. And yes, they do but it is tied to rather expensive Nexus 9K series hardware. So, in a rather un-Cisco like move rather than tying the product to an expensive piece of proprietary hardware, with Tetration one can deploy the management plane on hardware, as a VM or utilize a Cisco managed SaaS service. This is due to a break from the micro-segmentation model used by ACI where policy enforcement is done at a layer above the protected host. With Tetration an agent (boo! hiss!) gets installed on every protected host, be it Windows or Linux, to turn policy statements crafted at the management plane into rules in the native Windows Firewall or IP Tables. This comes with the inherent limitation of only being able to do layer 4 port/protocol security policies with a twist of being able to tell which process is listening or transmitting the traffic.
To automate the process of rule creation as new hosts come online Tetration utilizes policies built around tags. In theory this is great and provides for a more devops path to security. But in reality, it takes a fairly mature organization to have their security policies implemented in such a way that applying tags works. Especially when you start integrating with other environments such as VMware vSphere or border firewalls with their own sets of tags. Agreement across the board on what a tag means and what attributes are associated with it is critical.
Where Tetration gets interesting, and IMO provides real value, is with the agent installed on every protected host you are provided an inventory of every system. This inventory includes software (and version) installed, currently running processes, and historically run processes. So, you can know which of your web servers are vulnerable to Apache Struts bugs and where in your environment you still have SMBv1 running. The inventory data can also be shared with 3rd party tools through a REST API or via Kafka.
I see value in Tetration, but more for mapping out application dependencies and inter-relationships than for providing security. Whether the value justifies purchase all depends on Cisco’s licensing of the product which is historically one of Cisco’s weak points. Products typically are priced at a premium, and support renewals are akin to walking barefoot across a bed of salt and broken glass. It will be interesting to see what sort of foothold Cisco is able to gain with Tetration in what is becoming a crowded segment of host based micro-segmentation with Illumio, Guardicore, Edgewise Networks, and others having a head start.
Thank you to Remi Philippe, Rob Tappenden, and Tim Garner of Cisco for their presentation on Tetration at Security Field Day 4.
I was discussing Unix distributions with a bud on facebook. Hal Rottenberg
So I thought I would do a few posts on installs and results.
We are going to kick things off with OpenIndiana.
OpenIndiana is a free and open-source Unix operating system derived from OpenSolaris and based on illumos. Developers forked OpenSolaris after Oracle Corporation discontinued it, in order to continue development and distribution of the source code. Wikipedia
For the ease of installation, I am installing these in VMware workstation. I used freebsd as the OS when I made a new VM.
Lets go ahead and grab the media.
Below I walk through the install process.
There we have it. I hope you enjoyed the post.
Press Release – Rob Eggers Named StorCentric Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Rob Eggers Named StorCentric Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
August 12, 2020
StorCentric today announced Rob Eggers has been named StorCentric Chief Financial Officer, effective August 10, 2020. Eggers will be responsible for managing all internal and external financial actions of the company, reporting directly to Mihir Shah, StorCentric CEO.
“I am very pleased to welcome someone of Rob’s caliber to the team. He stands among the industry’s most highly respected and accomplished financial leaders,” said Shah. “He will play a crucial role in the company’s continued success, market leadership, and rapid growth trajectory, especially in the months ahead which will include some of the most strategic initiatives and innovative product portfolio enhancements in StorCentric’s history.”
“This is indeed a critical time in the storage industry, as so many emerging trends and market demands are colliding and forcing organizations to reassess data management workflows and data security risks,” said Eggers. “I’m extremely proud to be joining StorCentric, an incredible team of passionate and talented individuals, from every corner of the company.” He continued, “It is a team that is dedicated not only to developing and delivering the most innovative data management solutions, but one that is likewise committed to providing the right solution for each and every customer’s unique IT challenges, business goals and regulatory requirements.”
Rob Eggers is a senior finance executive with 25+ years of experience and a deep understanding of corporate finance, investor relations (IR), manufacturing, and sales, focused primarily in high-technology and networking companies. Prior to StorCentric, Eggers served in various senior financial management roles for 18 years at Brocade, including Vice President of Finance during which he directed all aspects of financial planning and analysis, IR, and was instrumental in scaling Brocade to a $2.5B storage networking company. Prior experience includes financial leadership roles with IBM and Samsung. Eggers holds an MBA and a BS in International Finance from Brigham Young University.
