Podcasts about dataloss

In this two-part special, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham delve into the critical topic of backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai.   Together with Bill Millar, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, they discuss the role of database administrators, strategies for protecting data, and dealing with various types of data failure.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last two weeks, we've been having really exciting discussions on Oracle AI Vector Search. We covered the fundamentals, benefits, the vector workflow, and lots more. Today, we're going to talk about backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai with Bill Millar. If you've been listening this season, you'll know that Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. Nikita: In this two-part special, we'll dive into some of the things you need to know about backup and recovery, especially if you're a database and backup admin. So, if you're the person in charge of keeping data safe and handling disaster recovery, this is definitely worth your time. 01:20 Lois: That's right, Niki. Hi Bill, thanks for joining us again. What's the role of a Database Administrator, or DBA, when it comes to backup and recovery? Bill: The DBA is typically responsible for ensuring the database is open and available when needed and at times you need to work with system administrators and other people within your organization to achieve that. But we want to try to protect the database from failure wherever possible. We want to increase the mean time between failures. Hopefully, we don't have failures, and we have to increase that time. But it might mean that we need to ensure we have redundant hardware and that in place, again, maybe out of the realm of the DBA, but people within your organization can help with that. We want to protect those critical components by using the redundancy. And we want to decrease the mean time to recover. Failures happen, but how fast can we get access back to that data after that failure. The faster we can do it, the happier customers are. Minimize the loss of data. It's never good to lose data, especially in a critical environment, but maybe in test and development, maybe not so bad.  02:39 Nikita: How do we ensure a separation of duties for backup and recovery processes? Bill: For a separation of duties, we do have a user called SYSBACKUP. It has the privileges that's required to perform backup and recoveries, the privilege to connect and execute the commands in what we refer to as RMAN, our Recovery Manager. As I said, it has permissions for backup and recovery because you do need to shut down the database, start up the database, those type of things. We're able to connect to that closed database to try to troubleshoot it, to get it to the open state again. It does not include any privileges to access data. The SYSBACKUP user is created when we install the database, when we create the database. We can use it explicitly for privileged user connection. It allows us to connect to the database. So RMAN connects as SYSBACKUP. 03:37 Lois: Bill, what should people keep in mind when figuring out what's considered critical data? Bill: You want to try to identify your critical data. Some data might be highly required to access and make sure we don't lose don't lose data, but then you might have some environments. OK, I don't need to have them up and running as fast. If we lose a little data, it may not hurt, but we want to identify the difference in the different data that we have on different environments. So we want to also prioritize that critical data, which data do we need access to first because how much will the company lose per hour of downtime because we can't do business. We want to make sure the access data protection requirements. Not everybody has access to everything. And there are different types of disaster that can happen that are going to be totally out of your control. There's the physical disaster, a hurricane or tornado, outages, power outages, component failures, failures within the building itself, corruption of data because of some of these failures. And then, the most dreaded one, the one that happens most often, usually those human errors, the logical errors, where the data is just bad, we are able to access and everything. It's just that something has changed that shouldn't have been changed. We want to make sure we access our recovery requirements.  05:04 Lois: So, what are they? What are those requirements? Bill: We want to base that requirement based on how critical is that data, how soon do we need to have access to that? What is our recovery point objective? Do we have a tolerance for any type of data loss? How frequently should we backups? How often they should be taken? What type of backups will be another thing we'll want to figure out? Is point-in-time recovery required? Are we able to or do we ever need to go back to a previous point in time to do something? It's not always just recovery for a database failure. We might need to do a recovery point in time to a different system so we can investigate something. What is my recovery time objective? Again, what is the tolerance for the downtime? How long can I be down? The downtime, the biggest part of when a system goes down is trying to identify what is the problem, then next is what is going to be my plan to recover, and then perform in the recovery. We might have a tiered required time objective based off of critical data, and then depending on the failure. Is that failure at the entire database? Is it just a tablespace? Is it just a table? Is it just a row? That also determines how long it takes to recover and what type of recovery we might try to perform. What is my backup retention policy? Do I have a requirement to where I have to have my backups off site? And it doesn't mean like back in the old days of mainframe computers, you'd back up to tape and you'd take those tapes off site. You might still do that today. Or, am I backing up to a cloud environment? So what do I need to have for that? What about long-term backups? We work with our day-to-day backups, but there's those backups that require for longer, archives like end of year backups. Some places require to keep their end of year backup for like 10 years. How are we going to handle that? So these are some of the things that we have to think about when we start talking about backup and recovery. 