Webinar- Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud – 2012-05-31

Hello everybody, and welcome to Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. Just a couple of things to get us started today. You should be able to hear the audio through your computer’s mic and speakers today. If you do lose your Internet connection, at any time you can reconnect using the same linkyou used when you initially connected. And if you need to contact ReadyTalkyou can do that at 800-843-9166. Just as a reminder, this webinar is going to be recorded today and everybody will be muted. So if you do have any questions you can go ahead and type those into the chat paneand we will get back to you either within the chat pane, or if it is content relatedI will be feeding those questions audibly to our presenters throughout the presentation today. Again, this webinar is Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. My name is Kyla Hunt. I am the webinar program manager at TechSoup. I am going to be the facilitator of this webinar today. Our presenter todayis going to be Sam Chenkin from npCloud. And he is going to be talking a lot about definitionsof disaster recovery and the cloud, and a little bit about npCloud products like npVault. And where it says Shab Sigman assisting with chat, that actually should be Kevin Lo. So you will be seeing his name pop up in the chat once in a while. And just a little bit about the agenda today, we of course are taking care of housekeepingright now. Sam’s going to be talking about npCloud, some terminology,backup considerations and the npCloud product npVault. At the end of the webinar I am going to be providing you with a linkto npVault products through TechSoup. So with that, I am going to go ahead and give it over to Samto go ahead and begin the presentation. So take it away Sam. Sam: Okay, thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Sam Chenkin. I am the product manager at npCloud. I realize that backup and disaster recoveryis not exactly the most exciting topic, so I am going to try to keep it interesting. Let me just lead off with a little bit of an introduction to npCloud. I’ll try to keep that short too. So npCloud is a nonprofit. We are a 501(c)(3) organization. And we provide cloud-based technology products to other nonprofits,and NGOs and charities. We have a mission just like you do. And our mission is to ensure all nonprofits can use technology to better serve their communities. So our whole deal is helping you do your work more effectively. We grew out of an organization called NPower PA. I’m sure some of you are familiarwith the NPower Network. We were founded in 2003 in Philadelphia. We have almost 400 regional clients. Over 100 of those, we provide all of their IT consulting needs,their networks, their servers. And we also do technology planning servicesfor the rest of the organization at some point. Really, working with these local, regional nonprofits we realized that there was a needfor something different. It was getting harder and harder to do project-based ITwhere every four years you put in a new server. You get your new computers every three years. It’s getting harder to get funding for these expenses that are increasingly being seenas operational. And it is just a lot of energy and time being spent on somethingthat isn’t really your main job as a nonprofit. You shouldn’t be spending all your timeworking on your desktops and your networks. So our goal was to address some of these needs. So we built npCloud to bring cloud technology to you as nonprofit organizations. We see these technologies as providing a predictable, ongoing costso you don’t need to raise that $10,000 every four years. You know ahead of time how much you are going to pay, and it is going to be a smaller amount. It’s going to be broken out month to month to month,easier to work into your operational budget. It’s going to be lower risk, because this isn’t your core job. It is not your job to maintain your servers and your networks. It is your job to help people. So you can let other people whose job it is, handle those things. And hopefully that leads to less anxiety for you as a nonprofit. Hopefully you can sleep safely at night knowing that your data is actually safe. And then it also provides really some tremendous features particularly around mobility and access. I am sure a lot of you are increasingly having mobile workforces, right?You hire people wherever they are and they help out from where they are. And people work from home and you want to work from client sites. And these are some of the real features among others of cloud-based solutions. Okay. So, that is the end of my npCloud spiel. And let’s get into the meat of the terminology. This is I think the most important sectionof this whole presentation. I want to — we are a nonprofitand we are a really education heavy nonprofit. I want to do some educationaround the terminology. What does backup mean? What does disaster recovery mean?What do these things mean?Really, there are a lot of terms that are being used and thrown around mostly as marketing speak. They are all used interchangeably and usually not correctly. Each of these thingsdoes have its own distinct meaning. And some of them won’t be applicable to you,but I want to go through the big ones. And just so you know, we are going to be using some really businessy and corporatekind of language. And I know that can be a turnoff, and why are we doing this?But the fact of the matter is, these big corporations, these big businesses,they are in the business of managing their risk. This is what they do and they arereally, really good at this business continuity and disaster recovery stuff. So this is a good example of where we can maybe learn and adapt some of what they havefigured out to actually work for smaller nonprofits. So let’s start with the big one which is disaster. If anyone wants to type into that chat windowwhat you normally think of when you think of a disaster. What does a disaster mean for your organization?Right, so data loss, fire, flood, natural disaster, you can’t access your data. Loss of facility, you are in a time of chaos. I like it. So all of these things are really big, really clear things and a lot of themare natural disaster related, things you have no control over, your entire building burning down,maybe your server crashing. But some things we don’t always think of are more subtle,and maybe higher risk things. One of the ones that we always talk aboutis your sprinkler going off over your server room. Someone accidentally hits the sprinkler headand now the closet that you’re using as your server room is flooded, and your server crashes. Or, maybe you have a user who is annoyed for some reason,and he or she decides to just delete your entire client database. So these are things that we don’t always think about when we think of disaster,but they are much more likely to happen than the natural disaster variety. So, when we go through these planning steps, we want to make sure we think