Tweet this: @StorCentric Names Rob Eggers Chief Financial Officer (CFO) www.storcentric.com @Nexsan @Drobo @RetrospectInc @VexataCorp
Press Release – Scale Computing Offers Acronis SCS Backup and Recovery Solutions on HC3 for Broad Range of US Public Sector Environments
Scale Computing Offers Acronis SCS Backup and Recovery Solutions on HC3 for Broad Range of US Public Sector Environments
Provides backup and cyber protection on the HC3 for federal, state and local government, healthcare and education, including the most sensitive computing environments
INDIANAPOLIS, August 11, 2020 – Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, today announced it is offering Acronis SCS backup and disaster recovery solutions, as well as a cloud storage option, on the HC3 platform for US public sector customers, including federal, state and local government, public utilities, and education, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations.
Seamless integration with Scale Computing’s HC3 infrastructure provides the unparalleled backup and cyber protection capabilities of Acronis SCS Cyber Backup and Acronis SCS Cyber Backup 12.5 Hardened Edition on a simple, scalable platform that many public sector organizations already use. Built-in Active Protection against ransomware and unparalleled recovery flexibility ensure that, no matter the operating environment, public sector organizations’ critical systems remain operational and sensitive data stays safe.
The integration of Scale Computing HC3 infrastructure with Acronis SCS backup software solutions is more critical in today’s world than ever before. As more and more organizations have adopted remote work policies in response to COVID-19, related cyberattacks have jumped thirty percent, and the number of ransomware attacks on public sector entities is back on the rise.
“Scale Computing already enjoys a strong presence in the public sector,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “Now, by adding support for Acronis SCS and its best-of-breed ransomware protection and backup software, we are even better equipped to meet the security requirements and unique needs of a wide range of public sector organizations, including the most sensitive government environments — something that has become even more critical today with the increase in ransomware and other cyberattacks.”
“By delivering both our regular and hardened backup solutions on the Scale Computing HC3 infrastructure, Acronis SCS ensures our public sector customers have access to the highly secure environment and affordable, self-healing platform they need to not only survive in today’s complex cyber threat landscape, but thrive,” said John Zanni, CEO of Acronis SCS. “That combination is incredibly valuable for IT teams responsible for ensuring America’s mission critical systems and sensitive data stay protected, both in these unprecedented times and well beyond.”
Acronis SCS Cyber Backup 12.5 Hardened Edition
Acronis SCS Cyber Backup 12.5 Hardened Edition, the company’s backup software for federal government and utilities, is purpose built to provide operational assurance to sensitive ‘no internet’ air gapped environments, including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and industrial control systems, Department of Defense weapons testing sites, development labs, training simulators, deployed tactical elements, and more. It is the only full-disk image backup and disaster recovery point solution available on the Department of Defense Information Network Approved Products List (DoDIN APL), is certified by Common Criteria, and is in process for FIPS 140-2 certification.
As a company that works closely with the US veteran community, including maintaining a workforce of twenty percent veterans and providing post-military IT job training and certifications to veterans via Acronis SCSVets, Acronis SCS has a unique understanding of public sector cyber protection needs and the critical importance of protecting sensitive government information and assets.
About Scale Computing
Scale Computing is a leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. Scale Computing HC3 software eliminates the need for traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, the HC3 self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects infrastructure problems in real-time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime. When ease-of-use, high availability, and TCO matter, Scale Computing HC3 is the ideal infrastructure platform. Read what our customers have to say on Gartner Peer Insights, Spiceworks, TechValidate and TrustRadius.
About Acronis SCS
Acronis SCS is an American cyber protection and edge data security company exclusively dedicated to meeting the unique requirements of the US public sector. The company’s innovative and comprehensive cyber protection, backup and disaster recovery, anti-ransomware, and enterprise file sync and share software solutions ensure operational assurance and data security across America’s federal, state and local government, education, healthcare, and nonprofit computing environments. All Acronis SCS employees are US citizens.