07:23 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you'll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:04 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, I want to talk about the different failures that can occur in an Oracle database. How would you categorize them? Bill: There are different category of failure. This is not an all-inclusive list by any means. It's just something that possibly can happen. So they can usually be divided into different categories like statement failure. All right. When doing a select and insert, update, delete, the statement itself fails. A user process fails. Single database session fails for some reason. Network failure, connectivity is lost. The user error, probably one of the most common ones we have to deal with. A user successfully completes an operation, but that operation was erroneous. They dropped the wrong table, updated the wrong row. Then there's the instance failure. The database itself shuts down unexpectedly. And then media failure, usually a hard failure of our disk. Something of memory, something failed and caused an error. 09:12 Lois: Ok. I want to dive a little deeper into each of these categories that you mentioned. Let's start with statement failures. What are typical problems that one might face? Bill: Attempts to enter invalid data into a table. They're trying to put a numeric field in a date field, and usually just working with the user is going to correct that. Is that the DBA responsible? Yes, no, maybe. They attempt to form operations with insufficient privileges. Attempts to allocate space that fails, well, that depends on are they going-- do they have unlimited storage or do they have a limit? Logic errors in the application. Well, that's where we're going to have to work with those developers to try to correct those type of errors. 09:59 Nikita: What about user process failures? Bill: User performs an abnormal disconnect, doesn't close out properly. It can cause something to hang up or even possibly erroneous data to be updated. A user session is abnormally terminated. Well, usually, we don't have to try to resolve those user type errors, but something we might need to look into. A user experiences a program error that terminates the session. Again, usually it's the application developers, but it's something as a DBA, we might want to keep an eye on. Is it the same person? Is it from the same location? Is it the same module within that application? Maybe there's some things we can help to identify what the possible problem can be. 10:43 Nikita: Bill, tell us about common issues that can lead to network failures. What can we do to mitigate these problems and ensure network resilience? Bill: The listener fails. Well, we can connect a backup listener and configure how it can connect time failover can work. A network interface card fails. Well, again, we're not the hardware people, but can we work with our network, our server team, whatever, to possibly have redundant network cards? The network connection fails itself. Can we configure a backup network connection? 11:18 Lois: And what about user errors? How can we recover from those types of scenarios? Bill: The user inadvertently deletes or modifies data. Well, we have some things we'll look at as far as like rollback a transaction along with the dependent transactions. Rewind that table back to where it should have been. You're also can use LogMiner. You can look at our redo logs to try to figure out where that bad transaction was. User drops a table inadvertently. Well, we can recover the table from the recycle bin if we have the recycle bin on or we may need to recover from a backup. 11:56 Nikita: What are common causes of instance failures, Bill? Bill: The dreaded power outage. Well, hopefully, we have some type of up system to keep us running, even if it's not for continuous operation. Maybe if it's just to allow us to gracefully take a system down. The dreaded hardware failure. If you have a way to predict a hardware failure, you can make a lot of money. Always happens at the most inopportune times. But then again, do we have redundant hardware? Do we have something in place to help allow us to continue to operate in case of a hardware failure? Failure of one of the critical background processes. Why did it fail? We can go out. We can look at our alert log, we have trace files. And then we have, you have the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We can do the same thing as looking at the alert log and trace files. But the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control gives us a GUI interface to allow us to do that. 12:53 Lois: Before we let you go, Bill, can you tell us about media and data failures? Bill: Failure of a disk drive, failure of a disk controller, deletion or corruption of a file needed for database operation, well, this is the dreaded media failure. So we're going to restore from a backup. If we need to move, we can move a data file to a different location. We can notify, hey, here's that new location. And then recover by applying any of the incremental backups, any of the redo to get it back to where it should be. And then we have the data failures. We can't access the component, missing data files at OS level. And maybe our system administrators deleted something thinking it wasn't needed, or maybe even a developer on a development type system. Don't have the right permissions. Tablespace is offline. Well, why is it offline? Did somebody took the wrong tablespace offline? We have physical corruptions, block checksum failures. It's inconsistent between the header and footer. Invalid block header field values, like all of them are zeroed out. Then we have the logical corruptions, inconsistent dictionary, corrupt row piece, the inconsistencies, a control file not synchronized with the data files, usually because we recovered something and didn't do it the right way. I/O failures, maybe we just exceeded the number of open files that we're allowed to have. Maybe it's just a network or an I/O error itself. And these are different types of failures that you might experience. Again, it's not an all-inclusive list. It's just a few examples. 