aboutnot just the big obvious ones, but also the less obvious and probably more likely issues. So here are the big terms. Resiliency is the fancy new term I just learned about last monthin the corporate world. When they talk about all this stuff, they talk about it in terms of resiliency. And then under resiliency, components of resiliency are business continuityand disaster recovery. You have probably heard those terms at some point,but they are separate and distinct items, and we will talk about them separately. And you will see that backup fits into all three of these different components. It is its own discrete item. So when we talk about backup,we will talk about it as it works with business continuity, and resiliency and disaster recovery. So, I am going to go over in a little bit of detail about business continuityand disaster recovery now. This is a little chart that demonstrates this idea. So along the x-axis you will see there is time, and on the y-axis there are capabilities. This is sort of your organization most of the time. You have full capabilities,and you are kind of going along. Everything is great, no problems,no problems doing your normal work. And then suddenly there is an incident. And this is what we were talking about in terms of disasters. So something happens and suddenly your capabilities are reduced. You are not able to serve your clients and your constituents as wellas you would like to be able to. Maybe you can’t talk with them because your phones are out. Or you can’t look up their information to figure out what they need because your database is down. Your capabilities drop precipitously, right? So now, we are down here. And this is where our two terms, business continuity and disaster recovery come in. Disaster recovery is kind of the obvious one. Everything is not working. What do we do to get us back up to where we were before the disaster?And unsurprisingly there are fancy terms for all these different points. But disaster recovery is how we get back up to that point. Business continuity is how we keep providing services while our main systems are down. So, what plans do we have in place to make sure that we are still able to communicate with clients,that we’re still able to provide those services while that disaster happened,before we have all our original capabilities back up and running?So, I was just curious. I wanted to ask a couple of poll questionsabout which organizations have business continuity and disaster recovery plansand how confident all of you as organizations are that your data is actually safe?Kyla: I am going to launch the polls now. So the first one is,has anyone ever done any business continuity or disaster recovery planning?So please go ahead and answer those. I see answers coming in. The options are; my organization has both, you have a business continuity plan,that you have a disaster recovery plan, or your organization has neither,and you are joking, right? I will give you a couple more seconds to answer. I am going to close the poll in five, four, three, two, one. Sam: I am impressed at the number of people that have both a business continuityand a disaster recovery plan. That is special. That’s good to see. I am not surprised that many more people have a disaster recovery planthan a business continuity plan. A business continuity plan is quite a bit more complicatedthan a disaster recovery plan. It spans a lot more of your organization. I expected to see a lot of people who don’t but I’m glad people aren’t just scared by the question,so that is great. Kyla: Awesome. So we’re going to the next one. This is, how confident are you that all your data,files, databases, e-mails, etc. are being backed up?And this is a scale from 1 to 6, either you lie awake at night worrying about this,or you sleep like a baby. I am going to leave it open for about five more seconds,so five, four, three, two, one. Sam: Okay. Great. So this is good. We have more people who are confident about their backups. And this is actually fairly unusual for smaller nonprofit organizations. I will admit that I have a little bit of suspicion about those people who say that they sleep like a baby,but maybe these are IT professionals who actually make sure that those backupsare running. If you are not an IT professional, please check with whoever is handlingyour backup and make sure that you have your data safe. Anytime I’ve talked to an organization that’s lost data they were surprisedthat they weren’t being backed up. But it’s good to see that people are thinking about thisand feel confident. So let’s talk a little bit about what we are going to be going over to dayand where backup fits into all of this. Backup obviouly provides basic assurancesthat you won’t lose your data. And it can be in addition to, or separate from,or sort of included in your business continuity and disaster recovery planning. So lots of times —So if you have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan you might have things like a hot siteor a warm site or a cold site or something like that. These are separate toand in addition to backup. Today we are going to be talking about backup and disaster recovery. NPower PA has a whole service we do around business continuity planningand it’s really complicated. It actually has just as much to do with the peopleas it does with the technology. So it’s a little bit out of scope for today. So Kyla, I didn’t know if you wanted to…Kyla: We had a question when you were talking about npCloud in general. This is from Sharon. She was wondering can npCloud provide productsand services to 501(c)(4)’s as well?Sam: Yeah. It’s not just 501(c)3’s but it depends on the product. And a lot of that is because we partner with third-party organizations. We don’t have a data center, right? That is not our goal to be the server experts. Our goal is to understand all the solutions that are out there and find the best ones for you. And negotiate pricing with them for nonprofits that is really affordableand then help you get there, and then provide support. So some of those partners have requirements about what kind of organization you need to be. But, we could absolutely have a conversation for your organization. Kyla: Okay, great. Thanks. Sam: And yes, we have worked with Canadian nonprofits. Kyla: Jenny was wondering if you could go over again what resiliency was?Sam: Sure. So let’s go back to — so resiliency is this blanket umbrella termthat encompasses business continuity and disaster recovery,and even backup to some extent. The idea is how resilient is your organization as a wholeto having a disaster happening, to having an outage?So if something does happen, how easy is it for your organization to bounce back from that?This is a newer term. Kyla: Right. And I was actually wondering, do you get people that are more interestedin disaster recovery or backup if they are defining disaster in a different way,so if they see disaster as just being a huge thing that hardly ever happens,or if it’s something that can happen that’s