Press Release – Zerto Customers Lead DR-to-Cloud Trend with Rapid Adoption of Azure
Zerto Customers Lead DR-to-Cloud Trend with Rapid Adoption of Azure
Global Azure Adoption Doubles in 1H 2020 Across Several Verticals; Zerto Triples IT Resilience Footprint Across Federal Government and Public Sectors with New Customer Acquisitions
BOSTON – September 1, 2020 – Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, today announced cloud technology trends and positive growth among its customer base for the first half of 2020. Zerto’s customers are pursuing the disaster recovery (DR)-to-cloud trend with rapid global adoption of Microsoft Azure. Additionally, Zerto has tripled its global IT Resilience footprint across the federal government and public sectors with new customer acquisitions.
Azure Adoption Ascends
During the first half of 2020, global adoption of Microsoft Azure doubled across several verticals. Virtual machines protected to Azure using Zerto has doubled year-over-year with half of the consumption driven by the education, financial services, healthcare, and technology sectors.
According to Gartner, Inc., “Cloud DR costs can be a fraction of the total costs for traditional DR sites.” In the 2019 Security and Risk survey, for more than 300 IT organizations worldwide, cloud-based recovery is the most popular choice across all levels of system availability.*
Innovation in the Public Cloud
Zerto customers also expanded their adoption among other public cloud providers. Earlier this year, Zerto announced integrations with AWS Storage Gateway and introduced support for Oracle and Google Cloud. The company also continues to make it easier for customers to adopt public clouds. A joint customer, QAD, a premier supplier of ERP software took advantage of the new Google Cloud and Zerto integration.
“With Google Cloud VMware Engine, we are able to quickly extend the enterprise class disaster recovery capabilities we have become accustomed to with Zerto to the Google Cloud,” says Scott Lawson, Director, IT architecture at QAD.
IT Resilience Footprint Grows
Zerto expanded its IT Resilience Platform footprint by more than 200% with new customers in the federal government and public sector in the first half of 2020. Additionally, Zerto experienced more than 200% increase in customer project implementation sizes among the legal, software and internet, and telecommunications sectors.
Key growth highlights include:
- New customers in the federal government sector increased by more than 250%.
- New customers in the public sector increased by 225%.
- New customers in the insurance industry increased by 18% with the average customer project implementation size increasing by 20%.
- The average new customer project implementation size in the legal and telecommunications industries nearly doubled.
- The average new customer project implementation size in the software and internet industry more than tripled.
- The average new customer project implementation size in financial services increased by 30%.
Customer Successes and Wins
In the 1H 2020, Zerto customers continued to build IT resilience and achieve results across multiple sectors and use cases:
- Ritchie Bros., a global asset management and disposition company, leveraged Zerto to simplify DR, gain more control, and support data center migrations. To learn more, read the Ritchie Bros. case study here.
- A leading chemical corporation leveraged Zerto to move DR operations to the Azure cloud and achieved new operational efficiencies. To learn more, click here.
- A regional credit union strengthened its IT resilience by adopting a multi-cloud DR strategy using Zerto with both Azure and AWS. To learn more, click here.
- New global customers using Zerto with Azure include Cairn Energy PLC, City of SeaTac, Grey County, and KIK Custom Products.
“We serve the people of Grey County, and because data serves the people, it needs to be available 24/7,” said Evan Davis of Grey County. “Zerto enabled us to easily make the move to Azure for more resilience. Now we have peace of mind that we can recover our data easily even in the midst of a disruption.”
ZertoCON was all About the Customer!
During ZertoCON 2020 Virtual Event in June, several customers spoke about their experiences and success with Zerto. Click here to access the following on-demand speaker sessions:
- Rich Bailey, VP of IT operations, PruittHealth discusses “A Customer’s Guide to DR in the Cloud with Zerto and Microsoft Azure.”
- Rodney Carlson, systems analyst, Horizon Bank shares his experience in “Modernize Your Backup with Zerto.”
- Kent Pollard, senior technical architect, IFDS discusses “IT Resilience for Kubernetes and Containers.”
- Jayme Williams, senior systems engineer, TenCate shares “A Tale of Two Ransomware Attacks: TenCate Uses Zerto to Recover from Ransomware in Minutes.”
In June, Zerto also honored KIND Snacks as the inaugural IT Resilience Innovator , a program that highlights IT leaders in disaster recovery, data protection, and cloud that are striving to protect their business from disruption.