14:41 Nikita: I know you said it's not an all-inclusive list and you were just giving us a few examples, but that seemed quite thorough! Thank you so much, Bill, for walking us through all of that today! Lois: Yeah, I totally agree! Thanks Bill! For more on what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Next week, we'll get into instance recovery and recovery strategies. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:15 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Alex Bouchereau, as they talk about Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture, which provides architecture, configuration, and lifecycle best practices for Oracle Databases.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Ranbir Singh, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00;00;00;00 - 00;00;39;11 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and I'm joined by Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs.   00;00;39;18 - 00;01;12;09 Hi, everyone. Last week, we discussed Oracle's Maximum Security Architecture, and today, we're moving on to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Maximum Availability Architecture. To take us through this, we're once again joined by Oracle Database Specialist Alex Bouchereau. Welcome, Alex. We're so happy you're becoming a regular on our podcast. So, to start, what is OCI Maximum Availability Architecture? Now, before we actually jump into the specifics, it's important to understand the problem we're trying to address.   00;01;12;11 - 00;01;38;01 And that is database downtime and data protection. We don't want any data loss and the impact of both of these types of occurrences can be significant. Now, $350K on average of costs of downtime per hour, 87 hours average amount of downtime per year is pretty significant. So, it's a very, very common occurrence. It's $10 million for a single outage, depending on how critical the application is.   00;01;38;03 - 00;02;02;28 And 91% of companies have experienced unplanned data center outages, which means this occurs fairly often. So, what can we do about this? How do we address the problem of data loss? It's important to understand a different terminology first. So, we'll start with high availability. High availability provides redundant components to go ahead and ensure your service is uninterrupted in case of a type of hardware failure.   00;02;03;01 - 00;02;24;24 So, if one server goes down, the other servers will be up. Ideally, you'll have a cluster to go ahead and provide that level of redundancy. And then we talk about scalability. Depending upon the workload, you want to ensure that you still have your performance. So, as your application becomes more popular and more end users go ahead and join it, the workload increases.   00;02;24;26 - 00;02;42;28 So, you want to ensure that the performance is not impacted at all. So, if we want to go ahead and minimize the time of our planned maintenance, which happens more often and a lot more often than unplanned outages, we need to do so in a rolling fashion. And that's where rolling upgrades, rolling patches, and all these types of features come into play.   00;02;42;29 - 00;03;10;20 Okay, so just to recap, the key terms you spoke about were high availability, which is if one server goes down, others will be up, scalability, which is even if the workload increases, performance isn't impacted, and rolling updates, which is managing planned updates seamlessly with no downtime. Great. What's next? Disaster recovery. So, we move from high availability to disaster recovery, protecting us from a complete site outage.   00;03;10;27 - 00;03;35;02 So, if the site goes down entirely, we want to have a redundant site to be able to failover to. That's where disaster recovery comes into play. And then how do we measure downtime and data loss? So, we do so with Recovery Point Objectives, or RPOs, measuring data loss and Recovery Time Objectives, or RTOs, measuring our downtime.   00;03;35;05 - 00;04;00;22 Alex, when you say measure downtime, how do we actually do that? Well, we use a technique called chaos engineering. Essentially, it's an art form at the end of the day because it's constantly evolving and changing over time. We're proactively breaking things in the system and we're testing how our failover, how our resiliency, and how our switchovers, and how everything goes ahead and works under the covers with all our different features.   00;04;00;23 - 00;04;21;28 A lot of components can suffer an outage, right? We have networks and servers, storage, and all these different components can fail. But also human error. Someone can delete a table. You could delete a bunch of rows. So, they can make a mistake on the system as well. That occurs very often. Data corruption and then, of course, power failures.   00;04;22;00 - 00;04;45;03 Godzilla could attack and take out the entire data center. Godzilla! Ha! And you want to be able to go ahead and have a disaster recovery in place. And then there's all kinds of maintenance activities that happen with application updates. You might want to reorganize the data without changing the application and the small, little optimizations. And these can all happen in isolation and or in combination with each other.   00;04;45;05 - 00;05;19;03 And so chaos engineers take all this into consideration and build out the use cases to go ahead and test the system. Do we have some best practices in place for this, then? Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture, MAA, is Oracle's best practice blueprint based on proven Oracle high availability technologies, end-to-end validation, expert recommendations, and customer experiences. The key goal of MAA is to achieve optimal high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for Oracle customers at the lowest cost and complexity.   00;05;19;05 - 00;05;54;07 MAA consists of reference architectures for various buckets of HA service-level agreements, configuration practices, and HA lifecycle operational best practices, and are applicable for non-engineered systems, engineered systems, non-cloud, and cloud deployments. Availability of data and applications is an important element of every IT strategy. At Oracle, we've used our decades of enterprise experience to develop an all-encompassing framework that we can all call Oracle MAA, for Maximum Availability Architecture.   