smaller, they are not thinking just a fire. They are thinking smaller things that you lose yourjust general like data backup or things like that. Sam: Absolutely. In my time at this organization, four years I have seen one organizationwith a fire that destroyed their offices. And you know what? Their server survived. It booted right back up and and all their data was fine. I have seen dozens of organizationscall us and say, we had one hard drive crash and we did not know that it crashedand then the other redundant hard drive crashed. Or it was being kept under a tarpand the sprinklers went off. Or someone was leaving and they deletedthis file or someone accidentally deleted this file and they had administrative permissionsand they weren’t supposed to. We have so many different kinds of disasters happenand very few of them are the ones you actually think about as disasters. I think that is a really important point and something to think about. Kyla: Okay, great. And before we keep going on I saw one comment I wanted to share from Jeff. It was with the [indistinct] scale. And he was saying that being the IT personhe is actually the one that can never be confident in data backup. Sam: Because you know what can go wrong, right?You know how easy it is for those backups to stop working and then you just don’t knowabout it for two weeks. I will say, none of the organizations that lost datadidn’t have a backup plan. It was always that it either didn’t include the right dataor it had stopped working a month or two months ago and no one knew. So having a backup plan is a really active process, and we will get into some of that later. Kyla: Okay, great. So I think you can go on to the next section. And just as a reminder everybody,if you have any questions while Sam is talking just feel free to type those into the chatand we will get them to him. Thanks. Sam: Now I want to go over some of the things you should be thinking aboutwhen you are thinking about backup. And we will tie this into disaster recovery. This is just a quick summary. There are obviously many, many, many, thingsthat you should think about when you think about backup, but I want to boil it downto the simplest. And some of these are a little bit technical, and that will be too simple for someand too complicated for others. So please let us know if you have questionsor if want more detail about something. So the first thing and really the most basic thing and the thing that often doesn’t get thought aboutis what kinds of data are you actually backing up in your organization?Everyone probably has files on their shared drive, on their P-drive. And they probably also have personal files on their H-drive or their My Documents folderwhich is stored on the server. And any solution out there will backup those files. Other things are quite a bit more complicated. Backing up your e-mail,which is often in Exchange, is its own beast. It is its own challengeand you need to back that data up in very different ways. And you actually need to make sure your software or whatever you are usingspecifically supports backing up Exchange. And then you have all your different databases. You probably have at least two databases that you are using in your organizations. Many of them are probably totally proprietary like maybe QuickBooks is an example of a databaseso it uses a file or Sage MIP or you use ProCare or any of these things. And these all have different databases that need to be backed up in different ways. So it’s really important that you do an inventory of what kinds of information you haveand check that against the list of what the backup provider is saying they support. Sometimes, it is not clear because one database is not like every other database. So you are going to have to do some digging. We will talk a little later. We can help you with that process too with our solution. Next up is retention and versioning. I wanted to get to this pretty earlybecause this is some of the most complicated technical stuffthat we are going to cover today. so retention and versioning is the area that discusses what is actually being backed upand how long it is kept for. Generally you have a retention policy, and the retention policyincludes two important pieces of information. The first is how long after a file is deletedfrom your server is that file deleted from your backup? If I delete a file this week or today,next week will that file still be in that backup? So if I deleted a file a week and a half agoand I didn’t realize that I deleted it today, does that deleted file still exist in my backups?The next is the number and age of versions that are maintained of each file. So when you work on a Word document or thisPowerPoint document or whatever,you normally make changes to it over time. So over a week you might havefive or six different versions of that file. And over a year, especially for those —most of you have Excel documents that you’re using to track intakesor something thatyour database doesn’t quite support, so you might have 200 versionsof that document over a year, and maybe many of those versions are important,because if someone mis-entered something you need to know what was going on at that time. So any backup system is generally going to maintain multiple versions of a particular fileand it is going to delete those versions once you either have a certain number of them —so I have made 12 changes to this file and the 13th one is deleted from the backup,or by the age of the version. So if this version is two weeks old,if I made this change two weeks ago, I don’t need to keep this version anymore. I only need to keep changes that have happened in the last week. These retention policies are driven by a number of factors. And I think the most important is what your actual plan is for the backup. If you are trying to protect against traditional disasters,there being a tornado or flood or something like that,you probably don’t need to keep many versions of your filesbecause you are going to know immediately if something happens. And another backup isn’t going to happen that will overwrite that,so you only need maybe one version of everything. But if you are trying to protect against a user deleting somethingor accidentally overwriting something or anything like that,then maybe you need to keep more versions and you need to keep deleted filesfor a longer period of time. The second one and the one that most organizations don’t actually think ofis how long will it take you to notice that something went terribly wrong?We see this a lot with databases, especially that sometimes a database becomes corruptedand things actually work fine for a week or two weeks. And it’s only after two weeksthat someone tries to run a report and realizes that things aren’t right. So you need to make sure that you have enough versions in your backupto cover that time period before you realize that something happened. Or, maybe a file gets deleted but you don’t need to look at that file for another two weeksand you don’t realize it’s been deleted