Sophos have released their latest Security Threat Report and in it they look at the threats the year has presented and how they will be helping protect you against these in 2013.

Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO at Sophos says "Protecting data in a world where systems are changing rapidly, and information flows freely, requires a coordinated ecosystem of security technologies at the endpoint, gateway, mobile devices and in the cloud."

The report draws attention to the fact that although the PC remains the biggest target for malicious code today, criminals have created effective fake antivirus attacks for the Mac. Malware creators are also targeting mobile devices as we experience a whole new set of operating systems with different security models and attack vectors. Efforts must therefore focus on protecting and empowering end users - no matter what platform, device, or operating system they choose.

Click here to read the full report

Here are 5 key reasons why you should use CA ARCserve for your business continuity, data protection and disaster recovery strategies:

It delivers true hybrid data protection - that means fast onsite backup and restore for improved business continuity along with replication and cloud support for offsite protection and disaster recovery

ARCserve gives you a single solution for:

• Both image-and tape-based backups
• Centralised management and comprehensive reporting for physical and virtual servers and geographically distributed workstations

It helps you virtualise with confidence and protect your investment - VMware. Hyper-V. Citrix XenServer. You're covered, whether you choose one or some combination of these for your server virtualisation platform. By using server virtualisation as part of your system and data protection strategy, you can speed recovery time and reduce costs

It helps you build an effective disaster recovery strategy - With ARCserve, you can use your own facilities and resources, partner with a managed services provider (MSP) or leverage a public cloud. Besides offering onsite protection and recovery, it allows you to quickly and easily migrate files, applications and even entire systems offsite and in the cloud for disaster recovery.
 
It lets you recover assets where, when and how you like - that includes all your systems, applications and data. You can recover a single file or email, an Exchange mailbox, a large server volume or an entire Exchange, SQL or SharePoint database, and in order to speed recovery and reduce infrastructure costs, you can choose whether to restore:

• From disk or tape
• At the data centre or a remote office
• From local disk resources or from the cloud

It can scale to meet your business's future needs - As your business grows and your IT environment and data protection strategies evolve, you can adopt new components to address new challenges

For more information, contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email: info@phoenixs.co.uk

Symantec NetBackup 7.5 Ends the Backup Window with 100 Times Faster Backups

With NetBackup 7.5, Symantec have created a single point of control for all your backup needs across physical and virtual environments, so you can forget about having half a dozen point solutions. They wanted to save you time and money, eliminating the need to constantly maintain and upgrade so many different kinds of backup. By doing this, they have solved the three biggest challenges you face in backup today:

Break the Backup Window
One of the most painful parts of backup has always been the time required. It's a big deal - a recent Symantec survey revealed that 72 percent of enterprises would switch backup products if it would double their backup speed. Not content with simply doubling the speed, Symantec implemented NetBackup Accelerator, which accelerates full backups by up to 100 times. This gives you the benefits of a full recovery image, instantly available, at the speed of performing an incremental backup.

So what is the secret sauce? NetBackup Accelerator provides packaged in a single backup type the capability to read only changed files, dedupe these changed files, send only unique data from the client to the media server and from these unique changes, instantly make a full backup image available for recovery using NetBackup's synthesis engine.

The results are astounding. Using old school backup, 1 TB of data could take up to 6 hrs to backup. With client deduplication alone, backup time is cut to 2 hours. With NetBackup Accelerator, backup time is cut to less than 15 minutes.

Unite Snapshots and Backup
Organisations use a host of different tools for data protection driven by unique service level agreements (SLA's) and data growth. One of the most attractive options for backups are snapshots because they provide a near instant copy of the data sitting on storage arrays. However, utilising the snapshot and replication capabilities of these arrays has traditionally meant that you also are faced with introducing additional tools to manage the backup policies and recovery of these arrays. Ultimately this leads to greater complexity and compromising ease of recovery.

With NetBackup Replication Director, you no longer have to compromise: get the best of Snapshots with the best of data protection. New to NetBackup 7.5, NetBackup Replication Director gives you one place to centrally manage replicated NetApp Snapshots, from one console, so you can utilise existing resources and reduce spending time, resource and training on additional, unnecessary tools. You can monitor, search and catalogue all your snapshots from within one console, allowing you to make the most of your existing resources and keep costs low.

Fight Infinite Retention
While customers are benefiting greatly from the built-in deduplication technology, they wrestle with the burden of retention and hold on to backups for far too long. Whether it is for eDiscovery, compliance or internal investigation, the answer is all too often 'put everything on hold,' increasing storage costs and making it more difficult to find information when it is needed for recovery. Symantec have solved the retention issue with their new NetBackup Search option. This allows you to search and find relevant backups for an investigation, put those backups on hold and expire what isn't needed. NetBackup Search also enables you to identify and move the information that needs to be retained for long-term retention to Symantec's market leading archiving solution, Enterprise Vault.

Finally, while enabling you to un-clog your backup, NetBackup 7.5 also makes recovery much simpler and quicker by the improvements made for operational recovery, which allow you to search and recover any files that exist in any backup or snapshot managed by NetBackup.

When you add these new capabilities to the existing, integrated technologies, like Dedupe Everywhere and V-Ray for advanced virtualisation support, you see the power of the full NetBackup platform. In the fight against complexity, you have a new tool - NetBackup 7.5 from Symantec.

For more information contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email: info@phoenixs.co.uk

In 2011, hype about hacktivism and the threat du jour overshadowed more common security risks. Sophos experts explain the threat trends you need to watch, in their Security Threat Report 2012.

click here to see the report in flash, HTML or PDF formats ...

For more information contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email: info@phoenixs.co.uk