00;05;54;07 - 00;06;20;21 And how was Oracle's Maximum Availability Architecture developed? Oracle MAA starts with customer insights and expert recommendations. These have been collected from our huge pool of customers and community of database architects, software engineers, and database strategists. Over the years, this has helped the Oracle MAA development team gain a deep and complete understanding of various kinds of events that can affect availability.   00;06;20;24 - 00;06;48;11 Through this, they have developed an array of availability reference architectures. These reference architectures acknowledge not all data or applications require the same protection and that there are real tradeoffs in terms of cost and effort that should be considered. Whatever your availability goals may be for a database or related applications, Oracle has the product functionality and guidance to ensure you can make the right decision with full knowledge of the tradeoffs in terms of downtime, data loss, and costs.   00;06;48;11 - 00;07;04;01 These reference architectures use a wide array of our HA features, configurations, and operational practices.   00;07;04;03 - 00;07;29;04 Want to get the inside scoop on Oracle University? Head on over to the all-new Oracle University Learning Community. Attend exclusive events. Read up on the latest news. Get firsthand access to new products and stay up-to-date with upcoming certification opportunities. If you're already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to mylearn.oracle.com to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you've not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.   00;07;29;04 - 00;07;57;19 Join the community today. Welcome back. Alex, you were telling us about how Oracle MAA or Maximum Availability Architecture has reference architectures that use a series of high availability features and configurations. But, how do these help our customers? They help our end customers achieve primarily four goals.   00;07;57;22 - 00;08;29;29 Number one, data protection, reducing data loss through flashback and absolute data protection through zero data loss recovery appliance. Number two, active replication, which allows customers to connect their applications to replicated sites in an active-active HA solution through Active Data Guard and GoldenGate. Number three, scale out, which allows customers the ability to scale compute nodes linearly through RAC, ASM, and Sharding.   00;08;30;01 - 00;08;58;19 Four, continuous availability. This allows transparent failovers of services across sites distributed locally or remote, through AC and GDS. These features and solutions allow customers to mitigate not only planned events, such as software upgrades, data schema changes, and patching, but also unplanned events, such as hardware failures and software crashes due to bugs. Finally, customers have various deployment choices on which we can deploy these HA solutions.   00;08;58;22 - 00;09;25;02 The insights, recommendations, reference architectures, features, configurations, best practices, and deployment choices combine to form a holistic blueprint, which allows customers to successfully achieve their high availability goals. What are the different technologies that come into play here? Well, we'll start with RAC. So, RAC is a clustering technology spread through different nodes across the different servers, so you don't have a single point of failure.   00;09;25;05 - 00;09;46;13 From a scalability standpoint and performance standpoint, you get a lot of benefit associated with that. You constantly add a new node whenever you want to without experiencing any downtime. So, you have that flexibility at this point. And if any type of outage occurs, all the committed transactions are going to be protected and we'll go ahead and we'll move that session over to a new service.   00;09;46;15 - 00;10;07;27 So, from that point, we want to go ahead and also protect our in-flight transactions. So, when it comes to in-flight transactions, how are we going to protect those in addition to the RAC nodes? Well, we can go ahead and do so with another piece of technology that's built into RAC, and that's the Transparent Application Continuity feature. So, this feature is going to expand the capabilities of RAC.   00;10;08;03 - 00;10;28;18 It's a feature of RAC to go ahead and protect our in-flight transactions so our application doesn't experience those transactions failing and coming back up to the layer, or even up to the end users. We want to capture those. We want to replay them. So that's what application continuity does. It allows us to go in and do that.   00;10;28;21 - 00;10;51;03 It supports a whole bunch of different technologies, from Java, .NET, PHP. You don't have to make any changes to the application. All you have to do is use the correct driver and have the connection string appropriately configured and everything else is happening in the database. What about for disaster recovery? Active Data Guard is the Oracle solution for disaster recovery.   00;10;51;05 - 00;11;29;08 It eliminates a single point of failure by providing one or more synchronized physical replicas of the production database. It uses Oracle Aware Replication to efficiently use network bandwidth and provide unique levels of data protection. It provides data availability with fast, manual, or automatic failover to standby should a primary fail and fast switch over to a standby for the purpose of minimizing planned downtime as well. An Active Data Guard standby is open, read only, while it is being synchronized, providing advanced features for data protection, availability, and protection offload.   00;11;29;08 - 00;11;50;23 We have different database services, right? We have our Oracle Database Cloud servers, we have Exadata Cloud servers, and we have Autonomous Database. Do they all have varying technologies built into them? All of them are Database Aware architecture at the end of the day. And the Oracle Database Cloud Service, you have the choice of single instance, or you can go ahead and choose between RAC as well.   00;11;50;25 - 00;12;23;25 You can use quick migration via Zero Downtime Migration, or ZDM for short. We have automated backups built in, and you can set up cross-regional or cross availability to do any DR with Active Data Guard through our control play. And we build on that with Exadata Cloud Service by going ahead and changing the foundation to Exadata, with all the rich benefits of performance, scalability, and optimizations for the Oracle Database, and all the different HA and DR technologies that run within it, to the cloud.   