until two weeks pass. So that is a really important thing to think about. The third is storage cost. This is pretty straightforward. Obviously you need more space the more versions you are keepingand the longer you are keeping deleted files. You usually do a cost-benefit. How much does it cost my organization to keep this stuffversus the risk of it being lost, and then you make that decision. And the fourth is legal requirements and you probably know who you are if this affects you. In some sectors you are required to maintain information for a certain number of years. Some people use their backup system to help do that. So think about how long you’re required to maintain a record if something happens. This is all pretty complicated. Maybe I will just pause for a momentif anyone wants to ask any questions?Kyla: I am not seeing any questions yet. I was thinking of a couple. First of all have many organizations do you come across that don’t have retention policies?Sam: All of them. Maybe three of the biggest ones have a formal retention policy written down. When I say retention policy it could mean a written policy in your policy handbookthat I am sure all of you have, and is totally up to date and you review it with your staffevery three months. But any backup system is also going to include a retention policyeven if it’s not called that. So when you configure your backups you say,how long should it be before this deleted file is removed, or how many versionsdo I want to keep of this file. So you’ll have some kind of retention policy. And if it is not an option that you get to set, it is something that is given to you by defaultby the software. So you should do the research to find that out. I think there are very few organizations that actually understandwhat a retention policy is, so that is something to think about. Kyla: Okay, great. With the legal requirements, do organizations usually come to youwith an understanding of what the legal requirements for the organization are?Sam: I would say that most know the name like HIPAA or PCI or whatever it is. We are not a legal entity and we do our best to help out. And sometimes they know everything needs to be encryptedand we have to be the only ones that can access it, and we can help out with that. But one of the nice things about having worked with nonprofits, me personally for four years,and our organization as a whole for nine is that we have a general understandingof what needs to be done. I am not going to call us the experts,or the legal experts, but we can help you along. Kyla: Okay, great. I think we can keep going. Sam: Okay. So, next up is monitoring. This is often taken for granted. Obviously when we are looking at backups we want to know if a backup failed. Did that backup get canceled? Was there an issue with the server? Did it break?What happened? But having a failed backup doesn’t actually necessarily tell uswhat we really want to know which is, did the backup complete successfully?Is our data safe even? That’s what we really want to know. Is our data safe?There are all these other questions that you really have to askwhen you want to know if your backups failed. I just talked to an organization two weeks agocalled us and is on npVault because of this. They were using, I think it was Carbonite. And they were getting e-mail notificationsthat the backups were completing successfully. And in reality they were completing successfully. They were backing up one file every night over and over and over again. For them, with the notifications they had set up that was a successful backup. So it didn’t actually tell them that their data was safe. And they lost almost all of their datain a server failure. So these are all these questions that you need to be asking. And then you need to know how are we actually notified if something goes wrong. If we get an e-mail we need to make really, really sure that someone is monitoringthat e-mail account. If we get called, that’s great. We need to make surethat whoever it is knows the right person to call. And kind of the wisdom that I would like to pass on to you if I can call it wisdomis there is no substitute for regular test restores. Getting a notification that your backup has completed successfullyor lacking a notification that they failed is not the same thing as knowing that your data is safe. You need to be independently, as a nonprofit organization, doing your own test restores,not asking your IT provider to. If if at all possible, you should be restoring your own filesmaybe once a month just making sure that you can download things successfully,because that’s really where you get hung up. Things seemed to be working,but in fact they weren’t. And you won’t know until you’ve tried to do a restore. So save yourself some heartache there. Next up is recovery. So if something happened, your user overwrote a file. They deleted a file. Your server crashed. you need to think —and this is specific to the backup solution you are using —how do we actually get the data? Do we download it?Does someone ship something to us? Do we copy it off of a hard drive?How long does it take? And really importantly, can I do it myself,or do I need to pay someone else to restore that file? If I need to pay someone else,how long does it take? How expensive is it? Is it actually worth itin case someone just deleted a file? This goes back to what we talked about beforewith retention policies and the intent of your backup. So if you want a backup system so that if a user deletes a file accidentally you can get it back,or they overwrite a file, you need to make sure that the actual restore processisn’t so cumbersome that it doesn’t make sense to do that. And the other thing is restoration is not the same thing as recovery. Restoration just means getting the files and the database export and that kind of stuffonto your server or whatever. What you need to know is what do you actually have to doin order to rebuild your server, reinstall the software, restore the database?How do you put the that data in something that’s actually running?And how long does it actually take before your organization is going to be able to get backto work? That is really what disaster recovery is all about. We are nearing the end of this section. I appreciate your patience. This is a slide with a lot of text but I promise you don’t actually need to read everything. I just wanted to give you an overview of the three most common backup locationsand methodologies. The first is backing up on-site usually to an external USB hard driveattached to your server or a thumb drive or something like that. The next one is doing an off-site manual backup which generally means once a weekyou swap out two external hard drives. You take one home. You keep the other one on-site. And the idea is you have an off-site backup. These two solutions are really, really, really cheap. They are dirt cheap. Maybe it’s two external hard drives. That’s what, $200 these days? It’s very inexpensive. You can often use the software built into