Data backup should be considered an essential part of running and maintaining a business. Every company and every organisation has data that cannot be easily or quickly replaced and in the event of data loss this can lead to lost revenue, disgruntled clients, and the loss of staff time during the data retrieval process. As well as information that most businesses would consider mission critical, employee information, client information, and project data can also become irretrievable.

Data loss is one of the most damaging events that can happen to any business and is one of the most common reasons for the failure of new small businesses costing companies millions of pounds every single month. Online data backup can usually be established so that data is stored automatically on a regular basis and should the need arise, this information can be quickly and easily retrieved. With daily backups the most your business stands to lose is a single day’s data – still damaging but less so than losing weeks or months of critical information.

Most companies recognise that IT is critical to the running of their business and without it, the company simply would not function. Even so, people are yet to take IT seriously enough to incorporate it into business strategy and budgeting.

If your server was to fail, do you have a plan to get it up and running again? Have you budgeted for this type of investment? It’s important to monitor your infrastructures health. Don’t take IT for granted and get caught off guard!

Your server could be trying to tell you something…

Becoming high maintenance? How much time is being spent on fixing small problems that would be better spent elsewhere? As your server gets older the issues will become more and more frequent, and you will experience a drop in productivity.

Making a lot of noise? This is probably the fans working in overdrive and is often a sign your server is getting old and tired – and could be close to failing.

Is your server sulking? Slow servers don’t just mean a less productive work force they are a sure sign that an upgrade is due

Does it need some space? The issue might not be the age and state of the hardware, it may just need more RAM or a software upgrade

Time to upgrade to a younger model!

Experiencing any of these factors means it’s time to shop around and see what your options are, before it’s too late. Don’t wait for a failure to occur, go to an expert for advice.

Unsure if you need to upgrade? Fifosys can carry out an audit of your systems that looks in detail at every aspect of your IT. From the network infrastructure and how it has been set up, to the servers, desktops, laptops and other hardware, and how they have been configured.

An audit will highlight any issues around security and other business risks that your organisation may be facing. For example, one of the things we look for is single points of failure. These are areas of the network, where if they fail, key services like email may be out of action for up to 5 days. We highlight in our audit report the risks that you accepting (probably unknowingly) with your current set up.

Now in its eighth successful year, the Young Guns celebrates the most outstanding crop of young entrepreneurs the UK has to offer. With only 30 people included in the group every year, they represent the very best of the UK’s entrepreneurial talent.

Mitesh will now be joining our Sales and Marketing Director, Elliot Zissman as a Young Guns alumnus.

This award recognises the hard work and determination that Mitesh has put into Fifosys over the years in order to get us to where we are today.

Mitesh Patel says “It’s nice to be considered a young gun, even though my gun doesn’t feel so young.”

50 guests from leading UK business attended the event at the prestigious Le Meridien Hotel in Piccadilly. It was an educational seminar aimed at giving business men and women the facts about how cloud computing can benefit their organisations. Mitesh Patel, the MD of Fifosys, gave the main presentation outlining the key information in this area, through the use of real life Fifosys client case studies. This was followed by an opportunity for networking.

Rory O’Shaughnessy, from Inside Job Ltd, a 20-man, office moving company, commented that it was “an informative evening together with very generous hospitality.”

The 3 articles, written by Mitesh, outline the benefits and risks associated with Cloud Computing as well as the advantages of a managed cloud solution.

Mitesh Patel says “We like the Cloud. Our clients like the Cloud. They like the way it offers fast, on-demand services without the need for long-term commitment in resources and applications.  They like the way it supports their mobile employees as well as office-based teams.  They like its flexibility and the opportunities for them to grow and enhance their IT services portfolio at low risk.  As we’re talking about properly-managed environments hosted by a reliable, expert supplier, we believe the Cloud can deliver some serious benefits to your business IT environment.”

Click here to read the 3 full articles Blue Sky Thinking on Cloud Computing

For more information or to arrange a meeting/interview with Mitesh, please contact Lauren Loubser-Bell on 0207 644 2610.

London – June 22, 2010 – Fifosys, one of Europe’s fastest growing providers of outsourced IT infrastructure solutions, today announced that it has been named as having the Best Public Cloud Implementation of the Asigra Cloud Backup platform. The award recognizes Fifosys for its success in the deployment and application of Asigra’s Cloud Backup™ platform in a public cloud environment. Fifosys was honored for its leadership in this area at the recently-held Asigra Cloud Backup Partner Summit in Toronto.