00;12;23;27 - 00;12;50;22 Very easy to go ahead and move from Exadata on-premise to Exadata Cloud Service. And you have choices. You can do the public cloud, or you can do Cloud@Customer or ExaCC, as we call it, to go ahead and run Exadata within your own data center--Exadata Cloud Service and your own data center. And building on top of that, we have Autonomous, which also builds on top of that Exadata infrastructure.   00;12;50;25 - 00;13;19;12 And we have two flavors of that. We have shared and we have dedicated, depending upon your requirements. And is all of this managed by Oracle? Now, at this point, everything's managed by Oracle and things like Data Guard can be configured. We call it Autonomous Data Guard in the Autonomous Database. With a simple two clicks, you can set up cross-regional or cross availability domain VR. And then everything is built, of course, from a high-available multitenant RAC infrastructure.   00;13;19;15 - 00;13;48;02 So, it's using all other technologies and optimizations that we've been talking about. Thanks, Alex, for listing out the different offerings we have. I think we can wind up for today. Any final thoughts? So high availability, disaster recovery, absolute requirements. Everybody should have it. Everybody should think of it ahead of time. We have different blueprints, different tiers of our MAA architecture that map different RTO and RPO requirements depending upon your needs.   00;13;48;04 - 00;14;12;01 And those may change over time. And finally, the business continuity we can provide with MAA is for both planned maintenance and unplanned outage events. So, it's for both. And that's a critical part to this as well. Thank you, Alex, for spending this time with us. That's it for this episode. Next week, we'll talk about managing Oracle Database with REST APIs, and ADB built-in tools.   00;14;12;04 - 00;16;57;28 Until then, this is Nikita Abraham and Lois Houston signing off. That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world, it is crucial for computer users to stay informed about the latest updates and security measures for their systems. For Windows users, automatic updates are a common method of ensuring their devices remain up-to-date and protected against various threats. While these updates are essential for maintaining a secure and smoothly operating system, they can also introduce unexpected problems, such as data loss, system instability, and other unwelcome changes. This podcast aims to shed light on the hidden dangers of automatic Windows updates and provides a comprehensive guide to help users protect their valuable data and maintain a stable system. Automatic Windows updates are designed to provide users with the most recent security patches and feature improvements, keeping their systems running optimally. However, these updates can also introduce new bugs and incompatibilities, which can lead to system instability and crashes. In some cases, the new software components may not be compatible with existing hardware or peripheral devices, causing further issues. Furthermore, unexpected changes to settings or configurations can leave users frustrated and searching for a solution. One of the most alarming risks associated with automatic updates is the potential for data loss. During the update process, files can become corrupted, overwritten, or even deleted entirely. For users who have not backed up their data, this can result in the loss of important documents, photos, and other irreplaceable files. It is essential for users to be aware of this risk and take the necessary precautions to safeguard their data. To protect against data loss and maintain a stable system, users should follow a few key steps. First, make sure to create regular backups of important files and store them on external drives or cloud storage services. This ensures that even if something goes wrong during an update, users can quickly and easily recover their lost data. Second, users should consider adjusting their update settings to have more control over when and how updates occur. By disabling automatic updates and choosing to install them manually, users can determine if there are any known issues or incompatibilities with the new software before installation. This allows them to take a more proactive approach to managing their system and avoiding potential problems. Third, it is essential for users to stay informed about the latest updates and potential issues. By following technology news outlets and forums, users can learn about any problems associated with particular updates and take appropriate actions to protect their systems. Additionally, users should keep their software and drivers up-to-date, as these can help prevent conflicts and ensure compatibility with new updates. Finally, users should consider investing in antivirus and security software, which can provide additional protection against malicious software and other threats. These programs can help users identify and address potential security vulnerabilities, keeping their systems safe and secure. While automatic Windows updates offer essential security patches and improvements, they can also introduce hidden dangers and risks to users' systems. By taking a proactive approach to managing updates, staying informed about potential issues, and implementing a robust data backup and security strategy, users can minimize disruptions and ensure their valuable data remains protected. Don't wait to unlock the full potential of your PC—listen to this podcast to learn more about the secrets to managing your computer updates and maintaining a stable, secure system.

Christophe Bertrand, Practice Director of Data Management and Analytics at Enterprise Strategy Group shares his insights on how companies can close the SaaS backup disconnect and ensure that their data is fully protected.

Jim McGann, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Index Engines educates us on the importance of considering cyber threats as the new disaster and shares his insights on validating your backups to avoid potential data loss.