your server, really easy. The problem is they are not reliable, so those hard drives fail pretty frequently. I am sure someone has had a backup drive that failed,hopefully not when they needed to restore data from it. With off-site back up, if you have that hard drive with you it’s probably in the trunk of your carbumping up and down as you drive along. With the off-site backup there is also a huge, hugelegal risk there. I had a client a while ago who lost for several hours their backup drivewith unencrypted information in a parking lot of a grocery store. It fell out of their carbecause that’s where they were keeping it, and it was just sitting in that parking lot. If someone had picked it up and decided to do something with the informationit could have been a real issue. The other big issue with these two solutions, at least with most waysof doing these two solutions is actually monitoring everything. It’s really hard to monitor these solutions. And things go wrong with them a lot,because it’s easy to unplug external hard drives and the swapping of hard drivesjust doesn’t work very well. It’s very hard to make sure your backups are actually running. If you are using one of these two solutions and you are not checking your backups every dayor every other day, you should be concerned about the health of your backups. I am not trying to fear monger. And it is not hard to check. It’s an easy way to make surethese two solutions aren’t going to cost you something in the long-run. The third solution and obviously what we’re focused on todayis backing up to the cloud, having the cloud be your location for your backup. And the biggest downside obviously is it is expensive. You have to pay for storage in the cloud because you have to pay someone ongoing fees. They have ongoing costs to keep that information somewhere that is not your site. And really for some organizations, that is a deal killer. It’s a huge issue. But, I think the thing to think about is what is the cost to your organization if you lose that dataand you have to make the decision for yourself. The benefits of the cloud are huge. For one thing it it just kind of works. Unlike swapping hard drives you install the software and you have to monitor itand make sure it is working and do those test restores. But, you don’t have to every day go into the server and do something. You can restore to anywhere. So if That data is online, you download it to your backup siteor to a user’s home or whatever you need to do to get that data if something happens. Lastly, they are easy to monitor. There is always pretty much a Web component,a website that tells you what the status is of your backups and e-mailsyou if something goes wrong. Those are more reliable than having software on your server. Just one more slide in this section. I just wanted to give a quick overview of, what is the cloud?So I think we hear about the cloud a lot. It is a really common term,and it is a really catchphrasey term which is obviously why we use it in our name. But it’s not really clear what it is. So the cloud is not that different fundamentally from your local network. So you have servers which have hard drives and memory and they are sitting somewhereand they might fail. But instead of one server you have hundreds or thousands of servers,and they are all distributing the work among so if one server fails you don’t lose your data. Things keep on working. And then all these organizations have,it is their job to maintain your data, keep everything safe. So they have network engineer is on call 24/7 area and they have air-conditioned data centerswith fire suppression systems, and all these fancy words, and ISO certifications,and tier 1 classifications, and all this stuff. So that is why you go with the cloud versus your closet. But because it is so physical and things can fail you still need to think about which cloudyou are actually backing up to. So do they know what they are doing?Do they have the certifications? Are they a tier 1, or a tier 2, or tier 3 data center?Do they have the ISO 9001 classification? Or is it just someone with their own closetand their own servers? And when you are doing a backup is it backing up to one data centeror is it backing up to two data centers. Just like you could have a physical disaster in your office,there could be a fire or something in that data center and your data could be wiped out. Carbonite, a couple years ago lost several files and clients databecause they only backed up to one data center and something happened to that data centerand they lost that data. And then you need to think about, is it secure? And your data will always be secure in transit. And generally every provider says it is secure. It is encrypted on their networks. Not everyone will allow you to encrypt data yourself using your own password,and that is a requirement for HIPAA. So if you are a HIPAA bound organizationyou need to make sure you find the solution that allows you to use your own encryption keyso the backup provider can’t decrypt your data and kind of look in it. I know some of that was really technical, so Kyla?Kyla: Okay, so let me take a look. So we had a question from Terry who was wondering,is it easy to do test restores and does your system, npCloud,make it easy for us to do the test restores?Sam: It is really easy to do file restores with most systems. You can normally fairly easily do a file restore. And with npVault you go into the softwareand you can do your own restore to whatever location you want. It is a Wizard. It’s straightforward. And we can also work with you over the phone with a remote sessionso you can see what’s going on. We can do a test restore with you that way. It is much harder to do a test recovery of things like your Exchange databaseand your SQL database. So the best you can do with those normally is download themand make sure it was last modified recently. In order to do a more comprehensive test restoreof Exchange and SQL, you need to work with your IT provider. And we can work with your IT provider to help them with that. But it’s a little complicated. But you should do a file restore at the very least, and then you should do a downloadof your Exchange or your SQL backups maybe once every six months,and just make sure that at least it is in there somewhere,and at least it has been modified recently. Kyla: Okay, great. And Sharon just said she doesn’t think she knows how to do a test restore. And I know some of what you just said answers that a little bit,but I was wondering if they are not with npCloud, would they go to their IT personto figure out how to do that?Sam: Yeah, you go to your IT person. Something to think about —the reason I say you as an organization should do the backups,is IT companies have a vested interest in seeming competent and seeming like they knowwhat they are doing. So if you can do the test restore your selfand you are going to the same IT person that set up the backups in the first place,you should kind of watch over their shoulder and see what’s going