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LESSONS FROM THE RANSOMWARE ATTACKS AT BALTIMORE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS & GREATER BALTIMORE MEDICAL CENTER

LESSONS FROM THE RANSOMWARE ATTACKS AT BALTIMORE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS & GREATER BALTIMORE MEDICAL CENTER

Just before Thanksgiving this year, as students were entrenched in virtual learning, a major ransomware attack took down Baltimore County Public School’s (BCPS) computer systems. As a result, schools closed for several days, many devices were unusable, and like any other major IT security incident, significant costs were incurred to remediate the damage. BCPS will most likely undergo an assessment to determine exactly how the incident happened and they will have to invest significantly to harden their systems and change how they operate.

Ransomware Attacks

Shortly after the BCPS attack, a few miles up the road, Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC) experienced its own ransomware attack, which took down many of their systems. Fortunately, patient care was still mostly maintained, aside from some postponed elective care. It appears that data and operations will be back to normal in fairly short order, but there will still be costs associated with this, and certainly, nobody at GBMC wants to be associated with a ransomware incident.

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Is Your IBM hardware reaching End Of Service (EOS) -IBM Support?

Is Your IBM hardware reaching End Of Service (EOS) -IBM Support?

It’s that time of year again….. What time of year, you ask? It is the time of year that you are receiving (or not receiving) notifications that IBM support and service will no longer be offered to you and your company on a range of products. This is hardly ever good news because it means you will have to do something about it, and whatever “it” is, is most likely going to cost money… IBM sends out end of service life notifications for the following software and hardware models: · IBM P7 · IBM S20 · IBM JS21 blades · IBM RS/6000 · IBM Power i5 · IBM Flex · IBM P6 · IBM Websphere This happens twice a year. Effective EOS dates are usually April 30th and September 30th. Hopefully you do receive a notice that your software or equipment is reaching its EOS date. Usually they will give you a month or two to plan for it and give you two choices: 1. Upgrade to a newer version or release. 2. Purchase a support extension What they don’t usually tell you is that there is a third option that is usually better for businesses like yours: 3. Use a third-party IBM support company In most cases, 3rd party support is a good option. 3rd party IBM support providers, like Abtech Technologies, can provide high quality hardware maintenance to extend the life of IBM products. Abtech Technologies has a dedicated and experienced staff that is very knowledgeable about IBM products and offer best in class software management and support. Abtech Technologies also has a large inventory of replacement parts for IBM hardware.
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Abtech Technologies awarded multi-year managed services contract.

Abtech Technologies awarded multi-year managed services contract.

Abtech Technologies has been awarded a multi-year contract to provide and deliver IT Managed Services, IT Security Services and IT Consulting Projects for the City of Lake Forest, CA. This is in addition to the Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Service that Abtech Technologies already provides for the city.

Abtech won the bid against strong competition. There were 48 companies registered to bid on this contract, some of them billion-dollar corporations.

Four companies were asked to interview and were taken through an extensive evaluation process.

Abtech Technologies was awarded the contract based on several factors, but key to the award was Abtech’s capability in IT Security, Project Management, IT Consulting and the overall deep technical knowledge of its many engineers.

About Abtech Technologies
Abtech Technologies has revenue of $20 million and employees 60 associates of which more than 50% are engineers.

In addition to the City of Lake Forest, Abtech Technologies has 300 other IT contracts supporting medium-sized and Fortune 500 companies. Abtech performs services ranging from Hardware Maintenance, day-to-day Managed Services, Database Administration, IT Security and various forms of Consulting.

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Archive, Backup, and Disaster Recovery

Archive, Backup, and Disaster Recovery

Backing up, archiving, and preparing for disaster recovery are obviously related. They overlap, but each one names a different purpose. Doing a good job at one of them doesn’t mean they’re all covered. Let’s consider what each one involves. Backup The purpose of a backup is to restore files that are lost or damaged. Recovery needs may range from a single file to an entire drive. A backup volume can be local or remote. It can be quick to access for getting back single files, or intended mostly for bulk recovery. Its focus isn’t long-term storage, though durability is a good quality. Versioned backups provide extra safety. A file can be corrupted, without being noticed, for a long time. If only the current version is backedup, and it’s corrupted too, that’s not useful. A backup that includes older versions gives a better chance of recovery. Many approaches are possible:
  • An attached drive. Software does frequent incremental backups automatically. It’s convenient, and it’s always up to date. The disadvantage is that malware or physical damage to the computer might affect the backup drive as well.
  • A shared storage system. Network attached storage (NAS) provides a large amount of backup space and keeps everyone’s backups together. It simplifies backup management if there are a large number of users.
  • Tape backup. Tape is good for high-volume storage and allows saving multiple backups. It’s good for recovering crashed drives, but not very convenient for restoring single files.
  • Offsite backup. Cloud storage is safer than any local backup from events that affect a whole office. It needs a fast enough Internet connection.
It’s best to combine onsite and offsite backup. If one method fails, the other will usually keep working. Archive Long-term archival storage involves a different set of goals. It has several important criteria:
  • Selection. Not every file needs to go into an archive. Figuring out which ones are needed can be a complicated task. It’s necessary to take business goals and regulatory requirements into account.
  • Durability. Unlike a backup, an archive needs to be kept intact for a long time, usually years. It needs to have its own backup. Storage media will eventually go bad, and old file formats may become difficult to process, so it can require periodic migration to new media and storage formats.
  • Identification. The information in an archive needs to make sense years after it’s created. It needs to be well-organized, and it has to include enough metadata to reconstruct its context and purpose.
Maintaining an archive is a more complex task than keeping data backed up. Disaster Recovery Backup is a part of disaster recovery preparation, but it’s not the whole story. If a catastrophic event takes out your business systems, you need a way of getting up and running again as quickly as possible. Being confident of that requires a recovery plan. When disaster strikes, it’s necessary to bring up an alternate system. Speed is essential; every minute that a company’s systems are down means lost productivity and income. If systems are down too long, it affects the confidence of customers and partners. Bringing new machines onto the premises might not be feasible if the damage is severe, and getting them running is time-consuming. The systems not only need to come back quickly, but with little or no data loss. If the recovery system has to roll back to the previous day’s records, it will take a lot of work to bring them up to date. The backup needs to be ongoing to avoid losing business data. Cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) lets your business operate with confidence that if serious damage happens, downtime will be short and data won’t be lost. StorTrust gives you the highest confidence that your data is always backed up and that you’re prepared for any disaster that may come. Whatever your backup, archiving, and DR needs are, Abtech is ready to meet them.