Data Solutions for Better Uptime

Business continuity is a key to success. If your information technology (IT) isn’t working properly or your network is hacked, it could throw a wrench in the entire works of your organization. Here’s a look by the seasoned professionals at ORAM Corporate Advisors at data solutions that can keep your business flowing even in the face of a crisis.Website MonitoringThere are software products available that will send a notification should your business website go down. Such monitoring software screenshots any errors and provides a second-by-second timeline to track where the issue(s) began. Not only does this information allow you to get your website up and running again quickly, but also provides insight into preventing such errors in the future to stopgap further downtime.This type of software means managers and/or your IT department will receive alerts about incidents by phone, text, email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and push notifications. It also offers mobile applications for Android and iOS devices which allows professionals to access reports, schedule staff members, and monitor website uptime remotely.One software program that offers website monitoring is Better Uptime. It combines incident management, uptime monitoring, and status pages. One of the things that set Better Uptime apart is it has built-in uptime monitoring that covers HTTP(s), ping, SSL & TLD expiration, cron job, and port monitoring. Additionally, those monitors can be integrated with on-call alerting and third-party monitoring tools such as Uptime Robot and Pingdom. When it comes to a user-friendly status page for understanding what is happening, Better Uptime gets the job done well.Another website monitoring program is AppOptics. This software provides diagnostic tools, full transaction diagnostics, and resource management. It’s also a highly-rated program as it offers root cause analysis and server monitoring as well.AppOptics offers continuous monitoring that scales with your applications for less downtime. The software monitors the health of your website, servers, hosts, containers, and even serverless environments. It also troubleshoots threats through distributed tracing, live code profiling, and exception tracking. The company even offers a free trial.WhatsUp Gold is a third website monitoring software offering all of the advantages of AppOptics. It also provides peace of mind for organizations that need to get, and remain, regulatory compliant when it comes to log management archiving. WhatsUp Gold provides complete clarity into the status and performance of applications, network devices, and servers. It’s good for on-premises hardware as well as servers in the cloud. This program also offers a free trial.Incident Management SoftwareAccording to ZDNet, it takes most companies more than six months to detect a data breach. What’s even scarier is new research shows the average financial or commercial business faces multiple attacks every month. That’s why incident management software is so important.When it comes to incident management software, xMatters offers both a free and paid version. The program provides easy-to-use on-call scheduling and incident timelines in addition to team management tools such as permission management.The xMatters software offers hundreds of pre-built automations so no hard coding is required. It offers a workflow builder that is as easy as drag-and-drop. Automated escalations prevent unacknowledged issues and simple calendars keep all team members on the same page. This single platform is designed to run in the background continuously to help protect your data.The free xMatters plan is ideal for small businesses that want to save money while implementing on-call functionality. To get phone call notifications, you must sign up for the paid version of the software.Resolver is another incident management program that offers corrective and preventative actions (CAPA), incident reporting, investigation management, and IT incident management. It also provides task management and safety incident management as well. This program makes incident reporting simple and accessible for your employees with hotlines and an incident portal. How and where employees report incidents or suspected incidents should be part of your company’s written information security plan (WISP).The Resolver program helps ensure risks and incidents are reported in a timely fashion and are not overlooked. It also streamlines incident and investigation processes to keep your business moving forward. Resolver allows you to build reports and analytics to provide insight into what is working, what is not, and where threats and risks are originating. It even provides critical details about losses and recoveries, evidence, and involvements so incidents can be quickly addressed.A third incident management program is AlertOps. It also offers incident reporting, investigation management, IT incident management, and task management. This is a software as a service (SaaS) incident response management platform. It alerts you immediately about incidents and provides data to rapidly resolve issues. The goal of this program is to empower your enterprise to resolve incidents quickly before they hinder daily operations that can lead to revenue loss and devastating consequences for your brand’s reputation.There are several benefits to using AlertOps including real-time, automated incident response, and comprehensive incident reports. Such reports allow you to analyze, learn, and optimize against future incidents. You can also resolve problems quickly with the software’s pre-built integration templates, workflows, and escalation rules. AlertOps also lets you track, analyze, and optimize incident response processes within your business.Backup ProgramsBacking up your business data is crucial, especially given that phishing attacks continue to rise year after year. According to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, malware was involved in 28 percent of data breaches. Again, your WISP should outline data backup so your business can quickly recover from a cyber incident.One program that is ideal for backup is Barracuda. Backup by Barracuda offers ransomware protection so cybercriminals can’t hold your data for ransom. Recovering your data with Barracuda after an attack is as simple as eliminating the malware, deleting criminally encrypted files, and restoring your valuable data with a good copy saved in the software.Barracuda’s backup software will restore data to both physical appliances, virtual servers, offsite locations, and the cloud. So wherever you want data backup, Barracuda has your business covered. It also has the capability to pull data from all of these sources and preserve it in case of a cyber event. In addition, it’s great for other events that may destroy data as well such as natural disasters and workplace incidents. You also get to choose where backed up data is stored so you choose where your valuable data will reside.With backup by Barracuda, you also get to decide how you want to recover your data. Data stored with Barracuda can include a set of affected files or you can recover your data to a snapshot in time, such as right before an attack occurs. The program also supports virtual or physical restoration of data which means you can recover it from anywhere at any time. Rather than recovery taking hours, days, or more, your data recovery can take mere minutes.Carbonite is another data backup software program that is a terrific option for enterprises of all sizes. A free trial is available that includes automatic cloud backup for servers and up to 25 computers, external hard drive and network-attached storage (NAS) device backup, and backup for databases and live applications in addition to other options.With Carbonite, your business gets data protection and migration solutions to keep lines of access open to critical business data at all times. The company offers Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365 as well as Carbonite Endpoint which offers automatic, secure data protection for all endpoints in your network. Carbonite Server provides an all-in-one backup and recovery solution should the worst occur. Furthermore, Carbonite Recover keeps a second copy of any system in the cloud as an instant failsafe in the event something goes wrong.If you’d like more information about data solutions to reduce downtime, revenue loss, and damage to your company’s reputation, contact ORAM Corporate Advisors at (617) 933-5060. The call is free and there is never any obligation.