on. They are unlikely to then do a test restore and say everything is workingwhen it is not and just leave it that way. But they might notice that things haven’t been workingfor two months and then fix it and do it test restore and give you that out put. And I am not speaking ill against any specific IT provider. But the temptation is thereand it really is hard to keep backups working with a lot of these solutions,and that can be hard to explain to an organization. So just work with your IT provider or find a third-party IT provider to help you out with that. Kyla: Okay, great. And we had a question come in that said,if you do a test restore do you lose any files changed since the last backup?Sam: Right, great question. And with file backups you would just do a test restoreto an alternate location, so you back it up to a separate folder so it didn’t over write things. And normally the default is not to over write things,because it would be easy to do that with a test restore. Within Exchange database or SQL database you can do a test restorewithout overwriting your existing SQL database or existing Exchange database. Kyla: Okay, great. And I am just going to ask a couple of more questions that have come in. There are some questions that have come in that are npCloud, npVault specific. So I am going to hold those until after you are done with your npVault section. But we did have a question coming in from Kathy who is asking,is there an independent rating agency for cloud servicesthat gives you are rating on things like security?Sam: Yes and no. There is an entire rating industry that is out there. And basically there is ISO, the International Standards Organization. They create all these standards that say in order to be classified as an ISO 9000 data centeror organization or whatever — and I’m sure and getting the numbers wrongand I could do some research on this if anyone wanted more detail. But they set out standards. And they say okay, in order to have this standardyou need to do test restores every day. You need to have a change policywhere anytime you make a change it needs to be checks out with these three people. You need to fill out these 12 forms any time anyone does anything. You need to secure your data center with biometric security. You need to make sure that your data centers have enough backup capacityto keep them online for 36 hours of the power goes out. They set out all these requirementsand then organizations apply for certification. And they pay a third-party rating agencythat has been certified by ISO to actually do the certification. So you can look at those certifications. And then there is a classification of data centers and generally they are classified as one,two, and three. And those dependent on the guaranteed uptime in the data center,so what percentage of the time they are going to be online,and what percentage of the time they are going to be unavailable. There are four tiers. I just found it. So there are a third-party organizationsthat set these separate requirements. So you should look at what certifications they’ve got and then you should actually look upwhat that certification means because there are tens of thousands of certificationsand many of them might not really mean much for cloud computing. So do your own research. Kyla: Okay, great. And you think we will have enough time for one more questionbefore the next section?Sam: Yeah, sure. I think we’ll be fine. Kyla: Okay. This question is asking, can you restore or recover individual filesor group of files? Or does restore apply to the whole backup?So the issue would be [indistinct] restored or recovered files if the server is down. Sam: You should be able to restore individual files. You should pick a solutionwhere you can do that. And really I don’t think there are many solutionsanymore where you have to download everything. Now that is not the same as with databases or with Exchange mailboxes. So you are unlikely with most solutions to be able to download this user’s mailboxand leave the rest in place. But you should be able to download this fileor this folder, or these 12 files. Kyla: Okay, great. And I think with that I will let you get on to the next section. And if there are any questions that we didn’t get to I will hold them for questions later. Sam: Oh, I see. 9001 is the wrong certification. I dig them up. That’s one from my schoolingI remember now. There are other ISO standards for data centers. And if you are interested I can dig those up and we can send them out after the presentation. Kyla: Okay, great. Sam: Okay, so let’s talk about npVault specifically. So as I said before, we have over hundred, we have about 120 local clientswhere we manage their whole network, all their servers, all their desk tops. We provide help desk services. We monitor their servers. We do the backups. We do the test restores. We handle that for these organizations. As an IT professional with a lot of experience, we were not able to reliably providethese organizations with back up without going in ourselves every three daysand checking to make sure things were working which is a huge pain. It took a lot of time to do. And we knew that we had to find something better. So we actually built npVault originally for our local clients so they would have reliable backup. And it is built out of the common needs that we see nonprofit organizations as having. So the first big benefits is, we will help you get on board with npVault. So it’s not just a web form that you go to and you sign up, and then you download the software,and you configure everything. We will actually have a conversation with you. And I don’t know how many of you feel really confident that they know exactlywhere everything is, and where all their data is. They know they use this database may be,but you don’t know exactly where that database file is stored. So we can work with you to figure all that out. We can remote into your server with you,with you looking over our shoulder to kind of look over all of that. And then we can help prioritize that data with you. So if you provide walk-in health services, you need to make sure your electronic health recordssystem is being backed up online. And we will take all this informationand we build a backup plan just for you to make sure your organization is safe. Kyla: As promised I wanted to remind you that we have 15 min. left. Sam: Yeah, we are doing fine on time. Next up we are real people working for a real 501(c)(3). And I promise we actually do care. And that is our big 888 number. And you will probably talk to me at some point if you sign upthrough TechSoup helping you get on board and having a conversation with youabout your organization. And I promise I will ask you what organization doesand what your mission is. I want to know. Next up is help with recovery. So you don’t just have to open up the softwareand download the file. We will actually help you get a file restored. So if a user deletes a file or whatever you can call that 888 numberand we will work with you