Fifosys won the award for its work with the London Medical clinic. The organisation’s previous tape-based storage system was rapidly becoming outdated, and in early 2009 the clinic started to look at solutions that could optimise its document backup and recovery. The aim was to ensure the ability to retrieve any lost data quickly and efficiently, especially in the event of a medical emergency. The tape-based system required staff to physically transport patient data, creating possible security and financial risks; consequently necessitating a more secure solution.
Fifosys carried out a full analysis of the company’s IT backup and data recovery needs. London Medical adopted Asigra’s complete Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery Software service throughout the clinic.
The Asigra system works with live and archived data, so London Medical was able to request that any data over 30 days old was archived, leaving only 15GB of data active.  Alternatively, the system could be set to provide staff with 90 days of financial backup.  However, the archived data could still be instantly retrieved if needed, even if a patient had returned to the clinic after two years’ absence.  
London Medical provides some of the world’s most advanced consultant-led diagnostic outpatient facilities for diabetes, heart disease, endocrinology, obesity, osteoporosis and eye disease.
London Medical can now be confident that patient data is secure. As an accredited MSP, Fifosys was able to provide a security statement, allowing London Medical to tender for public sector contracts in addition to treating private patients.  With an annual turnover of £5.9million, the company can also be certain that its financial data is protected, and that business continuity would be ensured in case of a systems failure.   
Dr. Ralph Abraham, Clinical Director at London Medical, comments: “Now I feel confident that all of our data is constantly protected; even if our systems go down or the clinic has a fire or flood, I know we can still get the data back. Our patients’ data is the lifeblood of London Medical and it is a priority for us to protect it and be able to manage it in a way that does not affect front line service or care.”

Asigra leverages the expertise of partners like Fifosys for new and innovative deployments of the Asigra Cloud Backup™ software platform, whether deployed to a public cloud, an internal private cloud or a hybrid implementation combining both.

Fifosys MD Mitesh Patel receives award from Asigra CEO David Farajun in Toronto

“Innovative partners have always played a fundamental role in the success of Asigra. Fifosys has demonstrated the technology and business skills that have enabled them to carve out a position as one of the elite providers of cloud backup services” said Asigra CEO David Farajun. “Fifosys has demonstrated a unique vision for the power of cloud backup and leveraged that vision into customer-focused services that deliver effective, efficient and comprehensive data protection.  We congratulate Fifosys for their leadership and thank all of our partners and customers who attended the Asigra Cloud Backup Partner Summit for their ongoing support in expanding access to the Asigra platform.”

 “Mitesh Patel, MD of Fifosys said, “We are delighted to be given recognition from Asigra, one of the pioneering companies in the field of Cloud Computing. Fifosys are committed to providing enterprise level solutions to the SMB market place and Asigra’s software allows us to do this with a competitive pricing model and a solution that works. By combining the Asigra software with our managed services offering, we are providing clients with an award winning proposition delivering Cloud Backup and Data Recovery services from our UK Fortress. ”

Two of the items listed here are always there – Explorer and Systray – those are Windows components and they are supposed to be there. But everything else is a program running now that gets loaded automatically every time you start Windows.

But how do they get loaded?

There are a couple of places where you can find out.

1.Look at your startup files.
 • Go to Start/Run, and type Sysedit.
 • In the resulting window you’ll see many cascading Windows.
 • In the Autoexec.bat window you might find a few lines to start a program. Or in the Win.ini file, look at the load= and run= lines. Anything in those lines after the = sign is a program to be loaded.

2.Windows also has a startup folder where it checks every time Windows starts. If there are any programs listed, it will start them automatically. You can find the contents of the startup folder by going to Start/Programs/Startup.
You probably think how did they get in there since you didn’t put them there. Some of them need to be running in the background to function properly, such as a virus scanner. They put themselves into a startup menu automatically when you install them. Others might not need to be there, but they load anyway to be available when you need them.

On our new and improved site you will find much more information on who we are and what we do. As well as articles, FAQs and our White Paper. There are also several case studies of our previous projects with more to come!

In the next couple of months there will be further improvements such as the addition of our technology page, further thought pieces and some tools to help manage your IT.

We would love to get some feedback, so please have a look, let us know what you think and also how we can make it even better.

One way of getting around this is to adjust and enforce your company’s IT Policy, specifically the sites that employees are allowed to visit. By blocking the main video streaming websites so employees will not be able stream content, however this runs the risk of employees then finding obscure free streaming sites which may have viruses or spyware. While this option does eradicate most of the problem, you may then be left with a bunch of disgruntled employees who may then decide to just not come in to work on the day of the match.

An alternative would be have a television in the office to screen important matches (such as England matches). This will enable employees to continue working, keep up to date with the games and will improve the sense of moral in your office. The other added benefit is that people who do not want to watch the match can carry on with their work without having to worry about bandwidth and network issues.
Let us know if your company doing anything for employees during the World Cup. It would be great to hear any innovative ideas.

Founded in 1991 and based in Marylebone, London Medical provides some of the world’s most advanced consultant-led diagnostic outpatient facilities for diabetes, heart disease, endocrinology, obesity, osteoporosis and eye disease. With an international reputation for excellence, over 50 patient consultants and sophisticated modern equipment, London Medical promise each patient unique, expert care.

Key challenges:

In the past 5 years, London Medical has grown from an 8-man company to an organisation employing 70 people. Following business expansion, with the resultant increased patient intake, London Medical was faced with exponential data growth and the associated storage requirements. As a busy outpatient centre, London Medical needs to securely store vast amounts of patient data, in compliance with the Data Protection Act. However, this information also has to be readily accessible to consultants and support staff and stored in a format that can be easily but securely distributed offsite to GPs and other medical professionals.