How do you manage insider risk with your staff? What are some of the employee actions that can be automatically discovered? Now, with more and more organizations now supporting hybrid work scenarios and managing employee turnover, insider risk of employee data theft is higher than ever. In this show, Talhah Mir, lead engineer on the insider risk solutions team at Microsoft, joins Jeremy Chapman to walk through the latest privacy-enabled insider risk management solutions, now part of Microsoft Purview. They'll show you how these use machine learning to automatically identify high risk incidents such as data theft, and how it provides the context and workflow you need for the right stakeholders to take appropriate actions. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - What Insider Risk Management in Microsoft Purview? 00:35 - Is the "Great Resignation" impacting insider risk? 02:48 - How to manage insider risk of employee data theft? 11:20 - How to maintain internal communication compliance? 13:33 - How to get started with Microsoft Purview ► Link References: To learn more insider risk management tools at https://aka.ms/insiderriskdocs Try out Microsoft Purview if you're using Microsoft 365 E3 at https://aka.ms/PurviewTrial ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? We are Microsoft's official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1 Join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen via podcast here: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/website ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ 

With the evolving size and complexity of virtual machine (VM) environments, organizations are experiencing impacts to their IT environments, including business disruption, increased infrastructure costs and risk of data loss. Transparent Snapshots simplifies and automates VM image-level backups without the need to pause the VM during the backup process. Ensure the availability of all your VMs at scale without business disruption. Join Nivas Iyer and Duncan Ramjass, Dell Product Managers for PowerProtect Data Manager, to learn about how you can protect all your VMware VMs using Transparent Snapshots.

The second part of our discussion with Joe Kissell, the author of Take Control of Apple Mail,5th edition focuses on how Joe extends the capabilities of the program by using third party utilities, some of the necessary but annoying security interruptions imposed on Mail, and why email (and other technical aspects of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS) still represents challenges to less technical users. This edition of MacVoices is supported by MacPaw, the makers of CleanMyMac X. Your Mac. Good as new. Find out more and get your copy at MacPaw.com/podcast, and use the code "MACVOICES" to take 5% off the purchase price. Show Notes: Guests: Joe Kissell is the publisher of  Take Control ebooks, as well as the author of over 60 books on a wide variety of tech topics. Keep up with him if you can on his personal site, JoeKissell.com, and on Twitter. Links: MailSuite by SmallCubed GPG Suite by GPGTools MailButler Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss        

Joe Kissell has updated Take Control of Apple Mail to the 5th edition. In the first part of our discussion, Joe outlines some of the nastier bugs in Apple Mail, including one that can lose data, explains why you may want to avoid column view, and why recovering a specific message from your backups can be a challenge. He discusses the evolution of the program, and why it is both powerful and frustrating. This edition of MacVoices is supported by MacPaw, the makers of CleanMyMac X. Your Mac. Good as new. Find out more and get your copy at MacPaw.com/podcast. Show Notes: Guests: Joe Kissell is the publisher of  Take Control ebooks, as well as the author of over 60 books on a wide variety of tech topics. Keep up with him if you can on his personal site, JoeKissell.com, and on Twitter. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Welcome!  Hey everyone.  I hope you are all doing well during this period of social distancing we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. If you are new to doing remote work or working from home then you are going to want to attend the series of webinars on tools, techniques, and tactics you can use to make this easier for you.  These are all offered at no charge. Later next week, I will be offering a live training course on securing your computers, networks, and browsers. This will be deeply discounted. No pressure, but if you are interested, I would appreciate your business. I was on with Jim Polito who was sitting in his kitchen under self-quarantine because the State of Massachusetts has advised their residents to stay home and avoid unnecessary travel and other unnecessary activities during this two-week time period. We discussed VPNs. What they are and when and why to use them and how to use them correctly. So, here we go with Jim Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig You are on a laptop, if you're at home, If you're on an airplane, at the airport, at a coffee shop, and you are using a VPN to connect into the network at work. You are now exposing the business network at work to everything around you in that coffee shop. Craig Mr. Jim Polito, this morning had me do a quick rundown of VPNs and why they might not be the right thing for you. And I talked a little bit about, but man some of the real cons to it and what can they do? And that's all part of what's happening later on. Today. I'm doing some intense stuff here on VPN, about an hour's worth answering all your questions, and helping you to understand the house the whys and the when should you use it when it comes to VPN? Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson, and here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. Jim There is nothing weird about Craig Peterson, nothing at all because he is our good friend. He is a source of invaluable information 365 days a year, but especially during this whole Coronavirus work at home time. He's just second to none. Joining me now, our tech talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Hey, good morning, Jim. Yeah, I've been very, very busy with webinars. I did them every day, twice a day now for the last week and a half. I've got another probably two weeks' worth, I think. We're going to be doing a live webinar, or two of them one at 4 pm and one at 7:30 pm. But webinars where I'm answering everybody's questions and I'm doing training. Today's topic is a VPN because it's very misunderstood. A lot. A lot of people need a VPN, but when do you need them? How can you use them? When should you use them? When are they useful? And even give some recommendations of some different VPN that you can use out there. So it's been going well, I haven't had a single, negative comment. And so far I've done about, I think it's 12 or 14 of these live webinars just talking about remote workers working from home, what's the technology need to use? What are the threads? How, how are they the home workers now endangering the office, but today's VPN, we're going to have more every day for the next two weeks, and it's right there on my homepage. Jim All right, and Craig, you've been making that available to our listeners, and you made it possible to listeners before you opened it up to everybody else. Greg, why don't you give us just a brief tutorial on a VPN, and that is, You know, so people understand it. I didn't know what it was until about five years ago, myself, and you know what a VPN is? And it's something that yes, in the right circumstances, can protect your data and protect everything else. Craig Yeah, you're right. It's VPN is the host. Again, we have a lot of TLS in this business, which stands for three-letter acronyms. VPN stands for Virtual private network. The idea is that you can hook up two networks together, that's where it came from initially. You know, way back when we'd have to have a T-one line going from one point to another. And you probably remember those Jim because radio stations were using them for years of leased lines to connect to the transmitter. Yeah, and yeah, TV stations everybody. So that's how it started. Well, those were expensive. I had two T-one lines coming to my house 25 years ago, and that cost me almost $6,000 a month. Very, very expensive. Things have changed today, and VPN came into being to replace those expensive leased lines. So with the Internet, what you could do is just have an internet connection and connect the remote office with the main office. And instead of having to have that expensive leased line, now you had a highly encrypted data channel, and it connects the two networks. So that's where it started. Today what we're using it for is very, very similar. We're still using it to connect networks. And that's the beauty of it. And that's the curse of it. And here's the curse smarts. You know, if you are on a laptop, if you're at home if you're on an airplane, At the airport at a coffee shop, and you are using a VPN to connect into the network at work. You are now opening up your business network at work to everything around you in that coffee shop. Jim So you've been talking about open 19 Craig Yeah, exactly. And Covid-19. What are we trying to do right now? Isolate? Jim Isolate? We're trying to die. That's the key. Craig Yeah. Because here's your significant danger. You walk into the house, and you bring Covid-19 into a home. And now all of a sudden people have it, and they're dying. Well, what do you think happens when you connect on a home computer? That is a pretty high likelihood that it's infected somehow? What happens when you connect that VPN now to the business network, you're spreading disease so VPNs on No, no, no, you have to be very, very careful. So here's another problem with the VPN. Jim So I guess the way you look at it is no, but the way you look at it is, so the VPN is that secure connection. But if your connection to that secure connection is lousy, then what's the sense of having that other secure connection between you and your employer? Craig You're making things worse. Exactly. Yeah, the connection may be secure. Yeah. So here's your other problem, you go out. And let's say you get a Norton VPN or something. And we're going to talk a lot more about this. Today, I'm going to show graphics about how this all works. So I help people understand. But you get one of these free VPN services or even one of these paid VPN services. Your data is only secure from your device to the VPN server. So let's say you're using one of these paid VPNs and you're connecting to the bank, and somehow you think And it's giving you additional security. It's not, and it is not at all. It might be making it worse, particularly with the free VPN services that are out there, you will be less secure because they are: what the old Willie Sutton quote, "why did he rob banks because that's where the money is," with VPNs that's where the money is going. Craig Yeah, the attackers are going after these three VPN servers and other VPN services, because they know that's where all of the connections are. And some of these VPN services are even tracking everything you do, everywhere you go, and some of them are also evil. I've seen VPN services that are running through Russia that require you to install this unique key so that you can use it and are doing a man in the middle attack. So that's why we're going to cover for an hour today. It will be at 7:30 pm. I am going through this and helping people understand. They can be useful, they can be necessary, but they must be appropriately secured and used correctly. Jim Alright, so Craig, there's a lot of different ways that folks can get information from you. Now, I know you've got a landing page on your website, and I'm going to I want you to give that out. But the first way is to get other information from you that you put out weekly to me, and then we share here, and that's by texting my name to this number. Craig to 855-385-5553. So just texting Jim 2855385 5553 Jim Standard data and text rates apply now, Craig, for folks to get to your website, and to find out about this webinar, the VPN information how do they do that? Craig Well, we have a registration on the site. The one that's up there right now is for last night. I haven't checked Just this morning, but I will be changing as soon as we get off the phone. Go to Craig Peterson dot com. It'll be right there at the bottom of the homepage at Craig Peterson dot