remotely to get everything restored. And if your entire server crashes, if you need disaster recovery serviceswe can help you kind of chart out what needs to be done. And we can work with your on-site IT provider and help them get everything back upand running. We won’t do the work for you. Obviously, that would be a lot of work for us. But we are not going to just abandon you to the wind and kind of say good luck. Here are these files. And if you have a network attached storage device which I will talk to when a moment,we can actually restore your files to that device on your network,so you can have your shared files back up and running within a few hoursafter a server crash or anything like that. Next up is flexibility. And I think this is — besides actually having a person to talk withand help plan out your backup strategy, the best feature and really why we built this solutionis flexibility. So what online companies don’t tell you is you don’t really needto back up everything online. So your electronic health records system or your donor database,those should probably go online. It’s going to be hard for you to exist as an organizationif you don’t know who has given you money in the last five yearsand you are dependent on donations. But some of the information, maybe like some templates that you have a or your user files,that is nice stuff to have, but it is not going to put you out of business if you don’t have it. So with our solution you can actually backup not just online,you can also backup a network attached storage device that’s on your network. You can backup to a device they just sits on your network. It’s only on your network. And our software will back up to both those locations, and will monitor both those locations. So we will make sure that not only the online backups, the cloud backups,but also those local backups are happening. And we don’t charge you for local storagebecause we don’t get charged for local storage. And npVault isn’t a huge moneymaker for us,trust me. We really are passionate about making sure that nonprofit organizations are safe. So this is how the npVault stuff works with that local storage. So we will back up some information to a network attached storage device,and some information online. And that network attached storage devicehas what is called redundant hard drives in it so if one of those hard drives fails,you don’t lose your backed up data. Right now they are about $380for 2 TB of redundant storage, and you buy that your self. We don’t make money off those sales. Okay, so just to give a brief overview of pricing, through TechSoup right now it is $24 a month. It includes 30 GB of online storage, and unlimited local storage. Again, that network attached storage device storage, that storage on your site, that’s free. It includes one backed up computer, the computer with a software installed on it. You don’t need to pay for every computer on your network,just the server that we are backing up, or may be the two desk tops at a remote sitethat don’t have access to the server. Additional storage is a dollar a gigabyte a month and additional computersare five dollars a gigabyte a month. So that’s pricing. So does anyone have any questions about the solution?Kyla: We do have some questions that have come in. We had a few questions from people asking if npCloud is compatible,or npVault is compatible with Mac networks. Sam: Not right now. It will be, but it is not at the moment. Now a lot of our other solutionsfor npOffice which is hosted Exchange, that does support Macs,and our virtual desktop and virtual server technologies do support Macs. But this solution is PC only at the moment. Kyla: Okay, got it. And if you could go back to the pricing slide again,Kay would like to see that one again. And Kathy just asked, we need to backup files on PCs not a server, so does npVault work?Sam: Yes, absolutely. And we need to work together to make sure those computersare left on while the backup is happening obviously. But yeah, we have some organizations that do that, a lot of organizations with maybe a serverand a big site and then a couple of remote users. I also saw a question earlier about system state backups. npVault backs up system state backups, files, Exchange databases, Microsoft SQL databases,and we can also backup VHDs, [indistinct] environments. But all that information is on our website. Kyla: Okay, great. And Catherine was asking, do you have any clients that are public libraries?Sam: Yes. Well, we don’t at the moment actually, but I am talking with two other public libraries. And we certainly don’t have a problem — we like public libraries here at npCloud. Kyla: Got it. And Don was asking do you use VM ware at all, or virtual servers?Sam: A lot of our clients use Hyper V because they get it for free. And we can backup VHD files from Hyper V. Or actually using Shadow Copywe can backup the virtual hard disk for VM ware as well. And I can tell you that our virtualization platform, np’s base is built on VM ware vSphere. I don’t know if that was the question. Kyla: I will take a look to see if he clarifies a little bit more. Denise in North Carolina was asking how much it costs to get the service set up?Sam: Oh, right. The service is free to set up actually. And this is I think where our passion as a nonprofit really influenced this solution. We want to make sure that you are getting the right information backed up,and that you are comfortable with what is getting backed up,and that we are all on the same page about it. So that process we talked aboutwhere we work with you remotely to take a look at your serverand we document everything for you, and that is all free. We don’t charge anything for that. That is part of the process. And I think that is really core to our mission as a nonprofit. Kyla: Okay, and Becky was asking the pricing by computer,we have three servers running multiple virtual servers. Is the price per physical server or virtual server. Sam: The price is per server that the software is installed on. If you have that many serverswe can have that conversation. It doesn’t need to be installed on every single server. It depends on what information you actually need to backup. So we could have a conversation off-line about your particular organization. Kyla: Okay, great. And going back to the question about Macs,Jess was saying we are in all Mac house. Do you have an estimated datefor when npVault would be available for Macs?Sam: I’m afraid I don’t right now. So as I said before, we partner with a third party. It’s in their pipe line. It’s been in their pipe line for about 6 months now. So I hope we are getting somewhat close. And if you want to send me an e-mailor submit an inquiry or something on our website, I could certainly reach out to youwhen that happens. And for those of you that are Mac people and it doesn’t work for you,I hope you can take something out of the general backup and disaster recovery earlierin the presentation and apply to some of the Mac only solutions if you need something right