The organisation’s previous tape-based storage system was rapidly becoming outdated, and in early 2009 the clinic started to look at solutions that could optimise its document backup and recovery. The aim was to ensure the ability to retrieve any lost data quickly and efficiently, especially in the event of a medical emergency, where records need to be accessed immediately, or a patient record being deleted in error.  With patients returning to the clinic at irregular intervals, long-term data retention was also an important consideration, so London Medical ideally needed the flexibility to set its own data retention rates.  Furthermore the tape-based system required staff to physically transport patient data, creating possible security and financial risks; consequently necessitating a more secure solution.

Solution:

Fifosys, the UK’s leading IT outsourcing company, had handled London Medical’s IT and data storage systems since 2004.  The company is vendor independent and specialises in designing, implementing and supporting infrastructures for its clients. 

In order to provide an alternative to the tape-based system, Fifosys carried out a full analysis of the company’s IT backup and data recovery needs.

 Mitesh Patel, MD of Fifosys, commented: “When we analysed London Medical’s data storage requirements, we realised that security and access were the two most important factors to consider.  

“We concluded that instead of increasing the two existing backup tapes to four, which would again reach capacity at some point, London Medical should employ a scalable online back-up solution with automated de-duplication of data for optimum efficiency. This would not only solve the capacity issue, due to the solution’s scalability, but would also prevent the time-consuming and risky practice of staff physically carrying large amounts of valuable data to the vault for storage”. 

Fifosys evaluated a number of systems, and decided that online data backup and recovery experts Asigra provided the most attractive solution in terms of service offered and value for money. The existing data backup provider would not offer the desired level of flexibility that London Medical required – the data was simply stored, rather than managed, and it could take up to three weeks for a full data restore in case of a systems failure.  With up to 70 NHS and private patients coming through their doors each day, London Medical needed to mitigate this risk.

Fifosys approached Asigra with a view to becoming a reseller with the ability to provide the service to its end users directly, in this case enabling the company to provide London Medical with the data flexibility it needed.  Asigra advised them to approach Zycko, their UK distributor, who arranged for Fifosys to become a Managed Service Provider for Asigra in October 2009. That same month London Medical adopted Asigra’s complete Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery Software service throughout the clinic. The implementation was completed over 10 working days without any downtime to the business. The engineers also only had to spend a 4 hours onsite. Fifosys went through consultations with London Medical to ensure that they were only backing up the data that needed to be recovered.

End user benefits:

One of the main benefits of becoming an Asigra reseller was the increased management Fifosys could exercise over the London Medical data.  Staff had the option to change the retention rules depending on their needs, ensuring data continuity. 

The Asigra system works with live and archived data, so London Medical was able to request that any data over 30 days old was archived, leaving only 15GB of data active.  Alternatively, the system could be set to provide staff with 90 days of financial backup.  However, the archived data could still be instantly retrieved if needed, even if a patient had returned to the clinic after two years’ absence.   

David Galton-Fenzi, Group Sales & Marketing Director at Zycko, commented:

“Asigra provides a world-class service in data backup and management. Other than its employees, data is often a company’s most valuable asset and the future of backup will be as much about security and retrieval as cost. Like many organisations, London Medical has to store different types of data, each with its own security requirements. This is an issue that is easily solved by Asigra’s Hybrid Cloud Backup technology which allows companies to align the value of information with the cost of protecting it. The cloud is an important element in the future of storage and will see continued development.”     

London Medical can now be confident that patient data is secure. As an accredited MSP, Fifosys was able to provide a security statement, allowing London Medical to tender for public sector contracts in addition to treating private patients.  With an annual turnover of £5.9million, the company can also be certain that its financial data is protected, and that business continuity would be ensured in case of a systems failure.      

Dr. Ralph Abraham, Clinical Director at London Medical, comments: “We needed to be able to swiftly retrieve any lost data, or, in the event that a patient record were to be deleted in error, have reassurance that it could be recovered both quickly and efficiently.

“Now I feel confident that all of our data is constantly protected; even if our systems go down or the clinic has a fire or flood, I know we can still get the data back. Our patients’ data is the lifeblood of London Medical and it is a priority for us to protect it and be able to manage it in a way that does not affect front line service or care.”

Future development

The quality of care and expertise that forms the foundation of London Medical’s premier healthcare service has consequently resulted in continued expansion as more and more patients turn to the provider for treatment. This growth will eventually necessitate the need for a larger data centre which can cope with the heightened levels of activity associated with an increased patient database. Patel explained: “The London Medical data centre will continue to grow as the provider takes on more patients. We have already spoken to them about the eventual possibility of a remote data centre coupled with the latest WAN optimisation bandwidth technology, in order for them to increase security and retain functionality. We can offer the latest data centre cooling and power techs that London Medical will be able to take full advantage of, while also solving the headache of hardware disposal that they would have had to deal with once their machines become obsolete. As the MSP we obviously take care of this for them, allowing them to attend their primary purpose – providing leading healthcare to a multitude of public and private patients.”