“Organizations are increasingly recognizing that building IT resilience and leveraging the cloud for DR is critical not only for IT operations and business continuity but also for simplicity, greater efficiencies, and control,” said Coley Burke, CRO of Zerto. “We’re excited to see the momentum for our IT Resilience Platform across federal and public sectors and look forward to bolstering IT resilience across all customers for the second half of 2020.”
* Gartner, What I&O Leaders Need to Know About Disaster Recovery to the Cloud, Nik Simpson, 27 November 2019
About Zerto
Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.
Press Release – Natural Gas Agency Lights Up Transition to Cloud Backup with iland
The Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia was looking to replace its tape based backup with a could solution. They chose iland Secure Cloud Backup with Veeam Cloud Connect. See the full press release below.
Natural Gas Agency Lights Up Transition to Cloud Backup with iland
Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia Replaces Physical Tape Backups with iland Secure Cloud Backup with Veeam Cloud Connect
Houston – August 13, 2020 – iland, a leading VMware-based cloud services provider for application hosting, data protection and disaster recovery, today announced the Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia has selected iland Secure Cloud Backup with Veeam Cloud Connect to backup its workloads, transitioning from years of relying on physical tape libraries.
The Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia (the Gas Authority) is the largest non-profit natural gas joint action agency in the United States, serving 79 members in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee who meet the gas needs of more than 245,000 customers. Natural gas has become more important to many communities and customers and the Gas Authority is safely and reliably delivering gas supplies every day. Their team is dedicated to growing natural gas sales through multiple markets.
Senior System Administrator Jason Espinales-Osorio explained that as the company grew it was also expanding its physical tape libraries at a data center several miles from their office. Tape storage is one of the oldest and most difficult to access backup methods. Espinales-Osorio spent valuable time retrieving old tapes and preparing them for pickup by their tape backup vendor. Unfortunately, this time consuming task meant their tapes and data sometimes sat at the offsite location for weeks at a time.
It became evident that tape backup, with its limited amount of space and high level of maintenance, was quickly becoming cost prohibitive. Espinales-Osorio decided to proactively seek several cloud backup vendors and quickly discovered iland to be a leader in Backup as a Service (BaaS).
“We were using physical tape and retention that was clunky. I had to drive to our offices, take them out and prep them for our vendor. It was getting painful,” said Espinales-Osorio. “It was definitely time to explore cloud backups and iland was a natural fit for us.”
“An easy, cost-effective backup solution has never been more important for growing businesses, especially those with tight IT budgets and increased data availability needs,” said Brian Ussher, iland president and co-founder. “iland prides itself on being able to seamlessly transition organizations like Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia away from legacy hardware, while also providing the resources and proven technology necessary to scale and succeed.”
In iland’s Secure Cloud Backup integrated with Veeam Cloud Connect technology, Espinales-Osorio found an easy, cost-effective solution, allowing him to replace cumbersome tapes permanently. He quickly implemented a backup strategy that had direct integration and 100 percent compatibility with Veeam’s industry-leading backup and replication software supported by iland’s award-winning Secure Cloud Console.
“iland really allowed us to get ahead of the curve,” said Espinales-Osorio. “For the longest time, we were stuck in those old ways of doing things. iland has gotten us moving forward.”
Espinales-Osorio praised the ease of the iland Secure Cloud Console, which allows him to manage his backups and expand his retention from anywhere. He now has much more time to work on his day-to-day system administrative and network tasks without worrying about physical tapes.
“I spent so much of my time dealing with those physical tape backups because that was a priority for us. We needed to make sure that data was there. Now I’ve got more time to do more of my regular day-to-day tasks because we can automate and leverage the cloud to handle backups,” said Espinales-Osorio. “The ease of the console and expandability is critical. Now we can expand our retention policies with just an email, it’s amazing.”
About iland
iland is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). They are recognized by industry analysts as a leader in disaster recovery. The award-winning iland Secure Cloud Console natively combines deep layered security, predictive analytics, and compliance to deliver unmatched visibility and ease of management for all of iland’s cloud services. Headquartered in Houston, Texas and London, UK, and Sydney, Australia, iland delivers cloud services from its cloud regions throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Learn more at www.iland.com.