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Computer crashes are a common problem for many computer users. Unfortunately, crashes can damage your data files, your system, or even leave your system unbootable.

Super Storm Sandy wreaked havoc across the entire Eastern US seaboard Halloween week of 2012.  Aside from the enormous path of destruction and storm related deaths, wide spread power outages continue to plague the greater tri-state area, particularly the New York boroughs, Long Island, New Jersey and costal Connecticut.    Electrical power: it’s the essential ingredient for keeping households and businesses physically operational. 

Enter generators. Particularly stand-by generators that are wired with auto-sensing transfer kits on dedicated sub-panels.  Those businesses that invested in stand-by power generation prior to this storm continued to operate irrespective of the electrical grid’s damage.  Consider the fact that the National Federation of Independent Business reports that some 30% of small businesses will experience a natural disaster (case proven).  In conjunction with good planning and a solid information technology platform, stand-by generators can help reduce down-time and protect your company’s operational effectiveness.

Prior to this freakish storm, small businesses (fewer than 100 employees) would argue that stand-by power generation was not worth the investment.  Often times, clients would say “…we never lose power, why bother?”  Or “…it’s too expensive to consider.” 

Based on this most recent weather experience, small business should be looking to protect their operations from both short and long term power outages as the price of a generator solution can be very reasonable.  Most important, small business owners should be asking themselves this question:  Is my competitor better prepared than me?

Should you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact TBNG Consulting at contact@tbngconsulting.com or at 855-512-4817.

The ability to recover data promptly and bring systems back online following a failure is of the utmost importance for today’s businesses. Users and customers alike demand the 24-hour business day, limiting the amount of downtime available to perform regular data backup procedures. With just minutes of downtime posing significant consequences to many types of organizations, a solid business continuity platform cannot be avoided.

Regardless of size, protecting vital information is critical to an organization’s survival.  Recent studies show that 93 percent of organizations that lose data because of a disaster go out of business within just two years. With technology advancing as quickly as it has and the increased digitization of all our information, data backup and recovery plans have become imperative. Unforeseen loss of sensitive data, database corruption, hardware crashes, human error and natural calamities can jeopardize an organization both financially and legally. Regardless of the size of your company, it is extremely important to have a reliable backup plan in case there is a need for immediate recovery of data.

TBNG Consulting provides solutions that can help keep your data redundant and protected by utilizing a hybrid of cloud and on-site services.   From client feedback, we believe the combination of these backup approaches to be the most effective, allowing freedom from manual and complex tape backup tasks, more predictable costs for budgeting, and most importantly a more reliable data recovery procedure.  As with any solution however, proper testing for various scenarios is highly encouraged.

Should you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact TBNG Consulting at contact@tbngconsulting.com or at 855-512-4817

Lately, small companies (say, gross revenues under $50M) are rapidly adopting the strategy of multiple Internet transports to protect against outages and achieve better uptime.  These transport types are the garden variety non-enterprise broadband links, such as DSL, cable and wireless.

Consider for a moment how much the average worker depends on what we might refer to as basic technologies: email, web browsing, and IP Telephony.  Now, factor in the more complicated business applications that might reside in the cloud data-center, third-party hosting or a VPN accessible corporate server.

This pathway must be robust and ideally redundant.

There are several techniques for link fail-over: software routing (ECMP versus Static), dedicated appliance and manual intervention.  Fortigate devices can handle multiple Ethernet hand-offs; this makes the device transport agnostic. Furthermore, you can easily configure the Fortigate with dead gateway detection to facilitate automatic failover.

Basic Link Failover can be accomplished utilizing two key components:

• Two default routes to ISPs with variable weighting (distance of 10 is more preferred than a distance of 20).  Configure your static routes to reflect primary versus secondary path by weighting the secondary path with a higher distance.

• Configure a ping server under the Router|Settings|Dead Gateway Detection.  Click on: create new and simply follow the interface options (you’ll need to create these ping servers for all ISP interfaces you are utilizing).  Be sure to pick a reliable ping target, which I advise to be your ISP gateway router.  However, you can certainly use other options such as public DNS servers.

As with any solution, be sure to test your configuration to ensure proper routing and failover.