com. That's s-o-n calm. Jim Alright, Greg, thank you so much. I appreciate the time, and we'll catch up with the next week. Unless, of course, something comes up, then you're always welcome here in between. Craig Alright, hey, thanks, Jim. Take care. Jim Take care. Bye-bye, Craig Peterson everybody a great resource. All right, a final word. When we return. You're listening to the Jim Pulido show from my kitchen with pops. Your safe space. Transcribed by https://otter.ai ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Cyber Security and Data Protection On this edition of Business Connections Live Steve Hyland asks Dan May, Commercial Director at the Surrey-based IT firm, ramsac about Cyber Security and Data Protection and how to use IT to ensure that their organisation is efficient, secure and resilient. As organisations have become increasingly dependent on their digital assets, so have criminals become increasingly adept at exploiting weaknesses in IT security. Not a week goes by without cybercrime or data loss making the news headlines, and with the new GDPR regs just around the corner, there’s even more reason than ever before for business owners to be sure that they are taking all reasonable steps to ensure that their vital digital assets are secure, that their ‘human firewall’ (ie. Their employees!) are properly trained, and that there are bulletproof measures in place to provide a resilient fall back position when a cybercrime happens. Dan May is the Commercial Director at the Surrey-based IT firm, ramsac. Dan works with businesses, schools and charities to help them manage their IT needs, supporting and managing IT on a day to day basis as well as making strategic decisions about how to use IT to ensure that their organisation is efficient, secure and resilient. On this edition of Business Connections Live, Dan will explain: The FBI believes there are two types of businesses in the world, those that have been affected by a cybercrime and those that don’t know that they have! Protecting digital data is not just an IT department problem – the human firewall is often the biggest weakness in a business’ front-line defence. Organisations need to invest in the appropriate technical solutions, but staff training and internal processes are just as important in protecting critical data. GDPR preparedness is not just about looking at your marketing processes – data loss through cyber theft could leave organisations vulnerable to significant fines or loss of reputation. Cloud computing does not mean that you’ve necessarily ticked the box for data security or back up – you still need to ensure that you have resilience, a clear idea of where your data resides and how you can recover it if anything goes wrong. Learn the business fundamentals of how your business can achieve: Business leaders should be able to sleep well at night, knowing that their critical data is secure, that their staff know how to keep it safe, and that if there was ever a problem, there is a clear and well-documented process for how to roll back. With some upfront thought and action, organisations can ensure that they are not only GDPR ready, but that they have good protection from fraud, theft or malicious attack. For more great information visit our Guests website or follow them on Social Media. Website: http://www.ramsac.com Twitter:  https://twitter.com/ramsac_ltd      https://twitter.com/ramsacDan Free Guide:   http://www.ramsac.com/cyber-security *******You Can Contact Business Connections Live****** The UK’s Leading Online Business Channel: Subscribe Here! http://businessconnectionslive.com/BC... Visit our Website http://businessconnectionslive.com Follow us on Twitter for the latest news https://twitter.com/bclbusinesstv Live Shows on Youtube Mondays Mid-day GMT https://www.youtube.com/c/businesscon... Follow us on our Google+ page https://plus.google.com/+Businessconn... Follow us on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/BusinessConn... You Can Contact Business Connections Live The UK’s Leading Online Business Channel: Subscribe Here! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... Visit our Website http://businessconnectionslive.com Follow us on Twitter for the latest news https://twitter.com/bclbusinesstv Live Shows on Youtube Mondays Mid-day GMT https://www.youtube.com/c/businesscon... Follow us on our Google+ page https://plus.google.com/+Businessconn... Follow us on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/BusinessConn... Find Out more about TubeBuddy https://www.tubebuddy.com/bclbusinesstv You can email the studio here studio@businessconnectionslive.com We are always looking for Industry experts… You can email the studio here studio@businessconnectionslive.com We are always looking for Industry experts…

Employees who are well trained are going to be a key part of your overall risk reduction strategy. Poorly trained employees are going to render investments you make in the technology sector to reduce your risks. Training does not have to be complicated. Steve and Femi talk about easy steps you can take to train your employees to safeguard cybersecurity risks.

Early on, most agencies did not address cybersecurity as part of contracting. Now, it is standard language in all contracts, especially those in Government and Industry entities. The number one rule in contracting is that your small business must meet or exceed the cybersecurity protection level of your client. The U.S. Department of Defense has its own cybersecurity requirements for contractors. Being noncompliant can lead to cancellation of contracts and/or liability for damages, or more. Femi and Steve talk about what kinds of measures your small business needs to do in preparation for bidding on government and industry contracts.

Today we take a look into a world that i find fascinating and have limited experience with: Mathematics. Specifically the math behind some datacenter functions. We even brought in a real live doctor of mathematics to talk about it! Let's take a listen.

Today we take a look into a world that i find fascinating and have limited experience with: Mathematics. Specifically the math behind some datacenter functions. We even brought in a real live doctor of mathematics to talk about it! Let's take a listen.