now. Kyla: Okay, great. And Kathy was asking, does the software get backed up as well as the files?Sam: That’s a complicated question. So our backupunless you have a virtualized environment backs up the data level. So it doesn’t do a bare metal backup where you just then restore the whole server back upand running. So it would backup the files. Now we can backup like a program files directory,but it is not quite the same thing as backing up the applications. So I would recommend that you submit an inquiry on our websiteand we can talk about the specific applications that you are worried about,and we could probably find a solution. The reason for that by the way as we are trying to limit the cost to you as an organization. And backing up all that stuff doing that bare metal backupwould be very expensive just because of data storage. Kyla: Right, right. And we had a question coming in asking how much does the monitoring cost?Sam: The monitoring is also free. It is part of that $24 a month fee. And the restores are also free. We won’t go in, we won’t rebuild your server. We won’t do that. What we will do is we will work with the local IT personto help them understand what has been backed up and how to restore everything. And we will give some guidance based on our experience about the best order to do thingsand some things to think about. Kyla: And we have a couple of questions come in about working with IT consultants. One question — I was just going to ask a couple of them at the same time. One question was, how does that work exactly working with IT consultants?And then the other question was from Diane was saying we already have an IT consultantsand they offer their own cloud infrastructure. So how could we have them work with npCloudso we can take advantage of npCloud ‘s special pricing through TechSoup?Sam: Sure. npCloud is kind of a separate solution to most of the other stuff that you are doing,npVault, so you could keep your IT provider and they could still use npVault. And there is software that exists on the server that they can check on backups. And we can add e-mail alerts for them so they know when something happened,or give them access to web portal so they can check to make surethat the backups actually worked. And we work with a lot of small consulting firmsthat don’t have a good backup solution for their organizations either and they are excitedthat we are here to provide them with this tool to then bring to their organizations. Does that answer the question?Kyla: I believe it did. And I will look to see if we get a follow-up for that. Sam: And I see a couple of questions about using and npCloud with the cloud serverand kind of how that works. And I just want to kind of point out,just because you are using a cloud solution doesn’t mean that your data is actuallybeing backed up. Amazon doesn’t guarantee that your data is safeor that things will ever be available. It is in their terms of service. And really every cloud solution makes that same claim. So it is important to have some redundancy built in there. So if you are using one cloud solution you should have a backup with a different cloud solution. And that might be already built into whatever cloud solution you are using. . Kyla: Okay. And Mark was wondering what vendors you worked withthat own the backups sites?Sam: We have a special relationship with an organization called Intronis. And we’ve gotten some really good pricing for thembecause we work with so many nonprofit organizations. Kyla: Okay. And I am just going to take a couple more questionsbecause we are nearing the hour. I do want to remind everybody if we don’t get to your questiontoday, I am going to forward unanswered questions to Samand he will be able to respond after the webinar probably within a week or so. So never fear, we will get to them. So here is a question from Bernadette. And I think this is really just a good general question. We are recognizing and need for a virtual server, can you help us understandhow to set this up and include npCloud?Sam: Absolutely. That is actually why we exist as an organization. And on our website you will see we have an whole product line called npBase. And that is all virtual desk tops and servers in the cloud. And we will help you outwith the whole process. We also have a solution called npOffice which is built on Office 365. We’ll help you get the nonprofit pricing for Office 365, and we will help you get onto Office 365which isn’t — it’s kind of like a server migration. It is not totally straightforward. And we have done like wow — we have like 1500 seats on Office 365 nowwhere we have migrated them. So that is really our goal to help make it easier to understandwhat you need and help you get there. Kyla: Okay, great. And that actually answered another questionwhich would be how would you backup Office 365? And I’m going to take one more question. So Bonnie was wondering, can the computers be in different locations, or laptops?Sam: Yeah, absolutely. They all go over the Internet. The real issue with backing up individual computers is just making sure that they are onat the same time when the backups are happening. And there are a couple of ways you can do that. You can have them not hibernate or go to sleepat night. Or we can set up the backups to happen continuouslywhenever the computer is on, or during the day, or in the afternoon. And we can work with you to figure out the best time for those backups to happen. Kyla: Okay, great. So with that I’m going to go ahead and do my closing bit here really fast. And this bit. ly should work but I will be sending out the full link as wellin the follow-up message afterwards. If you want to look at the npVault offeringsthrough TechSoup you should be able to follow that bit. ly link and take a look. And I wanted to go ahead and thank npCloud and thank Samfor this really really great presentation today. We really, really appreciate it. Just so everybody knows, we will be sending out the recording and the slide deckto everybody as well is some resources and links. And that should be getting to all registrants today. And just a little bit about who TechSoup is, we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofitlike the rest of you out there, or like many of the rest of you out there. And we are attempting to provide technology and technology resourcesso that your organization can fulfill your full potential. And a little bit about where those resources are, on the TechSoup websiteyou can go to the Learning Center to find articles. You can go to the blog to read blog posts. Don’t forget to check out our products on the Find Products section of the siteon the right-hand side. And you can subscribe to TechSoup newslettersBy the Cup and New Product Donation Alert. And again, thank you to Sam and npCloud. And thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalkwho has provided the donation of this webinar service. So again, thank you everybody. If you could take just a moment and fill out the surveyafter the webinar that would be great.